Suger's Miracles, Branner's Bourges: Reflections on "Gothic Architecture" as Medieval Modernism
Marvin Trachtenberg
When it becomes clear that a given interpretative model (or set of criteria) contains irreducible contradictions and is incapable resolving certain stubborn problems, time for new paradigm. Recognizing scholarship on Gothic architecture has long since reached this impasse, study identifies terms understanding in the oppositional pair "modernism" "historicism." These two transhistorical concepts are found to offer numerous advantages over such traditional categories as "skeletal form," "diaphaneity," "linearity," "diagonality," "square schematism," like, all which severely burdened by well known constrictive problematics "style," among other difficulties. Properly defined understood, modernism/historicism paradigm shown studying medieval across wide range concerns, from descriptive, componential, formal analysis social, intellectual, contextual integration. The entire apparatus great cathedrals seen radically new, comprehensive way, intractable historical problems seemingly oxymoronic "Gothic column" resolved. proposed further explored tested regarding both word image architecture, reading controversial texts Abbot Suger Saint-Denis, revised solution Bourges "problem."
Gesta