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Exploring Gothic Architecture: A Quiz on Key Features and Examples

Test your knowledge of Gothic architecture with this quiz that covers key characteristics, notable structures, and historical context.

#Gothic architecture #architecture quiz #historical architecture #cathedrals #Gothic style

1 Externally, ________ and spires are characteristic of Gothic churches both great and small, the number and positioning being one of the greatest variables in Gothic architecture.

2 A notable example is the doorway to the Chapter Room at ________.

3 Examples from the High Victorian Gothic period include Sir George Gilbert Scott's design for the ________ in London, and William Butterfield's chapel at Keble College, Oxford.

4 One of the best known and most typical of such façades is that of ________.

5 In some churches with double aisles, like ________, the transept does not project beyond the aisles.

6 For the most part, there was not a clean break, as there was later to be in Renaissance Florence with the sudden revival of the Classical style by ________ in the early 15th century.

7 It can be seen notably at the East End of ________ where the East Window is said to be as large as a tennis court.

8 One of the most distinctive characteristics of Gothic architecture is the expansive area of the windows as at Sainte Chapelle and the very large size of many individual windows, as at York Minster, ________ and Milan Cathedral.

9 A part of their influence was that they tended to build within towns, unlike the ________ whose ruined abbeys are seen in the remote countryside.

10 ________ has a group of lancet windows each fifty feet high and still containing ancient glass.

💡 Interesting Facts

  • the Monastery of Alcobaça, founded in 1153, includes the first Gothic buildings built in Portugal.
  • the Church of St. Elisabeth in Marburg was one of the earliest purely Gothic structures in Central Europe and served as the model for the Cologne Cathedral.
  • the Three Parishes pilgrimage churches in the Slovenian village Rosalnice contain a 15th-century Gothic sanctuary with wall paintings depicting the crucifixion and Saint Christopher.
  • the cathedral of the Lopushna Monastery (pictured) in northwestern Bulgaria, built in the 1850s, employs vernacular Gothic decorative features.
  • the construction of Basilica Cathedral St. Peter and St. Patern, Vannes (pictured) took seven centuries and featured styles from Romanesque to Neo Gothic.
  • the Gothic Monastery of Santa Clara-a-Velha (pictured) in Coimbra, Portugal, stayed abandoned under mud and water for over 300 years before it was rescued in an archaeological intervention.
  • the Gothic Collegiate church in Wislica, Poland (pictured), was built in 1350 on foundations of two earlier Romanesque churches.
  • Dadabhai Naoroji Road in South Mumbai, starting in Crawford Market and leading to Flora Fountain at its south end, is studded with neoclassical- and Gothic-style buildings of the 19th century.
  • Irish architect Thomas Duff designed St. Patrick's School in Belfast, believed to be the city's last surviving gothic building.
  • among many historic landmarks at the Andrew's Descent in Kiev, there is a medieval Gothic style castle that locals call the "Castle of Richard the Lion Heart" due to the legend the 12th century King of England had visited the building.
  • the English garden designer Batty Langley attempted to "improve" Gothic architectural forms by giving them classical proportions, described in his book Gothic Architecture, improved by Rules and Proportions.
  • gothic Trinity College Kirk, a 1460 memorial to King James II of Scotland, was demolished in 1848 to make way for Edinburgh's Waverley Station.
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