Gothic Church Architecture in Romania
Gothic Church Architecture in Romania

Summary/Abstract: This brief survey of medieval Gothic church architecture in Romania follows very belatedly in the wake of Banister Fletcher’s classic A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method published jointly by B.T. Batsford, London, and C. Scribner’s Sons, New York, in 1896. It is a lightweight comparative analysis of the morphology of Transylvanian and Moldavian church architecture set against a balanced background of political and ecclesiastical histories of these two former historical provinces of modern Romania. It also scratches the surface of the principal similarities with, and differences from, church buildings in the West, a subject almost completely neglected in the Propyläen Kunstgeschichte and other Art Encyclopaedias, or in the classical works of Alois Riegl, Heinrich Wõfflin, Banister Fletcher, Paul Frankl, Henry Focillon, Erwin Panowsky, Nikolaus Pevsner, Jurgis Baltrušaitis, Rudolf Wittkower, Ernst Gombrich or Giulio Carlo Argan and other famed art and architectural historians whose names are legion. As to the substantial scholarly Romanian contributions to the subject published in the vernacular, they unfortunately have little, if any, international circulation, due to the language barrier.

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