Design perhaps by Master Mason Stephen Lote and/or Master Mason Thomas Mapilton, Tracery Arcade from the Great South Window of Canterbury Cathedral, ca. 1426-35, Caen stone, 25 × 49 5/8 × 15 9/16 in. Courtesy of the Met.
Despite claims to the contrary, there really are not cathedrals everywhere, even for those with the eyes to see them. The Gothic cathedrals we generally associate with the term (Notre Dame in Paris, the Duomo in Milan, the Dom in Cologne, Salisbury Cathedral) were designed in a relatively short period, from the 12th to 14th centuries, and in a select number of cities, concentrated within about 700 miles of Paris. These building projects spanned centuries and generations; they were enormous, rare investments of labor and capital. Even if we include all Gothic churches (“cathedrals” refer to a subset — only the seat of a diocese is a cathedral) the extant large-scale churches from the medieval period number in the mere hundreds. The how of these Gothic masterpieces has been shrouded in mystery. Gothic by Design: the Dawn of Architectural Draftsmanship is a new exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that demystifies the very human process behind these buildings, revealing mind-bending ingenuity in a radically analog past.
Like many styles, the “Gothic” is a bit of retroactive branding in service of a later polemic. The style was baptized indirectly by a primary foil, Giorgio Vasari (1511–74), who needed the Gothic or Germanic style as a kind of nadir from which the formal purity of his cherished, Renaissance neo-classicism could emerge. He characterized the styleas “monstrous and barbarous,” forsaking order for “confusion and disorder.” The Gothic style had “polluted the world.” (In point of fact, Vasari was rather loose with just what counted as the Gothic, seeming to start the clock in the 500s, only to describe the kind of dense naturalistic flourishes that peaked some 800 years later.) Vasari is also, incidentally, an originating theorist of “design” (“designo”) as such. He is often credited with having established the primacy of “design” as the mental activity that fathers all of the arts. For Vasari, the dense, wild-seeming ornamentation of the Gothic was at odds with the formal rigor of proper design; as such, “Gothic by design” would almost be a contradiction in terms.
Peter Parler, Cross Section of the Northern Half of the Choir and Flying Buttresses of the Cathedral of Saint Vitus (Veitsdom) ca.1360; Pen and black ink, over blind ruling with stylus, guided by compassand straightedge, on parchment. Courtesy of the Met.
Alart du Hameel, Design for a Tower Monstranceca, 1484; Engraving. Courtesy of the Met.
Matthäus Böblinger, Design for a Mount of Olives Monument for the City of Ulm, 1474; pen and black ink, over blind ruling with stylus, guided by compass, on parchment 42 1/2 × 16 5/16 in. Courtesy the Met.
Thankfully the show, organized by Femke Speelberg, the Met’s prints and drawings curator, disproves that idea. On view is the individual genius and institutionalized knowledge networks that show just how keen the thinking was that gave us the Gothic. Speelberg was inspired by a massive 13-foot-long drawing of the Cologne Dom housed on-site (sadly, it was too tall for installation at the Met). She has pulled together a show of loans from European archives, including some truly monumental drawings: the 11-foot-tall design for the Crossing Tower of Rouen Cathedral by Roulland le Roux from 1516; Lorenz Lechler’s 1502 design for a monumental sacrament house (a 2022 acquisition by the museum). The single Gothic architectural drawing already in the Met’s collection prior to the acquisition — what appears to be a student’s work that is dainty by comparison, gives a sense of how necessary the show was.
The joy of the exhibition is seeing precision at scale — the lines were incised before they were inked (the line drawings of the Parler family, which played an outsize role in the period, set a high bar.) What is unfathomable to the modern viewer is that the process did not rely on numerical measurements. The whole process of design was based around basic geometric forms that established proportion but not absolute size. One highlight of the show is the 16th century schematic representation of tracery elements by Jörg Schweiger the Elder after a 15th century German example: we see Gothic ornamentation stripped back to its linear essence, suggesting how convoluted ornamentation emerges through iteration.
Drawing by Bernard Nonnemacher, Vaulting Plan for the Chapel of Saint Catherine, Strasbourg Cathedral, with Instructions for the Assemblage of the Vaulting, ca. 1542–46, Pen and brown ink over red chalk and charcoal underdrawing, 19 11/16 × 41 5/16 in. Courtesy of the Met.
Drawing by Anton Pilgram, Elevation, Section, and Floor Plan for the Stairs to the Pulpit, Stephansdom (Saint Stephen’s Cathedral), Vienna, ca. 1515, Pen and brown ink, over blind ruling with stylus, guided by compass and straightedge, on paper, 17 1/4 × 20 5/16 in. Courtesy of the Met.
The show is a boon to nerds. It is satisfying to see plan and elevation; to understand how things were put together. It is also fascinating to see different ideas being put in front of clients (who needed it done cheaply, then found the budget to do the original version after seeing the cheap version — the annoying process of client management is, it turns out, quite old).
Virtually every drawing in the show has a name attributed to it —a rare feat for works of this age. Visitors may recognize the name Erwin von Steinbach on drawings of the Strasbourg cathedral; the architect earned a paean from Goethe himself that helped to ignite the Gothic Revival. Goethe’s 1772 essay “On German Architecture” was a defiant rejection of Vasari’s caricature of the Gothic; he described his visit to the Strasbourg cathedral as a kind of religious experience: “An impression of grandeur and unity filled my soul, which, because it consisted of a thousand harmonizing details, I could taste and enjoy, but by no means understand and explain. They say it is thus with the rapture of heaven.” Gothic by Design dares to understand and explain just how that rapture of heaven came to be. It turns out it began with paper, ink, and a straight edge.
Installation view of Gothic by Design: The Dawn of Architectural Draftsmanship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photography Eugenia Burnett Tinsley Courtesy of The Met.