The Gothic Cathedral - (Bollingen) 3rd Edition by Otto Georg Von Simson (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The classic work on Gothic religious architecture, now with added illustrations and a new section by the author on rose windows

No other monument of a culture so radically different from our own is as much a part of contemporary life as the Gothic cathedral. In this illuminating book, esteemed art historian Otto Georg von Simson explores how Gothic architecture is an expression of supernatural reality, and shows how, to those who designed and worshipped in the great cathedrals of France in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, this symbolic function of sacred architecture overshadowed all others. The Gothic Cathedral takes readers from the birth of the Gothic style with the Basilica of St.-Denis to the consummation of the form in the majestic Cathedral of Chartres, revealing how these incomparable architectural masterpieces embodied the spiritual and intellectual order of the medieval world.

From the Back Cover

This essay seeks to understand Gothic architecture as an image, more precisely, as the representation of supernatural reality. To those who designed the cathedrals, as to their contemporaries who worshiped in them, this symbolic aspect or function of sacred architecture overshadowed all others. To us, it has become the least comprehensible.

Review Quotes

"The Gothic Cathedral is the most stimulating and comprehensive work on the subject to date. . . . If the cathedrals are to be understood, Mr. von Simson rightly declares, they must be seen not in the light of twentieth-century esthetic observation, but of twelfth-century religious experience, through which the supernatural permeated every aspect of human existence. . . . The resulting interpretation of the monuments is a critical tour de force."---Allan Temko, The New York Times Book Review

"Not since Mont-St.-Michel and Chartres has so poetic and so evocative a study of the Gothic movement been published. . . . The Gothic Cathedral is based on a wide factual as well as intuitive knowledge, transformed by the author's illuminating style into a text both formidable and pleasurable."-- "The Virginia Quarterly Review"

About the Author

Otto Georg von Simson (1912-1993) was professor emeritus of art history at the Free University of Berlin. His books include Sacred Fortress: Byzantine Art and Statecraft in Ravenna (Princeton).