Desedimenting Time Gothic Column Paradi PDF

Editorial
Desedimenting time: Gothic column/paradigm shifter
MARVIN TRACHTENBERG
Art exists and changes through time, but inwhat form inmajor aspects of the other arts, despite all the protests
is such change encoded in time, and vice versa? How of self-reflective awareness about this question.
are we best to describe and understand the restless and Comparable problematics exist throughout the larger
turbulent currents, tides, and storms of artistic transEuropean field of medieval architecture. This field is
movement that unfold through time? Can our histories permeated, indeed constituted, by a complex, intricate
be histories yet avoid arresting and sedimenting the stratigraphy. The overall zone of the "medieval/' as the
time-of-art into a lithic epochal stratigraphy? word itself connotes, is always primarily defined,
Despite the strong self-critical trends and powerful explicitly or implicitly, in opposition to ancient and
new of recent decades, the history of art Renaissance layers of cultural history. Within the
methodologies
at the turn of the millennium remains inmany ways medieval zone, historical space is subdivided into
closely attached to a nineteenth-century stratigraphie Romanesque and Gothic strata, and these in turn
practice (with origins stretching back to Vasari and devolve into Carolingian, Ottoman, Early, High, and
Petrarch): the familiar system of Romanesque, Gothic, Late Romanesque, Early, High, and Late Gothic layers,
Renaissance, Baroque, and so on, and subcategories not to mention regional and national mappings or sites
(and parallel systems in non-Western zones). One might of transition. In virtually every instance, determining
think that this system would by now have been fully boundary markers and contained historical spaces are
historicized, manifest mainly as quaint traces of an characterized by a particular, defined set of formal traits.
archaic discourse. This is far from being the case. Most Each field or subfield is placed in relationship to
scholars, of course, realize that all of these terms are neighboring ones, typically with strong oppositional
problematic and that they are interrelated in a tangle of distinctions and hierarchies.
often perverse, perplexing hierarchies, yet it seems Medieval stratigraphy, like most others, is thus
difficult for many of us to imagine art history without conceived at virtually every level essentially in terms of
this mapping. a particular style-system, and style, as we know, can be
This group of essays grew out of a College Art highly problematic for historical practice. It is, among
Association session (2000) that Ichaired, which sought other things, ferociously absolutist, hegemonic, and
to interrogate this antiquated diachronic system, posing intolerant in itsways. It is based on exclusion rather
two questions: In concrete terms of specific case studies, than inclusion. Itmakes for notorious difficulties in
how does it continue to affect art historical practices? formulating authentic transhistorical understanding and
Second, is such a stratigraphy of discrete historical in establishing meaningful social, political, and
spaces, defined stylistically or otherwise, necessary to economic grounds of the production of art. For
chronology and the diachronics of practice, or are there historians of medieval architecture, style-based
possible alternatives? stratigraphy thereby and in other ways produces an
These questions were not conjured out of thin air but enormous, densely and sometimes nightmarishly
stemmed from problems that deeply affect my own work entangled cluster of problems and issues.
in the trecento, early Renaissance, and northern Gothic These difficulties affect the architecture known as
architecture. It is out of the transhistorical perspective of "Gothic" with particular notoriety. It is not that readings
my teaching and scholarship that metacritical questions of the Gothic in the familiar terms of various traits?rib
have emerged and risen to a state of urgency inmy vaulting, skeletal structure, diaphaneity, diagonality,
thinking. InDominion of the Eye, for example, one of linearity, baldachins, and so forth, seen in varying
aims was to deconstruct
my principal the hierarchical, stylistic sets and movements?are in themselves
stratigraphie layering of quattrocento over trecento, the un informative or necessarily wrong. Rather, as Louis
still all-to-widely practiced submergence of the medieval Grodecki observed in 1977, none of these existing
by the Renaissance in the domain of urbanism as well as interpretative models offers "a firm rigorous definition"
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6 RES 40 AUTUMN 2001
of the Gothic.1 As a group they cannot be assembled semantic innocence or terminological futility, and
into anything more than an unwieldy and finally self emphasize that our definition of "Gothic" remains a
contradictory interpretative bricolage of mainly central point of reference in virtually all discussion of
and early twentieth-century criteria. European monumental architecture of the twelfth to
nineteenth-century
This unsatisfactory situation has not improved recently, fifteenth centuries. The question hangs heavily in the air
in fact quite the opposite. In the past three decades or as soon as the word "Gothic" emerges from our mouths
so, Gothic architectural studies have turned sharply or in our writings, not to mention our explications of the
away from the broad, object-based that architecture to nonspecialists and the public at large.
questions
earlier (no matter how limited We function as historians of this architectural zone in a
preoccupied generations
or irrelevant their methods may now seem) toward the most curious way, constantly speaking of the "Gothic"
as ifwe securely knew what itwas and that it actually
study of particular context-based issues?the functions
of individual spaces, questions of patronage and liturgy, existed, knowing all the while that the one thing certain
the specific social, political, material, and ideological about the subject is our very lack of any such articulated
dimensions of architecture.2 In this recent work (much consensus.Whether we like it or not, the "Gothic"
of it highly laudable on its own terms) the old question, question remains with us, and itwon't go away no
"What isGothic?" which runs as a central theme matter how much we pretend to ignore it.Yet, when the
Paul Frankl's exhaustive of the term are seem
through survey of Gothic's long problems directly confronted, they
is a miasmic intellectual quicksand; hence the tendency to
historiography (1960), rarely explicitly asked, because
around them and let them lie, like sleeping dogs.
implicitly it is considered somehow already answered, go
or conversely, because it is deemed irrelevant and in any To get beyond this impasse, Iwould like to turn to
case to answer.3 I refuse this attitude of another historical discipline?intellectual and scientific
impossible
history?and suggest that it offers a model that may
possibly serve to help us find a way out. Although
1. L. Grodecki, Gothic Architecture, tr. I.Mark (Paris, New York,
"paradigm shift" has made itsway in common parlance
1977), p. 24.
2. E.g., H. Kraus, Gold Was Their Mortar, the Economics of to denote all manner of change, few who use it
Cathedral Building, Boston, 1979; B. Abou-el-Haj, "The Urban Setting understand the actual mechanism of innovation that it
for Late Medieval Church Building: Reims and its Cathedral between concerned in Thomas Kuhn's brilliant book of 1962, The
1210-1240/' Art History 11 (1988):17ff;A. Erlande-Brandenburg,The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, where the term
Cathedral, The Social and Architectural Dynamics of Construction, tr.
in Artistic originated. Kuhn's analysis of the process of scientific
Martin Thorn (Cambridge, 1994); many of the articles
in Gothic ed. V. C. Raguin, K. Brush, and P. innovation is in essence not that complicated. Like the
Integration Buildings,
Draper (Toronto, 1995). See also the comments of W. Sauerl?nder on contemporary socio-intellectual historian Michel
this displacement, in "'Premiere architecture gothique' orNRenaissance Foucault (with whom he is often uncritically paired),
of the twelfth century'? Changing in the evaluation of
perspectives Kuhn sees history not as a continuum of change and
architectural history," Sewanee Medieval Colloquium Occasional
development but as a series of distinct, discrete systems
Papers 2 (1985):25-29. The shift in interest is starkly evident in
comparing P. Frankl's Pelican volume, Gothic Architecture (a stratigraphy, in fact). But whereas Foucault is
(Harmondsworth and Baltimore, 1962) and D. Kimpel and R. Suckale, interested only in defining and exploring the operational
Die gotische in Frankreich 1130-1270
Architecktur (Munich, 1985). terms of each discursive formation, and not at all in
Anne-Marie Sankovitch points out, "Since the embrace of social
transitions (or shifting) from one to the next, Kuhn,
history around 1970, formalism and the internal history of architecture
inversely, is only interested in the transitional process in
have been either rejected as elitist (or worse) or, more benignly,
as their necessary but narrow task so that all itsmicro- and macrodynamics, and not especially, or
regarded having discharged
we can now progress to a richer understanding of architecture in its
really at all, in the scientific paradigms themselves.4
full multidisciplinary In the efforts to anchor architectural in science do not just happen at
complexity. Paradigm shifts
form in its historical context, form itself has become self-evident and
random, according to Kuhn, or as unmotivated
the procedures of formal analysis often tend to be taken as a given,"
leaving us to deal unreflectively with the object in terms formulated
generations ago ("Structure/Ornament and the Modern Figuration of

Architecture," Art Bulletin [1998]:687). with the issue (Gothic defined as a new, postclassical
being implicitly
3. P. Frankl, The Gothic, Princeton, 1960. Christopher Wilson's style or architectural language, without any review of the problematics
insightful recent survey, The Gothic Cathedral, architecture of the of definition).

Great Church, 1130-1530 (London, 1990), despite its title, dismisses 4. This approach is found in all of Foucault's books, but see
or avoids the old question, shifting the center of discussion to the issue especially TheArchaeology of Knowledge (NewYork, 1972) and The
of the "Great Church" typology. Nor is there in Kimpel and Suckale's Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York,
masterful French Gothic survey (see note 2) any sustained engagement 1970).

Trachtenberg: Editorial 7
individual inspiration. Most scientific work ("normal anomaly that cannot

be accommodated by the current
science"), he explains, is not about formulating new "Gothic" paradigm (or any known one), a disturbance, a
ideas (a common misbelief), but rather involves testing fault line or fracture in the "Gothic" order of things in
and working out various implications and unresolved historical thought, that will force the search for a
problems of the established paradigm in a given field, solution by a new paradigm. The aberration that Ibring
gradually finding and tying up all the loose threads (or forward here for study is visible in figure 1, the nave of
"puzzle solving"). Sometimes, however, it is found that Notre-Dame in Paris. To the architecturally and
one of these problems?often a seemingly minor issue, historically informed eye?that is, informed by the
an obscure, current paradigm(s)?something
marginal detail left long in the dark?can be iswrong with this
resolved only with immense difficulty and complications picture, very wrong. It contains a prominent anomaly,
an alien presence,
and distortions of the paradigm. In fact, sometimes right there where you can reach out
forcing the paradigm does not work at all; it simply and touch it.The question is, just what on earth are
cannot be made to accommodate the problem. But the those big, solid, c/ass/ca/-looking columns doing in this
problem cannot simply be disregarded; itwill not go quintessential^ Gothic church?
away; something else is needed. Iam hardly the first historian to notice this problem.
"Exceptional science" (mistakenly thought to be the It registers inmost studies of Gothic architecture since
norm by the public) occurs when such a critical impasse the mid-nineteenth century in at least a passing mention
(or "crisis point") leads a researcher to formulate a or inflection of the text, somewhat as light rays are bent
modified or new general paradigm that will when passing by dense gravitational fields. We certainly
accommodate the "impossible" problem at hand. The would not want to wander extensively into this vast,
term "paradigm shift" describes not merely this repetitive, rather mind-numbing field of disturbance.
intellectual turn in itself, but itsmotivation, as well as However, an analysis of relatively recent treatments of
the complex social-intellectual, discursive process by the issue by two distinguished scholars will serve to
which a new paradigm is itself further tested and filled lay bare the interpretive challenge posed by these
out to the point that it replaces the former paradigm, Gothic columns.
usually against much initial resistance in the scientific The most comprehensive reading of the history of the
community (especially from its older, established problem to date is
Willibald Sauerl?nder's study of
members, who have much symbolic capital invested in 1985.5 His review of notable attempts to explain the
the status quo, as opposed to those just entering). Notre-Dame columns traces discussion back to 1805,
Paradigm shifts, moreover, alter not only the way when Friedrich Schlegel claimed that the columns were
problems are solved but the kinds of questions that are the result of a neoclassical remodeling of the building.6
asked (in Foucault's terms, the entire discursive In 1850, Viollet-le-Duc made the columns instead
formation changes). conceptually "earlier" than the rest of the building,
Kuhn's analysis thus could be said to posit a classic proposing that Notre-Dame as originally built embodied
dynamic for science (giving its self a conflict of two successive historical periods, with
narratological
transformations, or Kuhn's reading of them, or both, a Romanesque-type pillars supporting a wall that already
great appeal): an unsettling disturbance emerges in the had become Gothic, following the rule that, as
dense order of an individual's life, a family, a Sauerl?nder puts it, "A building contradicting the
a
can only represent
community; the mysterious disorder becomes principle of stylistic homogeneity
unbearable; an individual or group discovers the transitional stage."7
problem's secret with an inventive interpretive paradigm; In the twentieth century the demand for stylistic unity
the community is convinced, the alien, threatening at Notre-Dame receives, in character with the post
factor is purged, and order is restored. Thus, mutatis historicist outlook, not a historical but an abstract
mutandis, in Kuhn's reading, does science move from
one paradigm, one interpretive model, or order of 5. Sauerl?nder (see note
2), pp. 25-43.
scientific thinking, to the next. 6. Friedrich von
Schlegel, Ansichten und Ideen von der
In the "Gothic" zone of art history, there may be any christlichen Kunst, ed. H. Eichner (Munich, 1959).
7. Eugene-Emmanuel Viollet-Ie-Duc, Dictionnaire raisonn? de
number of hidden corners where such a tropology, or
l'architecture fran?aise, vol. 7 (Paris, 1869), p. 162; Sauerl?nder (see
transfer, of Kuhn's model of the scientific process-of note 2), p. 37f. On the problematics of the transitional as a concept
change to the aesthetic world might be brought into a in history by the nineteenth century, see Sankovitch (see
implanted
life.
What we would need is to identify an note 2), pp. 692-94 and p. 715 note 34.
parallel

Figure 1. Paris, Notre-Dame, nave, 1178. Photo: of Foto Marburg.

begun Courtesy

resolution enabled by phenomenological formalism. Early Gothic, was in reality a classical revival?"just
Following the imperative that the art historian must another aspect of the movement which Charles Homer
identify (i.e., produce) the formal unity underlying Haskins called 'The Renaissance of the Twelfth
apparent surface contradictions, Hans Jantzen in the Century'."12 Rather than seeking like his predecessors to
1920s reduces the columns to abstract parity with the explain away or minimize the problematic columns by
round shaftlike elements seen on the wall above (which making them Romanesque hangovers, neoclassical
he does not see as columnar).8 Sauerl?nder rightly notes restorations, formalist devices, or secondary elements of
Jantzen's iconic blindness to the fact that those "odd spiritual theater, thereby reconciling the columns to the
round pillars" have "attic bases and carefully carved rest of the building?to (however that is
the Gothic
foliated caps" that make them "all stand in the traditions understood)?Sauerl?nder instead overvalues them.
of the classical column"; yet he himself remains Effectively he reduces the entire building to the
apparently blind to the fact that the upper cylindrical columns, virtually ignoring the related forms above them
elements are also columns with the same tripartite ("smiling" at those who sought to explain them).
syntax, including attic-derived bases and abstractly Sauerl?nder resolves the Gothic-column paradox by
Indeed, it is not clear whether suppressing one of its two terms, pretending that the
Corinthianesque capitals.
Sauerl?nder is quite aware of what I term column non-classical presence in Notre-Dame, that which makes
avoidance language, the way scholars will,
formalist it something other than classical (or Romanesque)?the
attempting to declassicize it, call the Gothic column a difference that makes it "Gothic"?is not there or in any
pier, shaft, cylinder, respond, anything but a column. He case of little consequence. In other words, he does not
himself often slips in and out of this practice, on one resolve the paradox at all, but attempts to expurgate and
page calling the Notre-Dame examples columns but stifle it.
also "round column-like supports," "stout, round Moreover, in the way that one historical distortion
pillars," "odd pillars," "round pillars" (twice), and inevitably leads to another, his belief that the Notre
"unusual pillars," as well as using the word "respond" Dame columns constitute a revival requires that in the
(stressing function) for colonnettes (which describe form).9 preceding phase of medieval architecture such columns
Having to his satisfaction demolished were in steep decline or out of use, and thus potentially
historicizing
restoration and transitional ist theories along with revivable, and indeed he advances in some detail the
abstract formalist explanations of the problem columns, notion that in the half-century or so prior to Saint-Denis
Sauerl?nder finds his last target in the "ingenious but (which also prominently uses columns), "Romanesque"
also more absurd" iconographie interpretation of Hans architecture had suppressed the column (out of the need
Sedlmayr, who in his 1950s book10 developed out of for stronger pier supports for vaulting).13 The fact is,
"the old conflict of matter and spirit" a seductive however, that the column is typically retained in the
reading by which the "bulky supports of Notre-Dame apse ("the most sacred part," as Sauerl?nder admits),
are visual symbols of the church on earth" upon which even at Cluny and similar monumentally vaulted
the "spiritual church floats down from heaven." Without churches, and is replaced by piers only in the nave of
explaining quite why, Sauerl?nder writes off this
"spiritual theater" as little more than "the romantic
... a wishful 12. Ibid., p. 37. Without the phenomenon a
dream of the spiritualized cathedral calling "12th-century
Renaissance," Jean Bony discusses the columns of Saint-Denis, Notre
fantasy"?expecting the reader to be in spontaneous
Dame, and Sens in terms of an antique, specifically Early Christian
agreement with his reaction?and is done with it.11 revival {French Gothic Architecture of the 12th and 13th Centuries,
The point of Sauerl?nder's learned historiographie [Berkeley, 1983], pp. 62-64; reviewed by Sauerl?nder in The New
deconstruction is to clear the ground for his own York Review of Books, 8 November 1984, pp. 43-44, although not
mentioned in the 1985 article). Ultimately, however, sees
solution of the Notre-Dame column conundrum. His Bony
builders as interested not in the antiqueness of the column but rather
argument is a bit convoluted, yet itsmain intent is clear. its role in the structurally basilican format, which allows
lightweight
He accounts for the Notre-Dame columns by arguing him to (barely) remain safely within the standard (". . . in
paridigm
that the style-phase to which Notre-Dame belonged, the their desire to build spacious lightweight structures, in spite of stone
vaulting and with the help of more refined methods of vault

construction, the initiators of the new architecture became suddenly
8. Hans Jantzen, Kunst der Gotik 1957), p. 18. attracted by the solutions evolved in the thin timber-covered structures
(Hamburg,
9. Sauerl?nder (see note 2), p. 37. of the late Roman age; and this introduced a rather unexpected
10. Die Entstehung der Kathedrale (Zurich, 1950), p. 246ff. element into the pattern of speculation of early Gothic builders").
11. Sauerl?nder (see note 2), p. 39. 13. Sauerl?nder (see note 2), p. 35f.

Sauerl?nder's a-columnar examples. Typically, even "Renaissance" of the column, Onians emphasizes its
these compound piers prominently include attached widespread use circa 1100-1260, the for him
problem
half-columns or sometimes the period when ever larger
pilasters, which, although being that this is precisely
perhaps less iconlike than freestanding columns, were vaulted churches logically could have used sturdier, a
ubiquitous in Roman architecture (at, for example, the columnar piers instead as supports. In other words, for
Colosseum as well as throughout the provinces) and Onians the columns are not a stylistic paradox but a
would have also been apprehended as classicizing structural anomaly. He finds its explanation in the power
elements: them as such would be totally
to exclude of symbolism in the period, and interprets the columns
arbitrary. Furthermore, Sauerl?nder's statement that "by in purely exegetical terms, so that, for example, the six
the beginning of the twelfth century the column had pairs of chevet columns at Coutances and Le Mans
disappeared from the nave of the Romanesque basilica cathedrals represent the twelve apostles. Indeed at one
throughout Europe" is qualified by the author himself to point he asserts that what is involved is not mere
exempt Italy and the Holy Roman Empire?not exactly representation but presence?that in the eyes of their
minor areas (despite Sauerl?nder's calling them creators, those columns literally were apostles.15
"backwaters")?to which one might add numerous Such or intense symbolic practice
figuration in the
large-scale examples of columnar naves in England and author's view wasnot just a diffuse medieval
France itself (not just tiny ones as Sauerl?nder implies), phenomenon but chronologically limited in both writing
represented byTournus, Saint-Savin-sur-Gartempe, and architecture. For Onians "the period of the
Gloucester, and Durham (the intermediate piers). structurally weak column corresponds precisely with the
Moreover, a classical extinction-revival cycle would period when symbolism most interested ecclesiastical
involve more than and he finds, somewhat
presumably just columns, yet writers"; inversely, that the
Sauerl?nder does not claim such a broad a-classical column's "replacement by the structurally more
trend in 1100-1150 Romanesque architecture, although appropriate piers comes exactly at the time [after 1260]
he does try to negate the "classical flavor of the Cluniac when architects were beginning to assert themselves,"
churches" by insisting that this "flavor" is not a true implying without further comment that architects were
historicism but about
"decorum, beauty, splendor"? uninterested in or even against architectural meaning,
perhaps somewhatvaguely "attached to the heritage of and that they had little influence over the form of pre
classical architecture." For Sauerl?nder, whatever looks 1260 works such as Chartres, Bourges, or Notre-Dame.16
classical 1100-1150 is excluded or really something Onians also conjures a sweeping, breathtakingly
else, whereas after 1140/50 he allows us to apprehend simplistic explanation for the rest of the Gothic building,
only the classical forms in the churches, for him especially the great vaulting configurations (which he at
meaning only their main nave arcade columns, which least recognizes as worthy of mention, unlike
alone would fully constitute a classical Renaissance in Sauerl?nder). The entire, amazingly complex and
church architecture, at least regarding the interiors. innovative super-columnar apparatus of the cathedral
In Sauerl?nder's review, Schlegel, Viollet-le-Duc, was in his eyes simply a response to the column, i.e.,
Jantzen, and Sedlmayr are lured one by one into a was fully determined by the need to build lighter over
columnar man-trap. He "smiles" at their folly, then such slender supports. The power of symbolic discourse
proceeds unwittingly to tempt us in turn to "smile"?a "led builders from Suger onwards to abandon piers and
hazardous for sure?at
reaction his own energetic effort return to columns. Since by now great buildings could
to solve the riddle. This issue was addressed again three no longer be conceived of without vaults, this change
years later by John Onians. InBearers of Meaning, which led in turn to a drastic transformation of the upper parts
seeks to reveal the changing yet continuous symbolism of churches to enable their weight to be carried on
of the orders from antiquity to the Renaissance, a much slenderer supports."17
chapter in effect is dedicated to the problem of the At the same time, Onians seeks to defend his
Gothic column.14 Onians is not much interested in its interpretation of the Gothic column as exegetical,
historiography. Rather than seeing a late twelfth-century Christian symbol against the obvious contrary reading,
the column as historicist, classical reference?part of a
14. Princeton, 1988, Chapter VI, "The column in the Christian

Middle pp. 74-90. Onians was probably unaware of 15. Ibid, p. 90.
Ages,"
Sauerl?nder's study, which appeared in an obscure journal the year 16. Ibid, p. 88.
that Onians dates his preface. 17. Ibid, p. 90.

medieval "Renaissance" such as the one Sauerl?nder apostles; because they superficially take the form of
to preempt such an interpretation, fragile columns, however, and not heavy complicated
pictures. Evidently
Onians writes: piers, the vaulting had to be correspondingly
The fascination with columns . . . associated with the birth lightweight, hence the birth of the whole Gothic system.
If two such highly qualified observers cannot agree on
of Gothic architecture and sculpture can thus be seen as
such absolutely basic questions?whether a set of
the culmination of a tradition of Christian exegesis. The
is thick or thin, columns or
only other explanation for the [Gothic] fondness for supports apostles,
columns would be a respect for it as an Antique form. But overburdened or lightly loaded, determined or
this seems excluded by the very nature of the shift from determinants?which involve fundamental aspects of
Romanesque to Gothic, involving as itdid the rejection of a history, perception, and construction, then the problem
Classical vocabulary.18 is not in the observing individuals: the fault lies with the
common paradigm.
Here, to support his cause Onians falls back on
The valiant attempts of Onians and Sauerl?nder to
stylistic terms, the most fundamental, normative
run
of medieval architectural
solve the Gothic-column problem aground and
stratigraphie structuring history.
crash for the same reasons as their predecessors': the
All that isGothic, by such stylistic definition, must be
operative interpretive paradigm will not accommodate
purified of the classical still present in the Romanesque.
and legitimately "normalize" the anomaly. Why is this
Yet Onians's churches have not rejected a "Classical
so? In these various cases the paradigm ismore or less
vocabulary"?they have affirmed it. But not really,
structuralist in its stylistics. Itworks in exclusionary
Onians would have to argue (as Iperceive the
terms of difference as it posits closed sets of traits
implications of his text)?they only look that way in our
anachronistic vision. For their original audience, they incompatible with other sets. Gothic by its very
(structuralist) definition is opposed to the classic; that
were not really "columns" at all. Where we see
which is classical?whether of the antique,
columns, the period eye would exclusively have seen
Romanesque, or Renaissance variety?cannot be Gothic
apostles (and so forth). Apart from producing a reductio as
ad absurdum of the period-eye in this case the (as Onians proclaims, and Sauerl?nder recognizes).
concept,
well-known habits attributed to medieval
The column being a primary, quintessential classical
exegetical
form, its presence inwhat is termed "Gothic" produces
perception?such an argument is by no means closed.
a problem that cannot be solved when confronted
For example, one immediately would ask why, if the
no columness, no openly; the contradiction is absolute and ineradicable.
"columns" embodied absolutely
Hence the various historical attempts to avoid,
valorizing antique reference for their beholders, why
rationalize, or explain away the columns?they are later
were they used at all as opposed to any other
restorations (Schlegel); they are "transitional" hangovers
imaginable support, especially given their great
structural disadvantage, indeed, their inherent
and impurities (Viollet-le-Duc); they play a secondary,
earthly role in a Gesamptkunstwerk spiritual theatre
contradiction of the great medieval vaulting movement? are
I
(Sed may r); they not columns but abstract forms like
Directly comparing the analyses of the column
these two eminent everything else in the building (Jantzen). In every case
problem by scholars, published
one is these maneuvers either exclude columns from the
within three years of each other (1985-1988),
Gothic building, transform them into something else, or
astonished by their absolutely opposite take on the
in divergent directions. marginalize them.19 This happens not by choice, or by
question, with violent distortion
chance, or by intellectual incapacity, but by necessity, if
According to Sauerl?nder, we moderns see thickset
the traditional paradigm is not to be broken.
unclassical round piers in Notre-Dame, but medieval
saw as Onians's argument in fact parallels the last of these
people them truly classical columns; the reason
are so strategems (Jantzen's): he tells us that in the Gothic
the supports heavy, he reasons, is because of the
loads they were cathedral, what looks classical?big heavy columns with
great superstructure and vaulting
to carry. Not so writes Onians tripartite bases and heavy Corinthianesque capitals?was
predestined (although
not seen as classical by itsmakers, and therefore was
evidently in total independence of Sauerl?nder): it iswe
moderns who see classical columns in Notre-Dame,
whereas medieval people saw them as veritable 19. Sedlmayr's highly innovative reading of the Gothic, however,
which has been suppressed largely on political grounds (he was a
Nazi) rather than intellectual merit, deserves a closer look in relation
18. Ibid. to the interpretive terms advanced below the column.
regarding

not classical. In other words, we are asked to take

why the interpretation of Gothic architecture is so
seriously a kind of magic disappearing trick, as Onians in the first "Gothic Architecture"
problematic place.
conjures away the classical in the column (exegetically was, as iswell known (though generally in
suppressed
rather than phenomenologically). Sauerl?nder, although critical practice), a fiction devised by the Renaissance.
seeming at some level to intuit the paradigm problem as In order for Vasari and other writers of the Petrarchian
impossible, nevertheless does not seek a new one. genealogy to erase the legitimacy of the immediate past,
Rather he attempts to go around the old one with, so to to bury it as the "dark ages," its architecture had to be
speak, a linguistic slight of hand together with an depicted as darkly as possible. Thus itwas constructed
alternate disappearing trick. He unblinkingly continues by Renaissance in the most alien and strange
ideology
to call the architecture of Notre-Dame, terms possible: no rules or order, inwild
built with
"Early Gothic,"
yet what he describes in this architecture, what is decadence and disorder, by savage barbarians who had
present in the text, is simply a classical revival of destroyed the ancient buildings and killed all the
columns?a part of the "Renaissance of the 12th architects (as Vasari famously tells us).21 But the main
Century." Here, it is not the column as column that is point is that even after the positive reversal of fortunes of
made to disappear (as inOnians) but the rest of the "medieval architecture" beginning in the eighteenth
building (the "Gothic" part): it is simply not there. century, Gothic did not shed the strange and alien
In terms of paradigm-shift theory, to restate the character it at its discursive birth. Its traits
assigned
question, what is happening here is that both Onians essentially were now inverted, as if its original
and Sauerl?nder (and predecessors) are seeking to make "Renaissance" features now were seen in reverse: not
the column problem conform to the style paradigm and decadent but spiritualized; not disordered but
vice versa (just as, according to Kuhn, practioners of not the
hypersystematized; complex product of living
. . .
"normal" science "when confronted by an anomaly history but a brittle schema of abstract forms and
will devise numerous articulations and ad hoc It seems to have been fated that the various,
symbols.
modifications of their theory" in order to eliminate any now positive style-sets concocted to explain itwould
apparent conflict). Yet regardless of how much the remain deeply problematic. The Gothic-column
paradigm is bent, stretched, and distorted itwill not conundrum is only a marked symptom of a wider
work; only by conjuring and disappearing tricks critical-historical malaise.
performed on the and its elements, which are Given this line of interpretive descent, to again study
building
made to disappear into thin air, or transmute into flesh, the Renaissance foundation of "Gothic" discourse might
spirit, or abstraction, is even a rhetorically credible open up possibilities of shifting the interpretive
description possible. By understanding this, we have paradigm at the most effective juncture, its historical
navigated the difficult and crucial first move of the point of Here we might
origination. directly interrogate
paradigm-shift protocol: the demonstration that for a the curious term "Gothic" itself, by asking why we
particular, yet irreducible and crucial problem in the persist in calling European architecture of the twelfth
field of study, the old paradigm is simply not viable no through fifteenth centuries after a barbarian tribe of late
matter what.
antiquity. Are we here merely being creatures of
meaningless, ingrained habit, or might the word
"Gothic" not contain a germ of etymological truth? I
Toward a critical new paradigm for the "Gothic"
suggest that the word, despite the blatant absurdity in
Our historiographie exercise indicates that a new its usage, contains a key to understanding the period.
paradigm for the architecture commonly called Gothic is Here we must look to the linguistic practice of the
now needed.20 In searching for it, however, we should Renaissance, which first made the connection between
first back up a step and briefly reengage the question of the word "Gothic" and the architecture in question.
Essentially the connection is simple. In the eyes of the
20. I have the paradigm-analysis that follows in two Renaissance, the Goths were the destroyers of Rome and
explored
previous articles, "Gothic, Italian 'Gothic': Toward a Redefinition," its architecture. They were, in other words, the literal
JSAH (1991), pp. 22-37 (with an emphasis on the Italian difference to embodiment of anticlassicism. This, of course, was
France) and "Suger's Miracles, Branner's Bourges: Reflections on
bound closely with the Renaissance view of medieval
'Gothic Architecture' as Medieval Modernism," Gesta 39
(2000):183-205 (with an analysis of Suger's writings as to
they apply
the paradigm, and of Bourges as an epitome of medieval in 21. On the problem of Vasari's construction of the dark ages, see
modernity
formal terms). now the contribution of Anne-Marie Sankovitch to this volume.
specific

we tend to use "Romanesque" or

architecture: its essence (by necessity) was its either unthinkingly
anticlassicism. But the Renaissance also used another disparagingly, that is,with the idea that it represents, if
term for the recent post/non-antique architectural anything, a rather naive understanding of the pre
phenomenon, "lavori moderni."22 we put this term
If Gothic. Ipropose instead, in a manner somewhat
together with "Gothic"?that is, put together the two analogous to my etymological revaluation of "Gothic,"
earliest descriptive terms for the movement?we have an that the original core meaning of the word "Romanesque"
architecture that is both "modern" and "anticlassical"? also has a certain powerful validity (at least for
or going a crucial step further, "modernist" and immediate purposes at this point in the argument). I
"antihistoricist," which are two ways of saying nearly the would suggest that it provides a more accurate take on
same thing.23 I submit that these early sources were on the period it denotes than all the later academic analysis
to something closer to a better paradigm than most in terms of square-schematism, bay systems, radiating
later, "scientific" scholarship preoccupied with rib chapels, and the like, which, like the usual attributes of
vaulting, skeletal structure, scholasticism, diaphaneity, "Gothic," do not hold up under hard scrutiny regarding
geometry, diagonality, and so forth. Ipropose that were accuracy, compatibility, or comprehensiveness of
it possible to give later medieval architecture a name application to this highly varied architecture. Instead,
more descriptively accurate and less loaded with the early nineteenth-century term Romanesque was
misinformative connotations than "Gothic"?while at nearly on the mark, more historically accurate generally
the same time retaining the historically and conceptually than late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
legitimate, hidden meaning of that otherwise nonsensical rumination on the architecture in question. At this level
term?that name would be "medieval modernism." of analysis, itwould mean that pre-Gothic medieval
The architectural phenomenon in question, however, architecture was, quite simply, Roman-esque. Itwas, in
was far too complex to be reduced to the sort of other words, deeply historicizing.
This would seem to give us a conceptually
monadic paradigm that the implications of the concept clarified
of "modernism" might imply. In this preliminary medieval sequence: a phase of historicism, followed by
paradigm-research we need still to expand our view, one of modernism. Although in very general terms of
and go back a step in the common chronology, to the broad tendencies and emphases such a schema has a
period generally called Romanesque, a term with which certain validity, we must recognize that the picture is far
"Gothic" is often oppositionally paired, and that hence from being so simple. The former phase often embodied
requires some critical attention here.24 As with "Gothic," modernist tendencies as well, just as the period of
modernism was complicated by a historicist presence.
22. E.g., Filarete (cf. Frankl [see note 3], 256f, 858f). This should Neither was purist (except perhaps for the very final
not to be confused with later Renaissance use of the term "modern" of medieval which came close).
stages modernism,
for the Renaissance itself (for example, and Vasari). On the
by Raphael The components of historicism and modernism varied
of Renaissance see E. H. Gombrich,
phenomenon period-naming,
widely in form and strength throughout "Romanesque"
"Norm and Form: The Stylistic Categories of Art History and Their
Origins in Renaissance Ideals," in Norm and Form (London, 1966), Europe, a fact that invalidates the usual models of
pp. 81-88. descriptive analysis (which cannot accommodate this
23. The Gothic period itself, so far as we know, only qualified its and fuels my Some
complexity) proposed approach.
architecture as "opus francigenum." The phrase was
geographically, areas were nearly purist (through various
chronological
used by Burchard von Hall around 1280 in reference to the German
spans and in varying density of occurrence) in stressing
abbey church of St. Peter atWimpfen im Tahl (Frankl, p. 55). As Frankl
was similarly aware that the one tendency over the other. For example, the medieval
points out (ibid.), Gervase of Canterbury
Gothic choir of Canterbury Cathedral that he chronicled derived from churches of Rome were so faithful to Early Christian
France. In late medieval Italy, there is no reason to believe that the
models, that is, so immaculately historicist, that for
Gothic would not have been seen as something French, it
although
also may have in the
"Romanesque" scholarship they represent intractable
become already associated with Germany
to
trecento im Trecento," exceptions standard interpretative models (square
(H. Klotz, "Deutsche und italienische Baukunst
Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Instituts in Florenz, xi [1966], schematism, the bay system, and so on), while to the
173ff ). By the Cinquecento the geographical locus of the Gothic had
completely shifted to Germany in the eyes of the Italians (who often

called it the maniera tedesca); but for Philibert Delorme, presumably 1981), p. 4ff; andT. Bizzarro,
Acquitaine (Chicago Romanesque
current French notions, the Gothic remained French, as well Architectural Criticism: A Prehistory 1992). A further
reflecting (Cambridge,
as being "modern" (Frankl, p. 297). of course, is that the Gothic is oppositional to both the
complication,
24. On the term Romanesque, see Frankl, passim; the perceptive Classical and to the Romanesque, which are considered
oppositional
analysis of L. Seidel, Songs of Glory, The Romanesque Facades of to each other.

2. Rome, San Lorenzo fuori-le-mura, nave, 12th century. Photo: Marvin

Figure
Trachtenberg.
nonspecialist they are Romanesque only by their date, The great exemplar of this interaction was the
according to the usually received explanation (fig. 2).25 imperial Cathedral at Speyer. The first Speyer of the early
Normandy, on the other hand, was in certain aspects eleventh century took up the nearby fourth-century
sometimes so strongly modernist that instances such as Constantinian basilica at Trier, turned it outside in, and
Saint-?tienne in Caen (fig. 3) could be plausibly added an attenuated half-columnar layer of bay-dividing
included by Ernst Gall in his admirable book on early elements (figs. 5, 6). What is particularly telling is that
Gothic (which, however, implicitly posed the the second Speyer as rebuilt a half-century later ismore
conundrum of a premature, anachronistic rather than less historicizing (fig. 7). Not only are huge
manifestation).26 More characteristic of the period, or Roman-style groin vaults erected, but the main piers
considered central to it, are works like Autun Cathedral receive a double order of massive columns that are far
more antique
(fig. 4) or itsmodel, Cluny III,which embody a complex, in proportions than the original attenuated
often tense or conflicted
relationship between forms. As a whole the interior of
this prodigious
historicizing elements, such as classicizing columns, cathedral of the Holy Roman Empire thereby recalled
pilasters, vaulting, ornament, and "normative" still-famous large-scale vaulted ancient interiors such as
proportions, on the one hand and on the other the imperial thermae or the Basilica of Maxentius.
modernist tendencies towards the bay system, spatial Speyer tells us that what we call "Romanesque," just as
fragmentation, schematization, and attenuated itwas rarely a pure historicism, also was never an
proportions, a tension that, of course, was part of the inexorable "transitional" movement towards "Gothic"?
or now, tentatively, medieval modernism?a
pervasive and continuing ambiguity of the conflicted
medieval attitude towards antiquity.27
25. I seek
to explain this Roman purism in more positive terms in would emphasize (as in the text below regarding the "Gothic") the
"On Bruneileschi's Choice: on the History of the City of possibility that one might think of, for example, the attenuated
Speculations
Rome and the Origins of the Renaissance," in C. Striker, ed., Essays in columns and pilasters of Speyer, Saint-Sernin, Cluny III, and Autun not
of Richard Krautheimer (Mainz, 1996), pp. 169-174. in the usual terms of confusion and misunderstanding of the classical
Memory
26. E. Gall, Diegotische Baukunst in Frankreich und Deutschland (e.g., "In the Middle Ages, the return to the classical past was always
1925). and distorted," Sauerl?nder, as in note 2, 34) but more as
(Leipzig, fragmentary
27. On this huge and still open subject, see above all, E. Panofsky, self-conscious, knowing, modernizing distortions of the very antiquity
Renaissance and Renascences inWestern Art (New York, 1965). I to which these same buildings are so powerfully attached.

!-1!
*???>%>..
\.^->
Figure 5. Speyer I,c. 1030-60 (Hollar reconstruction).

3. Caen, Saint-?tienne, nave, 1064-77. Photo: Marvin
Figure
Trachtenberg.
misinterpretation that never has been quite put to rest.28

Itwas not driven by any unconscious process of stylistic
evolution but rather guided by a strongly self-conscious
view of history, of the present in its relationship to the
past, inwhich the latter was not to be relinquished in
architecture but instead emphasized (its strength
depending on specific circumstances, which could
easily go "in reverse"). Itdid not want vainly to be
"Gothic" but?not unlike our own recent Post-Modernist
architecture, as well as much of the nineteenth
century's?was both modernist and historicist at the
same time.
Thus, perhaps the fairest characterization of what has
been called the Romanesque period would be in terms
of a conflict, an instability, an unresolved tension
between the two currents of historicism and modernism,
inwhich the former tended to predominate, although
not in any progressive way or with any clear pattern. In
such a reading, the Gothic turn would no longer be
construed as a replacement of one style-set by another,
4. Autun, Saint-Lazare, forechoir, 12th 28. On the "transitional" in modern architectural discourse, see
Figure early century.
Photo: Marvin Trachtenberg. note 7.

Figure 6. Trier, basilica, early 4th century. Photo: Courtesy of Foto Marburg.
but rather a shift in orientation, a move towards the Modernism and historicism: Definitions
resolution of the contest, away from historicism and in and implications
favor of an ascendant, eventually dominant,
At this point, the terms historicism and modernism,
modernism.29 Yet even this more critically nuanced
which Ihave used while relying on a certain suspension
diachronics of medieval requires further
architecture
of disbelief on the reader's part, can no longer wait to be
qualification and elaboration it
beforemight offer a clarified as to their usage inmy argument. To do so it
viable new paradigm. Considering the paradigm
in this essay, what is required is an helps to realize that my approach here to medieval
problem highlighted architecture is derived from a familiar methodology
intellectual framework that accounts for the marked
historicism in a time of universally applied to the architecture (and other
presence of dramatically cultural production) of certain nonmedieval fields, in
intensified modernism without compromising either
term?a means to relate the problematic Notre-Dame particular the Renaissance and Modern periods. These
are generally understood not in terms of style, as are
columns to the rest of the building in a manner coherent
with a view of the architectural movement as a whole. virtually all current readings of the middle ages, but
rather in terms of what?for lack of a more concise
term?I would call "modalities of cultural-historical
consciousness." That is, the central factor underlying
29. This volte-face would in literary cultural production and reception in the Renaissance
closely parallel developments
intellectual circles in France,
centered in the shift that occurred around and Modern periods is seen as grounded in the mode of
1150 from a strong proto-humanistic revival of antique material to self historical consciousness, in the period's sense of the
new methods and interests or
relationship of the self, the institution, the community,
consciously emphasizing novelty, promoted
sometimes were prone to calling themselves
by scholars who formation to the past. It hinges
see S. C. Ferruolo, in
the particular discursive
"moderns"; "The Twelfth-Century Renaissance,"
W. Treadgold, ed., Renaissances Before the Renaissance (Stanford
on the dependence of cultural ambition and desire on
1984), pp. 139f, 144. the past or, conversely, the sense of independence from

least since Michelet and Burckhardt, the Renaissance

has been defined principally not as a style but as a
movement driven by a turn in historical self
consciousness and desire, by a deep new historicism
seen as pervasive throughout its cultural production. But
it is the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that provide
the more relevant parallel to my reading of the
medieval. Here, as realized for example in Labrouste's
Biblioth?que Ste-Genevi?ve, the nineteenth century is
now seen, much like the Romanesque, as a time
committed to exploring both historicism and
modernism, a project believed to be compromised in
the eyes of the early twentieth century, which turned
toward a purist modernism, as in Le Corbusier's Villa
Savoie (which, of course, was nevertheless imbued with
a strongly historicizing Platon ist formal idealism).
It is evident in observed patterns of misusage, that I
also need to refine and reinforce certain distinctions
(working, not absolute) in the terminology employed
here, especially regarding the word "modern/ism." One
that should be obvious, though it is often not kept in
mind, is the difference between modernism and
Modernism: respectively, between a transhistorically
potential mode of consciousness and experience and its
specific historical realization, as in the Modernist
movement of the twentieth century (or, indeed, the
wider "Modernist" project for civilization formulated by
the Enlightenment).31 Medieval Modernism would share
with recent Modernism a common antihistoricist
grounding in the "present," an emphasis on the critical
power of reason over precedent and authority, and
Figure 7. Speyer II,c. 1080. Nineteenth-century lithograph.
ultimately to some degree an empowering of individual
it?in other words, the oppositional pair that we know 31. See Habermas above. Compare Terry Eagleton's recent remarks
as historicism and modernism. on transhistorical constituted, inmy terms, by modernism

categories
and historicism: "Why should modernity define itself in purely
In the historicist mode, cultural production is
temporal terms, rather than by reference to a cultural style, a mode of
categorically grounded in and legitimated by reference an intellectual climate ... All are modern, but not
production, periods
to historical precedent, often though not always classical all of them live their experience in this mode. Indeed the classical is a
antiquity. Inmodernism, this historicist grounding is way of living one's experience as though itwere simply
a reprise of
would cultural the past, so that only those bits of itwhich bear the legitimating seal of
suppressed?some say repressed?and . . .
tradition can be regarded as authentic Modernity, by contrast, sees
production is considered, however self-deceptively, as
itself not just as one more phase of time, but as a phase of time which
both self-generating and self-legitimizing, grounded in re-evaluates the very notion of temporality . . What
. strikes it as most
the present (future) without recourse to history.30 Thus, at about itself is the of time,
typical dazzling, dismaying experience
which no longer comes wrapped in history or habit or custom but is
now almost their opposite. The modern is that which
becoming
30. On the concept and problematics of modernity, see above all reduces everything which happened up to half an hour ago to an
J. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. F. oppressive traditionalism; it is less a continuation of history than an
Lawrence (Cambridge, MA, 1986); on the medieval use of the term, W. abolition of it," ("Newsreel History," review of Peter Conrad, Modern
Freund, Modernus und andere Zeitbegriffe des Mittelalters (Cologne, Times, Modern Places [London, 1998], in London Review of Books,
1957). 12 November 1998, p. 8).

subjectivity,but?and this is a crucial distinction?not coexistence. These modalities are about conscious
necessarily any particular formal features of its cultural desire, and consciousness, as we know, is inherently
production. Unlike recent Modernism, which has been accommodating, expansive, and multilayered rather
so transparent and omnipresent in culture, medieval than intolerant, reductive, or monadic (as style tends to
Modernism experienced a much more problematic, be in its globalizing insistence on coherent sets of a
often submerged or disguised existence as a cultural limited number of formal traits in individual works,
project, especially in terms of its explicit presence in the artists, and periods). Itallows for irrationality and
textual record.32 exception, for the messy complexity and contradiction
But modernism also involves a third meaning, for of life, and of art. Thereby the cultural-historical
"modern" may and commonly does signify, of course, consciousness paradigm permits, indeed fosters, the
simply what is (or seems) new, recent, current, explication of conflicted, multilayered works. It
contemporary, up-to-date, and so on. In this usage encourages us to see works in anti-hegemonic terms, to
historicism can also be "modern," as in the Renaissance, see the cathedrals formally as the complex and even
when one use of the term modern was
not to designate self-contradictory entities that much contemporary
the "Gothic" but rather the then current classical research is in fact proving them to be socially, and to
revival.33 Although in practice both medieval and explain that complexity unburdened by the demands of
versions of modernism within a coherent view of their
twentieth-century vitally style, yet general formal
incorporated such "newness," this important meaning is character. The paradigm permits the unproblematic
not at the core of my redefinition of the medieval interpretation of periods of instability and of tension
passage known as "Gothic." My usage focuses instead between historicist and modernist desire, like the
on the evident, underlying shift in historical eleventh and early twelfth centuries, inmuch the same
consciousness, grounding, and desire rather than on the way that it allows for the complexity of the period of the
associated formal novelty of the cultural products of the turn to medieval Modernism?also known as the
shift, that is, specific formal difference from immediately Gothic?in which the rising tide of modernist desire is
preceding works. rarely unaccompanied by a strain of historicist
Furthermore, historicism analogously is to be consciousness, strongly manifest in certain specific
distinguished from what might be called traditionalism, situations and sites.
with which it is sometimes conflated. By traditionalism I In other words, the paradigm enables us to
mean the sheer continuation of practice (in activist or understand those problematic columns in
classicizing
polemicist form, itmay be called conservatism).34 Its Notre-Dame in Paris in the same terms as the
is not but or
opposite modernism, simply innovation, predominant modernism of these buildings without
modern-as-newness (on whatever terms of consciousness). compromising or either presence in the
subordinating
Turning from such problematics of definition, a manner unavoidable when the old
using Romanesque
crucial point of substance concerns certain advantages versus-Gothic paradigm according to which, as we have
of the cultural-historical consciousness paradigm over a seen, such classical elements by definition can never
style-centered methodology. The paradigm spares us the appear in the latter style. Moreover, it allows us to
many well-known difficulties associated with "style."35 understand S. Lorenzo in Rome, Florence Baptistery,
Itsmodalities of modernism and historicism can occur Autun and Speyer Cathedrals on compatible, meaningful
in infinite pure and impure states of existence and terms of identity and difference (which otherwise has
proven impossible), indeed to understand Florence
Baptistery and Bourges Cathedral on those same
32. Cf. note 29, however. terms. It lets us see St-Etienne in Caen as
congruous
33. See note 22.
34. Such traditionalism is, of course, to be distinguished from unproblematically including an eleventh century quasi
"invented" tradition, which is a historicist construct
(or retrohistoricist)
modernist interior elevation, sparing us the agony of
of real and imaginary elements of the past (often associated deciding whether the building is proto-Gothic or a
conjured
with what Idistinguish as conservatism); see E. H. Hobsbawm,
Romanesque building with some proto-Gothic features,
"Inventing Tradition," in The Invention of Tradition, E. H. Hobsbawm or whatever.
andT. Ranger eds. 1983), pp. 1-14.
(Cambridge, in this way, the paradigm may even
35. On the problematic of style, see above all M. Ultimately,
concept
reedited in idem., Theory and
allow us to develop a reading of medieval architecture
Schapiro, "Style," (1955), Philosophy of
Art: Style, Artist, and Society (New York, 1994), pp. 51-101, not as stratified horizontally into "Romanesque" and
especially
62ff regarding the critical position taken here. "Gothic" layers at all (which inevitably solicits stylistic

categorization), but vertically, as a continuum of cultural field of spatio-visual representation, or expanded to

production organized around dominant twin strands of embrace it,which would shift the methodology toward
historicist and modernist discourse, distinct yet often alignment with many specific forms of current research
entangled in ever varying relationships. To pursue such a in the period?and in art history in general.
dialectical genetic logic to its conclusion would
potentially imply a certain fundamental reorganization
not only of the "medieval" (an archaic, now rather
Building the paradigm
paradoxical term that would necessarily disappear)36 but During the rise of medieval modernism, historicizing
conceivably of architectural history as a whole (at least elements are deliberately, self-consciously, and
within the European-Western sphere): a ninety-degree pointedly made either to disappear or to lose, by
reorientation of history from horizontal stratification to a degrees, their historicist presence. The meaning-laden
consistently vertical dialectical structure, producing a historicist language taken from Rome, that agglomerate
transparency and compatibility between various of forms so strongly present in the previous (Roman
architectural time zones?those called medieval, esque) medieval phase, the classical apparatus of groin
Renaissance, Baroque, and Modern?currently regarded and barrel vaults, pilasters, trabeation, and load-bearing
as virtually incompatible the terms of their walls, is now in diverse ways and to varying degrees,
regarding
over time, negated
interpretation. through exclusion, suppression,
Moreover, such transparency would result not only subversion or conversion?a process also generally
diachronically but potentially synchronically as well. As applied, although in a singular way, to the column. In
has been recently demonstrated, the social tends to place of the old historicising assemblages a medieval
become involved in style-based narratives mainly to mode of architectural modernism takes hold: not the
explain away aberrations and inconsistencies in stylistic scattered, episodic, fragmentary, often superficial
patterns and development, thereby precluding modernist gestures, as previously (for example, at Speyer
meaningful contextual interpretation.37 Just as style or Cluny III), but a comprehensive, vital, new deep
based criticism is inherently asocial in its abstraction, so rooted program of structure and form, which is
the cultural-historical consciousness paradigm by inherently both modernist and anti-classical in logic and
definition is engaged in the social field, for what are effect, and in signification and self-conscious motivation.
consciousness and desire if not specifically that of What ismost interesting about this modernist
individuals, groups, institutions, and communities? program, in terms of my argument, are two distinct yet
historicism and modernism are transhistorical interrelated it drastically
Although ultimately procedures by which
concepts, they nevertheless compel close attention to remodels the cathedral. The first?which concerned
the historical specificity of the period under study. The everything but the column?is that in large part the new
cultural products of cultural-historical consciousness are program may be attributed to a paradigm shift that
inevitably representations of that consciousness; as occurred within the cathedral workshop itself (rather
representations they bridge the gap between artistic form than a shift in our terms of understanding the past).
and desire. This would suggest that the paradigm Iam More accurately, this turn entailed a series of such
proposing for medieval architecture might be displaced transformations, which in close sequence produced the
in its center from the matrix of consciousness toward the rib vault, the pointed arch, and the flying buttress so
essential to the new modernist building. These
were not
metamorphoses arbitrary, spontaneous
36. "Medieval," of course, combines the Latin m?dius (middle) inventions propelled by sheer modernist desire, but fully
and aevum a "middle
age" between ancient and followed the protocols of paradigm-shift
(age), designating theory and its
modern seem to make the term "medieval
periods, which would ruthless self-critical procedures. That is, each was
modernism" an oxymoron. This problem may be avoided, however,
by adhering to the distinctions made in the text above, by which
motivated by an impasse in the given design paradigm,
"medieval" would not any inherent qualities one or more intractable that it simply could
designate (or cultural problems
"style") but only an "intermediate" time period as such, with the not resolve, thus requiring a reconceptualization, a new
generic "modern" signifying the particular character of the epoch.
paradigm, which once formulated was
gradually
Admittedly, this demands agreement on specific usage, a problem in its problematics and implications and
explored
perhaps best ultimately solved by avoiding the term "medieval"
altogether, with its seemingly ineradicable connotations of cultural eventually spread into general modernist practice. Yet it
subordination to the framing classical-historicist must be said that architectural change of the level
periods.
37. Sankovitch (see note 2), 1998, pp. 694, 700-701. described here was not only a matter of problem

solving, important as that was. The modernist impulse

also embodied a fierce architectural iconoclasm that
seems to have inhabited these workshops, which of
course only reinforced the autocritical and inventive
drive to paradigm shifting. And indeed, medieval
modernism itself (insofar as it can be spoken of in
isolation) was unimaginable without the deepest levels
of architectural desire to power it.
The paradigmatic center of this transformative process
was the ruthless, powerful, and, Imaintain, highly self
conscious and knowing critique of the logic, geometry,
technique, and appearance of the Roman-esque?
ultimately Roman?groin vault, which had been the
workhorse of vaulted buildings. This critique lead not
simply to "progress" but to a radical mutation and
reversal of virtually all of its traits in the rib vault (results
that could not possibly have emerged without a high
degree of techno-historical knowledge and intellectual
motivation). In formal terms, this critique (deeply
Euclidian inmuch of its logic) worked essentially as Figure 9. Rib-vault diagram. From James H. Acland, Medieval
follows: Because the groin vault was conceived as two Structure: The Gothic Vault (University of Toronto Press,
1972). Reprinted with the permission of the publisher.
interpenetrating barrel vaults, it produced groin lines of
difficult-to-manage parabolic curvatures and folds, as
well as being inherently resistant to covering anything
other than a square plan?difficulties that towards 1100
and after came to be regarded in Norman and northern
French practice as untenable (fig. 8). The rib vault
instead begins conceptually and in construction as an
integral framework of discrete arches, each with an
independently generated curvature defined not by a
mere edge but by strong plastic form (figs. 9, 10). The
formerly secondary groin line thus becomes the visually
primary rib, with the vaulting surface now appearing as
the visually secondary infill, the web, which serves as
Figure 10. Saint-Denis, 1140-44. Photo:

ambulatory vaulting,
8. Groin vault Marvin Marvin Trachtenberg.
Figure diagram. Drawing: Trachtenberg.

the ground for the dominant figure of the ribs. All that is one of the
through the entire middle ages had provided
left of the historical model is the idea of masonry primary historicist elements, a central point of reference
vaulting, initially with a four-part cross-diagonal to antiquity, whose architectural authority was now
division; soon even that quadripartite organization is being shattered and replaced by a new modernist
frequently exploded as the flexibility of the modernist program. (Technically the broken arch was realized by a
rib vault is realized in an endless series of triangular, decentering operation, inwhich twin centers of
quadrangular, and polygonal plans. curvature replaced a single central point.) One might
Perhaps even more boldly revealing of the deeply say that the broken arch is an indexical sign of an
critical, iconoclastic thrust of the rising movement and architectural revolution.39
its profound and dazzling engagement in the paradigm An analogous dualism of motivation was behind the
shifting process is the closely associated modernist third major component of the new modernist program.
element known as the pointed arch. Ithas been With the advent of the flying buttress, the exterior of the
variously interpreted in terms of bent tree branches, cathedral rapidly became the purest and most powerful
heavenward thrust, Islamic precedent, and the like, but I modernist aspect of the entire building. Again the
propose that two factors dominated its genesis, one novelty was produced by a
paradigm shift, in this case
technical, the other visual. The first of these iswell the most profound of all. The traditional reinforcement
known, and involves the way the traditional semicircular system of large vaulted construction, going back to
arch posed insurmountable geometric problems to the Rome, was entirely contained within the building or
designer of rib vaults. In order to make the various closely adhered to it (e.g., as flat buttresses). Following
arches and ribs (technically the diagonal arches) of a an unwritten rule of structural decorum, components
vaulting unit rise to the same height?imperative for that could not be disguised as ordinary piers, arches,
both structural and visual reasons?using the unbroken and other standard elements of the Roman-based form
curve, the vaulting frame could only be assembled with language, tended to be hidden.40 In this mode, as the
an ungainly combination of semicircular, and great churches grew higher and larger, the massive
segmental,
stilted arch forms. Although workable, the solution was framework of aisles and galleries grew with them, piled
awkward, and evidently came to be regarded as up in layers around the high central vaults as a
intolerable (much like the groin vault). In other words, stabilizing framework (fig. 11), and such assemblages
the unbroken-curve paradigm, inherited from Roman could have been stacked even higher?even as high as
esque usage, presented intractable problems. A daring the greatest modernist cathedrals like Amiens and
new
paradigm, the so-called pointed arch, completely Beauvais. The intractable problem of this traditional
solved the difficulty: by using various degrees of was not size, as is often thought, but
buttressing frame
pointing, a given arch over a certain span could be flexibility, economy, and lighting. The paradigm of
made to rise to various heights, which now allowed all reinforcement by closed lateral assemblages was
the various arched components of a vault to rise to the expensive, clumsy, inefficient, spatially redundant, and
same attended a
height, only by not-unharmonious severely limited the height of the clerestory. A
diversity of the degree of pointing rather than the old completely new paradigm was needed if development
heterogeneity of arch-forms.38
39. The pointed arch, which first occurs in eighth-century Islamic
Yet the second factor behind the new arch formula
architecture, appears towards 1100 in Burgundy (for example, Cluny
may have been of equal motivation. Ipropose that to the
III) and elsewhere its adoption
(e.g., Durham), generally being
contemporary spectator it
would have perhaps most of attributed to structural see, e.g., J. Bony, French Gothic
advantages;
all looked not "pointed" (a post-medieval Architecture of the 12th and
English term) 13th Centuries (Berkeley, 1983), pp.
but instead like a broken arch (i.e., as in the relatively 17-21. That first in a "Romanesque"
it appears context would seem to
confirm my reading of that period as one of not infrequent modernist
recent French arc bris?). That is,
regardless of its key In any case, resistance to the broken arch can still be seen in
episodes.
paradigmatic role in resolving geometric problems of the the early phases of lle-de-France modernism, for example, S. Etienne
rib vault, the form would have been seen, in at Beauvais which to employ
especially (ca. 1120/30), continues stilting instead
the early period of its use, as a literal of pointing to solve the geometric of equivalent arch heights
breaking?and problem
reconstitution?of the semicircular, unbroken arch that in rib-vaults; only at the St-Denis choir (apart from the minuscule
Morienval "ambulatory") does the broken arch first proliferate to near
consistent use.
38. For a fuller, yet accessible of this problem, see M. 40. the most elaborate ancient examples of this practice
explanation Among
Trachtenberg and I. Hyman, Architecture from Prehistory to was the Pantheon, with its immensely system of relieving
complex
Postmodernity (New York, 2002), second edition, 226f. arches and vaults built invisibly into the thickness of the wall.

r '
Figure 11. Noyon Cathedral, c. 1170, axonometric. From

Figure 12. Modernist buttressing system, late 12th century and
Ernest Gall, Die gotische Baukunst in Frankreich und after. From James H. Acland, Medieval Structure: The Gothic
Deutschland (1925). Vault (University of Toronto Press, 1972). Reprinted with the
permission of the publisher.
other than sheer size was to occur. The buttressing

arrangement was reconceptualized (fig. 12). The new
idea was rational, simple, and extremely bold: the entire radicalism in a few decades of practice destroyed the
buttressing for the high vaults was now externalized, classical probity of closed volumes inwhich buttressing
taking the form of huge, immovable buttress-towers was essentially contained within the building.41 This
placed along the edge of the aisles, their great masses largely hidden, internalized reinforcement system?
projecting beyond the aisle walls, carrying immense equally evident at, for example, Cluny III,Saint-?tienne
quadrant arches?the flyers?reaching up over the in Nevers, Noyon, the Pantheon, and the Basilica of
aisle roofs to receive and transmit the vaulting thrust. Maxentius?was now exfoliated, as itwere, replaced by
Galleries were no longer needed, and their place could the explosive new mode of openwork reinforcement that
be taken by the huge clerestory zone of immense Iwould term modernist structural exhibitionism, in
stained-glass panels that soon appeared. opposition to historicist "Roman-esque" structural
The paradigm-shifting logic here was impeccable. But
itwas attended by a powerful motivational factor rooted 41. For a critical review and advancement of the research on
early
in the deep iconoclasm of the movement. In this S. Murray, "Notre-Dame of Paris and the Anticipation
flying buttresses,
perspective the salient point is the way modernist of Gothic," Art Bulletin 80 (1998):229-253.

Figure 13. Nevers, Saint-?tienne, choir, 1163-97. Photo: Marvin Trachtenberg.
decorum (figs. 13, 14, 15). Nothing created in the entire not only in the twelfth century or in the mode of the
middle ages could have been more alien or shocking to Notre-Dame nave supports. Although typically called
the classical sensibility than those giant, angular piers piers, responds, colonnettes, and shafts in the column
and half-arches leaping impossibly through space. The avoidance language of modern scholarship, they are
dramatic transformation of the cathedral exterior was all nevertheless columns, with classicizing bases,
thus made possible not merely by the internal structural and
cylindrical shafts, Corinthianesque capitals, and
logic of paradigm-theory, compelling though that logic they are everywhere?as main supports, as responds, in
may have seemed, but also by the powerful, iconoclastic the galleries and triforiums, and inmultiple layers and
antihistoricist urges of the medieval modernist levels in the tracery (e.g., fig. 16). The entire elevation,
movement, the urge of modernist consciousness to in fact, comes to consist of nothing but columns and
follow through in practice the radical direction that slender arches (and multiple arch-profiles), together with
rational analysis indicated. a few stringcourses and patches of remnant wall. So
In the origins of the rib-vault, broken arch, and flying
important are they, that the cathedral interior cannot be
buttress we have seen how the paradigm-shifting process easily imagined without them.
operated in the programmatic modernist transformations This is not only our vision but was evidently true also
of the cathedral.42 Yet there was, as already mentioned, for the builders. The columns were multiplied because
another mechanism by which medieval modernism took they were the only language available, even as yet
effect, and this iswhere the column question comes conceivable, for the vital needs of architectural self
back into play. Far from extinguishing the column, the representation in the elevation?that is, in the visually
new churches make it proliferate in their interiors, and primary interior aspect of the church. As Anne-Marie
Sankovitch has written, "the classical orders constitute a
resonant language with an established vocabulary and
42. If this makes the medieval modernist master masons syntax that communicate meaning which transcends
forerunners of post-"medieval" scientific method, it is not their strategy their usage in individual buildings, meaning that is not
that should be doubted or but also tectonic. Thus, for
but rather intellectual history that must be only ideological symbolic
reinterrogated. example, the column's syntax of base-shaft-capital

Figure 14. Rome, Pantheon, 118-28. Photo: Marvin

Trachtenberg.
Figure 15. Le Mans, cathedral, choir buttresses, after 1217. Photo: Marvin Trachtenberg.

'
) -. ff^H-*^ MmS"*! ! lili I 11?:JM^fcrr;
17. Saint-Denis, view, 1140-49. Photo:

Figure ambulatory
Marvin Trachtenberg.
pseudo-scholastic logic44 but forced to represent the

anticlassical. Thus, although historicist and modernist
desire were theoretically oppositional, in practice they
came to be intricately interwoven, with the latter
colonizing the former.
This representational self-affirmation and violence
was not achieved instantaneously, of course, but in an
Figure 16. Laon, cathedral, nave, after 1160. Photo: Marvin intricate multigenerational development. In a sense the
Trachten berg. "problem" columns of St-Denis and Notre-Dame
constituted the degree-zero point of this process,
appearing at a moment when, as Suger's texts make
so even in its
signifies 'support' and does clear, such blatant historicism was not only allowed but
metamorphosis as a Gothic pier."43 It is just such still required as a legitimizing presence in the church
that I here, although in its
metamorphosis emphasize interior, adopted not in spite of but because of the
rather than structuralist function. In this
ideological adjacent, still-daring, and somewhat alien modernist
process the column is not merely submitted to the
vaulting apparatus (fig. 17).45 Be this stage as itmay,
modernist vision: it is co-opted by modernism as a form what happens subsequently is clear enough. Highly
of symbolic expression, as an indispensable medium of indicative of the progressive takeover of the building by
representation, not only of rationalist (or "scholastic")
structuralist values but, more critically, of the modernist
44. In his detailed of what are in fact virtually all
discussion
movement itself.What largely happens in the cathedrals in his famous as scholasticism in
columns analysis of the cathedral
to the column is that this primary historicist element stone (Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism [New York, 1951], p.
is turned against itself, not merely neutered into 51 ff), Ranofsky totally engages column-avoidance language (the main
columns of Notre-Dame are "monocylindrical piers"); "column" is
43. "A Reconsideration of French Renaissance Church used only once (the pilier cantonn? ended with a capital "like a
Architecture," in J.Guillaume, ed., L'?glise dans l'architecture de la column," p. 82). Recognition of the pervasive presence of the column
Renaissance (Paris, 1995), p. 165. Sankovitch stresses the presence of might force certain intriguing modifications of Ranofsky's argument.
classicism throughout French architecture from the eleventh to the See the contribution by Anne-Marie Sankovitch to this volume.
fourteenth 45. 2000 (see note 20), pp. 195-199, on Suger.
century. Trachtenberg,

the modernist vision is the manner inwhich,

subsequently, these conspicuous historicist forms are
gradually subverted, transmuted, and ultimately
eliminated (not in linear progress but in a far more
complex developmental choreography). Ipropose that
what tended to be displayed and seen in this process
was not so much the column itself (as at St-Denis and
the main arcade in Paris) but its anticlassical, modernist
transformation, its degree of difference from a classically
authentic and column-usage
column (which evidence
suggests?including Speyer, St-Denis, Paris, and
numerous other cases?was known to architects and
clients of the time). The column, or columnar schema, I
submit, was now retained, indeed made newly to
proliferate densely throughout the church interior, in
order to make possible the systematic representation of
the critical progress of modernism through its
expository self-distancing from authentic historicism, in
readable, dramatic (and often hyperrational ?zed)46
architectural language.
A pivotal step in this movement occurs in the High
Gothic pilier cantonn?, which literally imprisons the
central column?earlier displayed freestanding and, by Figure 18. Reims, cathedral, pilier cantonn?, after 1211.
comparison, in good classical form at Paris and Laon? Photo: Anne-Marie Sankovitch.
in a modernist cage of attenuated colonnettes, turning
classicism against itself, as itwere, incarcerating the key
historicist architectural idol according to its own devices
(fig. 18).47 A generation later, for example, at Troyes
Cathedral or the nave of St-Denis, bundles of such
colonnettes dominate the pier completely: they are now
virtually all that we see, or are meant to see, of the
building's supports (fig. 19). All along, these colonnettes
are progressively and radically thinned down and
stretched out?as if on a rack?to the point that all
connection with antique supportive substance and
46. The "scholastic" reasoning of Gothic design emphasized by

Ranofsky, 1950, would have been virtually impossible without the
medium of the column (meaning that this mode of reasoning was
obviated by Late Gothic acolumnar formal fluidity and indeterminacy).
47. Of course the pilier cantonn? was also foreshadowed in both
Paris (in the clustered aisle piers) and Laon (the cagelike eastern nave
piers). Onians emphasizes the theologically problematic medieval

status of the column (pp. 74-90). Inmedieval illustrations pagan idols
often are seen to stand on columns, and when they fall the columns
sometimes break or fall with them; a notable instance occurs in the
socle relief at the Amiens west discussed
facade, by M. Camille {The
Gothic Idol [Cambridge, p. 2, fig. 3): the "columns
1989], of the
Egyptian temple snap like twigs before the onslaught of the Holy
... as if as part of an elaborate
Family representing, sculptural edifice
of images, the total destruction of an alien and competing edifice and Figure 19. Troyes, cathedral, after 1228. Photo: Marvin
its ?mages." See also T. Buddensieg, "Gregory the Great: The Destroyer
Trachtenberg.

EVFf ffS I^? Wl vJjM __|^^__ / on
20. Rouen, Saint-Ouen, nave, 14th 21. Rouen, Saint-Ouen, nave triforium, after 1529.
Figure century. Figure
Photo: Marvin Trachtenberg. Photo: Marvin Trachtenberg.
?conic presence is dissolved, all affirmation of their the suppression of historicism is finally completed (figs.
antique columnar origins negated: part of a process in 22, 23).48
which the classical element itself is physically forced But of course this was to be only a brief illusion.
(cumulatively imprisoned, stretched, broken) to At this very moment a new historicism emerged in
represent the anticlassical (figs. 20, 21). Similarly, the Italy, soon brutally to cut short the life of medieval
capital, that crucial sign of the classical Orders, is
abstracted into the crocket type and shrivels to a mere
of Pagan of the Courtauld and Warburg Institutes 28
speck in the gigantic elevation (as if burnt to a crisp on a Idols," Journal
(1965), 4ff.
spit), becoming at the higher levels nothing more than a 48. For a clarification of this final modernist transformation, see
faint sign of the terminal point of the columnar schema. 1995 (see note 43). The transformations of the classical
Sankovitch,
Inmany cases, the capital eventually disappears column that I have outlined might be loosely compared with
altogether, as does, in the still more radical Late Gothic, Ranofsky's analysis of contemporary sculpture, inwhich "the classical
the attic base and, indeed, the entire independent element is so completely absorbed as to become invisible," and his
reading of analogous trends in philosophy, and poetry
colonnette its historiography,
itself, which, having exhausted (1965, 102f ). In Ranofsky, however, these changes are driven
by
possibilities of modernization, finally gives way to a impersonal period forces rather than resulting explicitly from the
bundle of continuous vertical moldings, at which point agency of critically human consciousness and desire.
engaged

architectural killed the thriving virtuoso

treatise?that art
of modernist The main point of these
architecture.
concluding lines, however, is not to resolve this
extremely complex architectural turn but merely to
suggest how the historicist-modernist paradigm of
modalities of cultural-historical consciousness may
enable us finally to speak of "medieval" and
"Renaissance" in compatible, conceptual, and
interpretive terms?in the same breath.49
49. To review my analysis of the Gothic-column "crisis" and
proposal of a new interpretive paradigm in Kuhn's specific terms, he

writes (84):
All crises begin with the blurring of a paradigm and the consequent
. . .And all crises close
loosening of the rules for normal research
in one of three ways. Sometimes science
normal ultimately proves
able to handle the crisis-provoking problem despite the despair of
those who have seen it as the end of an existing paradigm. On
other occasions the problem resists even apparently radical new
The is labelled and set aside for a future
approaches. problem
with more tools.
generation developed
in the second instance more or less described the
Having effectively
state of on
research "Gothic" prior to my present thesis. Kuhn's further
words may a difficult road ahead for our discourse:
conjure
22. Gisors, Saint-Gervais, nave aisle after 1529.
Figure pier, . . .
finally,the case that will most concern us here, a crisis may end
Photo: Anne-Marie Sankovitch.
with the emergence of a new candidate for paradigm and with the
ensuing battle over its acceptance.
&?&$:
Figure 23. Abbeville, Saint-Wulfran, pier base, after 1488.
Photo: Anne-Marie Sankovitch.
modernism throughout Europe, long before it showed

any internal signs of faltering. This time, however, the
violence was achieved not through the internal critique
of paradigm-shifts or the symbolic colonization of form
language. Itwas mainly the printed book?the illustrated


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Desedimenting time: Gothic column/paradigm shifter

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leaving us to deal unreflectively with the object in terms formulated

generations ago ("Structure/Ornament and the Modern Figuration of

insightful recent survey, The Gothic Cathedral, architecture of the of definition).

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individual inspiration. Most scientific work ("normal anomaly that cannot

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Figure 1. Paris, Notre-Dame, nave, 1178. Photo: of Foto Marburg.

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vaulting and with the help of more refined methods of vault

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14. Princeton, 1988, Chapter VI, "The column in the Christian

This content downloaded from 130.126.32.13 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 18:19:06 PM

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not classical. In other words, we are asked to take

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we tend to use "Romanesque" or

completely shifted to Germany in the eyes of the Italians (who often

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2. Rome, San Lorenzo fuori-le-mura, nave, 12th century. Photo: Marvin

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Figure 5. Speyer I,c. 1030-60 (Hollar reconstruction).

misinterpretation that never has been quite put to rest.28

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least since Michelet and Burckhardt, the Renaissance

as historicism and modernism. on transhistorical constituted, inmy terms, by modernism

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categorization), but vertically, as a continuum of cultural field of spatio-visual representation, or expanded to

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solving, important as that was. The modernist impulse

Figure 10. Saint-Denis, 1140-44. Photo:

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Figure 11. Noyon Cathedral, c. 1170, axonometric. From

other than sheer size was to occur. The buttressing

This content downloaded from 130.126.32.13 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 18:19:06 PM

Figure 13. Nevers, Saint-?tienne, choir, 1163-97. Photo: Marvin Trachtenberg.

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Figure 14. Rome, Pantheon, 118-28. Photo: Marvin

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17. Saint-Denis, view, 1140-49. Photo:

pseudo-scholastic logic44 but forced to represent the

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the modernist vision is the manner inwhich,

46. The "scholastic" reasoning of Gothic design emphasized by

piers). Onians emphasizes the theologically problematic medieval

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EVFf ffS I^? Wl vJjM __|^^__ / on

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architectural killed the thriving virtuoso

49. To review my analysis of the Gothic-column "crisis" and

proposal of a new interpretive paradigm in Kuhn's specific terms, he

ensuing battle over its acceptance.

modernism throughout Europe, long before it showed

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