Tracery Patterns and The Phases of Gothic
Most 19th century histories of Gothic architectural style used a series of rather arbitrary categories based on the supposed evolution of the dominant patterns of window tracery. Such teleological models are now regarded as oversimplistic and are generally shunned by art historians, though they live on in the popular literature. In terms of the overall development of Gothic architecture, the crucial development was not so much the use of any particular tracery patterns but the transition from plate- to bar-tracery, which was what made the Rayonnant and subsequent styles possible.
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