Development of Christian Church Architecture

Outline of a vast subject: The Development of Christian Church Architecture


For more, I recommend this lovely book, well worth tracking down (I came across it in the Deanery second-hand booksale: Principles and Elements of Medieval Church Architecture in Western Europe


Architecture is probably the hardest bit of art history to get into, because seeing a photo of a building and actually moving around in it are categorically different experiences, and there's all the technical vocab to get comfortable with. But I remember worthily crunching through Pevsner at about 16, then going into Winchester Cathedral and actually seeing it - not a mass of fancy stone, but a structure of arcades and transepts and aisles and all the rest of it. The jargon is tedious but it opens things up. Today we have naming of parts. And naming connects to vision. a botanist can see things in a garden that I, in the same sense, can't. Reading about a church building - the plan, the elevation, the whatnots and bits and pieces - can be maddening until, click, your mind has generated a 3-D space and you can actually feel something of it. Also, fear of flying is well known, although the science of jet planes is (I'm told) pretty sound. But I've never heard of anyone afraid of entering a medieval cathedral, standing right underneath hundreds of tons of stone vaulting, put up there by medieval masons who were really just working it out as they went along and hadn't a qualification between them. (Yet pretty darned advanced physics was in the system somewhere. I wonder how they spoke about lateral thrust in the twelfth century, or compression.) Then again, if they've stayed up that long, one might think, coming back to the vaults. After all, they don't look that heavy.  And cathedral smashes are a rare news event (no doubt because the powerful Church Lobby keeps them out of the media). Pevsner does not write about architecture in this way, which is why is famous and must be crunched through.