Gothic Cathedral

Otto Georg von Simson (1912–1993) was professor emeritus of art history at the Free University of Berlin. His books include Sacred Fortress: Byzantine Art and Statecraft in Ravenna (Princeton).

"The Gothic Cathedral is the most stimulating and comprehensive work on the subject to date... If the cathedrals are to be understood, Mr. von Simson rightly declares, they must be seen not in the light of twentieth-century esthetic observation, but of twelfth-century religious experience, through which the supernatural permeated every aspect of human existence... The resulting interpretation of the monuments is a critical tour de force."--Allan Temko, The New York Times Book Review "Not since Mont-St.-Michel and Chartres has so poetic and so evocative a study of the Gothic movement been published... The Gothic Cathedral is based on a wide factual as well as intuitive knowledge, transformed by the author's illuminating style into a text both formidable and pleasurable."--The Virginia Quarterly Review