THE BUSINESS OF experiencing a building, or creating a representation of that building in words or images, is surprisingly difficult. A picture can be surveyed through the process of optical scanning—moving the eyes systematically up and down, from side to side, from the edges inward, or from inside out. The experience of the building, on the other hand, is kinesthetic: it involves moving the body, gathering multiple images, and piecing it all together. Memory and classification come to play. The experience is set in space and time: the time taken to walk through the interior spaces or around the exterior of the building; the time the building took to construct, the assessment of the relationship between the finished project and the initial vision.

Now, once we have begun to recognize the difficulties of grasping a single building—especially a complex structure like a cathedral—let us consider the enormity of the task of comprehending and representing the phenomenon we know as Gothic. For a period of around four centuries (ca. 1140—ca. 1540), countless buildings were constructed with a characteristic set of shared features, including forms of articulation and decoration as well as concepts of structure and space. Most of the surviving edifices are churches, but all kinds of buildings—castles, palaces, civic edifices, and homes—picked up elements of the same vocabulary of forms. Such was the force of the phenomenon that a Renaissance commentator compared it to the uncontrollable (and undesirable) spread of a living organism. Historians have been unable to agree upon the social mechanisms lying behind this force inherent in Gothic, some seeing it as a top-down expression of royal, seigneurial, or clerical power, others as a spontaneous expression of ethnic or national identity, and still others as a sign of the power, taste and expertise of a new urban elite.