Explore Byzantine and medieval architecture with engineer John Sherlock

Explore Byzantine and medieval architecture with engineer John Sherlock

well good afternoon ladies and gentlemen thank you so much for coming back to the auditorium and if you’re watching on a screen somewhere thank you very much for watching today’s topic is Medieval Majesty which for Europe is really about Christian architecture which is a bit of a pet subject for me because I used to work for the Anglican dasis of Chichester which is the body that sort of administers the Church of England in part of the south of England so quite a lot of clergyman jokes came across my desk um some of them I can’t repeat but some of them I can I’m sure we’ got some ex clergymen or ministers amongst us so I I mean absolutely no offense at all but um I remember one story of a new um Barber Shop a new hairdresser shop that was opened in a particular City and uh there’s a notice outside saying walk in off the street so somebody walked in off the street had a haircut and normal conversation what do you do and the chap said well I’m a farman and the chap said and the the barber said you do so much for the local community I insist that you have this haircut for free so we said well thank you very much had his haircut the next morning of course there was a nice bottle of wine a nice thank you card saying thank you very much second day another person walks off the street what do you do well I’m a policeman a policeman you do so much for the local community I insist that you have this hair cut for free so the next day nice box of chocolates and a thank you card and so forth and that day another person walks off the street what do you do well I’m a clergyman a clergyman you do so much for the local community I insist that you have this hair up for free so the next morning outside the shop there’s a whole line of clergymen so as well as going around the agnc we’re also taking this his historical Journey from left to right on the timeline uh if you’d like a copy the timeline we’ve got some of these nice ones out on the bar at the back and uh they look like that and they’re printed on nice card and the great Advantage is that it’s blank on the back so you can use the card to write a nice list or something when you’re fed up with a timeline but there are plenty of them on the bar at the back if you’d like one after the lecture um architecture can be divided into the these main headings but as I said on a previous occasion you’re s sure to start an argument if you try and make it as simple as this but really what we’re doing is the sort of central section Byzantine Romanesque and Gothic today about a thousand years of History don’t forget to look at the backs of your Euro notes if you’re carrying some Euro notes because there you’ll find the major styles of architecture represented the classical which we’ve just seen this is the Romanesque style there’s the gothic style and then on the 50 and 100 you get the Renaissance Styles or Renaissance Styles padian and Barack or Baroque these are my names for these Styles but as I said yester yesterday you’re in danger of starting an argument if you’re too rigid about the different names because different people call different periods different things so we’re going to start from the classical foundations which we laid over the last couple of times that I’ve been with you and as any Builder will tell you laying the foundations is very important and then we’ll move into the medieval period Byzantine or Byzantine Romanesque and Gothic and nobody quite Knows Why Gothic is called Gothic there wasn’t some race of Goths who introduced this style of architecture so nobody’s quite sure why it’s called Gothic but anything with a pointed Arch has come to be known as Gothic architecture so this is really the story of the spread of Christianity across Europe but it didn’t happen in a vacuum so where did we leave off when we were looking at classical architecture well we left off with the five orders of classical architecture do you remember the Doric Ionic and Corinthian that had come from ancient Greece and then the Romans added the Tuscan and the composite order so we have these five orders of classical architecture we have the use of materials introduced during the Roman period the brick work in particular and the discovery of the arch this is the arch of hadrin in Athens that many of you might have seen when we were in Athens and you can’t help thinking that someone is demonstrating that an arch can Spa span a wider void than just posts and little can so the Roman period bequeathed us the widespread use of the arch also the vault the earthquake brute Vault of course and also the Dome the uh Dome on tops of circular buildings just as a reminder we’re looking at the pantheon here a building which is very nearly 1900 years old so on these classical Styles hang the medieval uh period which begin really with the longlasting bantine or Byzantine style how did it come about well I’m no historian um fortunately we got a resident historian on this Voyage so if I make great howlers with the dates he’ll no doubt correct me afterwards you remember those those howlers that used to be circulated of school children um what was it Captain Cook circumcised the world with 150 foot Clipper is that kind of holler that I’m likely to make in the next few minutes so I I’ll try not to but basically the Roman Empire had become so large that it was unwieldy and almost impossible to govern lots of people have tried governing Europe it’s very very difficult I can assure you and um the Romans tried it and it was partially successful but an emperor called Dian there are his dates is famous for a number of things I’m just going to pick out four things he’s famous for first of all the Dian bars in Rome which is this sort of first century aquatic Pavilion in Rome secondly the Dian window now that’s not really he didn’t give it that name but this particular shape the arch shape with the two vertical columns has become known as the Dian window is probably called that because there are so many of them on the Dian bars but that has become a sort of motif that you find all over Europe and indeed the world so here we are in alisand in Norway and there you see a Dian window uh put back after the entire city was destroyed by far in 1904 and here we are in Venice in Italy uh the Zell mon Monastery and uh lots of people thought that this church bad was probably a paladio facade padio was a famous Italian architect and because his signature was this a might red pointer stopped working but you can see there uh his signature was that sort of Dian window so people thought that that was a padio facade people aren’t sure at the moment whether he had in the hand in designing that particular one but um we we simply don’t know another thing um Dian was rowned for was his enormous retirement home on the Adriatic Coast in a place that we now call split in those days it was part of the Roman Empire it’s been through lots of different changes of control it’s now part of Croatia and uh there the old town of split see if I can make my point of work I can’t I’ll try another one which is this one right can you see my little pointer there so the whole of this um portion of the old city of split is dian’s old Palace um and there’s a floor Planet it is absolutely huge uh there in the center well not quite the center but in this quarter here you can see what is now splits cathedral which is a tiny cathedral but it was originally built as the morsum of Dian when the Christians came along they didn’t like to remember Dian too much because he wasn’t that good about Christianity um so uh they took over his morum got rid of his sarcophagus and that’s now become uh splits Cathedral um because it was a Roman morum it had rather inappropriate pictures of Roman sold naked Roman soldiers going around the top which when it became a cathedral they didn’t think this was entirely appropriate imagery for uh worshippers when they looked up so these Roman soldiers have all been um what’s the word membered would probably be the right word and uh but it’s well worth a visit the uh Dian morum in the middle of split there’s a fourth Century drone picture of what the um uh Palace would have looked like on the waterfront in split in modern day Croatia and you can visit it there is uh a picture I took on the North side the north entrance to uh dian’s Palace in split but there’s one other thing that Dian is kind of renowned for and that is deciding that the best way to govern the Empire would be to split it in two into an Eastern Empire and a Western Empire and so two new capitals were declared Milan uh in the west and nicomedia uh modern day ismet uh in the East and these were the two uh capitals of the east and west empire now the next on the scene I told you I was no historian uh the next relevant person on the scene is the emperor Constantine uh there are his dates and in 313 he said Christianity is good and in 323 10 years later he said this is going to be the official religion right the way across the Roman Empire but the other thing that he’s renowned for is he decided the Empire should be reunited once again and it should be governed from the new capital there in uh what he called Constantino polis constan Constantine’s city which was the former Roman uh city of Byzantium its modern day Istanbul so it was Byzantium then it became Constantinople for a long time and now it’s called Istanbul and then of course he famous for the great triumphal Arch there in Rome that’s Constantine’s arch in Rome and so with Constantine is Born the long uh Byzantine or Byzantine era which combined this Roman power and Engineering Greek taste and philosophy and this newfound Christian faith and spirituality and suddenly across the Roman Empire there was a need to build churches because up up and then Christians had been meeting in private houses but now that it was an official religion uh large churches needed to be built but the question is what shape and from Roman days they knew how to do circular meeting places and you might have remembered when we were talking about Roman architecture we talked about the invention of the Basilica shape and for several hundred years these basic shapes were the staple shapes for Christian churches but as you know Roman history goes through all sorts of Crisis uh and the Western Empire collapses um uh more dates you don’t have to remember them all we’ve got a resident historian here so he’ll can he can refresh your memory on dates if you uh need them need it refreshed but the emperor Justinian there are his dates no he’s not I think his dates were on the last slide um but he’s a sixth Century Emperor he reunites the Empire once again and is very keen to reassert Imperial power and so he sets about building a bigger and better Church than anything that has gone before definitely a building to impress and so this Church of the Holy wisdom or Santa Sophia in Latin or Agia sopia in Greek is a huge Church in Istanbul uh constructed dur during the reign of the emperor Justinian and the result this massive Church uh it’s interior is awesomely huge you can ignore the Arabic diss that’s it would became a mosque it’s a mosque again now today actually but um it was a it’s a huge place of worship originally built as a church then it became a mosque um and then it became a museum uh with no religion at all and now I believe it’s a mosque again and the engineering Genius of this bantine era was placing a hemispherical dome over a square space because the floor plan of this church is essentially square but if you first construct enormous arches over the sides and then you fill in the four corners with curvy triangles which are called pendentives it literally means hanging pieces you can then put a dome or as Architects later discovered a drum and a dome on the resulting Circle so this incredible engineering feat of putting a circular Dome on a square space using huge arches and pendentes becomes a Hallmark of Byzantine architecture and the Church of the Holy wisdom in Constantinople is crowned with this massive dome which at 100 ft in diameter is still not as big as the pantheon dome in Rome which we were talking about last time but the space covered is awesomely huge and the reason for that is that although it’s a square floor plan and the Dome is only 100 foot if you put half a dome at each end a semi doome then the area you feel is being covered is a good 200 ft in One Direction and well over 100 ft in the other direction and it had exactly the desired effect people went into this edifice in those days just as they do today they looked at the amount of space that had been covered and they said wow and from this great Exemplar many great domed buildings can be found across the Roman Empire from this sort of period here we’re looking at a picture of San Vitali in Rena a Rena and here we’re looking at a picture of the inter of St Marx Basilica in Venice a 9th century uh Basilica but hugely modified since then there’s a picture of its exterior I’m sure a number of you have been there but it’s just worth noting that pointed ogive shape above the central door there CU that’ll crop up again and again as we go through different periods of architecture the other reason this is a particularly interesting edifice is that it’s one of the first cruciform shaped churches now what I mean by cruciform is cross-shaped there you can see that it’s basically a basilica but trps have been put on either side and it’s now a cross-shaped uh uh edifice um there’s also a difference that’s worth noting between um Western churches and Eastern churches after the great schism as the Eastern churches went off in different directions The Habit was to put the domes on the corners rather than North Southeast and West like we see and St Marks the domes are on the corners so you can usually tell what period a dome Church comes from as to the posi by looking at the positioning of the domes if it’s north south east and west like that it’s probably premillennial it’s a distinctively Byzantine looking building a dome sitting on huge arches and this basic concept a round Dome a top a square building is very common throughout medieval Church design here we’re looking at the 11th century Monastery at Daphne not far from Athens some of you might have been there when we were parked in Athens about 10 years ago I was fortunate enough to go to Ethiopia and there which is an Orthodox Christian country they in Adis Ababa they’re constructing the cities are expanding very quickly so they’re constructing churches and they are huge domed churches on basically a Square floor plan this is an aerial view of Westminster Cathedral Westminster R and Catholic Cathedral in London opened in 1903 there’s a um renowned English poet called John bman uh he was a 20th century uh poet he made wonderful remarks about various things and what he said about this building he said it’s a masterpiece in striped brick and stone in an intricate pattern of bonding the domes being all brick in order to prove that the good Craftsman has no need of steel or concrete so that’s Westminster Roman Catholic Cathedral in London and this technique this technique of putting a round Dome on a square building transcends all religious divides here we are in a mosque in Istanbul here we are in the synagogue in Florence it’s basically a dome sitting on pendentives and this is what for 500 years Grand places of worship looked like and the Byzantine era really lasted until the 1400s when constant Constantinople fell to Sultan mhmed uh but as the first Millennium passed there you can see the first Millennium roughly in the middle of the timeline a couple of things happened first of all there was a great split between the East and the West churches on theological grounds and so the Eastern Church tended to carry carry on along this Orange Line this banan line whereas the western church went its own way but also it being a thousand years since Christ’s first coming a lot of people thought that he might be coming back so better look busy so there was a great outpouring of Abbey and church building in the early part of the 10000s the 11th century here we are in the Church of San Minato uh just above Florence in Italy this is a an 11th century building this is before William the Conqueror had come across to England but look at the quality of the decoration already but it is a distinctly Roman looking building isn’t it it’s Basilica shaped it’s got these columns with fine Corinthian order capitals on top and at the Eastern end it has this apps um the apps is the semicircular bit that on the end of a basilica and uh there you can see the light is admitted through very thin stone or Alabaster which was the old way of admitting light into buildings before glass became a mainstream commodity still in Tuscany this is the extraordinary collection of edifices in Pisa showing off Romanesque at its most florid the baptistry in the front there the dwomo or cathedral in the middle and the famous leaning tower in the background incidentally do you know what Big Ben in London said to the Leaning Tower of Pisa he said I’ve got the time if you got the inclination I’ve got worse ones than that uh what we’re beginning to see is subtle changes in the tops of columns do you see distinctive uh fa like figures beginning to appear up until this stage uh column capitals were entirely abstract but as the Romanesque period develops you see more and more stories being told in the tops of columns but it’s still essentially a classical uh type of uh architecture uh here we are in the baptistry in uh Pisa there you can see columns Corinthian capitals both columns and pilasters the square columns that were introduced by the Romans here is a Romanesque uh facade in Luca Luca is the city in Italy where um I’ll think of his name in a minute help me who who the famous opan but Pini he either lived there or died there or was born there I can’t remember I think he lived and died there but anyway but is is lucer in Italy and uh a fabulous decoration on a Romanesque facade and this round arched Basilica style of church building quickly spread across the whole of Europe here we are in France the Basilica sandan V Vig Vine and this is the renowned Abby in VZ and what you see at the far end is the beginning of the use of glass to admit light in into the more important parts of the building here is the Basilica of Sana in tulus fine Romanesque uh edifice and the other thing that you see in cathedrals and abies like this this is s an still but you see it wherever there’s a place of pilgrimage is you see lots of little chapels built around the cathedral because lots of visitors lots of tourists would essentially go to these places and they needed little meeting places so around uh pilgrimage Cathedrals you find lots and lots of little chapels for uh the pilgrims to meet now every British school child is taught the date 1066 which is when William of Normandy becomes king of England it’s the death of King Harold uh documented in the Bayo tapestry which adorns the stairway of this ship and you might have been on Michael’s tour of the beo tapestry it’s not the real one it’s an IM it’s a um a reproduction of the famous Bayo tapestry that goes up and down the stairwells of this ship um following William the conqueror’s arrival in the south of England there immediately followed a massive building spree across the country of Abbey and Cathedral churches in a style that we often call Norman we call it Norman because it was Norsemen who came across uh when William the Conqueror invaded normen of course were originally the people from Scandinavia the Vikings so it was the Vikings who bought the Norman style into the British Isles but it went all over Europe here we are in Stanga in Norway uh as a fine medieval Cathedral um which is uh in the center of Stanga there in Norway note how the column capitals still showing little signs of classical inheritance you can see the volutes there but they are changing back in Winchester in England um some distinctive motifs to look out for of this period look out for that uh Arch the sort of uh large arch with two smaller arches inside it wish I could get my point oh that it is working again look there we are um the the arch with the two smaller arches inside it that’s a distinctive Romanesque Motif this cushion Capital the upside down Capital which converts a circular column shaft to a square Abacus that’s worth looking out for uh Another Thing Worth looking out for is the carved patterns on the circular arches uh here we are at southwell in England souel southwell I’m not quite sure how to pronounce it it’s probably pronounced souel the other thing that you don’t see that often in England but you’ll see it all over Europe is these twin pyramid spares almost wherever you go in Germany or France or Switzerland or Austria you’ll see these Twin Spires at the Western end of an Abby or Cathedral you don’t see it that often in England but it is a Romanesque motif and the other thing to look out for is these interlaced arches do you see how they’ve interlaced the different arches to create that extraordinary decorative effect so I was saying Romanesque abies Cathedrals and churches are springing up all over the British Isles this is the cathedral in Oxford in England and just down the river from Oxford if you find yourself there do go and visit iFly Parish church it’s usually open it’s a lovely little Roman tiny Romanesque Parish church and there is a photograph of it and I think there’s a picture of my wife just coming out of the door there and uh but it is the most most Heavenly little church and well worth a visit if you find yourself uh in or around Oxford this is not far from where I live a place called it spelt staining but it’s pronounced staining and it has this beautiful Romanesque Church in its Center but perhaps the greatest Romanesque cathedral in all of Europe and I would say this cuz I’m a Brit is darom Cathedral excuse me is darham Cathedral some European is uh getting his own back on me for suggesting that darham is the greatest Romanesque cathedral but I think it is and uh there is this fine interior of Durham Cathedral and here is the north porch and do you see once again that o shape has appeared above the doorway there and that there is the renowned knocker the leg the The Legend is that once you’ve knocked on that knocker you are granted Sanctuary inside the church so if lots of bad people are chasing you and quite a lot of bad people would chase you at different times in English History then if you can knock on that KN knocker you’re safe once you’ve knocked so we shall see whether that’s true or not I’ve not tried it but um it it might work here’s a picture I took around on the other side of daram Cathedral do you see this checkerboard pattern here I was fascinated I I have a friend who was the UNESCO world heritage manager for the Durham site and his previous job had been at the great mosque in Cordoba and before that he was in charge of the pyramids in Egypt he was Muslim by birth and he is saying this checkerboard pattern is an Islamic pattern that was brought across to England presumably by the Masons who’ had been traveling a bit and thought that pattern looks nice we’ll bring it back and put it into our pallet of things that we can offer um various the various people who commissioned great abbes and Cathedral churches so we’ve passed through the center of the New Millennium through the Byzantine and Romanesque period which is the Romanesque period is the first truly paneuropean language of Christian architecture but now something rather interesting happens and we’re going to watch a short video which describes what happened so here [Music] goes the building of a cathedral tested the skills and Ingenuity of the cathedral Builders to the Limit yet the idea and methods that they used had barely changed since Roman times in fact the style they built in in the early period is called Romanesque it’s based on the kind of arch that the Romans used the round Arch the shape was always based on a circle often a full semicircle sometimes a section of one or with the Curve slightly distorted it was simple but limited arches in the style known as Romanesque can be sturdy even chunky a whole building made of these arches has a muscular powerful effect but in the middle of the 12th century came an idea that would change all this a revolution in design and construction that would raise cathedral building to new levels of sophistication it was a style that would become known as Gothic [Music] it was born in France at s near [Music] Paris here the Visionary Abbott Su rebuilt part of the abbey church burial place of the French Kings he was using a new kind of arch not a round Arch but the pointed [Music] one but his aims went beyond this for Abott Su had a vision he wasn’t simply after something bigger and grander he had a theological rationale for his new design it was a Theology of [Music] light for medieval thinker light had a profoundly religious meaning the embodiment of spirit one writer called it the work should brighten our minds so they travel through the light to the True Light of Christ in seeing this light the dull mind is resurrected from Darkness Abbott Su and his unnamed Master Mason had glimpsed the possibilities of the pointed Arch it’s both stronger and more flexible than a round one both the shape and width of a pointed Arch can be varied in more ways and the weight of a building naturally moves downwards and outwards in a shallow curve closer to that of a pointed than a round Arch this simple difference was to change the entire way Cathedrals were conceived designed and [Music] built the Second Sunday in June 1144 may have had a greater effect on architecture than any other day in [Music] history at the dedication service bishops from all over Europe gathered at s to witness a building designed to evoke the experience of Heaven more completely than anything before it the Bishops were all struck they had seen the [Music] future so we saw in the video some of the rationale from moving to pointed arches which have become the standard shape haven’t they for places of worship in the western world this is a photograph of a church in ruic in Iceland there you can see pointed arches this is a 20th century cathedral in England in Guilford and there again pointed arches this is a 20th century cathedral in the USA the Washington National Cathedral again pointed arches so why have pointed arches become the kind of signature for places of worship well I’ve got four different theories and they may all be wrong so you might have an even better Theory than all four of these first of all there was so much trading and invading and crusading going on that the pointed Arch uh Motif which was widespread in the Middle East came back across Europe in Armenia in particular uh pointed architecture was very well developed my second theory is that there was a Romanesque fondness for this interlacing and if you interlace semicircles you get this pointed Arch shape so that could be another reason a third Theory now this is an engineering Theory so um as our guide said today I need your attention um if you look at a a uh Crossing Square basically to two two columns in each Direction the longest Arch is this one isn’t it the one going right the way across here the sort of hypotenuse going across the um the triangle now if that is going to be round then the ones that each end need to be either slightly lower or if they’re going to be the same height they need to be pointed if they were lower you get an undulating roof which they didn’t want so the um ones at either end are slightly pointed so that’s my third Theory and the fourth Theory which is another engineering Theory uh which you heard mentioned in the video is that pointed arches can bear much heavier loads on much more slender columns than round arches can so whichever Theory you choose and as I say they could all be wrong pointed arches become the new mode and this rather heavy Romanesque round Arch style gives way to this pointy arched uh Gothic style this impressively solid style as you said in the video uh gives way to a style that seems to draw the eye up and up and up here are some examples from England this is the uh walam Abbey in Essex near London in England and this is the West End of Gloucester Cathedral and the other thing they discovered from this era is that it’s possible for the forces to be carried down through quite narrow struts so essentially you can uh set up a relatively uh sort of skeletal structure using narrow struts uh with lots of space and because glass was becoming more and more widely available lots more light could be admitted so the concept the flying buttress which carries the force down to um down to the ground that way uh became another Hallmark of this particular period of of architecture and you see flying buttresses on many many different Gothic buildings throughout uh uh the world um here we are in bath in England some people say bath I say bath um here we are in Prague in the Czech Republic and here we are at St George’s Chapel in Windsor and sometimes the flying butress is actually incorporated into the masonry there’s an example from gler Cathedral and sometimes the flying bapst is actually incorporated into the internal masonry there’s an example from Worster cathedral but not every tall Gothic cathedral was a success first time the bishop of B in France visited Paris came back and told the Masons well I want something even taller than they got in Paris so he commissioned this enormously tall Cathedral the problem was it kept on falling down and uh the result B cathedral which is the tallest uh medieval Gothic vault in the world um kept on falling down and in the end only the East end of it was built so if you go to B in France what you’ll find is This Magnificent Gothic east end but there’s nothing down at the West End in fact if you go to the West End what you find is the old Romanesque Abbey that was there before and there you can just see towering behind it is this great new modern Cathedral well it was Modern in those days but um it was never actually completed every country’s Masons had their own ways of making Gothic Cathedrals Splendid here we are in Florence in Italy where there’s lots of colored marble available here’s the North European take we’re in vismar which is now in Germany um where brick was used to to make very high vaults and this is in Lubec in Germany the highest brick Gothic vault in the world and when Gothic came across the channel into Britain there are three distinct phases that were documented the first is called the early English phase and salsburg Cathedral is’s a very good example of that it’s distinguished Often by these lanet shaped windows so that’s the first phase and this is a photograph taken by a friend of mine of the interior of SSB Cathedral and the photograph is not upside down there’s this wonderful font in the center of the cathedral and the water in the font the surface is completely mirror likee so if you point your camera onto the surface of the water there you can take a picture an upside down picture of the roof of the cathedral the second phase of Gothic architecture that came across into the British Isles was the decorated phase and Lincoln Cathedral would be a fine example of that and so would Lichfield cathedral which is heavily restored in the 19th century and then the third phase was called the perpendicular phase perpendicular phase is distinguished because in the tracery you often get vertical lines that go all the way from the bottom to the top now this was a Romanesque Abbey but a chap called William of Wickham came along at the end of the 1300s and said no that’s all out of date I’m going to modernize it so he modernized it into this um 14th century perpendicular style and that West window was blown out during the English Civil War there was a big Civil War in England in the 1600s and uh the window was blown out and all the citizens gathered up the glass and hid it and then when all the soldiers had gone away they bought the glass back and they tried to put it back but they failed so that window is like modern art it’s sort of completely random pieces of colored glass from the inside have any of you seen the film of Le Miser or lesmis as we sometimes call it uh in that film The Abbey scenes are filmed in the cloer of Winchester college and an architectural purist like me can say well I can know that’s not France because what I can see here is perpendicular architecture and perpendicular never made it back across to the continent of Europe it stayed in Britain for some reason so um that’s another thing to look out for if you find yourself in Britain perpendicular architecture is a curiously British thing it never went back to Continental Europe back to France here we are in Amar the facade of the great cathedral in Amar and these Cathedral facades were like encyclopedias they’re educational as you walk in you can see lots and lots of biblical Stories being enacted around you uh here’s a slightly more a closer up of the same facade if you look carefully there trying to get my pointer to work there’s Christ sitting in judgment here’s the souls going off into the jaws of a very nasty looking dragon on one side and other Souls going into the bosom of Abraham on the other side and everything is in this facade uh labors of the month um everything is there uh Saints Prophets The lot so uh once you’ve been through that faad a few hundred times you’ll probably know the entire Bible even if you can’t read or write and not many people in those days could read or right so having pictorial um uh storytelling facades like that was terribly terribly important so we’ve almost come to the end uh just a summary on Gothic it was a complete break with a classical tradition it was a genre invented or discovered to to depict the distinctly Christian understanding of God and the church and Gothic was heavily revived in the 19th century by the victorians and we’ll talk a bit more about that when we come to my final talk so we’ve covered about a thousand years of History uh just a reminder that if you’d like a copy of this timeline uh there are some on the bar out at the back and I’ll be there as well in a minute or two to answer any questions that you might have and I’m going to leave you with a picture of a masterpiece of Italian Gothic it’s the upper Basilica of St Francis in a cc begun in 1228 ladies and gentlemen maybe I’ll see you again but in the mean time thank you very much for being here

Discover the intricate beauty and profound significance of the Byzantine and medieval architecture that has shaped Europe’s landscape. During this illuminating presentation titled “Medieval Majesty,” guest lecturer and engineer John Sherlock explores an array of Byzantine, Romanesque and Gothic architectural styles. With more than 1,000 years of history to uncover, Sherlock expertly navigates through the evolution of these styles, shedding light on iconic features such as the Diocletian windows of ancient Rome, the five orders of classical architecture and more.

Broadcast on Viking.TV on May 7, 2024.

Explore more of Europe:
https://www.vikingcruises.com/oceans/cruise-destinations/europe/index.html

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