Gothic art for beginners

How to read the labels Historical what the old sources say. Later tradition what later writers added. Modern modern practice and my own notes.

Gothic is the art of light. In the twelfth century, builders in France learned to raise stone walls so high and so thin that they could fill them with colored glass. The cathedral became a frame for light, and for three centuries that idea spread across Europe, into books, tapestries and the first paintings of real human feeling.

“Gothic” was first an insult. Renaissance Italian writers used it to mean barbaric, as if the style had been brought by the Goths who sacked Rome. The name stayed; the insult did not.

Three layers

Historical What buildings, objects and texts of the time show. Later tradition What later centuries read into them. Modern How people use these images today.

A new light at Saint-Denis

Historical The Gothic style began at the royal abbey church of Saint-Denis, just north of Paris, where Abbot Suger rebuilt the choir. It was consecrated in 1144. Suger wrote about his project and described the “wonderful and uninterrupted light” of the new windows. The art historian Erwin Panofsky translated Suger’s writings in 1946 and linked his love of light to medieval theology of divine light, a reading that later scholars have debated but not abandoned.

How the buildings stand up

Gothic builders combined three features. The pointed arch carries weight downward better than a round arch and can be stretched to many heights. The rib vault is a framework of stone ribs that carries the weight of the ceiling to a few points. The flying buttress is an outside arch that pushes back against the vault from tall piers beyond the side aisles. Together they let walls become thinner and higher and open into huge windows.

Stained glass

The Virgin Mary and Five Standing Saints above Predella Panels, 1440 to 1446. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (37.52.1 to .6). Image: Open Access, public domain (CC0).

Historical Stained glass is made from colored glass pieces held in lead strips, with details painted on and fired. These panels at the Met come from the Carmelite church at Boppard on the Rhine, made about 1440 to 1446. Notice how the saints stand under painted Gothic canopies, a building inside the building.

Books of hours and tapestries

Historical Wealthy laypeople commissioned personal prayer books called books of hours, organized around the hours of the day. The tiny Hours of Jeanne d’Évreux, painted around 1324 to 1328 by Jean Pucelle for the queen of France, is at the Met Cloisters, its margins alive with musicians and comic figures. The Limbourg brothers’ Très Riches Heures, about 1411 to 1416, left unfinished when the brothers and their patron died, apparently of plague, in 1416, is at the Musée Condé in Chantilly. Its calendar pages pair the work of each month with the zodiac above.

The Unicorn Rests in a Garden (from the Unicorn Tapestries), 1495 to 1505. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (37.80.6). Image: Open Access, public domain (CC0).

The Unicorn Tapestries at the Met Cloisters, woven in the Southern Netherlands about 1495 to 1505, show the hunt and capture of a unicorn. In the most famous panel it rests, collared, inside a round fence under a pomegranate tree. Scholars read it both as Christ risen and as a lover bound in marriage, and the meaning may well be both.

Toward real feeling: Duccio and Giotto

Duccio di Buoninsegna, Madonna and Child, about 1290 to 1300. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2004.442). Image: Open Access, public domain (CC0).

Historical In thirteenth-century Italy, painting followed Byzantine models. Toward 1300, painters in Tuscany began to give figures weight and emotion. In this small panel by Duccio of Siena, about 1290 to 1300, the Child reaches up to touch his mother’s veil, and the painted parapet at the bottom edge steps into our space. Giotto, painting the Arena Chapel in Padua in the early 1300s, gave his figures solid bodies and real grief. Vasari later wrote that Giotto “by the gift of God revived that art”, the start of the Renaissance story.

The esoteric angle

Historical Medieval cathedrals carried the whole cosmos: zodiac signs and labors of the months on portals, the virtues and vices, and the liberal arts. Astrology was part of learned medieval culture, and you can see it carved in stone at Chartres and painted in the Très Riches Heures.

Later tradition In the twentieth century, writers such as the mysterious “Fulcanelli” read cathedrals as hidden alchemical books. That is a later esoteric reading, not medieval evidence, though it is fun to know.

Modern Gargoyles are often said to scare off evil spirits. Their documented job was to throw rainwater away from the walls. The protective meaning is a modern one, and lovely in its own way.

Try it yourself

Find the calendar pages of the Très Riches Heures online. Choose one summer and one winter month. Describe the work, clothes, buildings and sky, then look at the zodiac above. Write one sentence on how the page joins human work to the heavens.

Before and after

Before this: Romanesque.

After this: Early Renaissance.

See every movement in order on the art movements timeline, or learn to look step by step in the free Art History for Beginners course.