Gothic Across Europe: Eight Styles from Cistercian Abbeys to Flamboyant Spires

Start with restraint. Bernard of Clairvaux, who died in 1153, held that churches should avoid superfluous ornament so as not to distract from prayer, and most of the famous Cistercian abbeys were begun in the 12th and 13th centuries in remote valleys. This is the quiet counterweight to every richly decorated style that follows.

The first phase of English Gothic, with pointed arches, lancet windows and rib vaults. It grew from Norman building and French Early Gothic but stayed distinctly English, with low interiors, flat rather than apsidal church ends and thick walls. Wells Cathedral and Lincoln Cathedral, built in the 1170s and 1180s, were among its first notable buildings.

Across the Channel, French builders stopped chasing height and chased light. Developed from about the rebuilding of the Abbey of Saint-Denis in 1231, Rayonnant took its name from the radiating bar tracery of the great rose windows in transepts and facades. It also crossed to England with Westminster Abbey after 1245, where it blended into the Decorated style.

English Gothic answers Rayonnant. In vogue from the mid-13th to the mid-14th century, it unified the arts into one elaborate whole, with traceried windows, the ogee arch and the lierne vault. Look for its two phases, Geometrical Decorated before about 1290 and Curvilinear or Flowing Decorated after it.

Gothic turns secular in Venice. From the 13th century the city built loggias of closely spaced small columns under heavy tracery with quatrefoil openings, and the style is most characteristic in palaces such as the Doge's Palace and the Ca' d'Oro rather than in churches. Venetian builders kept it going well into the second half of the 15th century.

Where stone was scarce, builders used brick. Brick Gothic spread around the Baltic and across Northeast and Central Europe once baked red brick arrived in the 12th century, and it avoided figurative sculpture in favor of walls structured with contrasts of red brick, glazed brick and white lime plaster. The towers of St Mary's church in Lübeck are its most significant church in the Baltic region, and it gave way to Brick Renaissance in the 16th century.

The third and last phase of English Gothic, and a style found nowhere else. From the 14th to the 17th century it favored large windows, four-centred arches and straight vertical and horizontal lines in tracery and wall panelling. The first Perpendicular building was designed around 1332 by William de Ramsey, and lierne vaults developed into fan vaults.

The late flowering. Flamboyant, from the French for flaming, appeared in France and Spain in the 15th century and lasted to the mid-16th, with elaborate stone tracery on exterior and interior and windows marked by an S-shaped curve. The northern spire of Chartres Cathedral and the cathedrals of Burgos and Segovia are major examples, and Renaissance architecture gradually replaced it.