ABSTRACT
Nineteenth-century attitudes to Gothic architecture veered between the wildest extremes of hostility and admiration, while interpretations ranged from the mechanical to the organic and eventually the transcendental. Gothic was not, of course, a discovery or even a rediscovery of the Romantics. The style seems never, in fact, to have lacked practitioners from the day when the apse of Saint-Denis Abbey was completed in 1144 to our own time. The natural analogy was taken up by Chateaubriand in Genie du Christianisme (1802), with a new feeling for the beauty and impenetrable mystery of nature. Carl Blechen's picture also conveys a very different sense of mystery inspired by Gothic churches. Detailed study of the history of medieval buildings had fragmented the eighteenth-century notion of 'Gothic' into a multitude of chronological and regional styles-from Early Christian to English Late Perpendicular, opening the door to endless discussion about their respective merits and appropriateness for different purposes.
