Gothic Art and Architecture

Flamboyant architecture originated in the 1380s in the work of the French court architect Guy de Dammartin. The style was not fully fledged, however, until the conclusion of the Hundred Years' War in 1453, when a surge of building activity took place throughout France. The final flowering of Flamboyant architecture occurred between the end of the 15th century and the 1530s in the work of Martin Chambiges and his son Pierre, who were responsible for a series of grand cathedral façades, including the west front of Troyes Cathedral and the transept façades of Senlis and Beauvais cathedrals. Disseminated over much of the Continent, the Flamboyant style produced its most extravagant intricacies in Spain. In Portugal, during the reign of King Emanuel I, from 1495 to 1521, it developed into a national idiom known as the Manueline style, marked by a profusion of exotic motifs.

Spurning the Flamboyant style altogether, English builders devised their own late Gothic style of architecture, the Perpendicular style. The use of a standard module consisting of an upright traceried rectangle, which could be used for wall panelling and window tracery alike, resulted in an extraordinary unity of design in church interiors. The masterpiece of the style, King's College Chapel (begun 1443), Cambridge, achieves a majestic homogeneity through the use of the new fan vaulting, the fan-shaped spreading panels of which are in complete accord with the rectangular panels of the walls and windows.

A large number of secular buildings were constructed in the late Gothic period. In Belgium a series of grand civic halls, some with tall belfried towers, begins very early with the great Cloth Hall (completed 1380, destroyed 1915) of Ypres and continues with such later town halls as those of Louvain (1448-1463) and Oudenaarde (1526-1530). In England and France the austere castles of the 12th and 13th centuries had been little affected by Gothic ecclesiastical architecture. In the last quarter of the 14th century, however, these somewhat severe fortresses were gradually replaced by graceful châteaux and impressive palaces that sometimes incorporated important architectural innovations. The earliest monument in the Flamboyant style, the large screen (1388) with traceried gables that surmounts the triple fireplace in the ancient Palais des Comtes at Poitiers, foreshadows the pierced decorative gables on the exteriors of the Flamboyant-style churches. In about 1390 Westminster Palace, in London, the largest of all medieval halls, was provided with a magnificent oak hammer-beam roof that became the prototype for numerous similar roofs in the parish churches of English towns.

In France from the late 15th century to the 1520s new châteaux in the Flamboyant style were being built extensively, from Amboise (1483-1501) and Blois (1498-1515), on the Loire, to Josselin (early 16th century), in Brittany. The prominent features of their exteriors are lucarnes, magnified versions of dormer windows. Sometimes, as on the façade added in 1508 to the Palais de Justice in Rouen, the ornate lucarnes are each flanked by their own diminutive flying buttresses. Other regional styles of secular architecture also flourished, from the Venetian Gothic of the Doges' Palace (begun c. 1345) and the Ca d'Oro (c. 1430) to the Tudor Gothic of Hampton Court (1515-1536), near London, and the Collegiate Gothic, which at Oxford lingered on into the early 17th century. By this time on the Continent, however, the luxuriant flowering of late Gothic forms had long since been replaced by the more intellectual and calculated architectural principles of the Renaissance.

See also Architecture; Romanesque Art and Architecture; Sculpture; Renaissance Art and Architecture; Gothic Revival.