Gothic Art

Chasing light, ceilings rose, walls thinned, and windows turned into stained glass. The style is usually traced to around 1140, at the abbey of Saint-Denis near Paris. Abbot Suger is said to have believed that the beauty of matter could carry the mind toward God, a reading known as the 'theology of light' though it is a twentieth-century art-historical interpretation, and still debated. Then there is the name. 'Gothic' was coined by Vasari in 1550 to mean 'of the Goths', barbaric. He pinned the name of the tribe that sacked Rome onto these delicate cathedrals. It took roughly three hundred years for the style to be taken seriously again. Almost none of the masons and glassmakers who built these cathedrals left their names behind. This was the golden age of the nameless hand.