Volume 50, Number 20 · December 18, 2003
The Last English Style
By James Fenton
Gothic: Art for England 1400–1547
Catalog of the exhibition edited by Richard Marks and Paul Williamson
an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, October 9, 2003–January 18, 2004. V&A Publications/Abrams, 496 pp., $75.00
In my childhood one of the first great questions of style that I encountered was the classification of medieval architecture. This was not a matter of marginal curiosity to a child growing up, as I did, in cathedral closes. The learning of church styles was the great key to visual experience. Paintings of any merit I hardly knew till I was in my teens, but architecture of the very highest merit (in Lincoln, Durham, and Lichfield) was there to be seen from the bedroom window. I lived and studied and sang, in choir and congregation, among this architecture.
Review, 3487 words
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