Humanists and the gothic

What the humanists of the Renaissance could not understand through their tunnel-vision obsession with classicism and Vitruvian ideals is that anthropocentrism, while claiming to glorify man, created such rigid rules that it ultimately crushed the very humanist ideal it sought to represent. Anthropocentrism reduced humanity to proportion — to forms twisted through measurement into geometry. To better understand the negative outcome of this reduction, it is essential to look back at what those same humanists called “barbaric”: the Gothic style — its essence, and why even those who later challenged the Renaissance humanists, like Perrault, still defined it as such.¹

When Vitruvius wrote his De Architectura, he was neither celebrated nor contested by the people of his time. As Mallgrave explains, he was not revolutionary; he simply translated into text what was already being built, adding his personal vision and philosophical interpretation to a practice that pre-existed him.² His work brought nothing foreign or disruptive — it simply codified what was already happening. And precisely because of that, because he neither created a new system nor contradicted an existing one, he went largely unnoticed. Over time, he was naturally forgotten — and with him, the very ways of Roman classicism faded as well, which is, in truth, a natural historical phenomenon.³

Historical bias later made the Middle Ages appear as a dark and static time, but that bias itself is a direct result of the Renaissance and its self-appointed relation to Vitruvius. After his rediscovery, the Renaissance positioned itself as the legitimate heir of order and reason, and in doing so, it set Vitruvius as the intellectual axis around which all future discourse would revolve. From that point onward, architectural theory could no longer exist in its own right — it became, almost by definition, a question of how one positioned oneself in relation to Vitruvius: either to continue his legacy or to break from it. This, in turn, distorted the way we perceive the Middle Ages. The Gothic was called “barbaric” not because it opposed Vitruvius, but because it had no relation to him whatsoever. And that accusation is absurd, since such absence of relation was not a choice, but a consequence — Vitruvius simply wasn’t known at the time.⁴

And so we may ask: how, then, was the Gothic style created, and who theorised it to give it such coherence and identity? It was not architects who shaped it, but theologians. Detached from previous architectural doctrines, they were free to think architecture anew — to imagine space as a tool for understanding the divine. In doing so, they reached a depth that no Vitruvian discourse could allow. The Gothic grew alongside the Scholastic movement, a period that sought light, reason, and order within faith. As Panofsky later demonstrated, Gothic architecture reflected that very Scholastic structure — an articulation of clarity, hierarchy, and revelation.⁵ Architecture, in that sense, became not a discipline of measure but a medium of illumination.

In such circumstances, the Gothic may well be one of the most deeply theorised architectural languages in history. What makes it so profound is precisely its distance from Vitruvian ideals: it was not rebellion but emancipation. The Gothic emerged free from inherited rules and precedents, and thus could construct its own intellectual foundation, rooted not in proportion but in revelation. Detached from Vitruvius and the rigid language of numbers, it could pursue meaning through theology — through the contemplation of light, space, and divine order. This freedom allowed for an architecture that was reflective rather than prescriptive, open-ended rather than codified. As Panofsky later revealed, the same logic that governed Scholastic thought — the search for clarity within mystery — governed the Gothic cathedral. In that sense, architecture became not a science of measure but a medium of revelation, a visible philosophy of faith.

Here lies the paradox that fascinates me most. The style that rejects human proportion ends up expressing the human spirit more truthfully than the one that claims to centre it. Vitruvian humanism was an exercise in imitation, a mirroring that reduced humanity to geometry. The Gothic, by contrast, was an act of invention. It did not imitate; it aspired. It was born from reflection and collective experimentation — from the imagination of masons who built as they thought, and thought as they built. Each cathedral was unique, the product of countless human minds converging toward transcendence. That is why the Gothic feels alive: it is a living expression of human imagination disguised under a sacred horizon, where reason and faith meet without cancelling one another.

Ultimately, while Vitruvian anthropocentrism confines the human within geometry, Gothic theocentrism liberates the creative act. The Gothic was called barbaric because it refused to codify itself — because it never sought to establish a universal canon, only to express an eternal question. Yet that refusal is precisely what makes it one of the most human of all architectural expressions. The mystical reaches deep into the soul, while the imitator risks losing individuality by rationalising it away.⁶