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Holy Terrors: Gargoyles on Medieval Buildings
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About Holy Terrors: Gargoyles On Medieval Buildings
Product Description Multitudes of gargoyles haunt the medieval buildings of western Europe, peering down from churches and cathedrals, houses and town halls. Holy Terrors offers a fresh and irresistible history of these wildly varied characters a society of stone creatures perched high above the workaday world. The true gargoyle is a waterspout, an architectural necessity that medieval artisans transformed into functional fantasies. The informative introduction to Holy Terrors explains everything that is known or conjectured about the history, the construction, the purposes, and the mysterious meanings of these often rude and rowdy characters. The three chapters that follow are devoted to the gargoyles themselves, imaginatively carved of stone in the form of people, real animals, and fantastic beasts. In clear, lively language, Janetta Rebold Benton puts these personality-filled sculptures into the context of medieval life and art and captures their quirky diversity in her engaging color photographs. Concluding the book is an invaluable guide to gargoyle sites throughout western Europe, as well as suggestions for further reading. This is the first book for adults to provide an intelligent and entertaining overview of medieval gargoyles, and it is bound to increase the already abundant legions of gargoyle admirers. About the Author Janetta Rebold Benton is a professor of art history at Pace University, Pleasantville, New York, and a lecturer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. A specialist in medieval art, Professor Benton has published several books and articles on medieval and Renaissance topics and has lectured in the United States and Europe. She has been studying and photographing gargoyles for over a decade. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. INTRODUCTION Look up! Look out! A multitude of gargoyles haunt the medieval buildings of western Europe, peering down from churches and cathedrals, houses and town halls. Clinging to edges and ledges, these projectionscarved of stone in the form of people, real animals, or fantastic beastsmark rooflines, corners, and buttresses, enhancing the picturesque quality of a building’s silhouette. When the sky is clear, gargoyles may merely glower from the towersbut do not stand below them on rainy days. Gargoyles are elaborate waterspouts. Usually taking the form of an elongated fantastic animal, these decorated gutters are architectural necessities turned into ornament. To prevent rainwater from running down the masonry walls and eroding the mortar, water is carried a gargoyle’s length away from the building and thrown clear of the wall. As can be seen by looking down at a gargoyle on the New Church in Delft, the Netherlands (plate 3), rainwater is removed from the roof via a trough cut in the back of the creature. The water usually exits through the open mouth, as demonstrated by a gargoyle in a courtyard of the Hotel of the Catholic Kings in Santiago de Compostela, Spain (plate 1). A sudden rainstorm in southern France provided an opportunity to photograph a functioning lion gargoyle as rainwater issued from its mouth on the Cathedral of Saint-Pierre et Saint-Paul in Troyes (plate 2). Rows of gargoyleslike those on the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris (plate 6), positioned along the peripheries of buildings and extending out beyond their walls, and like those that surround a tower on the Town Hall of Bruges, Belgium (plate 4)make clear their practical role as part of the drainage system. Water falling from gargoyles on the clerestory level of a church might, however, land on the aisle roofs. When Gothic flying buttresses were used, aqueducts could be cut into the buttresses to divert the water over the aisle walls, as seen at Burgos Cathedral in Spain (plate 5). Western European languages have many words to describe these architectural appendages. In Italian, gronda sporgente, an architecturally precise phrase, means protruding
