But for him, the associations were positive, and constituted a kitschy escape from Enlightenment rationalism. Walpole also used the term to refer to art of the distant past, particularly the ruins of castles and cathedrals, with an eye toward the supposedly exotic, menacing aspects (for Protestant English readers at least) of the Catholic church and Continental European nobility. (Vasari was also the first to use the term “Renaissance” to describe his own period.) Two hundred years after Vasari’s Lives, art historian, antiquarian, and Whig politician Horace Walpole appropriated the term Gothic to describe The Castle of Otranto, his 1765 novel that started a literary trend. The first, Giorgio Vasari-considered the first art historian-wrote biographies of great Renaissance artists, and first used the term Gothic to refer to medieval cathedrals, which he saw as barbarous next to the neoclassical revival of the 14th-16th centuries. Two significant figures in the evolution of the Gothic as a consciously-defined aesthetic were both art historians. But the story that joins them involves some strange convergences, all of them having to do with the idea of “darkness.” “What do fans of atmospheric post-punk music,” asks Adams, “have in common with ancient barbarians?” The answer: not much. ![]() ![]() Aside from obvious references like Bauhaus’ tongue-in-cheek ode, “ Bela Lugosi’s Dead,” the connective tissue between all the uses of Gothic isn’t especially evident. We know the various versions: the Germanic instigators of the “Dark Ages,” early Christian architectural marvels, Romantic tales of terror and the supernatural, horror films, and gloomy, black-clad post punks and their moody teenage fans. But the Gothic has always referred to an oppositional force, a Dionysian counterweight to a rational, classical order. We would hardly call an invading army of Germanic tribes a “counterculture.” In fact, when the Goths sacked Rome and deposed the Western Emperor, they did, at first, retain the dominant culture. ![]() The history of the word ‘Gothic,’” argues Dan Adams in the short, animated TED-Ed video above,” is embedded in thousands of years’ worth of countercultural movements.” It’s a provocative, if not entirely accurate, idea.
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