Gothic

Gothic was the visual language of the Western European Middle Ages, which took shape in the mid-twelfth century in France and prevailed until the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, finding its fullest embodiment in the architecture of the cathedral. Its aesthetic core was an aspiration toward the vertical, the dematerialization of mass and the treatment of transcendent light as a symbol of the divine. Its structural basis lay in the pointed arch, the ribbed groin vault and the external flying buttress, which allowed the wall to be reduced to a skeleton and dissolved into vast stained-glass windows. The interior fills with coloured light, space is directed upward, and the silhouette of the church is articulated by towers, gables, pinnacles and openwork tracery. In sculpture the Gothic figure elongates, acquires an S-shaped curve, a gentle tenderness and individualized emotion, and its drapery becomes complex and mobile. Painting develops in stained glass, book illumination and the altarpiece, tending toward a refined line, gold grounds and a growing sense of space. Classic monuments include the cathedrals of Chartres, Reims and Amiens and Notre-Dame of Paris; the late "flamboyant" phase is marked by sumptuous ornament, while the "International Gothic" produced the exquisite works of the Limbourg brothers. In the Ukrainian lands Gothic influences are felt in the Catholic churches and castle architecture of Galicia, Volhynia and Transcarpathia, in Lviv and Kamianets. Gothic bequeathed a conception of art as synthesis, in which architecture, sculpture, stained glass and light merge into a single spiritual image.