The Gothic in Germany and Austria

Tall cathedrals, stone figures with faces of their own and carved altarpieces in gold – the Gothic made the German cities the new centres of art.

The Gothic came from France and reached the German lands around 1230. St Elizabeth’s Church in Marburg and the Liebfrauenkirche in Trier were among the first fully Gothic churches. In Bamberg and Naumburg unknown stonemasons created figures that are astonishingly lifelike. The Bamberg Horseman and the founder figures in Naumburg have made posterity wonder who sat for them, and they are among the best-known sculptures of the German Middle Ages.

In 1248 Cologne Cathedral was begun on the French model. It was not completed until 1880. Along the Baltic coast a style of its own developed, Brick Gothic, with St Mary’s Church in Lübeck as its model. In the south rose St Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna and Ulm Minster. The cities competed for the tallest towers, and the burghers paid an ever larger share of church building. These were proud cities building for God and for themselves.

In the 15th century carved and painted altarpieces became the hallmark of German art. Stefan Lochner in Cologne painted sweet Madonnas against gold grounds. Michael Pacher in the Tyrol and Bernt Notke in Lübeck created huge works in wood in which sculpture and painting merged. Notke’s St George and the Dragon in Storkyrkan in Stockholm shows how far German art reached. At the same time printing was invented in Mainz, which would soon transform the whole of visual culture.

• The Gothic arrives – Marburg and Bamberg
• The Naumburg Master and the founders
• Cologne Cathedral – six hundred years of building
• Brick Gothic and the Hanseatic League – Lübeck and Bernt Notke
• The golden age of the altarpiece – Lochner, Pacher and Stoss