Read Gothic vs Romanesque: A Comparative History

Every traveller in Europe has stood in a great medieval church and hesitated: is this Romanesque or Gothic? The pointed arch is supposed to decide it, yet Durham Cathedral — the most Romanesque mountain of stone in England — is vaulted with pointed arches, and thousands of Gothic parish churches are roofed over round ones. This book separates the two styles properly. It follows Romanesque from the Carolingian and Ottonian inheritance through the pilgrimage roads to its regional summits — Speyer, Santiago, Pisa, Durham — and Gothic from its invention in Abbot Suger's Saint-Denis in the 1140s to Chartres, Amiens, Cologne and the fan vaults of Gloucester. It compares the two grammars part by part: the round arch against the pointed, the barrel vault and the fortress wall against the rib and the flying buttress, the painted wall against the wall of glass. It walks both styles across their maps, visits the buildings where they meet and mix, watches each of them end and each of them return, and closes with a field method of five signs by which any medieval church can be read — and the two styles told apart — in the street.