Gothic Architecture & Decor

I am Professor Lynn Porter of Fairfield University, and this is my lecture on Gothic Architecture and Décor. These are the various topics I'm going to cover in this talk, looking first at when we are and where we are in the world, and then we're going to look at the primary examples of public architecture with the Gothic church and all of the characteristics and innovations, including the pointed arch and the flying buttress and tracery and stained glass in the rose window. We're also going to look at ornament and sculpture, as well as domestic architecture with castles and private residences and looking inside at the Great Hall. Then we'll look at some iconic furniture and then the decorative arts that shows up with some book illumination, as well as tapestries and reliquaries. So when are we talking about? We're talking about the late Middle Ages. It's the end of the Middle Ages as transitioning into the beginning of the Renaissance. So where are we talking about here? We're talking about the western half of the Christian world. So on this map here from about the year 1200, you can see that we still have the Byzantine Empire going on down in here in what is now Greece and western Turkey, but then all of this area, basically west of there, is what we're talking about for the Gothic world. In this map from the year 1500, you see that the Byzantine Empire has now been transformed to the Ottoman Empire, and so Europe is starting to look more and more like what we think of as Europe, but again we still have that east-west split. So most of the examples of Gothic architecture come through in the churches, so I want to take a look at what that really looks like. Here's a diagram of a plan view or a ground plan view of a typical Gothic church. Now it looks a little familiar, doesn't it? Because it's clearly based on what we saw going on in the Romanesque period. So we still have that basic rectangular basilica form. I'm going to just put a box around that rectangle. There is our basic basilica form with the apse, the bump on the end, and as we saw going on in the Romanesque world, we have a transept. We have this cross going on that forms this overall Latin cross, and I also want to point out we've got some new terms here. Where the two vaults intersect, that forms what is called the crossing, but here's our names and ideas we've had before. We have the central nave with the aisles on either side, the apse on the end, so those names are all still the same. We have something new going on down here on the western end of the building. We have the narthex, which is basically the lobby before you get into the main church area, okay, and those big black chunky boxes are the towers on the outside of the building, and I also want to point out that we have an addition on the end of the apse end of the building that we've added on what's called the ambulatory. It's this area here that I'm scribbling on so that I can walk around actually behind the apse, and then sometimes we even have chapels radiating off of the ambulatory. Ambulatory literally means a walking place. So, in ground plan view, the Gothic church is very similar to the Romanesque church, isn't it? So, let's look at an actual cathedral. Here on the top, I have a ground plan view of the Rams Cathedral, which looks very much like the diagram I was just showing you, but over here on the right-hand side, that is a end of view, a cross-section view of the building, and I want to point out this little guy down there. That is the size of a human being. So, we have the central nave area, which is really, really, really tall because the floor is all the way down here. We have that side aisle, which now the proportions between the nave and the aisle are different, aren't they, in terms of height? And we also have this whole structure going on over here, which is new. We didn't see this before, so we're going to be taking a closer look at what's going on with that. That's actually what's called the flying buttress. So, let's look to some actual photographs to see what this looks like. Here we are at the west gate of the Rams Cathedral, and just as we saw before, there are three central portals with their archivolts, so that tends to look very much like what we've seen before, with a difference, though. Over the central portal, we have what's called a rose window. It is a true circle that is decorated in some way, so it's a major stained glass window. This is the first time we've seen stained glass. And throughout this entire building, you are going to see hundreds, if not thousands, of pointed arches. I've only drawn three little arrows here, but there are dozens of them in this one photograph. So, that pointed arch is one of the iconic things that says, oh yeah, you're looking at a Gothic building. And there you go, those twin towers on top of the narthex. We saw the diagram, and here we have the towers on the outside of the building. So, this is an iconic portal or facade end of the Rams Cathedral, which is a great example of a Gothic building. So, let's look at the building a little bit more carefully. Now that we're looking at the west end at the portal, you see how the archivolts, which kind of lead you into the actual doorway, they're definitely, they're pointed. They definitely are detailed and carved. In fact, over top of each one of them, you have a different story from the whole Christian world. Looks like over the left here, that looks very much like Jesus on the cross. On the right-hand side, I believe that is a sculpture of Jesus preaching to his apostles. And here in the center, we have a wonderful sculpture that is Jesus, that character, in heaven with his mother, the Virgin Mary, on his right-hand side, surrounded by beautiful angels. So, definitely we're telling biblical stories throughout the entire building. So, let's take a look at the other end of the building. Here we are. This is the opposite end of the same cathedral. Over here are our two towers, our twin towers on the facade, just for some reference here. So, now we're looking at the apse end of the building here, and look, we have flying buttresses. The buttress, which is that extra piece of masonry that helps hold things up, is here. There's one. It's like this tower. And then it's got a flyer that connects the buttress to the main building. Now we're looking straight onto the apse end, and you can see how you have these exterior buttresses all holding up the central building. In fact, when you look at the building from this end, it seems to be all about the flying buttresses, doesn't it? Along here at the bottom, right across here, that is one chapel off the ambulatory. Here is another chapel off the ambulatory. There's another one. So, those are those bumps off of the ambulatory, and this here, the central curved area, that is the apse end of the nave. So, now here we are inside the building, in the nave, looking up at the main vaulted ceiling. It feels like a Romanesque church, but with a difference, doesn't it? Like there's more height. There's more emphasis on a vertical line. It seems to be more delicate, doesn't it? And these are two views in the nave. On the left-hand side, you're looking back toward the main portal, and you can see that beautiful rose window up over that central portal. And on the right-hand image here, we're looking directly into the apse. So, that curved end of the apse with the main altar down below. Wow. Do you see how this architecture has a strong vertical line? Like going from those piers, your eye is pulled directly up into the vault. It's like you're being pulled upward, and it's this aspirational, religious feeling of looking up toward God. But there's also something just really functional about these buildings, because everything you see here is structural. Nothing is decorative because we wanted something pretty here. Every piece is helping hold up something else. So, this is actually considered a very honest and functional design style. And, you know, people will be people. So, it wasn't uncommon for towns to actually get into rivalries. And so, you see some of the earlier Gothic churches are smaller and shorter than some of the later ones because people were actually in competition to build bigger and grander designs. And the really amusing and amazing thing about this is that these people did not understand science in the way that we do today. There were no engineers. There were no people doing the math to figure out if these buildings would stand up. So, there wasn't any scientific principle involved here. They just did things based on a rule of thumb. And if in the process of building a cathedral, it fell down because it didn't have enough support, they would be like, okay, I guess we need to do that a little differently. And they would just simply start over again, building it bigger and better with a stronger design. So, a lot of it was simply trial and error. And also, these buildings took decades, decades to build. A person digging the foundation and putting in the floor for a building like this would not live to see it completed. It might be completed by that person's son or grandson or even great-grandson. So, entire generations of people worked on completing these massive structures. And here we are standing in the side aisle, looking up across the nave, up into the top of the opposite side of the nave. So, we have these basic arches down below that are holding everything up. Then we have our triforium level, that second level. And then our clear story is much taller than it was in the Romanesque period. And now we have it filled with these beautiful stained glass windows. Okay, let's take some time to actually document what we've been seeing. What are all of these characteristics we're talking about? I've said it several times already. Structurally, it's very similar to a Romanesque church. In ground plan view, it's almost identical. But once you get inside, you realize that the design is about a vertical line. Remember the Romanesque was a heavy, weighty, horizontal line. Here we're emphasizing the vertical line. And we're also emphasizing light. We have these huge windows that literally let light into the room through all of that colored glass. So, that then becomes symbolic of divine illumination. We have taken away that semicircular arch, and we have substituted the pointed arch or the Gothic arch throughout. And structurally, this is the thing I find fascinating. Yes, we have walls that enclose the building, but the walls don't actually support the roof. The roof would fall down, but for the flying buttresses. So, that's the whole function of the flying buttresses to actually hold up the roof. So, the walls are weak, and all of the stress is taken outside the building and put onto those flying buttresses. And why are the walls so weak? It's because we have so many windows. They're huge windows, which doesn't leave a whole lot of wall space. And because we don't have room for any kind of decoration on the walls, because there isn't really a wall, now we have decorated glass. We have stained glass windows. And because these windows are so huge, you need some kind of intermediate supports within them to hold them up and to hold up all of that glass. And all of those divisions within the window we call mullions, and then the decorative patterns that are pulled into the windows, that's what we call tracery. So, we have these enormous windows filled with stained glass, but the intermediaries within the windows we call tracery, and those are decorative also. And as I pointed out before, above the main door is a round rose window. I think the rose windows are the only truly round things that you find in the Gothic period. Everything else has that pointed arch to it. So, let's take a look at this innovation, the pointed or Gothic arch. With the innovation of the pointed arch, which is still swung with a compass, by the way, we now can have different widths between the supports that are holding up the arch, but we can now maintain a single height. As you can see with these diagrams that I've put here, the dotted lines are like where you would put your compass point to swing those arches. So, these are still able to be generated with the simple technology of a compass, but now you can see how these are three different widths of arches, but they're all the same height, and that's because you can move that center point for your arches and create a very pleasing pointed arch, while also having different widths between the legs. Think about it. If you're dealing with a semicircular Roman arch, if you want to have a wider distance between the two supports holding up the arch, you're going to need a taller arch because it's a true half circle. With the Gothic arch, now you're freed from that. So, here you go, some beautiful close-ups of some Gothic windows. The one on the left, we're looking from the outside of the building, and, of course, on the right, we're looking at the inside of the building. You see how that compass swing that forms that arch, they're concentric, so it's a very easy arch to draw with a compass or even just with a string and a pencil, and they're so elegant, aren't they? And I also want to point out that in both of these images, you see how the main arch has been subdivided into smaller arches. Here on the left-hand side, you have this principal arch, but then these three little ones inside it, right? So, again, the geometry is relatively simple. In the right-hand photograph, you can see how you have one large arch with two smaller arches, and inside each one, they have been subdivided even further down. So, the geometry, while beautiful and elegant, is still relatively simple. And just as we saw with the semicircular Roman vault, you can have two Gothic vaults meet at 90 degrees to form that groin vault, forming that indentation in between the two intersecting vaults, creating this X on the ceiling that is the ribbed edge of that groin vault. So, everything you see in this building is actually structural, not decorative. Later in the Gothic period, there was an adjustment in some buildings where the pointed arch wasn't quite pointy enough, so the ogive arch, which forms this beautiful S-shaped curve, was introduced, and that causes these beautiful flame-like arches, right? That is called flamboyant style. Flamboyant literally means flame-like. So, that is an arch that can still be swung with the compass. If you put a compass point here and a compass point here, you could still swing that curve, but this is a later, fancier adjustment in the Gothic period. And while we're talking about innovations from the Gothic period, let's really look at that flying buttress idea. Okay, here we have a cross-section of a Gothic cathedral, and you can see that very, very high central nave with aisles on either side, and then, of course, we have that vault over top of the nave. But with all of that glass in the clerestory level, there isn't enough wall to actually hold up that vault, so you need to have some buttresses. But you don't want to get in the way of the light. You don't want to have a buttress right up next to the stained-glass window in the clerestory. So, you have the buttress set away from the actual thing that it's going to be supporting, and then you have this flyer that actually directs the weight down and out onto the buttress. So, the ceiling is held up by the buttress out here, and the flyer helps transfer that weight. Here is another diagram of the same idea. You have that main arcade at the bottom level. You have your triforium level gallery, and then the clerestory, the very, very high clerestory, and then the vault over top with the flyers coming off of the vault and connecting down to this buttress, which is on the outside of the aisle. And so, the flyer connects to the buttress, and then, believe it or not, this pinnacle finial actually helps balance out the whole thing. So, there's nothing that is purely decorative. I always thought these finials, which is a fancy word for a knob on the top of things, the finial I always thought was a decorative doodah. No, it helps balance out the buttress. Everything is structural here. So, again, looking at the apse end of the building, you have multiple buttresses that radiate out from the apse end, and then multiple flyers. You even have a series of flying buttresses down the side of the building. It's harder to see because they're so close together, but each one of these blue lines is another buttress that has its own flyer helping hold up that vault over top of the nave. Here's several different views of, again, the same building, the Rams Cathedral, but now we're looking at the side of the building, not the apse end. So, again, you have this tower-like buttress and the flyer attaching up to the nave roof. Here in the right-hand photographs, we're actually standing between the buttresses and the building, so the flying elements, the flyers, are literally going over our heads. How cool. Okay, I want to unpack the idea of tracery now. So, the Gothic look is all about these massive windows, and the windows are made up of tiny pieces of glass, but you still need some intermediary supports in there to hold up the edges of the glass pieces. So, all of this beautiful decorative stonework is called tracery, and obviously you can get in there with your compass and you can swing all of those arcs to form all of those shapes. So, we are taking the very functional need of creating ways to hold up all that glass, but now we're also making it a decorative element, too. So, these are some diagrams of different elements of tracery, and here we see the real thing, right? On the left-hand side, we have on the Valencia Cathedral. I can tell that this cathedral is older than the cathedral at the top, the Limoges Cathedral. How can I tell the Limoges Cathedral is younger or later in the period? Oh, it's that flamboyant style. You see that ogive arch there, that flame-like shape? There you go, that's a little bit later, but all of these are stone pieces, beautifully carved pieces of stonework that fill in that massive window and allow for something to help hold up all of that glass. So, let's take a look at the glass. We have these massive openings that are going to fill the building with light, and they also give us an opportunity for some decoration. So, here you see a rose window with some kind of geometric pattern that's emphasized in the tracery as well as in the actual glasswork itself. This is the rose window in the Rance Cathedral we've been looking at. Now, in the clear story over the nave, same cathedral, now you can see that there's different biblical themes and ideas and stories being told in the glass. So, there's beautiful little stories. The closer you look at these, the more you see, oh, there's an angel or there is an apostle doing something important. So, again, we're still dealing with people who are not literate, and the church itself is helping tell all of the stories that are important to the study of Christianity. In terms of how the glass itself is crafted, in the early Gothic period, this is a great example of where it seems like the pieces of glass are simply fit in, kind of like you do with a mosaic. So, there is a crudeness to the style. The story you see being told here is the story of the Annunciation, which is represented throughout the art world. This is the story where the angel comes down to earth and tells Mary that she will be having a child by God. Here on the right side, I've shown an image of the same Bible story, but now we're talking about 250 years later, and so we're much later in the Gothic period, and I think it's really easy to see that there is an increased natural style, and so much of the light and shadow is actually achieved by painting on the glass, as opposed to using just chunks of colored glass, like in the early Gothic example. I want to take a closer look at the idea of the rose window also. Here is our old friend, the Rams Cathedral exterior and interior, looking at that main rose window over the central portal. But as the building was being constructed, you can see these are all on that same building, but you can see how there's a different style included in each window, a different style of tracery, though it's all still geometric, and a different style of the use of the glass itself. In terms of ornament and sculpture in the Gothic period, we see some recurring motif. In addition to the pointed arch, we see a lot of geometrical shapes and shapes within shapes within shapes, and a very common motif that you've seen quite a lot of here today, actually, is based on a look that's kind of like a clover. So, there's different numbers of leaves you can find. The quatrefoil has four lobes, or four leaves. Sankfoil has five. The trefoil has three. So, you see how the designers of these buildings found ways to break up the geometric shapes that they were building within these pointed arches. Another common motif is the crucifix, the Christ on the cross image. And again, we have a bit of a difference between early and late Gothic. Here you see an early version where Christ is shown literally in that cross shape. His head is erect. His arms are totally out straight with a nail through each hand. His feet are side by side with the nail through each. So, there's something very almost geometrical about the actual human figure here. But as we move later in the Gothic period here, there's about a hundred years difference between these two images. It's the same idea. It's still a crucifix, Christ on the cross. But now you see the more naturalistic figure. You see the sagging body. You see the head pointed down. So, you have a more pathetic image, don't you? And you can't talk about Gothic sculpture without talking about a gargoyle. Here on the left-hand side, I've got three different gargoyles. Each one of them is actually the cover to a rain spout. The whole function of a gargoyle, in addition to being a grotesque, they're also designed to help pull water off of the roof and put it away from the building so it doesn't soak into the ground right next to the building. So, when it's raining, these gargoyles are actually spitting water out of their mouths. On the left-hand side, we have, this is a gargoyle from the Cologne Cathedral. This is another gargoyle from the Cologne Cathedral. So, you see there's, you see the sculptor having a little bit of fun carving these individual shapes. Here we have a gargoyle at the bottom, some kind of a bird character from the Noyon Cathedral, all of those in France. On the right-hand side, we're back at our old friend, the Reims Cathedral. All four of these beautiful gargoyles are on that one building. So, I think there's a common misconception that a gargoyle is just a grotesque, but actually, no, it's a grotesque with a function to carry the water away from the building. It's a pretty fancy water spout, isn't it? And I add in this central image, which is just one of my favorites. This is on the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris. This is one of the grotesques that looks off of the building out toward the city, and we usually call them gargoyles, but that really is a misnomer. This is technically a grotesque, but you see how there's a sense of whimsy and fantasy and a sense of humor carved into these. They're not nearly as terrifying as the grotesques we were looking at in the Romanesque period, are they? Okay, enough about churches. Let's talk about domestic architecture. Let's look at some castles. In my Romanesque lecture, I showed you some images of early Windsor Castle, so let's see how it continued to develop. This basic shape seems familiar, doesn't it? We have the shape of that lower ward or bailey, but now we have a stone curtain wall. We don't have that wooden palisade anymore, do we? Now we have that stone keep still on top of the motte, and even a gatehouse. This is a great example of why you need a gatehouse. The gatehouse gives you the ability to look down on the people who are coming in through the gate, so you can protect and defend that very, very vulnerable spot, the actual gate. So the gatehouse juts away from the curtain wall to allow for more defensive action. Here we have an aerial view of Windsor Castle as it exists today, and you see that they have maintained a tremendous amount of the Gothic character of this castle. Here is that central part of the castle, the keep. Now it's called the Round Tower. It's been fully completed in this photograph. It is the beating heart of the castle, the area that is most defensible, and that gate that I was showing you before has subsequently been replaced. This one was replaced in the lifetime of King Henry VIII, which is technically in the Tudor period, which is a little bit later than the Gothic. Here is another gatehouse into that same castle. This one is actually Gothic, and you see how you have those two towers either side from which you could actually shoot down into this very narrow walkway that you force the visitors to come through. What's going on at the other end in the upper ward? Well, even today you have royal processions of the Royal Mounted Guard. How cool! But look, now we're actually inside that upper ward area looking at it, and again you can see how they have made a conscious choice over the centuries to maintain the Gothic character of this structure. But castles are for royalty, so let's see how some of the nobles lived. Let's take a look at Penzer's Place, which is in Kent, which is outside of London. This is a manor house built in the 1300s, and what I really want to show you is on the inside. I want to show you the Great Hall. This is the most important room inside the manor house, or you even had these in castles. But a Great Hall was a large central room that was used for lots of things, for gatherings of people, for banquets, for trials, for parties, so it was that really central place. So this is two views of the same room within Penzer's Place. On the left-hand side, you're looking at the entrance end where you walk in through those those two doors underneath, and overhead you have what's called a minstrel gallery. So that's where you're hired musicians, you know, you hired a band for the night. That's where your musicians would be playing for your event, but they're not down on the same level as your party guests. And then if you look to the right-hand side, you see there is this raised dais. That is just a raised step up. That is elevated area for the owner and the family to gather in, so you have the hierarchy already built into the actual structure. And the room is heated with a central fireplace. Literally, right in the middle of the room, you got a fire going, which actually is a great way to heat a room. It's also a great way to make a really smoky room and a place for people to fall into, right? I mean, it would be dangerous, but having the fire centrally located is going to help heat everything in that room. But take a look at those windows. There's our old friend, the pointed arch over the entrance area with quatrefoils built in. Looks like in the side wall, we have some flamboyant arches with a quatrefoil there up at the center also. So, all of those motifs that we saw in the Gothic churches absolutely carried over into the domestic architecture. Penzhurst Place is in England. Let's see what's going on over in France. This is a French manor house, about the same period, a little bit later, the House of Jacques Coeur. And, you know, everything the French do, it just tends to be a little bit more elegant than what the English do. One of the things that makes this building recognizably French is going to be those really, really steep roofs. We're going to see that carry through. Also, this here I wanted to show you is built around a central courtyard. Here is photographs of the building today, basically giving us a view of what it's like within that central courtyard, that you could come into this space and you're protected within this space, but you're still not within the building. So, it's very much the same idea as a castle, but these manor houses were on a much, much smaller scale. But how do I know this is Gothic? Take a look at the left-hand side here in this central turret situation. I'm circling it in blue. There's our old friend, the Gothic arch, right in there. Oh, yeah. So, that image carries through no matter where you are in the Gothic world. You're going to have that pointed arch. And looking in the great hall of this same house, I wanted to point out this building is a little bit later in time. And you know that fireplace in the middle of the room isn't terribly practical. So, by the time you get later into the 1400s, you're going to see the fire moving off to one side or one end of the room, forming what we now would call a fireplace. But it's a hooded fireplace, and this great hood over top of the fireplace has all of those same motifs that we've been seeing in the architecture. Again, also, if you look over the two doors, you see those Gothic arches, the flamboyant arch there on the right. So, you see all of those motifs just carried through in just about every way that you can geometrically break down this room. So, what's going on with the furniture? I gotta say, we don't have a lot of elegant furniture. The most important piece of furniture anyone had was a chest, because you could put it onto a wagon and take it with you, and your chest could contain all of your most important items. So, in the Gothic period, we're looking at these big, chunky, rectangle shapes with heavy proportions, very straight, basic lines. But the ornament on them is where it's really obviously Gothic, because there's our old friends, all those beautiful Gothic arches, and then the arches within the arches within the arches down in this later piece down here on the right. When it comes to things to sit on, we're still talking big, chunky, rectangular things. The black and white photo here is an armchair. Boy, doesn't that look comfy. But it also doubles as a chest, right? So, it's still something that you could fold down and put on top of a wagon and take it with you. On the top right, we have a piece of an illuminated manuscript showing various holy people who are sitting on a series of stools. Again, boxy, clunky, and wherever there is a way to break up a shape, it's going to be breaked up with that Gothic arch. And down here at the bottom, the long bench situation, that's called a settle. And so, it again, it's a cabinet that is also a thing to sit on. And it has a linen fold detail, which is a common motif in addition to these arches and quatrefoils. Let me show you in more detail what I mean by a linen fold. Boom, there you go. That linen fold motif is literally the kind of a conventionalized, abstracted shape of a piece of folded linen. How cool and beautiful, right? And so, you will find this motif in furniture. You will even find it in walls and panels within walls, panels within cabinets, and these chests. So, that linen fold is a very common Gothic motif too. And yeah, people sleep, so they need a bed. And again, you see how we're talking about big, chunky, rectangular pieces? So, we're talking about these gorgeously carved footboards and these columns holding up that tester, that roof situation over the bed itself. And that gives you something to hang curtains from, because remember, these buildings weren't really heated. Some rooms were with those massive fireplaces, but there was no central heating. So, at night, you would crawl into your very cold bed and close the curtains around you, and your body heat would warm up just the area of the bed itself, so you could be warm and comfortable throughout the night. But looking at the right-hand photograph on this page, can't you see how gorgeously carved they are? Really quite beautiful. Let's look at the other decorative arts. Of course, we have to look at book manuscripts. We are talking about a time before movable type, before a printing press could really make individual pages possible. So, you would have people literally sit there with a pen and ink, copying out the text of a book. But just writing down words gets really boring after a while. So, the people who did this illuminating actually started to draw pictures on those pages, too. And that's where things got really interesting. Let me show you a close-up of this page. Let's start at the top. This little S-shaped thing that looks kind of like a dragon now that you look at it, right? But it's also got a jester head. So, someone's having a good time while they're drawing this whimsical, fantastical, grotesque, strange, and odd little shape. But then if we look down at the big, blocky, blue square, that is actually the letter G. So, it's the initial letter G in this section of this missile, which is a religious text. And within the G, we have a story being told. We have the birth of the infant Virgin Mary. Obviously, there she is as a baby with her halo already being handed to her mother. So, the illuminated texts, in addition to all of this gorgeous lettering, includes all of these beautiful little drawings. Here is another example. This square shape with these five human figures in it is actually an initial E. It's the beginning E to this section of the missile. And it's the story of the Adoration of the Magi, where the three wise men arrive in Bethlehem to meet the baby Jesus. And so, you see Mary holding the baby Jesus and the three wise men with their gifts pointing to the star. So, there's a biblical story baked into this initial letter. And you find this throughout all of these manuscripts. Each one you can see was individually handcrafted. And days and days would be spent by one person sitting there drawing these beautiful shapes, in addition to all of the lettering that went into creating the books. And if you're thinking, wow, these books look really cool. I would like to see an actual illuminated book. That's a good thing, because we have one in our library on campus. We have a reproduction of a very, very famous illuminated book called the Book of Kells. And you go into the library and you ask for a librarian, you can be shown to the case where it is. And it's just gorgeous. And you can see that every single square millimeter was individually crafted and individually lovingly shaped and drawn. They're just astounding works of art. But they're also functional books. Man, illumination is amazing stuff. In the Gothic period, we also have really rich tapestries being woven. This is a stole. So, this would be something that might be laying down the center of the table. And you see how it's got images of the martyrdom of St. Catherine, Catherine and her wheel there in the center panel. So, we're still telling Bible stories. We're still telling stories about the saints. But sometimes it is in tapestry form. Here's another image of a really famous tapestry. This is just a small portion of the full tapestry. But this is a piece of the Bayou tapestry, which I don't think is technically a tapestry. It is a long piece of that has been hand embroidered. So, all of those lines, they're not painted. They're just made up of a series of stitches with colored thread. And you can see how there is a story being told here. We have soldiers on horseback wearing chain mail in some kind of a battle where people have died, look down at the bottom. And they're fighting soldiers on foot with spears and shields. So, like I said, this is just a piece of the entire tapestry. The tapestry is 20 inches high, but it is 230 feet long. And it tells numerous stories leading up to the Norman conquest in England. We find a lot of information and history baked into this one tapestry. Here is another tapestry that tells the story of the creation. And in each wedge, you see on the left, you have just the void with the earth and the water and the air. And then you have the creation of animals. And over by the time you get to the four o'clock time, like if it were a clock, you have Adam naming all of the animals. So, again, we're telling the story of the creation as you move around this curved tapestry. And there's one more form of decorative arts that I want to show you, reliquaries. Now, we're still talking about a time when people wanted to be near the relics of the people who were very close to Jesus. So, here we have an example of a reliquary made out of ivory and bone. This has images of eight of the apostles going around the entire box. Here we have another reliquary that feels a little bit like a cathedral, doesn't it? Like the Gothic church itself, made out of gold and silver, as well as enamel and paint. And we can see various Bible stories being told in the panels here, too. And this last one really gets me. So, this one is made of rock crystal and silver and gold and gems and pearls. This is the reliquary for the tablecloth from the Last Supper, right? And if you did have a piece of that special piece of fabric, wouldn't you want it to be in something crystal clear so you could look in and see the actual fabric? How amazing. So, these reliquaries are really, really finely crafted high art, all with the purpose of commemorating a piece of Jesus' life. Of course, there were a lot of charlatans out there who picked up a piece of wood on the side of the road and sold it to someone for a lot of money and said, look, here's a piece of the original cross. Or they took a chicken bone and they said, hey, look, this is a toe from a saint. So, there were a lot of relics that were total balderdash. But still, the boxes, the special reliquaries that they were conveyed in certainly exhibited something amazing about the period. So, there you go. That's what we have talked about here today. Thank you for your time.