Gothic and neo-Gothic art appreciation thread

Well, since nobody is replying, let me start... Jerónimos Monastery - Portuguese Late Gothic/Manueline style.

Duomo di Milano

And the gorgeous Canterbury cathedral, one of the most beautiful in the UK.

And speaking of Gothic Revival art...

OK, OP.

The Milan Cathedral's horrid (19th c.) facade? The whole structure looks like a gigantic squared-off Quonset hut trying to look fancy with hundreds of sharp-pointed pinnacles, like an amusement park auditorium on the midway. The approach to Gothic - yes, infused with Byzantine touches - found with many structures in Venice represent a better example of what Italians could accomplish in Gothic themes, particularly in secular buildings.

BUT I love Gothic, especially the early and decorated English and the Early, High and Early Rayonnant French, plus some of the French regional variations.

Aesthetically I do not like the English perpendicular or later Rayonnant and Flamboyant styles. The former combines simplified lines with less-intrinsic and too-elaborated decoration, and fan vaulting makes me feel queasy. Its strange modernity expresses an oddly secular view.

Rayonnant and later French Gothic, until the Baroque (with a bit of earlier Renaissance) took hold strikes me as overtly sophisticated and mildly cynical. The French lacks the passion of the Spanish forms, and the cynical tone comes from the intellectualism of the intricacies. A step into Baroque cleansed the French architectural palate.

I grew up with American German Gothic on a grand scale, so its characteristics feel like home to me, especially the hall-church handling of the aisles with an equal height to the nave, in contrast to the lowering of the aisles in both French and English. The more-traditional handling

Favorites? In France, Saint Denis, Laon, Paris and Amiens (Sens, Senlis). All the statuary bovines stacked on the levels of the Laon towers stunned me so much when I first saw them I about cried. Anyone outside the country who has a stereotype of the French national psyche full of pissy quibbles, hauteur and dismissive rationality needs a minute with the Laon cows.

In England, among the primary set, I like Wells, Exeter (the backset Norman towers!), Ely (Yes, I truly like the mixed styles in England.), Canterbury (the tensions of history played out in the structure) and Lincoln. The craziness of the Lincoln and Peterborough attached-and-irrelevant facades, like backdrops for the Mystery Play carts, shows the inevitable idiosyncrasies in English Gothic. Salisbury being the sole example, of course, as the sole built-whole-from-scratch English Cathedral. At least until Liverpool!

The integrated-design tendencies of the French versus the English built-over-time mode make for the greatest differences, as you know, OP. Large French Gothic projects usually were taken on by municipal collaboratives, perhaps with some support from royals and nobles, while English projects were usually in the hands of the associated monastic or secular-canon organizations that ran them. French cathedrals look unified in most parts, while English cathedrals are conglomerations of different periods, depending on ambitions of abbot-bishops, revenue desires for patron-saint shrines, fallen roofs and burnt-out naves.

Favorite Gothic Revival? My old parish church shown here (overtaken now by Euro-Catholic reactionaries, but at least they saved the buildings. And Trinity Church!

R5, I absolutely LOVE YOU (even if I don't agree with you in several points). Thank you for your wonderful contribution!

Oh, good. I'm charmed to be able to pose pompously. And I probably disagree with myself in several areas. My aesthetics are my own and my primary ground when I'm thinking or talking about architecture. With Gothic in any phase (and I do see Revival as more than a retro-pastiche in many of its examples) I encounter a reaching search (not just upwards) in stone, wood and metal for contact with the divine.

As for my sniffing at the Rayonnant and later works, I was exaggerating. Beauvais alone, in its mad, broken heights, is a climax of ambition that shocks me even in photos.

Thanks for the thread. I'll close with the fact that, for different reasons, both the upper and lower chapels in Sainte-Chapelle make me feel claustrophobic and rather ill. Ta!