Gothic Art describe late medieval art and architecture

Gothic was used as a term of ridicule by Giorgio Vasari to describe late medieval art and architecture; it was "monstrous and barbarous," invented by the Goths. The early Renaissance artist Lorenzo Ghiberti characterized the Middle Ages as a period of decline. Humanists of the Italian Renaissance, who placed Greco-Roman art on a pedestal, considered the uncouth Goths responsible not only for the downfall of Rome but also for the destruction of the classical style in art and architecture.

                                                           

Contemporary commentators in the 13th and 14th centuries considered Gothic buildings opus modernum (modern work). The great cathedrals displayed an exciting and new building and decoration style. Although Gothic Art became an internationally acclaimed style, it was, nonetheless, a regional phenomenon.
The whole design of the cathedral reflects the builders' confident use of the complete High Gothic structural vocabulary: the rectangular-bay system, the four-part rib vault, and a buttressing system that permitted almost complete dissolution of heavy masses and thick weight-bearing walls. At Amiens, the concept of a self-sustaining skeletal architecture reached full maturity.
Amiens Cathedral is one of the most impressive examples of the French Gothic obsession with constructing ever taller cathedrals with a height reaching 144 feet above the floor. The tense, strong lines of the Amiens vault ribs converge to the colonnettes and speed down the shell-like walls to the compound piers. Almost every part of the superstructure has its corresponding element below. The overall effect is of effortless strength, of a buoyant lightness one normally does not associate with stone architecture. Viewed directly from below, the choir vaults seem like a canopy, tentlike and suspended from bundled masts. The light flooding in from the clerestory makes the vaults seem even more insubstantial. The designers reduced the building's physical mass by structural ingenuity and daring, and light dematerializes further what remains.
Statues of Old Testament kings and queens decorate the jambs flanking each doorway of the Royal Portal. They are the royal ancestors of Christ and, both figuratively and literally, support the New Testament figures above the doorways. They wear 12th century clothes, and medieval observers regarded them as images of the kings and queens of France, symbols of secular as well as biblical authority.

                                                        

The figures stand rigidly upright with their elbows held close against their hips. The linear folds of their garments--inherited from the Romanesque style, along with the elongated proportions--generally echo the vertical lines of the columns behind them. Despite this architectural straitjacket, the statues display the first signs of a new naturalism. The sculptors conceived and treated the statues as three-dimensional volumes, so the figures "move" into the space of observers. The naturalism is noticeable particularly in the statues' heads, where kindly human faces replace the masklike features of most Romanesque figures.