Practice question · Sort into groups
Sort each element by whether it fights thrust with mass or skeleton.
Groups: Mass (Romanesque solution) · Skeleton (Gothic solution)
- Flying buttresses spanning the aisles
- Pointed arches steepening the thrust line
- Thick unbroken walls carrying the roof load
- Small windows keeping the wall solid
- Rib vaults funnelling load to piers
- Thick unbroken walls
Hints
- Ask whether the load is absorbed in bulk or routed through members.
- Routing the load is what frees the wall for glass.
Show the answer
Mass (Romanesque solution): Thick unbroken walls, Small windows keeping the wall solid, Thick unbroken walls carrying the roof load
Skeleton (Gothic solution): Flying buttresses spanning the aisles, Rib vaults funnelling load to piers, Pointed arches steepening the thrust line
Why
Two philosophies of load: absorb it in bulk, or route it through a frame. Gothic chose routing, and got the window as its reward.
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…
- '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.