5. Aftermath. As the nineteenth century drew to a
close enthusiasm for Gothic generally slackened, while
at the same time the fashion for Gothic revival building
yielded to new modes derived from Renaissance and
baroque exemplars. Scholarly attention began to focus
increasingly on a more careful examination of individ-
ual monuments and groups of monuments so as to
define their status more exactly, a course that is still
being fruitfully pursued in the 1970's. In the twentieth
century, however, there were renewed efforts to un-
derstand Gothic art and architecture as the products
of a single essence of the civilization, thus harking back
to the broader perspective of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. The German art historian Wil-
helm Worringer, for example, advocated a semimys-
tical conception of Gothic as the product of an inborn
racial factor, the Nordic spirit (Formprobleme der
Gotik, Munich, 1912). A more abstract concept was
set forth by Dagobert Frey in his Gotik und Renais-
sance (Augsburg, 1929), where the key to the Gothic
attitude is seen in the factor of succession as against
simultaneity, which was supposed to have prevailed
in the Renaissance. Frey's concept, though buttressed
by many ingenious observations regarding such varied
topics as mapmaking and stagecraft, is essentially
unverifiable, as shown by the fact that it has been
possible for Marshall McLuhan to maintain just the
opposite, namely, that the era dominated by the prin-
ciple of succession set in only with the spread of print-
ing, i.e., after the effective end of the Gothic age. In
a more restricted fashion Erwin Panofsky attempted
a demonstration of the often mooted parallel between
Gothic architecture and scholastic philosophy, but
without success because of faulty methodology. It is
significant that historians of music and literature,
though often receptive to such art-historical concepts
as mannerism and baroque, have generally ignored the
concept of Gothic.
The inherent difficulty of reaching conclusions about
such a broad and much contested concept as Gothic
civilization may be illustrated by the thinking of Paul
Frankl who devoted much of his long life to a tenacious
effort to clarify just this problem. While Frankl elo-
quently affirmed his faith in the idea of Gothic Man
(concretely symbolized for him in the figure of the
suffering Jesus), he was forced to admit that even in
his chosen sphere of architecture most castles built
during the so-called Gothic period are decidedly
un-Gothic in style. Thus the Gothic cannot be defended
as a universally valid period concept even in architec-
ture, but is only applicable to ecclesiastical buildings,
their decoration, and sphere of influence.
In conclusion, attention must be drawn to two im-
portant results of the centuries-long quest for the
meaning of the idea of the Gothic (apart, that is, from
the incidental illumination it may offer to historians
in search of bypaths relating to such concepts as classi-
cism and the sublime). The first result is an elucidation
of certain essential and original traits of medieval
civilization—parliaments, the feudal system, special
genres of lyric and epic poetry—even though none of
these is normally termed Gothic nowadays. The second
result is the enhanced understanding of Gothic art and
architecture and its decoration. With its various phases
and manifestations, especially in cathedral building,
Gothic architecture is now generally recognized as
one of the greatest creations of Western civilization.
