Word: gothic
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...hardly visit the great exhibition of English Gothic art, "The Age of Chivalry," which opened this month at the Royal Academy in London, without mixed feelings of delight, surfeit and loss. The first, obviously, because this is the first show to trace so large a part of England's cultural inheritance. It starts in 1216 with the enthronement of Henry III and ends with the death of the last Plantagenet, Richard II, in 1399, a span of nearly 200 years that brought Gothic art to England from France...
Sturdy and reflective, unwilling to accept imported style wholesale, English artists and craftsmen took French Gothic and, once it had been imposed on them by the Norman hierarchy in the major arts like architecture, transformed it in their minor arts. The image of the cathedral as the castle of God, its porches guarded by twin impregnable towers, was inspired by the donjons that the feudal barons built along the Seine and the Loire at the end of the 11th century, but in English cathedrals like Wells (constructed between 1186 and 1300) it acquired a definitive grandeur as the sign...
...patronage of five Plantagenet kings and has a lot to say about how works of art were commissioned by the nobility and the great merchants, executed by their makers and read by the audience. It wanders off into didactic byways and outlines, among other things, the changing reactions to Gothic art and the problem of its conservation for later generations of antiquaries and romantics in the 18th and 19th centuries. There is an anxious longing to put everything connected with the Middle Ages on view, no matter how slight its aesthetic import. One half-expects to find Piers Plowman...
...figure survives in England; to find a probable example, the organizers of this show had to borrow an exquisite polychrome Christ from Norway, where it had been made by a traveling English artist for a church in Bergen around 1230-45. Just as in the greatest monuments of English Gothic today -- the Lady Chapel of Ely Cathedral, say -- one sees only the bare background of a decorative and sculptural scheme whose figural richness can never be restored or even reimagined, so the remains of medieval sculpture that have been assembled for "The Age of Chivalry" cannot really evoke the culture...
Stranded on the spookiest night of the year, what better way to trick those Hallowed Eve blues than by treating yourself to a good gothic read? We ain't talking Stephen King pulp or Amityville schlock, but serious, tried-and-true, capital "I" Literature. If you intend to read your way through the most macabre and bone-chilling of Holiday vigils, get in store a shelfload of works guaranteed to keep you white-knuckled, wired, and wide-eyed...