The Anti-Gothic Turn

This book presents a revisionist account of the Gothic-to-Renaissance transition in European architectural culture. Its title, Missing the Point: The Untold Story of Gothic Architecture's Demise, makes punning reference to three serious phenomena: the way the pointed arch and other Gothic innovations go missing in Renaissance architecture; the way late Gothic architecture goes missing-or at least finds itself under-represented--in many modern surveys of art history; and the ways these abandonments themselves go missing in most discussions of the historiography of art. The book's introduction outlines the historiographical problems surrounding the transition between Gothic and Renaissance architectural cultures, and explains the need for a comprehensive analysis that does not take Gothic architecture's demise for granted as natural, inevitable, or unimportant. The immediately following chapter explores the relationship between tradition and innovation that characterized medieval architectural practice throughout its history, paying particular attention to the ways in which this tension played out in the origins and early spread of the radically progressive architecture now called Gothic. The central section of the book consists of a series of chapters that trace the unfolding confrontation between Gothic architectural culture and the Renaissance culture that emerged as an alternative to it. These chapters clearly demonstrate that Gothic architectural practice continued to thrive for more than two centuries after the emergence of Petrarchan Humanism, and for more than a century after the emergence of Brunelleschi's classicizing architecture in Florence, two developments often seen as heralding the Renaissance. These chapters also break new ground by weaving together chronologically arranged case studies of collisions between Gothic traditions and Renaissance incursions in a series of territories reaching from eastern to western Europe, with attention p