× Expand Photo by Harry The city of Carcassonne, France

If the art of ancient Greece and Rome represented the perfection of western civilization and the Renaissance was merely a rebirth of that golden age, what do we make of the Medieval era in between? This question confronted architects and theorists in the 19th century, just as the Age of Enlightenment began to fade into Romanticism.

Several weeks ago, we looked at the architecture of George Ingham Barnett, who brought Neoclassicism to St. Louis. As mentioned before, Neoclassical architecture, along with its cousin Greek Revival, was the logical expression of young American democracy. Representative government occurred within the confines of buildings shaped by the birthplace of democracy. And expressions of religious freedom also seemed more suited to buildings that did not look like the houses of worship left behind in state-controlled churches in Europe. Hence, the Old Cathedral and St. Mary of Victories.

But styles change, and the influence of new architects in Europe would allow Americans to like “distasteful” styles again. The rise of Romanticism, a reaction to the emotional sterility of Neoclassicism, helped trigger this revival of Medieval architecture. In addition to focusing on emotion, Romanticism focuses on breaking rules—heresy to the strict order of classical architecture—and returning to a wild, untamed spirit in Europe. Rising in the early 19th century, Romanticism also capitalized on the renewed confidence of German culture in the wake of Napoleon’s defeat in 1815. The emperor was himself a builder of great Neoclassical monuments, including the Arc de Triomphe and the Vendôme Column. Consequently, for German, French and English builders, it was again fashionable to embrace the Romanesque and Gothic styles so long pilloried by Renaissance architects and theorists.

× Expand Photo by Avda Schinkel's Altes Museum in Berlin

One of these emboldened architects was Karl Friedrich Schinkel, who began his illustrious career as a Neoclassicist. In fact, he was a painter (the Saint Louis Art Museum has a masterful triple portrait of his children) before abandoning his palette and turning to architecture. Working for the kings of Prussia, he guided the ascendant northern German power out of the Rococo style after it helped to defeat Napoleon, adorning Berlin with several important Neoclassical monuments instead. Schinkel’s Altes Museum, completed in 1830, exhibited the royal art collections and served as a visual bookend for the city’s central plaza, later inspiring our own Soldiers’ Memorial in St. Louis.

× Expand Photo by Dieter Brügmann The Friedrichswerderscherkirche, in Berlin

Schinkel’s Friedrichswerderscherkirche, completed the following year, became the first Gothic Revival church in Berlin. It broke with the stern Neoclassical formalism that Frederick the Great had established the previous century in the ceremonial center of Berlin. The Friedrichswerderscherkirche was just a church for the Frederick Quarter, the first suburb of early modern Berlin, built inside the fortifications wall several centuries before. But this is far from an average church. Besides reviving the Gothic style, it reintroduces brick, a traditional and beloved Northern German building material, to Berlin, not out of poverty but out of pride. Supposedly Schinkel had traveled to England and marveled at the early Industrial Revolution factories of that nation. They’d inspired him to revive that building material back in Berlin. And the rich red brick that had become a symbol of St. Louis could easily adapt to the popularity of the Gothic Revival, its pointed arches filled with stained glass supplied by Emil Frei & Associates. The sadly departed Bethlehem Lutheran and St. Liborius are the philosophical children of Schinkel in St. Louis, among dozens of others.

Photo by Chris Naffziger Bethlehem Lutheran Church in Hyde Park

While Schinkel was at the height of his career, another Romantic, John Ruskin was born in England in 1819. Ruskin is famous for his art criticism, especially his advocacy of the painting of the Renaissance, but his influence on the architectural world was of singular importance. In his 1849 Seven Lamps of Architecture, he argues that the Gothic style represents the purest and most beautiful style of architecture, and buildings that represent the seven “lamps” of Sacrifice, Truth, Power, Beauty, Life, Memory, and Obedience are the most perfect. Beyond a doubt, his deep religious belief influenced his bias toward Gothic architecture, which both its proponents and opponents agree is far from the pagan-influenced architecture of Greco-Roman civilization and the European Renaissance. Ruskin’s follow-up, the three-volume Stones of Venice, further argued that the Italian city’s Gothic architecture served as the perfect inspiration for English Gothic Revival. I find Ruskin’s legacy ambiguous; he seems unable to reconcile his own constantly changing tastes with a final, cogent legacy. (These days, the only place I hear his name is in academia, where he is often the brunt of sly jokes.)

Yet another 19th-century European architect enamored of Gothic architecture is Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, born in 1814, the year before Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo. You’ll appreciate Viollet-le-Duc’s legacy if you’ve traveled to Paris: what you saw was not, in fact, the work of a medieval architect, but rather the work of Viollet-le-Duc. You see, by the 19th century, Notre Dame de Paris and many other famous French churches and chateaux were at least 600 years old, and the French Revolution had brutally abused those hulking masonry buildings right at the time when they needed tender loving care. On top of that, Gothic construction possesses some inherent structural flaws, wanting to kick out and collapse (that’s why they need flying buttresses). So when French society settled down a bit during the reign of Napoleon III, Viollet-le-Duc took the time to restore many of those critical works of architecture.

He also took some artistic liberties. As he maintains in his writings, including his Discourses on Architecture, it is better to renovate a building into its best appearance, not its original appearance. Who wants to look at an imperfect building when one could look at its perfect Platonic form? Notre Dame de Paris gets a new improved flèche spire to replace the one that was torn down; the amazing fortress-city of Carcassonne gets new, Disneyesque conical roofs to top its turrets.

× 1 of 2 Expand Photo by Chris Naffziger A few of the many rose windows at Most Holy Trinity Roman Catholic Church in Hyde Park × 2 of 2 Expand Photo by Chris Naffziger Most Holy Trinity Roman Catholic Church in Hyde Park Prev Next

I can’t help but think of Viollet-le-Duc when I gaze at the beauty of Most Holy Trinity Roman Catholic Church in Hyde Park; it possesses a multitude of rose windows, a French Gothic invention originally used only to anchor the ends of naves and transepts. At Holy Trinity, the rose windows replace the pointed Gothic arched clerestory windows, a clear violation of the “rules” of Gothic architecture. Certainly there is a bit of Viollet-le-Duc’s creative rebellion in the churches of St. Louis.

× Expand Photo by Madhurantakam Notre Dame de Paris, showing the rebuilt flèche spire by Viollet-le-Duc

By the end of the 19th century, the Romantic spirit of creative individualism had inspired architects as varied as Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. But as is so often the case, the pendulum swung back, and in the early 20th century, a love for rules and tradition revived in the Beaux Arts style of Cass Gilbert (architect of the Saint Louis Art Museum).

And then the pendulum swung again…