rodheadlee Posted April 20, 2021 Posted April 20, 2021 On 4/16/2021 at 7:57 AM, OGHoosier said: Not gonna lie, it was actually going to Rome that helped me recognize this. I've grown up as an American low-churcher, fully buying into the whole "4-bare-walls-and-a-sermon" shtick which we have in our cookie-cutter meetinghouses. I fully bought into the narrative that the Catholic church had done wrong in spending so much money on churches. Ironically enough I didn't have the same response to Gilded Age robber baron mansions, with which I saw nothing wrong as a teenager. I guess that goes to show how much I had bought into that star-spangled American paradigm of Protestant-flavored capitalist humanism. By now things have entirely changed though. I wasn't prepared for the astonishing beauty of Italian churches and by the end of it I was compelled to admit that I didn't think it was a bad thing that such buildings and works of art were made. I couldn't. I had to acknowledge that they were good things. That led to a reformation in my nascent understanding of aesthetics and my convictions regarding the relationship of the society and the individual. My eyes were opened by reading the novel Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follet. It describes taking two generations to build a cathedral. Building all these Catholic cathedrals kept a lot of people busy for a long time. I believe they also led to some new important structural designs. 3
OGHoosier Posted April 20, 2021 Posted April 20, 2021 15 hours ago, rodheadlee said: My eyes were opened by reading the novel Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follet. It describes taking two generations to build a cathedral. Building all these Catholic cathedrals kept a lot of people busy for a long time. I believe they also led to some new important structural designs. Oh absolutely, Western aesthetics were carried in the womb of the cathedrals for centuries. They were far and away the most beautiful buildings in Europe for ages, particularly since even the palaces of nobility and royalty were built with practical defense in mind. Churches were the only buildings built explicitly to be beautiful, to be the Bibles of the poor, and we owe a great deal of our knowledge of architecture and engineering to the practice of cathedral construction. 1
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