The Gothic cathedral movement

The Gothic cathedral movement was a complex phenomenon but its relationship to the culture of the later Middle Ages has sometimes been idealized. In this view the churches were seen primarily as evidence of the selfless devotion of the populations of western Europe to the worship of God. The intricate symbolism of the buildings and their decoration, analogies between architecture and scholasticism, the allocation of vast resources to construction, and the impressive range of technical and stylistic innovation all demonstrate the extent to which the intellectual, economic, administrative, technical and artistic energies of the age were channeled into the creation of the cathedrals. And it cannot be denied that this era of pilgrimages and crusades was a time of intense religious feeling. But to view the cathedrals merely as a manifestation of popular religious sentiment is extremely limiting. Historians have also shown that the Gothic churches were concrete expressions of the power of various secular and ecclesiastical factions, dominant economic institutions that often caused serious distortions in local economies, products of an emerging architectural profession with an interest in meeting technical and artistic challenges for their own sake, and, above all, a primary means of generating the very consensus which was said to be responsible for their construction.

The Gothic style originated in the rebuilding of portions of the Abbey Church of St. Denis, traditional bur

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not display direct parallels. In Panofsky's argument the subtlety of detail in the work of both Scholastics and Gothic builders resulted from their shared interest in applying a "postulate of clarification for clarification's sake," or, as Radding and Clark put it, a "desire for refinement for its own sake." But there was, instead, a shift in intellectual approach in both Scholastics and builders in the twelfth century in which the pursuit of individual questions or problems was replaced by the attempt to create "whole systems of solutions to intellectual and artistic problems." The scholars abandoned the glossing of individual texts and the formulation of definite answers to specific theological propositions for the construction of a systematic response in which the answer to each question necessarily impinged on every other question. The parallel development in architecture that required a similar shift in cognitive processes was the work of builders "who, now endeavoring to devise increasingly complex and integrated spaces, found themselves having to design small details with an eye to the effects each decision would have on the whole." As Radding and Clark conceive of this change, the Gothic builder, beginning with t

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