Gothicized buildings and the role of symbols in Baroque architecture

Abstract

Recently, researchers have found that several buildings or building parts, previously believed to be Gothic, had actually been built in the Baroque period. This research is based on the most comprehensive collection of the Gothicized buildings from the Baroque time in Hungary. They can be clearly separated into two groups, the reconstruction of medieval churches and the chapels of the Holy Sepulchre. These examples show that beyond the generally mentioned two methods of Gothicizing in the Baroque period (survival and revival), there is a third way, which can be connected to the heyday of Baroque and to the buildings of demanding clients. Apparently, this phenomenon was more common than previously assumed; there are not only unique and extravagant examples of it (like the architecture of Santini in Bohemia), but there are also several examples in Hungarian records. Since they were neither marginal, provincial nor ‘out-of-date’ buildings, we cannot consider them as anachronistic phenomenon and it should be possible to explain their formation with the same factors that generated the construction of traditional Baroque works.