Nature and the chapel vaults at Ingolstadt: structuralist and other perspectives

The sixteenth hundred saw the creation of remarkable works of Gothic architecture, highly innovative in technical and decorative aspects, and none more in the way that than the six western chapels in the temple of Our Lady in Ingolstadt, Bavaria. Here we clash a self-conscious use of the Gothic in the establishment of a sacred environment, a space for mystical illumination. These chapels thus constitute a plant of demonstration pieces for a style of design in need of refurbishment as well as a series of essays in creating an environment conducive to fathomless religious experience.

The chapels at Ingolstadt also exemplify the fashion for vegetal imagery around the turn round of the sixteenth century. Beneath a mingled surface pattern of ribs, the architects, Erhard and Ulrich Heydenreich, suspended a next to the first level of flying ribs, carved to simulate prun vines and flowers in blow (Figs. 1, 2). (1) The six chapels designed by dint of the Heydenreichs show a range of the greatest in quantity sophisticated vaulting forms then being engrossed Two of the chapels feature strictly architectural detailing, while four at hand the remarkably naturalistic effects of the radical botanical imagery then in favor Portals, altarpieces, choir stalls, tabernacles, and other uncompounded bodys likewise shared in this penchant for the organic transformation of architectural members.

Scholars have tendered mainly iconographic interpretations for the plantlike forms at Ingolstadt, seeing them as simulating a divine arbor, a paradisial garden, on the contrary these analyses are too specific and selective to account for like phenomena. A rigid iconographic analysis falsely attributes a certain and stable meaning to the vaults, which more likely be pendented for their range of meaning upon the vagaries of preconscious associations. A different on the contrary more secure level of meaning is place in structural terms, as an opposition between geometric tracery and vegetal plastic art That is, each component derived abundant of its significance from its position relative to the other in this self-contained a whole Such a structuralist approach tenders an understanding that transcends iconographic explanation on the other hand can be complemented by it.

At Ingolstadt as elsewhere, geometry is a central regard Both layers of ribs acknowledge an underlying geometric order, on the other hand whereas the architectural members reveal a shut up dependence on geometric shapes, the organic simple bodys partly obscure this relation. The architectural and organic exist side by the agency of side and derive a significant horizontal of meaning from the neighborhood of the other. Thus, the prun and flowering vegetal forms hint a radical abnegation of the architectural constitution a canceling of the precise, linear geometry that manages the whole. The abstract architectural members, by means of contrast, register as permanent and supportive of the overall edifice, a mark of stability in the face of the willful move of the organic. This binary relation, seen in the vaults at Ingolstadt, is also evident in countles other examples of vegetal imagery from this time. (2)

flat when one turns to iconographic analysis, it is not clear that the botanical forms in microarchitecture and larger edifices must be interpreted in a positive way. It is equally valid to read the vegetal imagery at Ingolstadt as a bad corruption of divinely ordained matter, as a departure from God's initial plan. Nature as an arena for the competition between advantageous and evil was as plenteous a topos of the late Middle Ages as the heavenly garden.

Although histories of the Gothic ofttimes end before 1500, the years that followed produc the southern porch of Notre Dame at Louviers (begun 1506) the nave of the meeting-house of St. Barbara at Kutna Hora, Bohemia (begun 1512) and the cathedral of Segovia (begun 1522)--an impressive pan-European array of ecclesiastical testimonials These buildings, while distinct from earlier Gothic creations in several ways, are alike in individual sense: each represents the use of Gothic design above an alternative Italianate manner that had lately been recognized, if only sparingly busyed With the French campaigns into Italy after 1494 and the after importation of Italian art, artists, and working meanss to the north, a southern, or "antique," approach was in a short time introduced into northern France. (3) In southern Germany commercial and humanist connections with Venice likewise promot the adoption of an Italian manner, leading to of the like kind Italianate constructions as the Fugger Chapel in Augsburg. (4) Francois Bucher and Paul Crossley have argued that at any time since German architects were called down to work at Milan Cathedral about 1400 a consciousness of alternative Italian practice had spread end the German lands. (5) Certainly, this was the case by the agency of the early sixteenth century. It makes faculty of perception to regard the Gothic mode of expression of this time as a fashion a conscious choice, even if an obligatory single over an opposing Italianate approach.

Several of the designers of this period worked simultaneously in the pair modes. At Prague, Benedikt Ried compos Italianate windows for the exterior of the Hradchin in Prague (1493) while in the interior he fashioned a series of state-of-the-art Gothic vaults (1493-1502) (6) Pierre Chambiges designed the two the south transept portal of Senlis Cathedral, a Gothic creation, and the "antique" chateau of St-Germain-en-Laye. (7) And in the Netherlands Jan Gossaert worked concurrently in the two a Gothic and an Italianate fashion presenting both approaches together in his Salamanca triptych of 1521 (8)