Practice question · True or false
'Gothic' was coined by later critics as an insult, meaning barbarous.
Hints
- Who were the Goths, to a Renaissance Italian?
- The name is a slur that stuck.
Show the answer
True
Why
True. Renaissance writers used it to mean the barbarian style that had displaced classical architecture, and Vasari's usage fixed it. The builders called it opus francigenum, the French work. A surprising number of period labels — Baroque, Impressionism, Cubism — began as abuse.
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"?
- A Romanesque church absorbs vault thrust in wall mass; a Gothic one sends it out along flying buttresses. Why…
- Sort each element by whether it fights thrust with mass or skeleton.
- 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.