Search Results

(b Hampton Falls, NH, Dec 16, 1863; d Boston, Sept 22, 1942).

American architect and writer. Cram was the leading Gothic Revival architect in North America in the first half of the 20th century, at the head of an informal school known as the Boston Gothicists, who transformed American church design.

In 1881 Cram was apprenticed to the firm of Rotch & Tilden in Boston. His letters on artistic subjects to the Boston Transcript led to his appointment as the journal’s art critic by the mid-1880s. In 1886 he began his first European tour. In 1888 he founded the firm of Cram & Wentworth with Charles Wentworth (1861–97). With the arrival of Bertram Goodhue, the firm became Cram, Wentworth & Goodhue in 1892, and in 1899 Cram, Goodhue & Ferguson, with Frank Ferguson (1861–1926) having joined the office as business and engineering partner following the death of Wentworth.

Cram was strongly influenced both by the philosophies of John Ruskin...

English painters, copyists, writers, and epigraphers. Norman de Garis Davies (b Glasgow, Sept 14, 1865; d Oxford, Nov 5, 1941) and his wife, Nina [née Cummins] Davies (b Thessaloníki, Jan 6, 1881; d Hinskey Hill, Berks, Apr 21, 1965), recorded the tomb paintings of dynastic Egypt. Their scrupulous work was of unparalleled importance, both in preserving a vanishing archaeological record and in shaping 20th-century perceptions of ancient Egyptian funerary art.

Norman had no formal artistic training and became interested in Egyptian archaeology while working as a Nonconformist minister in Australia. In 1898 he joined Flinders Petrie’s excavations at Deshasheh as a copyist and epigrapher, later working at Deir el-Gebrawi, Sheikh Said, Saqqara, and Amarna for the Egypt Exploration Society. Nina studied at the Slade (1900–1902) and later at the Royal College of Art under Walter Crane. They met and married in Alexandria in 1907...

(b ?Andernach; fl 1590s; d before 1598).

German carpenter and copyist. He made a craftsman’s copybook (Cologne, Hist. Archv, Hs. Wf^o. 276*) that reproduced important verbal and graphic evidence on particular design techniques of Late Gothic master masons in Germany. He included a few biographical details, such as variant spellings of his name and the fact that he was known in his home town of Andernach as Jacob Keul. On one page of architectural drawings he wrote, ‘Drawn in Vienna in the year 1593’, and on another, ‘Drawn in Breslau in Silesia in 1593’. By 1596 he had returned to Andernach and inscribed one of his drawings accordingly. The Andernach archives have revealed that he was the son of Jacob Keul, who may also have been a carpenter. In 1596 the younger Jacob Keul was paid from the accounts of the Watch and Artillery Master for working with several other carpenters at the ‘stone lodge on the Rhine’ (Koblenz, Landeshauptarchv, MS. 612. III. H. 4, fasc. 5, p. 215). In ...

(b Naples, May 14, 1718; d Naples, March 8, 1785).

Italian architect and theorist. He began his training in 1732 with the architect Martino Buoncore, whose style he later dismissed as ‘Gothic’. However, Buoncore had a good architectural library, in which Gioffredo studied the writings of Palladio, Vitruvius and Vincenzo Scamozzi. During the same period he studied with the painter Francesco Solimena, believing an understanding of the human body to be an essential part of architecture.

Gioffredo qualified as an architect in 1741, after being examined by Giovanni Antonio Medrano (b 1703), one of the kingdom’s engineers. Unfortunately his technical education was somewhat neglected, and he earned for himself the sobriquet ‘l’imprudente architetto napoletano’ after Luigi Vanvitelli was called in to work on his Villa Campolieto (1762), Resina, and the Palazzo Casacalenda (c. 1766), Naples, both of which were in danger of collapse.

Gioffredo’s architectural knowledge was largely acquired from books and from the direct study of ancient buildings. In the preface to his ...

(b Mulhouse, Sept 28, 1727; d Kassel, bur May 1798).

Swiss architect, painter, draughtsman and writer. He served as an engineer in the French army (1748–54) and drew Gothic monuments in Spain (1748) and copied ancient vases and painted idyllic landscapes in Rome (1749–54). He then stayed from 1755 to 1759 with Horace Walpole at Strawberry Hill, where he worked as a topographical artist, portrait painter and architectural draughtsman. Having left Walpole after a domestic dispute, Müntz attempted to support himself through commissions, producing drawings of a Gothic cathedral and possibly the Alhambra for Kew Gardens, a dining room and cloister (New Haven, CT, Yale U., Lewis Walpole Lib.) for Richard Bateman, and an oval room for Lord Charlemont, to complement his vase collection. All were in the Gothic style, as were a number of architectural drawings later used in a guide by Robert Manwaring (1760). Müntz left England in 1762 and spent a year recording monuments in Greece and Jerusalem before settling in Holland, where he worked until ...

(b Boppard, March 22, 1808; d Cologne, July 16, 1895).

German architect, writer, and politician. He was Germany’s foremost Gothic Revival theorist and publicist and a crucial figure in the completion of Cologne Cathedral. A jurist, parliamentarian, and founding member of the Catholic-oriented Zentrumspartei, he defended the interests of his native Rhineland in a political career that stretched from the 1848 National Assembly to the Reichstag. Nonetheless, art and architecture remained his first loves and played an integral role in his political programme. He helped to shift the Gothic Revival away from the pan-German nationalism and liberalism of the early 19th century and to create a movement saturated with regionalist and separatist values.

Reichensperger was educated as a lawyer in Berlin, Heidelberg, and Paris; he served the Prussian administration, becoming an appellate judge in 1841. He supported the religious and political revival that swept the Rhineland in the late 1830s and helped to establish a Catholic press and to organize a series of Catholic lay brotherhoods. His political vision was inspired by the writings of Johann Joseph von Görres, who expressed a critical view of the modern state and enthusiasm for the decentralized power structure of medieval society. Reichensperger was active, from its founding, in the Dombauverein, the association dedicated to the completion of ...

(b Padua, April 27, 1803; d Padua, Feb 26, 1880).

Italian critic, art historian, architect, and teacher. He was one of the most important writers in mid-19th-century Italy on Gothic art and architecture—an interest stimulated by his support for the Catholic Revival and manifested in his Gothic Revival architectural designs.

He belonged to a noble family awarded the title of marchese by the House of Este princes in Modena, with permission to add Estense to the name Selvatico. He enrolled in the Faculty of Jurisprudence in the University of Padua, mainly to satisfy his family, but he never took his degree. Instead he began to study the history of art and culture with the Abbot Ludovico Menin, a local scholar, and took painting lessons with Giovanni Demin (1786–1859), whose work was known for its late Neo-classicism and incipient Romanticism. More important, however, was his meeting with Giuseppe Jappelli, the architect who adorned Padua with such masterpieces as the Caffè Pedrocchi and whose stylistic eclecticism was very significant at that time. Selvatico painted a few pictures, none of which survived; he also produced some architectural work, which, although not particularly remarkable, can be clearly documented. He began to participate in the cultural life of his city and entered the Accademia di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti in Padua while still a young man. He also visited the most famous cities and monuments in Italy and went to Paris, London, and Germany; evidence of these travels can be seen in his later practical and theoretical work. He was influenced not only by artistic movements but also by more general social and cultural developments, which, because of the Industrial Revolution, were further advanced in France and England than in Italy....

[Ger.: ‘special Gothic’]. Term first used by some German art historians to describe Late Gothic German art, mostly architecture. In 1913 the German art historian Kurt Gerstenberg published Deutsche Sondergotik, in which he considered the Late Gothic style in architecture as the German version of Gothic. In his concept this German ‘special’ Gothic was chiefly characterized by the widespread use of the Hall church (Ger. Hallenkirche) in which the nave and the aisles are of equal height: therefore the chronological extent of Sondergotik was the same as that in which the hall-church type was used, that is c. 1350–1550.

Gerstenberg believed that if High Gothic were a French creation, Sondergotik was a German development, and that it paraded qualities that characterize German conceptions of architecture. He found ‘irrational’ features in the formal character of Sondergotik that he thought corresponded to the ‘irrationality’ of the German spirit in general. The substitution in many cases of the hall church for the basilica meant that in German architecture the clear articulation of space had been abandoned. In contrast to the earlier clearly defined spatial units, the interior was unified into a whole. In the German Late Gothic buildings described by Gerstenberg as representing ...