LATE GOTHIC PERIOD

Late gothic period Paris had been the leading artistic center of northern Europe since the 1230s. After the ravages of the Plague and the outbreak of the Hundred Years' War in the 1350s, however, Paris became only one among many artistic centers.

 

Painting As a result of this diffusion of artistic currents, a new pictorial synthesis emerged, known as the International Gothic style, in which, as foreshadowed by Pucelle, Gothic elements were combined with the illusionistic art of the Italian painters. Beginning in Paris in the 1370s and continuing until about 1400 at the court of Jean de France, Due de Berry, the manuscript illuminators of the International Gothic style progressively developed the spatial dimensions of their illustrations, until the picture became a veritable window opening on an actual world. This process led eventually to the realistic painting of Jan van Eyck and the northern Renaissance and away from the conceptual point of view of the Middle Ages. Thus, even though the International style is sometimes described as Gothic, it nevertheless lies beyond the boundaries of the Gothic period itself, which by definition is also medieval.

Sculpture

Gothic sculpture, however, remained unaffected by the Italian proto-Renaissance. About 1400 Claus Sluter executed at Dijon for Philip the Bold, Duke of Bourgogne, some of the most memorable sculptural works of the late Gothic period. Eschewing the slender willowy figure style and aristocratic affectations of the 14th century, Sluter enveloped his figures in vast voluminous robes. In the mourners on the tomb (begun 1385, Musee des Beaux-Arts, Dijon) of Philip the Bold, Sluter created out of drapery alone eloquent images of sorrow. In the statues surrounding the Well of Moses (1395-1403, Chartreuse de Champmol, Dijon) he transformed the Old Testament heroes into earthy Flemish patriarchs, whose realistic depiction nevertheless conveys a feeling of spiritual grandeur.

After Slutcr's death in 1406, his influence spread from Bourgogne to the south of France, to Spain, and later to Germany. By 1500, however, with Michel Colombe and the Mannerists of the school of Troyes in France and with Tilman Riemenschneider, Veit Stoss, and Adam Kraft in Germany, the era of Gothic sculpture drew to its close.

Architecture  In France, late Gothic architecture is known as flamboyant, from the flamelike forms of its intricate curvilinear tracery. The ebullient ornamentation of the flamboyant style was largely reserved for the exteriors of the churches. The interiors underwent a drastic simplification by eliminating the capitals of all the piers and reducing them to plain masonry supports. All architectural ornamentation was concentrated in the vaults, the ribs of which formed an intricate network of even more complicated patterns.

Flamboyant Style  Flamboyant architecture originated in the 1380s with French court architect Guy de Dammartin. The great surge in building activity, however, came only with the conclusion of the Hundred Years’ War in 1453, when throughout France churches were being rebuilt in the new style. The last 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 facades, including the west front of Troyes Cathedral and the transept facades of Senlis and Beauvais cathedrals. Disseminated over much of the Continent, flamboyant architecture produced its most extravagant intricacies in Spain. In Portugal, during the reign of King Manuel I, from 1495 to 1521, it developed into a national idiom known as the Manueline style, marked by a profusion of exotic motifs.

Perpendicular Style 
Spurning the flamboyant style altogether, the English builders devised their own late Gothic architecture, the Perpendicular style. The use of a standard module consisting of an upright traceried rectangle, which could be used for wall paneling and window tracery alike, resulted in an extraordinary unity of design in church interiors. The masterpiece of the style, the chapel of King’s College (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.

Secular Buildings

The list of important secular monuments in the late Gothic period is long. In Belgium the series of grand civic halls, some with tall belfried towers, begins very early with the great Cloth Hall (completed 1380, destroyed 1915) of leper and continues with such later town halls as those of Leuven (1448-1463) and Oudenaarde (1526-1530). In England and France the austere castles of the 12th and 13th centuries had been little affected by the ecclesiastical architecture. In the last quarter of the 14th century, however, the grim fortresses were gradually replaced by graceful chateaux and impressive palaces that sometimes were the source of 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, foreshadowed the pieced decorative gables on the exteriors of the flamboyant-style churches. In about 1390 the largest of all medieval halls, that of London's Westminster Palace, was provided with a magnificent oaken hammer beam roof that furnished the prototype for numerous similar roofs in the parish churches of English towns.

In France from the late 15th century to the 1520s, new chateaux 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 Bretagne. The crowning features of their exteriors are those magnified versions of dormer windows, the lucarnes. Sometimes, as on the facade added in 1508 to the Palais de Justice at 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 1345?) and the Ca d'Oro (1430?) to the Tudor Gothic of Hampton Court (1515-1536) on the Thames and the Collegiate Gothic, which at Oxford lingered into the early 17th century. By this time on the Continent, however, the luxuriant growth of late Gothic forms had long since been replaced by the more intellectual and calculated architectural principles of the Renaissance.

Tweet