Italian Gothic Architecture - Beginnings of Gothic Architecture in Italy

Beginnings of Gothic Architecture in Italy

Gothic architecture was imported in Italy, just as it was in many other European countries. The Benedictine Cistercian order was, through their new edifices, the main carrier of this new architectural style. It spread from Burgundy (in what is now eastern France), their original area, over the rest of Western Europe.

This kind of architecture had in fact already included most of the novelties which characterized the Gothic cathedrals of Île-de-France, but with a more subdued, and somewhat "ascetic", formal approach. Figurative decorations are banned. The stained glass windows are reduced in size and colorless. The verticalism is reduced. In the exterior bell towers and belfries are absent.

Always present, however, are oval rectangular groin vaults and clustered piers, composed by an ensemble of smaller columns, which continue with engaged pillars to the vaulting-ribs. The capitals have very simple decorations, usually not figurative. The stone-dressing is very accurate as well. The result is a quasi-modern cleanness, lacking embellishments.

The Cistercian architecture could be easily adapted, with slight modifications, to the necessities of Mendicant Orders such as the Dominicans and the Franciscans, which in Italy were living a huge expansion in Italy. Both strove for a certain cleanness, when not poverty, in their edifices. They needed large naves and aisles to allow the faithful to follow preachings and rites without visual obstacles, like it happened instead in the cathedrals, whose interiors contained numerous pilasters and had the choir separated by walls from the nave.