Review: Late Gothic Architecture: Its Evolution, Extinction, and Reception, by Robert Bork

Abstract

Robert Bork Late Gothic Architecture: Its Evolution, Extinction, and Reception Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2018, 552 pp., 32 color and 337 b/w illus. $119, ISBN 9782503568942 Robert Bork has written a remarkable book that in its scope has no competition. He offers a detailed analysis of late Gothic architecture, tracing its long history and examining the ultimately successful challenge to the style made by classicizing architecture from Italy. Bork reminds us that the years just prior to this challenge witnessed some of the most dazzling and wondrous inventions of Gothic architecture. Nave vaults were equipped with looping ribs resembling the petals of flowers. Smaller chapels displayed hanging ribs, miraculously suspended several feet below the webbing of the vaults. Tracery fields became ever larger and more complex, veiling broad segments of facades. Artful filigree towers of intricate design rose far above the pavement. Gothic elements became increasingly mimetic, imitating vegetal forms and other objects, such as the enormous buckle dressing the buttress at the Portuguese monastery of Tomar. Yet by the middle of the sixteenth century, the Gothic was in decline. For much of the previous century the Gothic's innovative building techniques had led architects such as Filarete to call it the modo moderno ; by 1550 this was no longer the case. Giorgio Vasari changed the nomenclature, referring to classicizing approaches as modern and the northern tradition as barbarous, German, Gothic. This extensive volume has numerous strengths. Bork deals with both northern and Italian buildings, Gothic and antique, and discusses the complex interplay between practices on both sides of the Alps. He charts the Gothic's origins and trajectory, including the High Gothic of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, noted for its supposed rationality, an aesthetic opposed to later manifestations. He offers the most detailed account to date of how the late Gothic evolved from …