Gothic Revival
(Encyclopaedia Britannica)
architectural style that drew its inspiration from medieval
architecture and competed with the Neoclassical revivals in the
United States and Great Britain. Only isolated examples of the style
are to be found on the Continent.
The earliest documented example of the revived use of Gothic
architectural elements is Strawberry Hill, the home of the English
writer Horace Walpole. As in many of the early Gothic Revival
buildings, the Gothic was used here for its picturesque and romantic
qualities without regard for its structural possibilities or
original function. Another early example of the tendency toward
ornamentation and decoration was Fonthill Abbey, designed by James
Wyatt, a country house with a tower 270 feet (82 m) high. Nothing
could more clearly illustrate both the impracticality of usage and
the romantic associations with medieval life.
The earliest manifestations of an interest in the medieval era were
in the private domain, but by the 1820s public buildings in England
were also being designed in the Gothic mode. Perhaps no example is
more familiar than the new Houses of Parliament (1840), designed by
Sir Charles Barry and A.W.N. Pugin. In that large cluster of
buildings, the haphazard picturesque quality of the early revival
was replaced by a more conscientious adaptation of the medieval
English style. Other structures built around mid-century were within
this basic pattern. Later, the desire for more elegant and sumptuous
landmarks created the last flowering of the style.
In the United States, the style also can be divided into two phases.
The early one, rich but comparatively unscholarly, was exemplified
by Richard Upjohn's Trinity Church (New York City, 1840). This
style, as in England, was favoured by the wealthy for their country
estates. The later style, archaeologically more correct, inspired
such structures as Renwick's St. Patrick's Cathedral (New York City,
1859–79) and was to dominate public building.
There were several reasons for the change of direction from
Neoclassicism to the Gothic Revival, but three stand out as, by far,
the most important. The first, sparked by the general Romantic
revolution, was the literary interest in medieval times that
produced Gothic tales and romances. By setting their stories in
medieval times, authors such as Walpole and especially Sir Walter
Scott helped to create a sense of nostalgia and a taste for that
period. The ruins of medieval castles and abbeys depicted in
landscape paintings were another manifestation of this spirit. The
second was the writing of the architectural theorists who were
interested, as part of church reform, in transferring the liturgical
significance of Gothic architecture to their own times. The third,
which strengthened this religious and moral impetus, was the
writings of John Ruskin, whose Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849)
and Stones of Venice (1853) were widely read and respected. Ruskin
stated that the quality of medieval craftsmanship reflected the
morally superior way of life of the medieval world and urged a
return to the conditions operative in the earlier period.
The writings of the French architect Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc
provided the inspiration to sustain the Gothic Revival movement. His
own work, however, was often weak Gothic, and his restorations were
frequently fanciful.
The Gothic Revival was to remain one of the most potent and
long-lived of the 19th-century revival styles. Although it began to
lose force after the third quarter of the 19th century, buildings
such as churches and institutions of higher learning were
constructed in the Gothic style in England and in the United States
until well into the 20th century. Only when new materials and
concern for functionalism began to take hold did the Gothic Revival
disappear.
Origins and development
The architectural movement most commonly associated with Romanticism is the
Gothic Revival, a term first used in England in the mid-19th century to describe
buildings being erected in the style of the Middle Ages and later expanded
to embrace the entire Neo-Gothic movement. The date of its beginning is not easy
to pinpoint, for, even when there was no particular liking for Gothic,
conservatism and local building practices had conditioned its use as the style
for churches and collegiate buildings. In its earliest phase, therefore, Gothic
Revival is not easily distinguished from Gothic survival.
The first clearly self-conscious imitation of Gothic architecture for reasons of
nostalgia appeared in England in the early 18th century. Buildings erected at
that time in the Gothic manner were for the most part frivolous and decorative
garden ornaments, actually more Rococo than Gothic in spirit. But, with the
rebuilding beginning in 1747 of the country house Strawberry Hill by the English
writer Horace Walpole, a new and significant aspect of the revived style was
given convincing form; and, by the beginning of the 19th century, picturesque
planning and grouping provided the basis for experimentation in architecture.
Gothic was especially suited to this aim. Scores of houses with battlements and
turrets in the style of a castle were built in England during the last years of
the 18th century.
With developing archaeological interest, a new and more earnest turn was given
to the movement—a turn that coincided with the religious revivals of the early
19th century and that manifested itself in a spate of church building in the
Gothic style. Only toward the middle of the century were the seriousness and
moral purpose that underlay this movement formulated as a doctrine and presented
to architects as a challenge to the intellect. Augustus Charles Pugin, in
England, was the first to codify the principles of the Gothic Revival. Far more
persuasive andinfluential exponents, however, were Eugène-Emmanuel
Viollet-le-Duc in France and John Ruskin in England, who gave to the movement a
moral and intellectual purpose. The second half of the 19th century saw the
active and highly productive period of the Gothic Revival. By then, the mere
imitation of Gothic forms and details was its least important aspect; architects
were intent on creating original works based on the principles underlying Gothic
architecture and deeply infused with its spirit.
Another contribution that the Gothic Revival made to architecture was the
encouragement of freedom and honesty of structural arrangement. Structural
elements could be provided as and where they were needed. There was no need for
dissimulation. French architects, in particular Viollet-le-Duc, who restored a
range of buildings from the Sainte-Chapelle and Notre-Dame in Paris to the whole
town of Carcassonne, were the first to appreciate the applicability of the
Gothic skeleton structure, with its light infilling, to a modern age, and the
analogy was not lost on subsequent architects at a time when the steel frame was
emerging as an important element of structural engineering. Functionalism and
structural honesty as ideals in the Modernmovement were a legacy of the Gothic
Revival.
Not surprisingly, the Gothic Revival was felt with most force in those countries
in which Gothic architecture itself was most in evidence—England, France, and
Germany. Each conceived it as a national style, and each gave to it a strong and
characteristic twist of its own.
National and regional variations
Great Britain
From the 17th to the 19th century
A Gothic Revival was in a sense initiated early in England during the late 16th
century under the influence of Elizabethan and Jacobean notions of chivalry and
again between 1620 and 1630 under the impetus of William Laud's Anglicanism; but
it is in the Gothic experimentalism of the late 17th century, particularly that
of Wren's circle, in which seeds of a Gothic Revival can be discerned. Although
buildings erected at these times imitated Gothic forms, none of them were
revivalist in spirit. The Gothic Revival was largely conditioned by literary
theory and practice. Although it had antecedents, the so-called “revolution of
taste” in the mid-18th century was most clearly marked by publication of Richard
Hurd's Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762) and Thomas Percy's Reliques of
Ancient English Poetry (1765). Thomas Gray, especially in his poems of the 1750s
and, later, in his letters, was the first major poet to seek inspiration in a
“Gothic” past—not only medieval but Celtic and Icelandic. Thomas Warton, poet
and critic, acquired his interest in the Middle Ages from architecture and, in
his work on medieval English cathedrals and churches, connected theliterary
aspect of the Gothic Revival with the work that was begun by a group of
antiquaries in the late 17th century and that was continued into the 18th.
The transition from a survival to a revival phase of Gothic architecture took
place almost imperceptibly. Curiously enough, it was Vanbrugh, England's great
exponent of the Baroque spirit, who made the first successful attempt to evoke
sensations of the medieval past. In 1717 he built a house for himself at
Greenwich, near London, that was intended to conjure up a “castle air.” It is a
simple, robust, brick building that relies for its effect on slender proportion
rather than detail. But it is an isolated work of its kind.
Only toward the end of the 18th century did “picturesque” take on a precise
meaning, affecting the planning and the forms of English architecture, but, from
the late 17th century onward, isolated gardens and estates were laid out to take
advantage of the irregularity of landscape, resulting in compositions that
approximated those in the paintings of such 17th- and 18th-century artists as
Claude Lorrain, Salvator Rosa, and Gaspard Poussin—hence, the denomination of
the style as Picturesque. It was William Kent, in response to the literary ideal
of “naturalness” of such writers as Sir William Temple, Joseph Addison, and
Alexander Pope, who was first acclaimed for fashioning the Picturesque landscape
that was to be made famous in the 18th century by Lancelot (“Capability”) Brown
and who introduced occasional buildings into it, often in a Gothic style, to
serve as a focus of interest. There were, however, other precursors, notably
Vanbrugh and Charles Bridgeman.
Kent first used the fanciful Rococo Gothick that was to become characteristic of
the 18th century in 1732, on a gateway in the Clock Tower at Hampton Court. He
also reconstructed the Tudor buildings of Esher Lodge between 1729 and 1733,
introducing ogee arches and quatrefoil openings. These he used again in the late
1730s in the Temple of the Mill at Rousham, Oxfordshire, where he laid out one
of the first irregular gardens. The ornamental character of the Gothic Revival
was thus established from the start, and it was popularized as such within a few
years by Batty Langley, author of Gothic Architecture Improved by Rules and
Proportions (1742). Pretensions to archaeological accuracy appear in two
churches built in 1753 by Henry Keene—that at Shobdon, Herefordshire, and a
charming, though now derelict, octagonal church at Hartwell, Buckinghamshire. An
ardent admirer of Gothic, Keene had begun Gothicizing Arbury Hall, Warwickshire,
as early as 1748. It was to the amateurs Sanderson Miller and Horace Walpole,
however, that the credit for a full-scale domestic Gothic Revival was due.
Miller, a Warwickshire squire, began about 1744 by inserting pointed arches in
the south front of his Tudor house at Radway, Warwickshire. Later, he put up a
garden ornament in the form of a mock Gothic castle at nearby Edgehill, the idea
of which became fashionable and made a reputation for him as a designer of
Gothic extravaganzas. His most significant work was Lacock Abbey, Wiltshire, the
symmetrical, flattened facade of which is thinly decorated with Gothic motifs.
Walpole's Gothic, though apparently as lighthearted, was more serious in intent.
When, in 1747, he decided to rebuild his house, Strawberry Hill, Twickenham,
Middlesex, he proposed to reflect faithfully in its architecture his tastes for
topography, history, and heraldry. He formed a “committee on taste” to advise
him on the design. Among the members were the amateur archaeologists Richard
Bentley and John Chute, both of whom provided designs. The architect responsible
for the execution of most of the work was William Robinson. During the early
phase of building, alterations and interior decorations were made in a pretty,
decorative style, with a freedom unhampered by any serious archaeological study.
Nor was there any real feeling for medieval composition in the massing of the
elements. But in 1761, when a vast circular tower was added to the southwest
corner of the house, Walpole gave evidence of a deliberate attempt to achieve an
asymmetrical, picturesque composition. The west of the house was more freely
grouped.Finally, in 1776, James Essex, probably the most earnest Gothicist of
the period, inserted the Beauclerc Tower between the west end and the round
tower, making the wholethe first and most determined example of a large-scale
Picturesque composition.
The fortuitous appearance and the deliberate irregularity of Strawberry Hill
were exploited in many late 18th-century buildings. The most extravagant and
sensational of all Gothic Revival buildings was Fonthill Abbey (1796–1806),
Wiltshire, designed by James Wyatt primarily as a landscape feature for the
arch-Romantic William Beckford (). The great central tower collapsed in 1807,
and most of the building hastoday disappeared; but, in John Rutter's
Delineations of Fonthill (1823), it is still possible to perceive something of
the grotesquely spectacular quality that made this building, for a short time,
notorious.
Although many classical architects, including Sir William Chambers and Robert
Adam, applied Gothic details to the exterior of their country houses (and Adam
was even employed at Strawberry Hill), they displayed no great interest in the
style and always retained strict symmetry of composition. George Dance used it
more thoughtfully and originally in his occasional Gothic buildings—the facade
of the Guildhall (1789), London; Cole Orton Hall (1804–08), Leicestershire;
Ashburnham Place (1813–17), Sussex; and the churches of St. Bartholomew-the-Less
(1789), London, and Micheldever (1808), Hampshire.
Walpole's innovation assumed real significance only toward the end of the
century, after the theory of the Picturesque was evolved and publicized by
Richard Payne Knight and Uvedale Price. Already Knight had given architectural
form to his ideas of rugged, irregular, and apparently “natural” composition in
Downton Castle, Herefordshire, near Ludlow (1774–78). This was the first
irregularly planned castellated (castle-style) building with a classical
interior. It inspired a vast range of such buildings. John Nash is the best
known andmost proficient exponent of the style. Starting with his own house,
East Cowes Castle, on the Isle of Wight, in about 1798,he exploited the
deliberate irregularity of plan and silhouette afforded by the castellated
style; from Caerhayes(1808), Cornwall, in the south, to Ravensworth Castle
(1808), Durham, in the north, Nash dotted England (and also Ireland) with
Picturesque castles, houses, and ornamental cottages all of vaguely Gothic or
Italianate inspiration.
Sir John Soane attempted the Gothic style on at least three occasions—at Port
Eliot (1804–06), Cornwall, at Ramsey Abbey (1804–06), Huntingdonshire, and for
the library at Stowe (1805–07), Buckinghamshire—but, like his master Dance,
strongly influenced by the French Neoclassical theorists Cordemoy and Laugier,
he attempted to distill the effects of Gothic rather than to imitate the style.
His suspended arches and his clustered ribs rising sheer from the floor and
continuing around the vault are, ultimately, of Gothic inspiration.
France
In France a taste for medieval legend survived into the 16th century
in aristocratic circles and was nurtured not only by the literary
works of the Italian Renaissance poets Ludovico Ariosto and Torquato
Tasso but also by books on heraldry and blazonry by humanist
scholars. More remarkable as evidence of conscious, widespread, and
continuing popular interest in the Middle Ages—and especially in
Gothic building—were topographical studies and guidebooks published
from the middle of the 16th century onward. The Gothic tradition of
building continued, especially in ecclesiastical circles, far into
the 18th century. But it was largely survival rather than revival.
French admirers of Gothic architecture regarded it primarily as a
challenge to the intellect. The architects Delorme in the 16th
century and Derand in the 17th analyzed the construction of the
Gothic vault. They were quick to appreciate it as a highly efficient
and economical framework of columns and ribs, supporting the webs of
the vaults (which they regarded as no more than infilling panels
carrying no thrust) and counterbalanced by buttresses and flying
buttresses—as something, indeed, of a structural scaffold. It was
this structural elegance that early 18th-century enthusiasts of
Gothic, such as Cordemoy, sought to infuse into contemporary
architecture. In the Nouveau Traité de toute l'architecture (1706)
Cordemoy proposed that a new, honest, and economical architecture
might be arrived at by abstracting the principles of Gothic
construction and applying them in a perfectly regular classical way.
There was no question of reviving the Gothic style; interest in
Gothic was to be altogether transmuted into classical terms. The
building of the church of Sainte-Geneviève (now known as the
Panthéon) in Paris, designed in a style confirming the Neoclassical
ideal but on principles derived from Gothic architecture, gave a new
impetus to the study of Gothic construction. French architects were
imbued with a rational appreciation of Gothicthat was without
parallel.
Although there was a native French vogue in the 18th century for the
medieval literature of the troubadours, it was the intrusion of
English ideas that prompted more authentic representations of the
medieval world in stage settings and history paintings after 1772.
Certainly, the Gothic taste in architecture was conditioned by the
introduction of the informal landscape garden. By 1781 there were a
number of English gardens in France with mock-Gothic pavilions, and,
during the last two decades of the century, many more were built.
But the frivolous, lighthearted “Gothick” of 18th-century England
never took hold in France; the French made virtually no attempt to
imitate, let alone rival, the splendours of Strawberry Hill and
Fonthill Abbey.
To the Revolutionaries at the end of the 18th century, Gothic
architecture seemed a symbol of the vested power of the aristocracy
and the church, and many buildings were wantonly destroyed. Yet,
popular interest in the picturesque charms of Gothic architecture
was sustained and even intensified by such men as Alexandre Lenoir,
who in 1795 turned the largest of the Paris depots for plundered
works of art, the Petits-Augustins (now the École des Beaux-Arts),
intothe Museum of French Monuments. Here, by clever juxtaposition
and subtle lighting, the Middle Ages seemed tobe endowed with an
aura of magic. By suggesting a relationship between a chivalric past
and the actual forms ofGothic sculpture and architecture, Lenoir
coloured the imagination of a whole generation of Romantics. The
great Romantic writer François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand, was
fascinated by Lenoir's collection. Indeed, a celebrated chapter on
Gothic architecture in Chateaubriand's Le Génie du christianisme
(1802; “The Genius of Christianity”), in which Gothic is not only
taken as the symbol for the old French Catholic spirit but also is
traced beyond, through the forests of Gaul, to nature itself, was
directly inspired by Lenoir's work. Inevitably, a Romantic Gothic
image was popularized in the years that followed; Romantic
playwrights, novelists, and painters were seduced by the charms of
Gothic. Even antiquarians succumbed to the Romantic myth, and from
1810 onward a spate of popular guidebooks and studies of Gothic
architecture was published.
In spite of a few Gothic-inspired fantasies and an archaeological
interest in medieval architecture that found expression in the
Neo-Romanesque church of Saint-Paul (1835) at Nîmes by Charles-Auguste
Questel, architecture remained a virtually impregnable stronghold
until after 1840, when a hard core of Gothic Revivalists began to
emerge. This was composed of consistent medievalists who were
stirred primarily by archaeological pretensions. Stimulated by the
activity of English scholars in Normandy, they patiently studied the
medieval remains of that region and slowly forged the science of
French Gothic archaeology. An equally important aspect of the Gothic
Revival was inaugurated by the great Romantic author Victor Hugo,
when he published in 1831 Notre-Dame de Paris , the explicit purpose
of which was the glorification of Gothic as a nationaland Catholic
style of architecture. But it was the Protestant statesman François
Guizot who first gave real impetus to those ideas promoted by Hugo.
In 1830 he inaugurated the organization that seven years later
became the Commission on Historical Monuments.
All the serious, acceptable architects of the Gothic Revival were
amateur archaeologists, and they acknowledged an archaeological
standard of taste. They designed from the first in the 13th-century
style, and nearly all had restored at least one Gothic building
before they undertook to build anything new. The patronage of the
Commission on Historical Monuments and later of the Diocesan
Buildings Service (formed in 1848), for which thousands of medieval
buildings were restored and enlarged, was thus of enormous
importance in furthering the aims and the technical skill of the
Gothic Revivalists. The men who sustained the Gothic Revival were
almost all taught by the commission's leading architects, Jean-Baptiste
Lassus and Viollet-le-Duc. Lassus trained Viollet-le-Duc first on
the restorations in Paris of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois and the
Sainte-Chapelle. In 1844 they were both appointed to restore
Notre-Dame de Paris and to build a new sacristy in the Gothic style;
this was regarded as an official sanction for the Gothic Revival.
But, although a picturesque revival of Gothic had already been
initiated in the provinces, official sanction for a full-scale
revival was not easily accorded. The members of the French Academy,
faithful to Neoclassical ideals, were firmly against it.
In 1844 the north tower of the abbey church of Saint-Denis, begun
under Suger in 1135, was found to be in danger of collapse. All
Gothic Revivalists were aghast. Adolphe-Napoléon Didron, editor of
the Annales archéologiques and propagandist for the Gothic Revival,
tactlessly accused the Council of Civil Buildings, which was charged
with the approval of all building plans in France, of
irresponsibility. Its members, mainly academicians, retaliated by
arbitrarily stopping the construction of three churches in the
Gothic style that Didron had acclaimed in his journal. Didron then
launched a counteroffensive; he demanded a public inquiry into the
restoration of Saint-Denis. Under threat of this inquiry, which was
powerfully supported by the prefect of the Seine district, Barthelot
Rambuteau, the council was forced to approve the plans for Sainte-Clotilde
in Paris by Franz Christian Gau, plans that they had held up for
more than four years. It became a cause célèbre. A furious pamphlet
war followed, from which the Gothic Revivalists emerged triumphant,
and in 1852 Didron estimated that 200 neo-Gothic churches had been
built or were in the process of construction. But the victory was
short-lived. Sainte-Clotilde, as completed by Gau and his successor
Théodore Ballu in 1857, was an anomalous expression of revivalist
ideals. Didron disliked it intensely, and the dispute caused many
admirers of Gothic architecture to reflect seriously on the merits
of a Gothic Revival.
Lassus went on to build Saint-Nicolas (1848) at Moulins,
Saint-Pierre at Dijon (1852), and Saint-Jean-Baptiste-de-Belleville
(1854) in Paris. Viollet-le-Duc constructed Saint-Gimer (1853–57) at
Carcassonne, the church of Nouvelle Aude (1855) and Saint-Denys-de
l'Estrée (1860–67) at Saint-Denis; he restored the Château de
Pierrefonds (1858-70) to a state of colourful medieval splendour for
Louis-Napoleon; and, in his Dictionnaire raisonné de l'architecture
française (1854–68; “Analytical Dictionary of French Architecture”)
and the Dictionnaire raisonné du mobilier français (1858–75;
“Analytical Dictionary of French Furniture”), together running into
16 volumes, he provided the vital visual and intellectual
inspiration required to sustain the Gothic movement. But he was by
no means a convinced revivalist. All but one of his secular works
are in an uneasy Renaissance mode. He determined to think his way
beyond the Romantic attractions of the Gothic style. Pursuing the
inquiries of 18th-century theorists, he envisaged an architecture of
the 19th century that would be based on the rational system of
construction and composition that he recognized to be embodied in
Gothic but would in no way imitate its forms and details.
Architecture, he thought, should be the clear expression in
19th-century materials of 19th-century structural and functional
needs. He was unable to accept the challenge of his own ideas. Both
he and his disciples—Paul Abadie, Émile Boeswillwald, Eugène-Louis
Millet, Maurice Ouradou, Anatole de Baudot, Édouard Corroyer, Félix
Narjoux, and Édmond Duthoit—continued to design buildings (primarily
churches) in a weak Gothic style. There were many less thoughtful
and determined men who put up imitations of Gothic architecture in
the late 19th century, but the Gothic Revival was never a
full-blooded affair. Some of the finest buildings designed after the
medieval manner—Saint-Pierre-de-Montrouge (1864–72) in Paris, by
Joseph-Auguste-Émile Vaudremer, is one—were isolated works by
architects who worked outside the orbit of the Gothic Revivalists
and who had no qualms about the intellectual honesty of their chosen
mode of expression.
Germany and central Europe
As in France, German interest in medieval legend, history, art, and architecture
was sustained throughout the Renaissance both by the general public and by
scholars and antiquarians. Interest was focused, in particular, on the
cathedrals of Strasbourg and Cologne, buildings that were to assume an almost
symbolic significance in the history of the Gothic Revival on the Continent. In
his Rerum Germanicarum Epitome (1505; “Epitome of Things German”) the humanist
Jakob Wimpheling extolled Strasbourg cathedral as the rarest and most excellent
of buildings, and Oseas Schadaeus' guide to the cathedral, Summum
Argentoratensium Templum (1617; “Strasbourg's Finest Church”) was the first
illustrated guidebook ever devoted to a single medieval building and, in spite
of its Latin title, was written in German. Other 17th- and early 18th-century
histories and guides—and there were many—give ample evidence of a respectful
appreciation of Gothic, despite the jibes of fashionable leaders. Appreciation
of Gothic was a traditional and emotional affair, far removed from the studied
and analytical interest of the French. Not surprisingly, English Gothic
sentiments permeated Germany with the mid-18th-century taste for things English.
Conjectures on Original Composition (1759) by the English poet Edward Young
enjoyed a vogue in Germany that it never aspired to in England. English
attitudes and ideas provided the German Gothic Revival with its peculiarly
impassioned character.
The Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) conception of the late 18th century
invested Gothic with extraordinary and unparalleled qualities; it seemed to such
philosophers as Johann Gottfried von Herder (and, under his inspiration, to the
genius and writer Goethe) to be of the most sublime and exalted inspiration—an
expression at once of all nature, all things divine and infinite. Goethe's paean
to the cathedral at Strasbourg—and to its builder Erwin von Steinbach—was a
16-page pamphlet, Von deutscher Baukunst (1772; “On German Architecture”), that
was an inspiration to all future revivalists. Goethe epitomized Gothic as the
expression of the German spirit. Gothic became a German architecture, and it was
to remain such in the estimate of all Germans, even German scholars, for 50
years and more. Goethe's passion for Gothic was not long sustained, but his
enthusiasm was shared by other contemporaries, notably, the author and statesman
Friedrich von Schlegel, who saw Gothic not only as an expression of the German
spirit but specifically of a German Catholic spirit. This belief he shared with
the brothers Sulpiz and Melchoir Boisserée, by whom he was largely inspired.
Sulpiz Boisserée was the most active and enthusiastic of early Gothic
Revivalists. His great preoccupation was the cathedral of Cologne, which he
measured minutely, starting in 1808 but continuing up to the publication of
Ansichten, Risse und einzelne Theile des Doms von Köln (“Elevations, Sections,
and Details of the Cathedral of Cologne”), issued between 1823 and 1831, and an
accompanying text, Geschichte und Beschreibung des Doms von Köln (“History and
Description of the Cathedral of Cologne”), of 1823. The purpose of this study
was the restoration and completion of the unfinished cathedral. He enlisted the
moral support even of Goethe and the financial support of King Frederick William
III, who in 1824 ordered the preservation of the building. This work of
conservation was carried out by Friedrich Ahlert, under the guidance of Schinkel,
and after his death by the most gifted of Schinkel's pupils, Ernst Friedrich
Zwirner. The task of completion was started in 1842, at the command of King
Frederick William IV, and was carried through after Zwirner's death by Richard
Voigtel, who finished the work only in 1880. The building of the Cologne
cathedral was an expression of German nationalism and marked the beginning of
the Gothic Revival proper in Germany.
Earlier expressions of the Gothic Revival in architecture were of a Rococo or
Picturesque nature and were much influenced by contemporary fashions in England.
From 1725 to 1728, Joseph Effner, gardener to the elector Maximilian II Emanuel
of Bavaria, built the Gothic-inspired Magdalene Chapel on the grounds of the
Nymphenburg Palace in Munich. In 1755 Frederick II the Great of Prussia himself
designed the Nauener Gate in Potsdam, and in 1768 Prince Franz of Anhalt-Dessau
laid out his park in the Picturesque manner and scattered it, in the years that
followed, with Gothic hermitages and ruins. Other 18th-century German gardens
were similarly embellished: the New Garden in Potsdam, laid out in the 1780s for
Frederick William II by Langhans, or the more spectacular ruined Ritterburg
(1793–98), in the park of the landgrave William IX of Hesse at Wilhelmshöhe.
There were even odd or idiosyncratic interpretations of Gothic—the tower of
Mainz cathedral (1767–74) by Franz Ignaz Neumann or the Laugier-inspired
remodeling of the St. Nikolai Church in Leipzig (1784–97) by Johann Friedrich
Carl Dauthe. In the latter church, the Gothic ribs of the vault were transformed
into palm fronds.
The first architect of any distinction to take an active interest in Gothic was
Karl Friedrich Schinkel. He was inspired by Friedrich Gilly's engravings of the
castle of Marienburg in East Prussia (1799) to paint, between 1810 and 1815, a
number of visionary studies of Gothic buildings in the manner of the German
Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich. He also designed several stage sets in
the Gothic style. Schinkel's first serious architectural composition was a
Gothic mausoleum designed in 1810 for Queen Louisa of Prussia. He did other
equally Romantic designs in Gothic, the most spectacular being that for a
cathedral in the Leipzig Square, Berlin. But none of his ambitious Gothic
projects wasexecuted.
Other prominent Neoclassicists who experimented with Gothic were Friedrich von
Gärtner, designer of the Ludwigskirche (1829–44) in Munich, and Gottfried Semper,
who provided the plans for the Cholera Fountain in Dresden (1843). But their
handling of Gothic forms was stiff and awkward, as was that of most German
architects of the period, whose works were adulterated and unconvincing essays
into the style.
The first significant church of the Gothic Revival was the Votive Church
(1856–79) in Vienna by Heinrich von Ferstel. Indeed, Vienna was the centre of
the most active and intriguing adaptations of Gothic. Friedrich Schmidt, who had
worked under Zwirner at Cologne, was the leading revivalist. He built no fewer
than eight churches in Vienna, ranging in date from the Church of the Lazarists
(1860–62) to St. Severinus Church (1877–78). The most ambitious is the Fünfhaus
parish church (1868–75) outside Vienna.
Along the Rhine, several great castles were restored and dramatized with spiky
Gothic trimmings. In Dresden there was a minor outburst of revivalism, but these
works cannot be said to have contributed much to the course of architectural
history. The Gothic Revival in Germany was nota concerted movement, and there is
no specific term in German to describe it. One of the rare buildings that may be
considered as characteristic of a specifically German revivaland exuberantly
Gothic is the Munich Town Hall (1867–74, enlarged 1899–1909), by Georg Joseph
von Hauberisser.
