Practice question · Multiple choice
A Romanesque church absorbs vault thrust in wall mass; a Gothic one sends it out along flying buttresses. Why does only the second strategy permit large windows?
Hints
- Ask what the wall is DOING in each system.
- You can only cut a hole in something that is not holding the roof up.
Show the answer
D. Because external supports leave the wall carrying almost nothing
Why
The window is a structural consequence. Once load travels through ribs and buttresses the wall becomes infill, and infill can be glass.
Practise Medieval Art and Architecture
The app has 5 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. History I is free to start.
More questions on Medieval Art and Architecture
- Why is a Gothic cathedral described as an "encyclopedia of the illiterate"?
- Sort each element by whether it fights thrust with mass or skeleton.
- 'Gothic' was coined by later critics as an insult, meaning barbarous.
- A medieval painter who could draw a convincingly receding floor still made distant saints as large as near…
- Match each Gothic element to its structural job.
- Order these developments in medieval architecture.