The architecture of the Middle Ages is still vividly present in the cities of Europe. This highly pictorial text provides information on medieval buildings, introducing the fundamentals and the unique features of the Romanesque and Gothic art of building, and especially of sacred buildings.
Drawing on new work published over the past twenty years, the author offers a history of building in Western Europe from 300 to 1200. Medieval castles, church spires, and monastic cloisters are just some of the areas covered.
"Dismantles the religious, political, and geographic walls that have separated medieval art and architecture and treats not only western Europe but also the Byzantine Empire and the Islamicate world from ca. 200 CE to ca. 1450 CE. Includes a wide variety of art forms, from large architectural complexes to small amulets printed on paper"--
This book is the first devoted to the important innovations in architecture that took place in western Europe between the death of emperor Justinian in A.D. 565 and the tenth century. During this period of transition from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages, the Early Christian basilica was transformed in both form and function.Charles B. McClendon draws on rich documentary evidence and archaeological data to show that the buildings of these three centuries, studied in isolation but rarely together, set substantial precedents for the future of medieval architecture. He looks at buildings of the so-called Dark Ages—monuments that reflected a new assimilation of seemingly antithetical “barbarian” and “classical” attitudes toward architecture and its decoration—and at the grand and innovative architecture of the Carolingian Empire. The great Romanesque and Gothic churches of subsequent centuries owe far more to the architectural achievements of the Early Middle Ages than has generally been recognized, the author argues.
The 11th and 12th centuries witnessed a transformation of European culture, from architecture and the visual arts to history, philosophy, theology and even law.
In this book Allan Doig explores the interrelationship of liturgy and architecture from the Early Church to the close of the Middle Ages, taking into account social, economic, technical, theological and artistic factors. These are crucial to a proper understanding of ecclesiastical architecture of all periods, and together their study illuminates the study of liturgy. Buildings and their archaeology are standing indices of human activity, and the whole matrix of meaning they present is highly revealing of the larger meaning of ritual performance within, and movement through, their space. The excavation of the mid-third-century church at Dura Europos in the Syrian desert, the grandeur of Constantine's Imperial basilicas, the influence of the great pilgrimage sites, and the marvels of soaring Gothic cathedrals, all come alive in a new way when the space is animated by the liturgy for which they were built. Reviewing the most recent research in the area, and moving the debate forward, this study will be useful to liturgists, clergy, theologians, art and architectural historians, and those interested in the conservation of ecclesiastical structures built for the liturgy.
A history of the influence of communication technologies on Western architectural theory. The discipline of architecture depends on the transmission in space and time of accumulated experiences, concepts, rules, and models. From the invention of the alphabet to the development of ASCII code for electronic communication, the process of recording and transmitting this body of knowledge has reflected the dominant information technologies of each period. In this book Mario Carpo discusses the communications media used by Western architects, from classical antiquity to modern classicism, showing how each medium related to specific forms of architectural thinking. Carpo highlights the significance of the invention of movable type and mechanically reproduced images. He argues that Renaissance architectural theory, particularly the system of the five architectural orders, was consciously developed in response to the formats and potential of the new printed media. Carpo contrasts architecture in the age of printing with what preceded it: Vitruvian theory and the manuscript format, oral transmission in the Middle Ages, and the fifteenth-century transition from script to print. He also suggests that the basic principles of "typographic" architecture thrived in the Western world as long as print remained our main information technology. The shift from printed to digital representations, he points out, will again alter the course of architecture.