Gothic Art Quotes & Sayings

Everything in New Orleans is a good idea. Bijou temple-type cottages and lyric cathedrals side by side. Houses and mansions, structures of wild grace. Italianate, Gothic, Romanesque, Greek Revival standing in a long line in the rain. Roman Catholic art. Sweeping front porches, turrets, cast-iron balconies, colonnades- 30-foot columns, gloriously beautiful- double pitched roofs, all the architecture of the whole wide world and it doesn't move. — Bob Dylan

Entering a garden like Bomarzo was like succumbing to a dream. Every detail was intended to produce a specific effect on the mind and body, to excite and soothe the senses like a drug. To awaken the unconscious self. — Linda Lappin

Not without deep pain do we admit to ourselves that the artists of all ages have in their highest flights carried to heavenly transfiguration precisely those conceptions that we now recognize as false: they are the glorifiers of the religious and philosophical errors of humanity, and they could not have done this without their belief in the absolute truth of these errors. Now if the belief in such truth generally diminishes, if the rainbow colors at the outermost ends of human knowing and imagining fade: then the species of art that, like the Divina commedia, Raphael's pictures, Michelangelo's frescoes, the Gothic cathedrals, presupposes not only a cosmic, but also a metaphysical significance for art objects can never blossom again. A touching tale will come of this, that there was once such an art, such belief by artists. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Pure evil has no real place. And that means, doesn't it, that I have no place. Except, perhaps, in the art that repudiates evil - the vampire comics, the horror novels, the old gothic tales - or in the roaring chants of the rock stars who dramatize the battles against evil that each mortal fights within himself. — Anne Rice

It has been sometimes argued that there is no truer criterion of the vitality of any given art-period than the power of the master-spirits of that time in grotesque; and certainly in the instance of Gothic art there is no disputing the proposition. — Thomas Hardy

In Britain, chinoiserie was eclipsed by the medievalism of Sir Walter Scott and the Gothic Revival, while in Europe japonisme would be chinoiserie's successor. Japonisme never compelled the general middle-class British taste as did the indigenous medieval style. Nonetheless, through extensive importations to Britain of Japanese art and artifacts, notably by the shop Liberty's of London, as well as through the artists James McNeill Whistler and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the architect E.W. Godwin, and the writer Oscar Wilde, the Japanese style of decoration was known in Britain well before 1894. — Linda Gertner Zatlin

The feat of superbly imitating a muscle, as Michelangelo did, or a face, as Raphael did, created neither progress nor a hierarchy in art. Because these artists of the sixteenth century imitated human forms, they were not superior to the artists of the high periods of Egyptian, Chaldean, Indochinese, Roman, and Gothic art who interpreted and stylized form but did not imitate it. — Fernand Leger

Your machinery is beautiful. Your society people have apologized to me for the envious ridicule with which your newspapers have referred to me. Your newspapers are comic but never amusing. Your Water Tower is a castellated monstrosity with pepperboxes stuck all over it. I am amazed that any people could so abuse Gothic art and make a structure not like a water tower but like a tower of a medieval castle. It should be torn down. It is a shame to spend so much money on buildings with such an unsatisfactory result. Your city looks positively dreary. — Oscar Wilde

Gormenghast.
Withdrawn and ruinous it broods in umbra: the immemorial masonry: the towers, the tracts. Is all corroding? No. Through an avenue of spires a zephyr floats; a bird whistles; a freshet beats away from a choked river. Deep in a fist of stone a doll's hand wriggles, warm rebellious on the frozen palm. A shadow shifts its length. A spider stirs ...
And darkness winds between the characters.
- Gormenghast — Mervyn Peake

(speaking of Ann Radcliffe) A work of art worthy of the name is one which gives us back the freshness of the emotions of childhood. — Andre Breton

In the 16th century,parks and gardens were models of the cosmos and also tools for altering one's consciousness, possibly for changing one's destiny. — Linda Lappin

Architecture traditionally has been the slowest of art forms. It was not unusual for great cathedrals to take centuries to complete, with stylistic changes from Romanesque to Gothic or Renaissance to Baroque as common as the addition of chapels or spires. But because the function remained the same, the form could be flexible and its growth organic. — Martin Filler