Gothic Cathedrals
1130 O.S. – Dec 202489 items
architecturemedievalFrom Suger’s choir to Cologne’s spires
In 1144 Abbot Suger consecrated a new choir at Saint-Denis, north of Paris, with ribbed vaults, pointed arches and walls opened up for glass. Within a century the style had spread from Canterbury to Burgos; within a century and a half, to Uppsala and Cyprus. Some of the buildings went up in forty years, others took six centuries: Cologne, begun in 1248, was finished only in 1880, and Milan’s last door went on in 1965.
How to read it
Each great building’s construction campaign is a band. They overlap for centuries, which is the point: Chartres, Bourges, Reims, Amiens and Beauvais were all building sites at once. Fires, collapses and consecrations are events; a few sit inside their band.
The
stylesare bands too: Early Gothic, High Gothic, Rayonnant and Flamboyant in France; Early English, Decorated and Perpendicular in England; and the Gothic Revival that finished Cologne and restored Notre-Dame.Dates before 1582 are in the Julian calendar, as the sources give them: Saint-Denis’s choir was consecrated on 11 June 1144 Julian, which the proleptic Gregorian calendar would call 18 June. Later dates are Gregorian wherever the country had switched; England kept the Julian calendar until 1752. Most medieval items are only year-precise, and the notes give the range where sources differ.
The epilogue, the Notre-Dame fire of 15 April 2019, is told hour by hour in
UTC; Paris was two hours ahead.Filter by
master buildersfor the architects we can name,stained glassfor the windows,relicsfor the saints and treasures the buildings were made to house,recordsfor the tallest vaults and spires,disasterfor fires and collapses, andrestorationfor the completions and rebuildings.
For bright is that which is brightly coupled with the bright, and bright is the noble edifice which is pervaded by the new light. — Abbot Suger, verses on his new church, translated by Erwin Panofsky
Items
Saint-Denis’s west front dedicated
Saint-Denis’s choir consecrated
The Magi reach Cologne
Thomas Becket murdered at Canterbury
Canterbury’s choir burns
William of Sens falls from the scaffold
Notre-Dame’s high altar consecrated
Chartres burns
Reims burns
Villard de Honnecourt’s portfolio
The Crown of Thorns reaches Paris
Rayonnant
Westminster Abbey: Henry III’s church
Decorated
Chartres consecrated before Saint Louis
Beauvais’s choir finished: the highest Gothic vault
Beauvais’s choir vaults collapse
Amiens’s labyrinth names its builders
Lincoln’s spire tops the Great Pyramid
Salisbury’s tower and spire
Ely’s central tower collapses
Cologne’s choir consecrated
The Black Death reaches Siena
“Ars sine scientia nihil est”
Pope Martin V consecrates Milan’s high altar
Charles VII crowned at Reims
Cologne’s south tower stops at 56 metres
Bourges’s north tower collapses
Seville’s crossing falls
Lincoln’s spire blows down
Beauvais’s crossing tower completed
St Nicholas, Famagusta, becomes a mosque
Beauvais’s tower collapses on Ascension Day
Goethe’s “Von deutscher Baukunst”
Notre-Dame becomes a Temple of Reason
Cologne’s façade drawing found
Victor Hugo publishes Notre-Dame de Paris
Pugin’s Contrasts
Cologne’s medieval crane comes down
Cologne completed
Reims shelled and set alight
Reims reconsecrated
Coventry’s cathedral destroyed
The fire brigade is called
The spire falls
Firefighters go into the north tower
A new rooster on a new spire
Notre-Dame reopens