The Gothic Cathedral: Origins of Gothic Architecture and the Medieval Concept of Order - Expanded Edition (Bollingen Series, 106) - Hardcover

Von Simson, Otto Georg

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691099596 ISBN 13: 9780691099590

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 1988

Synopsis

The description for this book, The Gothic Cathedral: Origins of Gothic Architecture and the Medieval Concept of Order, will be forthcoming.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

This essay seeks to understand Gothic architecture as an image, more precisely, as the representation of supernatural reality. To those who designed the cathedrals, as to their contemporaries who worshiped in them, this symbolic aspect or function of sacred architecture overshadowed all others. To us, it has become the least comprehensible.

Review:

"The Gothic Cathedral is the most stimulating and comprehensive work on the subject to date. . . . If the cathedrals are to be understood, Mr. von Simson rightly declares, they must be seen not in the light of twentieth-century esthetic observation, but of twelfth-century religious experience, through which the supernatural permeated every aspect of human existence. . . . The resulting interpretation of the monuments is a critical tour de force."---Allan Temko, The New York Times Book Review

"Not since Mont-St.-Michel and Chartres has so poetic and so evocative a study of the Gothic movement been published. . . . The Gothic Cathedral is based on a wide factual as well as intuitive knowledge, transformed by the author's illuminating style into a text both formidable and pleasurable." (The Virginia Quarterly Review)

About this edition

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 0691099596
• ISBN 13: 9780691099590
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 3
• Number of pages: 275