FOR RELEASE: March 30, 1998
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ITHACA, N.Y. -- When Cornell University art history Professor Robert G. Calkins was 17 years old, he took a bicycle trip through southern England and France. "I was swept off my feet," he said, by the countryside, the people and the antiquity he saw. Most of all, he was amazed and moved by the great cathedrals of Europe.
This year, Oxford University Press published Calkins' Medieval Architecture in Western Europe: From A.D. 300 to 1500, marking the first time an overview and selection of major monuments of European architecture have been brought together in a single textbook. It includes 419 photographs and drawings and an IBM-compatible CD-ROM that features 860 color photographs of the buildings. Calkins took 75 percent of the photographs in the book himself and nearly all the photos in the CD-ROM.
"These buildings mirror what was going on in the cultures that built them," Calkins said. "They manifest the technical accomplishments, the thought processes, the allegories, the vices and virtues and the religious vision of their time. In a way, they mirror the whole range of human experience.
"A cathedral looms over its town," he said, "so you see in it a symbol of the town and city, and you also see the power of the church. It dominates the way religion dominated the lives of medieval people, but it also expresses the pride of accomplishment of its townspeople. With its insubstantial, crown-like exterior mass and its multiple spires and pinnacles forming a picturesque silhouette, the cathedral evoked a reminder of the goal of salvation."
Medieval Architecture in Western Europe begins with a study of the structural antecedents found in late Roman architecture, explores the Byzantine influence on early Christian buildings, then moves through the Romanesque and Gothic periods.
In an article in Humanities magazine, Calkins warns that "the cathedral must be interpreted with caution," because it reveals "diverse contradictions and conflicts." Building cathedrals wasn't all angel music and reverence, Calkins reminds us. "The construction of Reims was interrupted for years by civic opposition, and the townspeople of Amiens tried to burn down their incomplete cathedral in 1258."
Calkins was born in California and grew up in New York City, and his father was a dean of the Columbia University business school who later became president of the Brookings Institution. Calkins graduated from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, and after two and a half years in the U.S. Army stationed in Europe, he earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1966. He has taught at Cornell since 1966.
In Chartres "the windows glow in a dim interior, suffusing the space with a purple glow from the prevalent reds and deep blues and projecting puddles of multi-colored light," Calkins writes in Humanities. "The interior, like the exterior, evoked the Heavenly City of Jerusalem, of which St. John's description in the Book of Revelation was apt: 'And the city had no need of the sun, neither of the moon to shine in it: for the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the Light thereof.' Medieval man aspired to salvation and reception into the heavenly kingdom. In such a building, with all the precepts of faith laid out before the worshiper, he was almost there."
"At the end of this millennium," Calkins said, "medieval buildings are still relevant as reminders of the importance of re-evaluating what we are about. The humanity in the buildings is in the details, the variations of design and vignettes of human emotions and pathos, as well as of daily life, in the sculptures and stained glass.
"Do we have anything equally magnificent to mirror our civilization at the end of the 20th century?" Calkins wondered.
In Medieval Architecture in Western Europe: From A.D. 300 to 1500, he provides us with an introduction to the great monuments of Europe. And for the man who has made some 35 visits to Chartres since his teen-age journey, the discovery never ends.
"I find something new there every time," Calkins said.
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