How did the name of a first-century BC Germanic tribe from southern Sweden become the name of a twelfth-century AD French ecclesiastical architectural style? The explanation involves ignorance, deceit, and a certain amount of chauvinism on the part of early art historians. To the medieval master masons who developed the style it was "opus modernum" ("modern style"), or "ogival" (for its "pointed" arches), but the humanistic tidal wave of the Italian Renaissance obliterated all knowledge of the origin and evolution of Gothic architecture. Renaissance architects were preoccupied with the knowledge that they had revived the glorious classic style of ancient Rome which the Germanic tribes had destroyed. The chief culprits, according to art historian Vasari, were the Visigoths, whose sacking of Rome in 410 AD brought the moribund empire towards its belated close.

Gothic arches near the Chapel of Grace.

This link to the Visigoths stuck, and late historians assumed that medieval descendants of these tribal northerners had developed the "Gothick" style, a barbarian-inspired interlude between the golden architectural ages of Rome and the Renaissance. It was not until the early 19th century that the origin, history and engineering skill of Gothic architecture began to be understood, and its best examples -- as cultured and refined as any classic work -- again appreciated.

It is now well established that the Gothic style grew out of its early medieval predecessor, Romanesque architecture, in north-central France (Normandy and the Ile-de-France) in the mid-twelfth century. Experiments in various churches with pointed arches and vaults, structural simplification, and larger windows, all came together in the ambulatory and choir of thenew Abbey of St. Denis, north of Paris, in the 1140s, the brainchild of its visionary Abbot Suger. Gothic architecture is unique in that no other major style can trace its origin to a single person. Blending architectural innovation with the rich symbolism of light, harmonic proportion, and Byzantine-inspired display, Suger originated a style that evolved rapidly throughout royal France, culminating in the great French cathedrals of the next century. From here the new style spread throughout western Europe, each region adapting Gothic to its own needs. The key structural innovation -- the channelling of weight through ribs, shafts and buttresses -- had allowed for eliminination of much wall space, and encouraged the development of vast stained glass rose and lancet windows. In late medieval times, mastery and virtuosity in Gothic architecture gave way to mannerism and decoration, and the style faded into the Renaissance.

The soaring arches inside the Nave at Grace Cathedral.

A liturgical and theological revival took place in the Anglican Church in the nineteenth century. With it came a new appraisal of Gothicarchitecture, which was hailed and romanticized as the ideal architectural expression of ardent medieval faith. Gothic became the perfect architectural vehicle of English church tradition, a complete reversal of earlier "Gothick" denigration. Truro, Guilford and Liverpool Cathedrals are late products of this movement. In early twentieth-century America, the Episcopal Church embraced these ideas, and Gothic cathedrals rose in the United States -- notably St. John the Divine in New York, and St. Peter and St. Paul (National Cathedral) in Washington D. C.. Grace Cathedral, San Francisco is a late and unusual end product of this movement, blending high French Gothic with English and Catalan touches in a seismically-safe concrete and steel form. Yet even here, far in time and space from the rolling northern countryside of medieval France, the power and daring of the style impresses the viewer. If a Visigothic chieftain could be brought here, he would certainly look up in awe, and wonder how his tribal name had become transformed, far in the future, into a cathedral style.

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