ABSTRACT
The Gothic style, which had emerged in the environs of Paris, never enjoyed the same status in Italy that it did in northern Europe. Italian builders were hardly unaware of Gothic architectural fashions, however. Pointed arches, ribbed vaults, complex window tracery, and other stereotypically Gothic features had already begun to appear in Italian buildings in the decades bracketing 1200. The growth of the Cistercian order in the twelfth century, and of the Mendicant orders in the thirteenth century, fostered this spread of architectural ideas. Because these orders embraced austerity, though, their designers deliberately avoided the full complexity of the Gothic cathedral type. For this reason, in part, the Gothic tradition tended to serve in Italy as a source for individual motifs, rather than as a comprehensive framework governing architectural creativity, which it became in the north. Another crucial factor in the Italian situation, of course, was the presence of many impressive Roman and early medieval monuments, whose prominence created an unusually strong sense of historical continuity on the peninsula. As Marvin Trachtenberg observed in an incisive 1991 article, Italian builders of the Gothic era often chose to qualify their acceptance of northern Gothic “modernism” by emulating these indigenous models of architectural authority. Italian design thus remained distinctly historicizing, even before the systematic suppression of non-classical forms in the Renaissance.1
