Roland Recht, Believing and Seeing: The Art of Gothic Cathedrals, Translated by Mary Whittall, The University of Chicago Press

Content Provider	Semantic Scholar
Author	Gibbs, Robert
Copyright Year	2011
Abstract	This is a translation of a book originally published in 1999, and as a potential text book for ‘Gothic’ or ‘High Medieval’ art it must be seen as a product of these limitations in 2008. ‘Believing and Seeing’ as a title, a fair translation of its French original, sets this apart from most previous efforts at summarising what its subtitle describes as ‘The art of the gothic cathedrals’. Despite the subtitle Recht is above all concerned with ‘Gothic art’, and this he sees as above all the product of the development of the sacrament of the Eucharist and the devotional emphasis on the Passion of Christ, and ‘the new standing of the visual arts in a society where the written word surrendered its dominant position to them’.1 The latter point is surely highly contentious and hardly applicable to the theologians and canonists who dominated the commissioning of those arts.2 But the prominence of the arts as a means of expression for devotion is convincingly present throughout Recht’s book. Structurally this is rather curiously diverse, a foil perhaps to Christopher Wilson’s Gothic Cathedrals, an ideal modern summary in English of the buildings that contain that ‘art’, or to Paul Crossley’s fundamental revision of Paul Frankl’s Gothic Architecture,3 neither of which make it to either of the two bibliographies, rather confusingly divided into Recommended Reading and a general bibliography.
File Format	PDF HTM / HTML
DOI	10.4000/lettre-cdf.698
Alternate Webpage(s)	https://arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/gibbs.pdf
Alternate Webpage(s)	https://doi.org/10.4000/lettre-cdf.698
Language	English
Access Restriction	Open
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article