Gothic architecture and its effects on underprivileged populations

Gothic Architecture and Effect on Common People (underprivileged People)

Gothic architecture and medieval society

Gothic architecture's vast, sweeping and expansive designs and its emphasis on religiosity is a product of stratified feudal society. The dominating political and social influence of the Roman Catholic Church and the need for lords to protect their property in the absence of strong central governments produced its aesthetic. The rise in religious fervor sparked by the Crusades also fueled the desire to create large structures in tribute to God. The Gothic style has its origins in France, as embodied in the famous Notre Dame Cathedral. Yet the necessities of creating vast structures for orders of monks, given the centrality of monastic life in English worship, popularized the Gothic style in England, where monasteries housed living and worship quarters as well as courts of law and libraries ("Medieval gothic principles," Medieval Spell, 2009). Feudalism provided a ready source of labor in the form of serfs and tradesmen to hoist the heavy building materials of stone in France and England and brick in Germany ("Gothic architecture," Think Quest, 2000; "Medieval gothic cathedrals," Medieval Spell, 2009).

One of the most famous interpretations of Gothic architecture was provided by Erwin Panofsky's seminal work Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (1951). Panofsky argued that Gothic architecture was based upon "visible and tangible equivalents to the scholastic definitions of the order and form of thought. Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologiae and other great treatises were organized so that the reader is led, step-by-step, from one proposition to the other and is always kept informed as to the progress of this process" (Liukkonen & Pesonen 2008). Aquinas was famous for taking two apparently contradictory statements in scripture or the writings of the saints and reconciling them through logic. Similarly, said Panofsky, Gothic cathedrals often had two clashing styles that were apparently grotesque, yet were reconciled through the design of the architect. Panofsky said that both scholastics and the builders of the cathedrals paid homage to the heavenly and social order, although there was an apparent surface of disharmony. However, there is also a more prosaic explanation of the contrasting styles manifest in Gothic cathedrals: because they took so long to complete, the construction of the cathedrals was often interrupted by warfare, and thus they were constructed during different social periods and exhibited the influence of different builders, rulers, and forms of construction ("Medieval gothic principles," Medieval Spell, 2009). Furthermore, even when there is symmetry and surface order in Gothic cathedrals, there is always a sense of disorder lurking beneath the veneer: traces of individuality and the grotesque seep forth in the form of gargoyles.