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Summary
Summary
Christopher Tadgell covers the major architectural traditions of the Middle Ages, from the Romanesque architecture of the ninth and tenth centuries, built on the legacy of ancient Rome and including elements from Carolingian, Ottonian, Byzantine and northern European traditions, through to the evolution of the Gothic which heralded new, structurally daring architecture. The book ends with the Italian rediscovery of classical ideas and ideals and the emergence of the great Renaissance theorists and architects, including Brunelleschi, Alberti, and Bramante. As well as the palazzos, villas and churches of Renaissance Italy, this period saw the building of great chateaux in France, palaces in Germany and the golden-domed cathedrals of Russia.
With more than two thousand images, including many plans, The West is a beautiful, single-volume guide to the history of architecture in this period, covering the whole of Europe from Ireland to Russia and placing architectural developments within their political, technological, artistic and intellectual contexts.
Author Notes
Christopher Tadgell taught architectural history for almost thirty years before devoting himself full-time to writing and research, travelling the world to see and photograph buildings from every tradition and period.
Born in Sydney, he studied art history at the Courtauld Institute in London. In 1974 he was awarded his PhD for a thesis on the Neo-classical architectural theorist, Ange-Jacques Gabriel. He subsequently taught in London and at the Kent Institute of Art and Design in Canterbury, with interludes as F.L. Morgan Professor of Architectural Design at the University of Louisville and as a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He has lectured at universities and other learned institutions around the world, including the universities of Princeton, Harvard, Columbia, Brown, Cornell and Virginia, IIT and the Graham Foundation in Chicago, and Cambridge University and the RIBA in the UK. He is a Trustee of the World Monuments Fund, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and the Royal Asiatic Society, and a Member of both the British and American Societies of Architectural Historians.
Tadgell's The History of Architecture in India (1990, several reprints, Phaidon) is the definitive one-volume account of the architecture of the subcontinent, while many publications on French architecture include the standard account in Baroque and Rococo Architecture and Decoration (ed. Blunt, 1978, Elek) and the definitive English-language monograph on A.J. Gabriel. He has contributed many articles on Indian and French architecture to The Grove Dictionary of Art and other major reference books.
Reviews 1
Library Journal Review
Tadgell continues his "Architecture in Context" series with a fine fourth addition concerning architecture in the Western tradition during the time between the start of Christendom and the Reformation and its spread from Spain to Russia, from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean. Like the previous volumes, this one is the result of the author's traveling the world and photographing the structural spaces he learned to know intimately from 30 years of teaching. Tadgell's images emphasize the space and grandeur of the buildings perfectly. Just the right angles illustrate what the building space is meant to be about. Many of the photos of churches, for example, truly create the feeling of entering the kingdom of God, by catching the sanctuary in just the right light or shooting up into the domes to highlight the space toward heaven. Tadgell's intimate knowledge of the topic is also reflected in his gift for parsing one sentence together, which captures subtlety and historic scope others would need paragraphs or chapters to put across. Verdict A labor of love so arresting both architecture aficionados and scholarly art historians will seek out the other entries in the series (Islam: From Medina to Magreb and from the Indies to Istanbul, The East: Buddhists, Hindus, and the Sons of Heaven, and Antiquity: Origins, Classicism, and the New Rome).-Nadine Dalton Speidel, Cuyahoga Cty. P.L., Parma, OH (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Part 1 Renovation of Gravitas |
| 1 Prologue |
| 2 Empire Regained and Relapsed |
| 3 The Centre: Holy Roman Empire |
| 4 The East: Towards the Third Rome |
| 5 The West: Post-Carolingian Diversity |
| Part 2 Refraction of Light |
| 6 Introductions to the Gothic Age |
| 7 Light into Stone: The Gothic Cathedral |
| 8 Secular Building in the Gothic Age |
| Part 3 Revival of Classicism |
| 9 Introduction |
| 10 Cataclysm and Classicism at Large |
| 11 Epilogue: From Medieval Towards Neo-Classical Abroad |
| Conclusion |
| Glossary |
| Further Reading |
