Because the concept of Gothic has been associated with barbarians and barbarity since the word was first devised, it may seem an incompatibility for the adjective to have been attached to any writing system whatsoever. Yet among many other things, the term “Gothic script” has come to denote a modern print alphabet. The same one also goes by the name of black letter or Morris Gothic, after the craftsman and designer William Morris (see Fig. 1.2). Its nearest relative today appears in the Engravers Old English typeface employed in the banners of newspapers such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and The Los Angeles Times.
(Such fonts have been undisplaced, despite their proximity to the Nazi-tainted black letter that was for many decades part and parcel of German national identity.) At the same time, the epithet designates the wholly different standard set of letters that was devised in late antiquity for the language of the actual ethnic group called the Goths.
The bewildering elasticity in the usage of Gothic script holds true on a far grander scale for the whole spectrum of applications to which the descriptor is routinely put nowadays. Since the outset, when the epithet was applied to describe many aspects of what we alternately call medieval, Gothic has been a misnomer. The style, especially architectural, that prevailed from the late twelfth century has nothing whatsoever to do with the Germanic band of late antiquity.
The label is even more inapt as applied to subsequent culture, where it has come to comprehend various shades of meaning. Such well-entrenched misapplication starts with architecture and novels from the eighteenth century and leads to clothing
Fig. 1.2 “Morrisgotisch” font. Based on Troy typeface by William Morris, 1891–92.
Berlin: H. Berthold, 1903.
and other dimensions of personal presentation in modern-day Goth culture. A word that means too many things may end up being all too hard to wield to any good effect, yet Gothic has not yet reached such a dire pass. For all the complications and confusions, we would go too far to decommission the term altogether. Apropos of the Middle Ages, Gothic pertains most convincingly to architecture and art during a stretch from the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries. During this period, among many other things, great cathedrals and churches were built in this style, belief in miracles was intense, and the cult of the Virgin Mary pulsed strong, along with relics and representations of her. Our Lady’s Tumbler belongs very much to this Gothic age. Even when customized drastically to suit the demands of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the story was allowed or even desired to retain and encapsulate important and positive features of the distant medieval time in which it was recognized to have originated. The tale was Gothic, and it was further Gothicized as understandings changed of what this characteristic entailed.
The medieval was exotic. Exoticism and alterity may have both seductive and repulsive capacities, since they are edgy or even over the edge. If orientalism supplied for consideration geographically extraneous cultures that could be differentiated from present-day Europe, medievalism furnished chronologically alien ones.
Medieval revivalism fell into the realm of what could be called “time exoticism” or
“temporal orientalism.” Both orientalism and the Middle Ages were felt to be authentic, traditional, and folkish, at a juncture when those qualities were being relinquished in the West with the onward march of modernity. The two categories, oriental and medieval, remain yoked together even today, but now likened to each other almost exclusively to negative effect. But that is now. Let us return to then—and to the very
beginning of then. The parallel functions that orientalism and medievalism served caused the two phenomena to be linked already in books brought out in London in the 1750s. Orientalism manifested itself particularly in chinoiserie, the imitation of Chinese or Chinese-like motifs and techniques. Ornamental Architecture in the Gothic, Chinese and Modern Taste from 1758 contains many plates meant to needle viewers into recognizing similarities between supposedly medieval and supposedly Chinese ornaments of architecture. The nexus between the two styles became familiar reasonably soon across the Atlantic from England in the New World. Already in 1767, the Virginia Gazette ran an advertisement in which a Williamsburg cabinetmaker offered to prospective customers to produce “all sorts of Chinese and Gothic paling for gardens and summer houses.” For a long time, any turn to Asian cultures was related to a turn to nature. As the paragon of what is alien to Western culture, Asia was taken to be all-natural. The same held true for the Middle Ages, in their opposition to classical antiquity, the Renaissance, and neoclassicism.
Such fusion between Gothic and what was still then designated the Orient persisted, and analogies continued to be drawn long afterward. With the opening of Japan in 1853, that culture too became an ingredient in the cocktail. For instance, a design from circa 1869 for the interior of an Irish castle hybridizes Gothic and Japanese in what may seem an eerie anticipation of later styles such as the so-called Aesthetic and art nouveau. Similarly, in the early 1880s a cataloger of William H.
Vanderbilt’s house and collection interpreted the placement of a Gothic casket in a so-called Japanese room as unremarkable. In 1908, a reviewer in the New York Times held up John Pierpont Morgan’s twelfth-century wooden “seat of wisdom” Virgin and Child from the Auvergne (see Fig. 1.3) as “a wonderful piece, almost Chinese in its rigid architectural forms and the regular curves of the drapery.” Presumably the writer had in mind a statue from China, such as a Buddha (see Fig. 1.4). A French postcard, labeled without evasiveness “Middle Ages,” bears an illustration by the French graphic artist, Ernest-Louis Lessieux (see Fig. 1.5). Primarily a watercolorist, he produced from 1900 to 1902 many different postcards in themed sets. Stylistically, most of his cards from this phase bear the hallmarks of art nouveau, with occasional orientalist features. In this instance, the posture, grooming, and attire of the young beauty are reminiscent of women depicted in Japanese hanging silk scrolls (see Fig.
1.6). In Victorian England, thanks to the medievalisms and even the medievomania of the architect Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin and the art critic John Ruskin, earlier associations of Gothic with primitivism and the exotic did not disappear altogether.
Yet in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the orientalism of the style was transmuted at least sometimes into more religious and even sacramental iterations.
Pugin not only witnessed but even participated in the intimacy between literature and architecture, which from the beginning has colored many Gothic movements. Already in 1831 he designed stage scenery for an opera production that drew upon Sir Walter Scott’s novel Kenilworth.
Fig. 1.3 Unknown artist, Virgin and Child in Majesty, ca. 1175–1200. Wood sculpture made in Auvergne, France, 79.5 × 31.7 × 29.2 cm.
New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1911.
Fig. 1.4 Unknown artist, Standing Buddha in Abhayavara Mudra, Udayana Type, 1368–1644.
Bronze sculpture, 78 × 29.2 × 26 cm. Cambridge, MA, Harvard Art Museums, Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Bequest of Grenville L. Winthrop.
Imaging Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved.
Fig. 1.5 Postcard depicting a fanciful vision of medieval life (Ernest Louis Lessieux, 1900).
Fig. 1.6 James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Caprice in Purple and Gold: The Golden Screen, 1864. Oil on panel, 50.1 × 68.5 cm. Washington, D.C., Freer Gallery of Art. Gift of Charles Lang Freer.
Image from Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:James_McNeill_
Whistler_-_Caprice_in_Purple_and_Gold-_The_Golden_Screen_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg