The Gothic style
What you're looking at - and what it means
The term 'Gothic' covers a multitude of styles and nearly 500 years - and that's excluding the neo-gothic and gothic revival of the late eighteenth century onwards. Most children know you can recognise Gothic by the pointed arch, in contrast to the rounded arches of romanesque work. But there's more to it than that.
Gothic is an all-encompassing structural system, using vaulting and buttresses to replace the thick walls of romanesque with a wall system of shafts, which carry the stresses, and huge windows. The whole wall, in later Gothic, often seems to have been replaced by windows, making the building transparent. And of course, given this opportunity, the medieval artists created huge programmes of stained glass windows to fill the space - for instance at Chartres, at Bourges, at the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris.
Gothic is a highly linear style. Space is articulated
by arcades and shafts, with a concentration on line rather than mass. 
And at the same time it has an encyclopedic aim. Gothic cathedrals seem to want to capture the entire universe, and become microcosms, symbols of the Creation, taking the worshipper symbolically from everyday life to the eternal life of heaven. There's a desire for integrity and wholeness which was never there in romanesque work.
The gothic style began in North-East France at Laon, Reims, and in Paris and the Ile de France, just before 1200. Chartres is perhaps the greatest monument of the early gothic, its original stained glass still in place and with three great porches, all ornamented with fine sculpture. (If you're on a French tour it's probably the best day trip possible from Paris - trains only take an hour. And we have a podtour for the cathedral and city.)
The early gothic and 'rayonnant' style which follows it are often based on simple geometrical figures, with circles prominent, and fairly broad arches (contrasting with the narrower lancets of the Early English style). Rose windows become a keynote of the French gothic style, found in both western and transept facades, with increasingly delicate and complex tracery.
As French Gothic progresses, we see how matter is transformed into light. There's even a theological or symbolic aspect to this style, as contemporary theologians saw God in terms of light penetrating the darkened universe. Flying buttresses are used to provide external support to the wall, and enable even more weight to be taken out, so that the wall becomes a mere skin of glazing.
At the end of the Gothic period, from 1400 onwards,
we find the 'flamboyant' style in France. It's highly curvilinear, with
hardly any straight lines left; even the pillars stop having separate shafts,
and instead adopt wavy mouldings. S-curves create wavy, ogival profiles,
and ornamentation becomes exuberant, with filigree screens and fine panelling
everywhere. Beauvais cathedral has some fine flamboyant work, but my favourites
are the facades of Rouen - the cathedral and Saint-Maclou. (They were the
painter Monet's favourites, too.)
France is best known for its Gothic cathedrals,
but there's some fine domestic work, too. In Bourges, the house of Jacques
Coeur , built in 1450, shows the kind of town house a noble and high minister
of state could aspire to. And one of my favourite museums in the world,
the Musée de Cluny, occupies the old Hôtel de Cluny - the abbot
of Cluny's town house in Paris, on the left bank. It's a lovely house, with
dormer windows in its high pitched roof and a richly decorated portal.
The Hôtel de Sens, which belonged to the bishop, also survives, though
it is not as impressive, or as ornamented.
In England, gothic starts with the Early English style, a style of great simplicity with long, thin lancet windows and trefoil arches. Salisbury, built in 1220 to 1258, is the greatest work in this style - unlike most medieval cathedrals in England, it's never been changed or had parts added since the original building campaign. Salisbury also introduces a characteristic English horizontality with its fine western screen-façade, very different from the twin-towered, vertical facades of France. It's a direct precursor of the great Gothic screens at Lincoln and Peterborough.
Early English develops into the Decorated or geometrical style, which is similar to rayonnant in many ways. Westminster Abbey is one of the great works of Decorated style, but I prefer the tomb of Edward II in Gloucester Cathedral - a marvellous work of about 1330 with a fine pinnacled canopy. The multiplication of pinnacles and niches becomes a key feature of this style, and cusped arches are introduced, bringing the delicate S-curve with its concave/convex ambiguity into the style. There's a slight literalmindedness to Early English, which can be rather cold in effect - Decorated brings a new delicacy and gentle touch.
English Gothic is particularly notable for its development of vaulting from the simple, quadripartite vaults of the Early English style, towards more complex forms. Lierne vaulting, for instance, adds subsidiary non-structural ribs which link the main ribs, forming a sort of net. This creates many more points of intersection, which are often decorated with carved roof bosses. Perhaps the most stunning vault is in Norwich cathedral nave, dating from 1446. Bishop Lyhart's vault shows us the whole history of the world in the bosses - including his own coat of arms (the lying hart, a deer at rest) and the badges of the houses of York and Lancaster that were still fighting it out for the throne of England.
By the time the Perpendicular style arrives, vaulting of incredible complexity is being created; fan vaults in Gloucester cloisters and King's College chapel, pendant bosses in Oxford cathedral and Ottery St Mary.
The Perpendicular is pretty much the opposite of what's happening at the same time in France with the flamboyant style - instead of curving lines, Perpendicular brings in rectangular panels, and flattens the arches and vaults. But like flamboyant, it tries to integrate the wall and windows within a fine and regular surface decoration. At Gloucester cloisters, it's quite difficult even to see where the walls end and the vault begins. And also like the flamboyant style, the Perpendicular thins down the wall even further, creating huge areas of glass like the fine east window of Gloucester cathedral (1362) which is the size of a tennis court.
Perpendicular is probably best known at King's College Chapel, Cambridge, and in the Chapel of Henry VII in Westminster Abbey (after 1500), but if you tour the rural areas of England you'll find it in the East Anglian 'wool churches' built by wealthy cloth traders, and the fine, high church towers of Somerset and Devon.
Germany started following the French Gothic style in the cathedrals at Strasbourg (now part of France; these things change) and Cologne. But while the French created a rather classical style, with fine proportions, German Gothic aims for height, with the twin towered façade and fine spires. The choir of Cologne cathedral was begun in 1248 under Master Gerhard, from the Amiens workshop, and it's a classic French design in all but its narrowness and height. It transforms French Gothic proportions, creating an elemental verticality and even emphasising it in the details, as the piers rise to the ceiling directly, with no capitals or shaft rings to break the vertical thrust.
The German townscape just isn't complete without a Gothic spire. And the best of them all, I think, is at Ulm, though it only dates from 1890 - the cathedral was begun in 1377 so this has to be one of the longest building campaigns ever!
Like English Gothic, German Gothic in its later phases seems to concentrate on the challenge of developing new, complex types of vault. There are net vaults, start vaults, and at Annaberg in Saxony, interlaced curved vaults like the petals of a flower (from about 1500). German Gothic also influenced developments in Central Europe, for instance in Prague where German architect Peter Parler worked on the cathedral and the Charles Bridge.
In the north of Germany there's also a very special, unique form of the style - Backsteingotik or 'brick gothic'. The flat heaths and boglands of the Baltic coast have little stone to use for building, so brick is the main material instead. But the rich merchants of the Hanseatic league which dominated trading in the area created a marvellous Gothic style using this apparently unpromising material. Lubeck and Stralsund are exceptionally good examples of the style, with merchants' houses in great numbers, as well as fine churches. Lubeck has an almost surreal, imaginative town hall with huge circular 'wind holes' at the top of the wall. In Poland, the cathedral in Gdansk and Malbork castle take the style to extremes of size.
Italy, on the other hand, never took to the gothic style and never really adopted it as a structural form. Many Italian churches retain the open wooden ceilings of the Byzantine and Romanesque tradition well into the gothic period. There seems to be an innate conservatism that stopped gothic from changing the already entrenched regional styles. For instance in Verona, gothic churches are built on the same model as the earlier romanesque basilicas - there is no change in plan and little difference in feeling. In Venice, the gothic palace follows the existing Veneto-Byzantine forms quite closely - the only major diffrence is the introduction of pointed arches - and eve the Doges' palace, though strongly Gothic in detail, also owes a great deal to Byzantium.
But Italy does adopt gothic as a decorative element
- and there's some very fine work, like the façade of Siena cathedral.
For the best view of Italian gothic though I think you have to look at painting
rather than architecture - Pisanello is a master of the 'International Gothic'
style.
Milan Cathedral is a single and amazing outpost of the Gothic in Italy.
It's huge - the second largest of the gothic cathedrals - with double aisles,
and covered in incredible pinnacles and crenellations, with 135 small spires.
But the inside is dim, with little light - completely opposed to the values
of the northern gothic which prioritised transparency of the structure -
and has no towers.
Spanish gothic begins with foreign influence. For instance John of Cologne built Burgos cathedral in a thoroughly northern French style, and Leon cathedral is even purer French style with its rose window and fine collection of leaf and flower patterned stained glass.
But as Spain became familiar with the gothic style, it domesticated it, developing it into a purely local style using star vaults (for instance in the New Cathedral at Salamanca) and often adopting mudejar styles and features from the work of Moorish southern Spain. Eventually the Isabelline style energed, with its flattened, rounded arches and prolific ornamentation. The Royal Chapel in Granada, and Miraflores charterhouse near Burgos, are probably the greatest monuments of this style.
Portugal goes even further with its Manueline style (around 1500) at Batalha and the Hieronymite monastery in Lisbon. This style is crawling with ornament, filigree screens, and amazingly florid tracery. Some of the decoration even seems Indian in style, or vegetal, as if the whole building has been grown in a test tube rather than carved out of stone. Twisted and organic forms almost prefigures art nouveau.
Most gothic architecture is ecclesiastical. But there's also a lot of secular gothic left, from the fine castles Edward I built in Wales to the town halls of the early Italian republics. While some buildings - such as Caernarvon castle, the fortress of the Teutonic knights at Malbork, and the palace of the Popes at Avignon - retain the character of a fortress, later gothic castles tend to become more gracious and elegant, though they keep their crenellations.
In Flanders, fifteenth century town halls with belfries make a magnificent addition to the cities of Bruges, Brussels, and Louvain - the tall gothic towers stand out against the flat landscape, and the halls are covered in ornament, dormer windows, pinnacles. Quite different from these splendid buildings are the four-square, box-like town halls of Italian towns like Gubbio in the Marches, or Volterra in Tuscany, but I must confess to a liking for these robust structures - which are the precursors of the elegant Palazzo Pubblico in Siena, with its amazing Torre della Mangia of 1334.
But of course if you want to see a late Gothic town, you won't always be seeing stone architecture. Lubeck is a lovely example of brick, but more often you'll see fine half-timber building. French half timber in towns is generally high, making the most of narrow plots, as in Rouen, while English half timber is more expansive - best seen in the small East Anglian town of Lavenham. And in Germany there are some amazing half-timber towns like Celle.