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Medieval Europe + Byzantine
Course: Medieval Europe + Byzantine > Unit 10
Lesson 2: Gothic art in England- Wilton Diptych
- Wilton Diptych (quiz)
- Southwell Minster
- Salisbury Cathedral
- Salisbury Cathedral
- Lincoln Cathedral
- Wells Cathedral
- Gloucester Cathedral
- Four styles of English medieval architecture at Ely Cathedral
- The Chapter House of York Minster
- Henry VII Chapel, Westminster Abbey
- Matthew Paris’s itinerary maps from London to Palestine
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Gloucester Cathedral
Gloucester Cathedral, begun 1089
Speakers: Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker. Created by Beth Harris, Smarthistory, and Steven Zucker.
Video transcript
- [Steven] We've taken
the train up from London to see Gloucester Cathedral. - [Beth] We're standing
in what is probably the most famous part of
Gloucester cathedral. And that's the cloister. - [Steven] In the center
of the cloister is a garth, an open garden and surrounding it is an enclosed walkway on all four sides. This is traditionally a place
where monks would meditate and would circumambulate, they would walk along the passageways. But if I were a monk
trying to clear my mind to let the spiritual in, I might be a little overwhelmed
by what surrounds me. In all four passageways, there's the most spectacular
architectural decoration. This is the birth of an architectural form that we call a fan vault. - [Beth] And fan vaults are
typical of this very late phase of English Gothic architecture, that art historians
call the Perpendicular. - [Steven] The Perpendicular
is the last style in the progression of English Gothic. What we think happened
is that Royal masons who had developed the
style first in London were then brought here and here invented this extraordinary space
that we're walking through. And these magnificent fan vaults. Let's go look at a
couple of other examples of the Perpendicular here
at Gloucester cathedral. - [Beth] We're standing
now in the presbytery. - [Steven] So what we're seeing here is not building from scratch, but instead it's taking
this new delicate style, the Perpendicular and
applying it to the surface of the massive masonry
that had come before. So we're seeing a kind of
refurbishment of this church, a kind of renovation so that
it didn't feel old fashioned anymore, so that it
reflected the newest style. The style that had developed in London. - [Beth] By the early 1300s,
this part of the church, which was built in the 12th century would have looked dark and heavy. And the Gothic architects
wanted to flood the space of the cathedral with light. - [Steven] And they did. This room is filled with enormous windows, but towering over them all is a window that's the size of a tennis court. It's a wall of glass, an
almost impossible achievement. This window cost a fortune. We think that the glass
was imported from France, but the costliness didn't
come from importing so much as the materials that were
required to produce the glass. This would have taken a forest of trees to light the kilns that were
necessary to make the glass. - [Beth] That stained glass
represents a hierarchy. At the bottom we have the
insignia of the nobility, the people who help to pay for
this very expensive window. - [Steven] So these are
Kings and lesser nobles. - [Beth] That represent
temporal power, earthly power. Above that spiritual
power, abbots and bishops. - [Steven] And in the middle
frieze, we have saints. - [Beth] And then above that
in the center, the Virgin Mary and Christ, and on either
side of them, six apostles. - [Steven] And then above
that, we see angels. As our eyes drawn upward, we're drawn towards the heavenly. - [Beth] The vaulting that we see above us would have originally
been brightly painted. So even more glorious
than it appears today. - [Steven] And this is a
very complex web of stone. Relatively late in the
development of the English Gothic we begin to see these web
like surfaces in the vaulting, and that's because the
English have introduced three additional types of ribs. You have a center ridge rib,
which runs along the roof line. - [Beth] And here we
have one in the center and one on either side. So three parallel ribs run
straight down the center, leading our eye to the glass. - [Steven] But we also have tierceron, which are additional decorative ribs that are attached to the peers. And then finally we have
the small linking ribs, which are called lierne. - [Beth] And these lovely,
elegant, thin colonettes that begin almost at floor
level and bring our eye all the way up to the vaulting where that complex ribbing
is decorated with bosses. Some of which are floral
and some of which show us angel's singing and
playing musical industry. - [Steven] When ribbed
vaulting was first introduced, it was a structural system, but here it has become decorative. We're at the east end of the
church, but we can actually walk into another building
that's even further east. This is the latest construction that took place at the cathedral. It's called the Lady Chapel. - [Beth] Lady Chapels are named for the Virgin Mary, My Lady. - [Steven] We've walked
into the Lady Chapel and light is overwhelming. This is a building that seems impossible to be made out of stone. - [Beth] There are walls of colored glass. Some of it dates to a later
period, but as light floods in it creates flickers of
colors on the stone itself. This is a space that
seems truly miraculous. Let's go now to the western
part of the church, the nave. So we can get a sense of what it was that those 14th century
architects wanted to cover up. - [Steven] We've walked to
the front of the church, to the nave, this large open space surrounded on either side by an aisle. And it is so different from
that later perpendicular Gothic. - [Beth] It's true that
here, instead of seeing slender bundled colonettes that rise from nearly the floor up to the vaulting, we have big, heavy, wide
cylinders for columns that help support the vaulting. And those are not decorated. But if you look up between
them to the arches, we see rolls of molding. We see zigzag patterns, chevrons. We see this interest in
embellishing these round arches, which are so typical of Anglo Norman or Romanesque architecture. - [Steven] Those chevrons
are everywhere in this room, just above the arches
you see a string course that runs the entire length of the nave. And it's made out of a double chevron. Above that in the triforium you can see double arches
and chevrons there. And so there is this desire to decorate. - [Beth] Here we are in
the early 12th century, soon after William the
conqueror comes from France and invades England, and the architects are just
figuring out stone architecture. How do you support a
large, wide stone vault? You need big, heavy
columns to support the roof and the structure above. So in the 1200s, they built
the vault that we see today in what we call the early
English Gothic style. And typical of the English
Gothic are these vaults whose ribs spring from corbels that are located between the nave arches and in between the arches of the triforium where we also see a darker colored stone called purbeck marble. All of this is so typical of this early English Gothic style. - [Steven] And to make
it even more complicated. We have yet another style here. As we look across the nave
towards the south aisle, we look at these wonderful
stained glass windows, which are ornamented with
hundreds of ball flowers. This is yet another
style of English Gothic, which is known as the Decorated style. And so in this room, we're overwhelmed with the weight of the oldest
style of the Anglo Norman. We see the Early English Gothic
above us in the vaulting, and then we see the Decorated
Gothic in the south aisle. And then if we look eastward,
we can see the Perpendicular. This church is overwhelming in its beauty, but it's also a history lesson of the architecture of medieval England. - [Beth] We could even
go further back than that because there was an Anglo-Saxon church on this location before the
Norman invasion, before 1066. - [Steven] And we could
even go further back than the Anglo-Saxon
because the church was built in part on the foundation
of ancient Roman walls from the period when the Roman empire occupied this part of Britain. And it's so important to
remember that the relatively spare interior that we
see today does not reflect the opulence of these spaces
before the reformation. It's a little bit hard
sometimes to imagine what these spaces looked like. There is one candlestick in
the Victoria and Albert Museum in London that came from this cathedral. It can give us just a
sense of how spectacular the objects that furnished
the space originally were. - [Beth] In many ways,
we are inside history at Gloucester cathedral.