Registration

South German Late Gothic Design and Building Praxis
3 (Right) ”Initial check for a tabernable. (Vienna Akademie).” In: François
Bucher, “Design in Gothic Architecture: A Preliminary Assessment,”
Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 27, no. 1 (1968): 67.
5
The geometric systems had many levels. They governed
the making of template and thus the mason’s
chisel. They provided the grid on which plans,
elevations, and details evolved and thus also the
means to re-experience the creative process at will.
Each of the systems produced a logical, repeatable,
and reasonably flexible approach, controlled
by the unchanging laws of geometric progression.
Thus planning also reflected the absolute order of
the world as represented in cosmological schemes
showing inscribed figures representing the orderly
perfection of the universe.” 21
The Late Gothic in German and Czech lands
The German Late Gothic is set apart from other Late
Gothic styles by its unusual emphasis on formally and
structurally complex figured vaults as a primary medium
of a church’s expression, and perhaps to some extent by
the hall church (Hallenkirche) type, in which transepts
and clerestories are eliminated and the vaults of the nave
and aisles are made level or nearly level with each other.
These features are epitomised in St.-Annen-Kirche in
Annaberg, vaulted between 1517–25 by Jacob Haylmann,
who was Baumeister from 1513 and a pupil of Benedikt
Ried. The double-curved ribs of its looping floral vaults,
which reprise those of the Vladislav Hall and St. Barbara’s
in Kutná Hora, are particularly emblematic of the Late
Gothic in German and Czech lands.
The style in question was the subject of Kurt Gerstenberg’s
1913 work, Deutsche Sondergotik, or German Special
Gothic. In it, Gerstenberg argued that the style was
decisively defined by a sense of unified space (Einheitsraum)
unique to German Hallenkirchen. In the words of
Paul Crossley, Gerstenberg “evoked an essentially non-European
and Nordic racial identity as the driving spirit of
German creativity.” “His nationalist stereotypes—Germanic
‘slowness,’ ‘irrationality,’ and a sense of the ‘limitless’—
all of them quintessentially embodied in the picturesque
spaces of the German hall church, struck a deep, atavistic
chord in German art historiography in the interwar
years.” 22 The label “Sondergotik” has fallen sharply out
of use since the Second World War, 23 and Gerstenberg’s
work has been substantially criticised as a nationalist
project based on cherry-picked examples.
Crossley and Kavaler give much credit for this revaluation
of Gerstenberg to Norbert Nußbaum and his seminal
German Gothic Church Architecture of 1994. But the difficulty
of drawing lines through Central European history
is made quite apparent upon reading Hans Böker’s much
more critical review of the English translation. Conceding
the importance of the Nußbaum’s work in recovering
the German Late Gothic from obscurity, Böker finds
Nußbaum’s criticism of Gerstenberg tepid, and levels a
damning accusation at Nußbaum for his “exclusive use of
German place-names without an indication of their present
official form—especially for the eastern regions of today’s
Poland and the Czech Republic (the sole exception
is Gdansk)—[which] makes one suspect that it was the
pre-1945 Reich, and not the present understanding of a
‘Europe of regions,’ that still provides, at least subconsciously,
the boundaries for the book.” Böker acknowledges,
“[a] definition of what constitutes German Gothic
architecture is not at all clear as it might appear.” 24