Review: Renaissance Gothic: Architecture and the Arts in Northern Europe, 1470–1540, by Ethan Matt Kavaler

Abstract

Ethan Matt Kavaler Renaissance Gothic: Architecture and the Arts in Northern Europe, 1470–1540 New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2012, 344 pp., 80 color and 210 b/w illus. $75, ISBN 9780300167924 Ethan Matt Kavaler’s beautifully produced new book makes an extraordinary contribution to the growing discourse on “Late Gothic” artistic production in the last decades of the fifteenth and first decades of the sixteenth century. The very title chosen by the author—a “provocative oxymoron” (22)—complicates old notions of Gothic as a style that “develops” continuously over three centuries, entering into a period of “decline” before being swept aside by the Renaissance. The unruly and provocative material Kavaler deals with in this book is hard to cram into a traditional structure of chapter headings, and it has to be said that the introduction is disturbingly multifarious in its content. Yet the author’s argument is, for the most part, well served by the thematic organization into five chapters—“Ornament and Aesthetics,” “Flamboyant Forms,” “Microarchitecture,” “Natural Forms,” and, finally, “Deconstruction and Hybridity”—a sequence that conveniently allows the author to reserve his most original thinking for the later parts of the book. The introduction provides an overview of problems of taste and historiography: older historians of Gothic often professed a real dislike for this mode, which they considered to be “overcharged” with ornament of a kind that had broken loose from its old role of expressing architectural behavior. A few carefully chosen juxtapositions make the point: the “rational” forms of Saint-Maclou of Rouen (ca. 1440), in which slender filleted piers run smoothly into arches and ribs, is contrasted with the “jungle of overlapping shafts” (11) in the church at Brou, built some seventy-five years later for Margaret of Austria. Similarly juxtaposed, we see an austere geometric window (ca. 1300) from the nave of the minster at Freiburg im Breisgau with a window from the sixteenth-century choir where “designs have become fully emancipated from the mundane task of supporting the glass” (12). The coexistence of elements of …