Gothic Art Quotes

“The new artistic urge often led to cathedrals being left unfinished or, if finished, to their giving us the feeling, of which Goethe was the first to become conscious, that they are somehow incomplete, indeed impossible to complete, because in the process of endless, interminable development. This impulse into the unlimited, this inability to be content with any conclusion, comes out all the more clearly in the Passion plays because of their extreme naïvety. It is in the ‘drama of movement’ of the Middle Ages that its dynamic sense of life, its unrest, dissolving traditional modes of thought and feeling, its nominalistic turning to the multiplicity of changing and transitory particulars, are most directly apprehended.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, Volume 1: From Prehistoric Times to the Middle Ages

“On the one hand, Gothic art abandons the decorative and predominantly cumulative style of Romanesque composition, replacing this by forms more akin to the classical, based upon the principle of concentration. On the other hand, it breaks up the whole, which in Romanesque art was at least pervaded by a certain decorative unity, into a number of partial compositions, each one in the main built up according to the classical principle of unity and of subordination, but in total giving the effect of a rather indiscriminate conglomeration of subjects.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, Volume 1: From Prehistoric Times to the Middle Ages

“In periods such as the early Middle Ages, which in general were free from social conflict, there is not, as a rule, any radical antagonism between artistic intention and technique; the art forms and the technique are employed harmoniously and say the same thing in different ways, the one factor being no more rational or irrational than the other. But in times like the Gothic age, when the whole of culture was rent by antagonisms, it often happens that the spiritual and material elements in art speak different languages and, as in the present case, the technique appears rational but the artistic aims irrational.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, Volume 1: From Prehistoric Times to the Middle Ages

“Since Gothic days all great art, with the exception of a few short-lived classicist movements, has something fragmentary about it, an inward or outward incompleteness, an unwillingness, whether conscious or unconscious, to utter the last word. There is always something left over for the spectator or reader to complete. The modern artist shrinks from the last word, because he feels the inadequacy of all words— a feeling which we may say was never experienced by man before Gothic times.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, Volume 1: From Prehistoric Times to the Middle Ages