1. The Renaissance Tradition: “Gothic Barbarism.”
The pejorative use of the term “Gothic,” which was
dominant in modern times at least until the late eight-
eenth century, depended on a three-stage concept of
history apparently first adumbrated by Petrarch, and
then elaborated and diffused by Filippo Villani, Leone
Battista Alberti, and other Italian humanists of the
Renaissance. According to this concept two periods of
cultural excellence—classical antiquity and the nascent
modern era—flank a dark chasm of ignorance and
barbarism, the Middle Ages. The Italian scholars
blamed the Germanic invaders for this catastrophe. In
two areas of cultural development—handwriting and
architecture—they specifically emphasized the perni-
cious role of the Goths. Lorenzo Valla, whose anti-
medieval attitude is exemplified in his best-known
achievement, the exposure of the “Donation of Con-
stantine” as a forgery, condemned the “monkish” Black
Letter script as Gothic, a designation which serves to
distinguish late medieval script from the Carolingian
and Renaissance hands that precede and follow it. (In
Germany a version of Gothic script, termed Fraktur,
survived in printed books into the twentieth century.)
Valla also suggested that the Goths were responsible
for the decay of the Latin language. From this usage
the term could be extended, as by François Rabelais,
to condemn a coarse and rustic literary style, i.e., one
employed by writers insufficiently disciplined by study
of good Greek and Latin models. Yet the most influen-
tial pejorative use of the Gothic idea is due to the
reflections on architecture of the art historian Giorgio
Vasari. In his Lives of the Architects, Painters and
Sculptors (1550), Vasari generally follows his fifteenth-
century predecessors Manetti and Filarete in designat-
ing medieval architecture as simply “German”
(tedesco). On several occasions, however, he attributes
it specifically to the Goths (though he does not use
the adjectival form gotico, only the noun). Vasari con-
demns medieval architecture as disorderly, mean,
overdecorated, and flimsy in appearance. The archi-
tectural style presumably introduced by the Goths was
thus synonymous with a whole array of faults of taste,
standing at the opposite pole from the classical style,
which was held to be a universally valid model.
In the seventeenth century Vasari's polemic was
echoed in transalpine Europe, not only by specialist
writers on the visual arts such as Sir Henry Wotton
and Joachim von Sandrart, but also by poets such as
John Dryden and Molière. The last-named author, for
example, in his poem “La Gloire du Val-de-Grâce,”
inveighs against the fade goust des ornamens gothiques
(“outmoded taste for Gothic ornamentation”). All these
writers used the adjective Gothic—first attested in 1610
in this sense—as a matter of course, discarding the
older term “German,” possibly because of the chance
of confusion with modern Germany where cultivated
taste had long since rallied to the classical ideal. More-
over, the characteristic seventeenth- and eighteenth-
century doctrine of the parallel of the arts invited the
extension of the pejorative connotation of Gothic to
other media besides architecture. Charles Dufresnoy
(1611-88), in a posthumously published tract which
was to enjoy great popularity, De arte graphica, applied
the idea to painting. In France this approach struck
deep roots: in 1757 the Encyclopédie defined Gothic
painting as un genre de peinture aux formes grêles et
raides (“a style of painting with harsh and rigid forms”),
a judgment frequently echoed down to the first decades
of the nineteenth century.
Literature, however, provided the largest arena for
the search for Gothic aberrations, though it is notable
that the parallel with architecture is never far out of
mind, witness John Dennis' disapproving remarks on
the state of English literature in his day (1701): “While
the French reformed the structure of their poems by
the noble models of ancient architecture,... we re-
solved... to adhere to our Gothic and barbarous
manner.” The attractions of the parallel were, of
course, enhanced by the vogue among the nobility of
the Grand Tour, in which examples of ancient and
modern classical architecture were carefully inspected
with a view to the cultivation of taste in general. In
literature, apart from the broad condemnation of rustic
modes already found in Rabelais, more specific fea-
tures, correctly or incorrectly traced to medieval
sources, were exposed to pillory as Gothic faults. Poets,
for example, were admonished to cast off “Gothic
rhyme” and turn instead to blank verse, which was
held to be more in accord with the precepts of the
ancients. This admonition may be traced back as far
as Roger Ascham's Scholemaster (1570), and Jean-
Antoine de Baïf's Étrennes de poésie (1574). And in
England admirers of Tasso, Ariosto, Spenser, and other
supposedly medievalizing epic poets had to cope with
the charge that these works were hopelessly marred
by fanciful and chivalrous elements redolent of linger-
ing Gothic taste.
In the work of some critics the idea of the Gothic
escaped entirely from its historical moorings so that
phenomena we now would term baroque—Italian
opera, the architecture of Francesco Borromini, and
the complex metaphors of metaphysical poetry—are
tarred with the Gothic brush. In this way the category
of the Gothic could merge with that of the bizarre
or grotesque. Oddly enough, even the geometric gar-
dens of the Renaissance incurred censure as Gothic by
Bishop Richard Hurd (1719-1808) and other enthusiasts
for the freer and more “natural” art of English land-
scaping. These writers were, of course, unaware that
this trend in gardening, as Arthur O. Lovejoy has shown
(Essays..., pp. 136-65), was a subversive intrusion,
a harbinger of a new aesthetic orientation that was,
among other things, to achieve the rehabilitation and
even for a time the exaltation of the Gothic.
In England such social customs as duelling and
hunting were denigrated as survivals from the era of
Gothic darkness. In some eighteenth-century writers
the adjective is often reduced to an epithet meaning
simply “old-fashioned” or “countrified,” as in Oliver
Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer (1773), where Mrs.
Hardcastle, a self-proclaimed lady of fashion, com-
plains ironically of the “Gothic vivacity” (i.e., dullness)
of her husband, a conservative country squire.
Gradually, then, the idea of the Gothic broadened
to embrace almost any fault of taste, ranging from a
harmless social gaffe to the crudest barbarity. Paradox-
ically, Gothic aberration might stem not solely from
rusticity and lack of cultivation but also from perverse
overrefinement, as in the phenomena we now generally
regard as baroque. Thus the sanity of the classical
golden mean stood between the opposing menaces of
the Gothic Scylla and the Gothic Charybdis.
