Practice question · Put in order
Order these developments in medieval architecture.
- Suger rebuilds Saint-Denis with light as theology (~1140)
- Romanesque churches: mass, round arches, dim naves
- Early Gothic: pointed arches and rib vaults spread
- Renaissance critics coin "Gothic" as an insult
- High Gothic: Chartres and the age of the great windows
Hints
- The style began at one abbey and was perfected elsewhere.
- The name was applied centuries after the buildings.
Show the answer
- Romanesque churches: mass, round arches, dim naves
- Suger rebuilds Saint-Denis with light as theology (~1140)
- Early Gothic: pointed arches and rib vaults spread
- High Gothic: Chartres and the age of the great windows
- Renaissance critics coin "Gothic" as an insult
Why
The style was born at Saint-Denis, perfected at Chartres, and named by its enemies two centuries later, a reminder that period labels are written by whoever comes after.
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.
- '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.