Divergent Currents in German Late Gothic Spire Design 1


Chapter 8: Divergent Currents in German Late Gothic Spire Design

The openwork spires of the southwestern Empire, like their eastern cousinsat Vienna and Meissen, grew out of what might be called the main line ofgreat spire design. Daring and innovation were certainly valued in thistradition, as the tremendous heights and complex detailing of thesestructures attest. At the same time, however, this tradition remainedconservative, in that it stayed largely dependent on architectural ideaspioneered in France in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In terms ofoverall form, the tall pyramidal spire format seen at Chartres continued toguide the Ensingers and their successors, much as it had guided theirpredecessors working at Freiburg and Cologne in the years around 1300. Interms of articulation, similarly, the richly decorative but largely skeletalappearance of openwork spires represented a natural extension of aestheticnorms that had been prevalent in French Rayonnant design.

By the fifteenth century, the formal standards embodied by the main lineof openwork spire design came to be questioned from two opposingdirections. On the one hand, the increasing virtuosity of Late Gothicdesigners fostered the exploration of ever more complex and convolutedspire forms, which often abandoned the traditional pyramid formaltogether; many such experiments related closely to the design ofcontemporary micro-architectural shrines, which was becoming animportant field for virtuoso artistic display in its own right.1 On the otherhand, German Late Gothic architectural culture witnessed the emergence ofa streamlined or even reductive approach to design, apparent especially inthe planar walls and boxy exterior volumes of many of the era’s hallchurches. These two seemingly contradictory impulses actually went handin hand to a certain extent, as complex vaults and micro-architecturalshrines became foci for architectural interest in otherwise simple buildings.The cumulative effect of these divergent but linked tendencies was tochallenge the primacy of the traditional great spire format. By the end ofthe fifteenth century, three principal alternatives to the openwork spire typehad been developed: buttressing pyramids; domes and wreaths; andstreamlined or reductive tower forms.

1 See François Bucher, "Micro-Architecture as the `Idea' of Gothic Theory and Style."Gesta 15, nos. 1-2 (1976): 71-91; and Peter Kurmann, "Gigantomanie und Miniatur:Möglichkeiten gotischer Architektur zwischen Grossbau und Kleinkunst," Kölner Domblatt61 (1996): 123-46.

270 Great Spires: Skyscrapers of the New Jerusalem

Buttressing PyramidsThe term buttressing pyramid refersto a tapering spirelike structurecomposed largely or exclusivelyout of miniature flying buttresses.Flying buttresses had originallybeen developed to deal withstructural forces in full-scalebuildings, but representations offlying buttresses soon began toappear in media such as stainedglass and goldwork, wherestructural forces were of noconsequence. In the south transeptclerestory of Reims Cathedral, forinstance, flying buttresses areamong the few architecturalelements of the real cathedral thatappear in the “portrait” of “EcclesiaRenensis Metropolis,” executed inthe mid-thirteenth century (fig. 8-1). In such early examples, theflying buttress motif may havebeen intended not only to evoke theappearance of a particular cathedral,but also to invoke the prestige ofm o d e r n F r e n c h cathedralarchitecture more generally. By that

time, flying buttresses had fundamentally altered the traditional relationbetween architecture and space, by transforming buildings from closedvolumes into open skeletal structures. They thus played an important rolein making Gothic architecture appear airy and weightless, qualities thatmany designers of the day clearly held dear. Not surprisingly, therefore,glaziers and goldworkers soon began to imagine fantastic structures madeof flying buttresses whose slender proportions and delicacy left the worldof real full-scale architecture far behind, as in the early fourteenth-centurywindows of the Saint Catherine Chapel at Strasbourg Cathedral (fig. 8-2).Miniature flying buttresses with flanking pinnacles had also appeared inthe lower half of Strasbourg Plan B, but they were left out of the actual

8-1 Reims Cathedral, glass panelfrom south transept clerestory.


Strasbourg facade. At Freiburg, though, the corner pinnacles flanking themain tower incorporate delicate flying buttresses that cluster around thecentral pinnacle shaft. These structures were far smaller than the openworkspire above, but their successful construction demonstrated that buttressingpyramids of respectable size could be executed in masonry.

The development of buttressing pyramids accelerated in the laterfourteenth century thanks to the proliferation of micro-architecturalmonument types, ranging from small metal reliquaries and monstrances tolarge free-standing monuments comparable to the earlier French Montjoies.The famous three-tower reliquary at Aachen, for example, includesdecorative flying buttresses, as does the Parlerian tabernacle in Prague’sSaint Wenceslas Chapel. Such flying buttresses began to appear in thespirelike masonry canopies over masonry statue niches, as seen in the choirinterior of St. Sebaldus in Nuremberg, consecrated in 1379 (fig. 8-3). The

8-2 StrasbourgCathedral, glass panel ofSaint Catherine Chapel.

8-3 Nuremberg, St. Sebaldus, statue canopieson interior wall of choir.


growing popularity of the feast ofCorpus Christi in the century and ahalf after its inception in 1264,meanwhi le , fos te red thedevelopment of various sacramenthouse formats, including thebuttressing pyramid type. TheParlerian sacrament house fromKolin, dating to the 1370s,provides an early and fairly simpleexample of this type, with only onetier of flying buttresses around thecentral pinnacle. The multiplicationof such buttress tiers wouldeventually produce extraordinarysacrament houses like those of UlmMinster or St . Lorenz inNuremberg, which rank among themost complex and elaborateproducts of the Gothic architecturalimagination. These structures wereso airy and delicate that they had to

be anchored to the walls and piers of the buildings they occupied.Interestingly, though, some of the most ambitious early experiments withthe amplification of the buttressing pyramid theme involved larger free-standing monuments, such as the Spinnerin am Kreuz in Wiener Neustadtand the Schöner Brunnen in Nuremberg, both designed in the 1380s.

In the Schöner Brunnen, a municipal fountain canopy erected between1385 and 1396, three progressively smaller octagonal stories linked by twotiers of flying buttresses support a slender terminal pinnacle (fig. 8-4). Thisarrangement creates a tapering overall silhouette, even though most of theconstituent elements in the structure are strictly vertical. In this sense,multi-tiered buttressing pyramids like the Schöner Brunnen resemblecollapsible telescopes more than cones or simple pyramidal spires. Sinceeach of the buttress uprights in the Schöner Brunnen carries a V-shapeddoublet of flying buttresses, creating an octagonal star in plan, each of thesuccessive stories is rotated by 22.5 degrees with respect to the one below.This gives the canopy a certain geometrical dynamism, but the overallorganization of the structure remains lucid, in large part because of the clearhorizontal demarcations between each of the gabled stories. The designer of

8-4 Nuremberg, Schöner Brunnenand Frauenkirche.


the Schöner Brunnen was HeinrichBeheim the Elder, who haddeveloped this rich but crisparticulation style while working aschief architect of the St. Sebalduschoir.2 The fountain canopy can thusbe plausibly understood as anovergrown cousin of the smaller andsimpler statue canopies seen at St.Sebaldus. As a soaring bundle ofvertical uprights knitted togetherwith diagonal arches and buttresses,the Schöner Brunnen introduced abuttressing pyramid format thatwould be reprised with morecomplex detailing in manysubsequent microarchitecturalshrines.

In 1382, even before work on theSchöner Brunnen had begun, theHabsburg court architect MasterMichael developed his designs forthe Spinnerin am Kreuz in WienerNeustadt, in which he deployedmany of the same elements seen inBeheim's fountain canopy, but witha more lyrical sensibility (fig. 8-5).Where the Schöner Brunnen appears rigid, the Spinnerin am Kreuz appearsloose and organic. In plan, the Spinnerin transforms from a triangularlysymmetrical base story to a hexagonally symmetrical terminal pinnacle;consequently, there are only three flying buttresses in the lower buttresstier, and six in the upper tier. This relatively open plan allows greatervisual access to the inner core of the structure than is possible at theSchöner Brunnen, where the cage of buttress uprights acts as visually densescreen. In elevation, meanwhile, the horizontal divisions between storiesare less crisp than in at the Schöner Brunnen, because the buttresses playoff against the structure of the inner core and its flanking tabernacles,

2 Gothic and Renaissance Art in Nuremberg, 1300-1550, exh. cat. (New York, 1986), 35,132-35.

8-5 Wiener Neustadt, Spinnerin amKreuz.


creating effects of syncopation andelision.3 In these respects, MasterMichael's Spinnerin anticipatesmany of the most advancedbuttressing pyramid designs of theLate Gothic era, in whichcompositional freedom andvirtuoso display went hand inhand.

Prominent public monuments likethe Schöner Brunnen and theSpinnerin am Kreuz blur the linebetween architecture and micro-architecture, in terms of botharchitectural practice and socialfunction. The long-noted formalanalogies between the WienerNeustadt Spinnerin and the southspire of the Viennese Stephansdomattest to the close connectionsbetween spire design and the designof smaller structures, even if Master

Michael himself played a smaller role at the Stephansdom than hadformerly been supposed. The Spinnerin was commissioned by Wolfhartvon Schwarzensee, who served Wiener Neustadt as a judge, and latermayor. The Schöner Brunnen, meanwhile, was one of the principal civicmonuments in Nuremberg. Its construction was funded by the citygovernment, and its iconographical program celebrated the imperialelectoral system in which Nuremberg played an important part, especiallyduring and after the reign of Emperor Charles IV. The fountain, moreover,occupies a conspicuous place on the city's main market square, which hadbeen created after Charles gave his tacit approval to the razing of the Jewishquarter that had formerly occupied the site. For modern observers lookingback at these events, the ugly and violent pogrom of 1349 stands out as adark stain on the city's history, but for Nuremberg's medieval Christiancitizenry the creation of the market and the subsequent erection of theSchöner Brunnen and adjacent Frauenkirche were doubtless seen asaffirmtions of the city's pride and its privileged place in imperial affairs.

3 Elisabeth Hassmann, Meister Michael: Baumeister der Herzoge von Österreich. (Vienna,2002), 117-196; Timmermann, “Staging the Eucharist,” 81.

8-6 Bebenhausen, Cistercian abbey,Dachreiter.


Indeed, the creation of the market and thefountain canopy created a visually andideologically focused public space in thecenter of a city that had formerly beendivided into the separate precinctssurrounding St. Lorenz and St. Sebaldus.Thus, while the Schöner Brunnen was farsmaller than the great spires of Freiburg,Vienna, or Strasbourg, it played a roughlyanalogous role in marking the city'ssymbolic center. Like Master Michael'sSpinnerin am Kreuz, it defines anintermediate scale in which thebuttressing pyramid idea developed in therealm of micro-architecture began topenetrate into the built environment.

The first church tower to incorporate thebuttressing pyramid principle was thecrossing tower added to the Cistercianabbey church at Bebenhausen between1407 and 1409 (fig. 8-6).4 This relativelysimple structure, designed by theCisterian lay brother Georg von Salem, includes just a single battery ofeight flying buttresses, arranged in octagonal array around a short towercore that supports a small openwork spire. All of these components rest ona solid masonry cone that carries the weight of the tower down to thecrossing piers. Today, the tower appears rather squat, because it rises onlyslightly above the church's roof, but it would have appeared leaner andmore autonomous when it was built, since the roof was cut back to create aframing space around the crossing in which the tower would rise freely.The conceptual autonomy of the tower comes through with particularclarity in a mural inside the church, which shows the tower's donor, AbbotPeter von Gomaringen, presenting it to the Virgin Mary as though it werea monstrance or reliquary unconnected to the rest of the building (fig. 8-7).Despite its physical integration into the fabric of the abbey church,therefore, the Bebenhausen spire remained in many respects miniaturistic.

4 Philip S. C. Caston, Spätmittelalterliche Vierungstürme in deutschsprachigen Raum:Konstruction und Baugeschichte (Petersberg, 1997), 113. See also Timmermann,"Architektur und Eucharistie,” 9.

8-7 Bebenhausen, Cistercianabbey church, wall painting.


RegensburgThe idea of the spire as buttressingpyramid found perhaps its mostspectacular expression in a four-meter high drawing fromRegensburg showing a facadearranged around a colossal axialspire, whose openwork structureappears veiled by three successivetiers of flying buttresses (fig. 8-10).Although a number of features ofthe drawing appear to haveinfluenced the construction ofRegensburg cathedral's actualfacade, the contrast between thegrandiosity of the drawing and the

relative modesty of the facade as built raises interesting questions about therole of architectural fantasy in the later Middle Ages. This ambitiousdrawing may well have been meant to assert the artistic leadership of aGothic cathedral workshop with a long tradition of achievement that wasbeing challenged by the emergence of other workshops in the area.

Regensburg Cathedral was no mere upgraded parish church. The city hadbeen seat of a diocese since the eighth century, and the cathedral'sreconstruction in the Gothic style, which began in the 1270s, reflectedknowledge of the most up-to-date and sophisticated French Rayonnantdesigns. Indeed, Regensburg Cathedral has long been recognized as anenlarged version of Saint-Urbain in Troyes, despite the contrast betweenthe cathedral's muscularity and the brittleness of its French prototype. Inthe late thirteenth century, therefore, Regensburg Cathedral was perhaps themost architecturally advanced church under construction east of theRhineland. Construction proceeded relatively rapidly between 1280 and1380. By 1325 the entire choir and most of the transept were completed,including a reinforced crossing meant to support a central tower.5 No suchtower was built in the Middle Ages, and attention turned to theconstruction of the nave, which took place between 1325 and 1341.6 Then,between 1341 and 1380, the south tower of the west facade was built up toits full medieval height, just above the third story (fig. 8-8).

5 See Manfred Schuller, "Bautechnik und Bauorganization," in Der Dom zu Regensburg:Ausgrabung, Restaurierung, Forschung, ed. Peter Morsbach, exh. cat. (Munich and Zurich,1989), 80.6 Achim Hubel, The Cathedral of Regensburg, trans. Genoveva Nitz (Munich, 1991), 7.

8-8 Regensburg Cathedral, facade.


In formal terms, this south towerfollows the example set by the restof the rather sober exterior.Ambitious Rayonnant precedentsinform the design, as is evident inthe Strasbourg-derived statuecanopies of the buttresses, forexample, but the overall effect atRegensburg is mural andsurprisingly stark. In the lowerstory of the tower only two smalllancets pierce the wall, while in thesecond story all the tracery formsare carved in shallow relief. Eventhe use of tracery harpstrings in theupper level does little to relieve theflatness of the facade, since themullions are arranged in the planeof the wall. Perhaps the most novelfeature of the facade, one that mayeven have influenced Peter Parler,was the use of an exteriorbalustrade to divide the first storyfrom the second, forming a sort oflower sockel zone.7 In general,however, the appearance of thesouth tower was both sedate andtraditional.

By the time the third story of thesouth tower was completed in1380, the tremendous progress of Gothic architecture in central Europe wasmaking the Regensburg facade look outmoded. Levels of decorativerichness formerly seen only at the Rhenish cathedrals of Strasbourg andCologne had appeared not only in Peter Parler's upper choir of Prague, butalso in the elaborate rose-window of St. Lorenz in Nuremburg. Other Parlerprojects including the Frauenkirche in Nuremberg and the colossal UlmMinster also threatened to eclipse the cathedral of Regensburg, once themost sophisticated building in the region.

7 See Jaroslav Bureš, "Der Regensburger Doppelturmplan: Untersuchungen zur Architekturder ersten Nachparlerzeit," Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 49 (1986): 1-28.

8-9 Regensburg, so-called double-tower design for cathedral facade.


Evidently in response to these challenges, the Regensburg workshopproduced a large drawing of an ambitious and sumptuously decorated two-tower facade--or, more properly, of all the sections of such a facade exceptthe south tower (fig. 8-9).8 With its dense cladding of tracery panels andniches, this "two-tower" drawing resembles the masterful Strasbourg PlanB from a century earlier, but its curvilinear tracery forms and ogee archesbetray the up-to-date influence of the Parlers. A pointed turret above therose window provides a counterpoint to the horizontality of the twoprominent balustrades.9 The rose itself, surrounded by a vortex of tracery,synthesizes influences from Strasbourg and St. Lorenz in Nuremberg.Cusped arches in the corner turrets of the tower evoke goldwork. Overall,the drawing creates an impression of exceptional richness andsophistication.

The relationship of this drawing to the actual progress of construction inRegensburg remains poorly understood. The drawing represents a moreadvanced and ambitious version of the two-tower facade programintroduced in the cathedral's south tower. Many features of the south tower,such as the strong balustrades and tiny side-aisle portals, recur in thedrawing in more elaborate form. Even certain details, such as the diagonalmolding on the outboard lateral buttress and the differing treatments of theupper and lower balustrade, seem to have been borrowed from the southtower. These formal analogies, together with the absence of the south towerfrom the drawing, suggest that the design was developed as a scheme forthe completion of the Regensburg facade, incorporating the extant southtower. On the other hand, the lavishness of the drawing contrastsdramatically with the sobriety of the south tower as built, giving it theflavor of an ideal project. Optimal realization of the scheme in the drawingwould entail destroying the south tower and starting from scratch. Thedevelopment of a second ideal plan some years later suggests that this ideaheld strong appeal to at least a few within the Regensburg lodge, eventhough the economic and political problems of demolishing recentlycompleted work must have been obvious to all involved.

The drawing mentioned earlier that depicts a single colossal towerrepresents the second of these ideal plans for the Regensburg facade (fig.

8 Friedrich Fuchs claims that a spire was intended to crown the tower shown in the drawing;see "Zwei mittelalterliche Aufriss-Zeichnungen: Zur Westfassade des RegensburgerDomes," in Morsbach, Dom zu Regensburg, 224. It seems equally plausible, however, thatthe drawing was meant as an updated version of Notre-Dame in Paris or other great facadesthat had been left square-topped, defining their own genre whatever the original builders’intention.9 One hundred years or so after the Regensburg drawing was made, an analogous turretwas built at Toul. The west facade of Saint Gudule in Brussels displays a similar geometry.


8-10 & 8-11 Regensburg, single spire plan (left) and detail of itsupper section (right).


8-10). Current scholarship dates this single-tower drawing to the decade1400-1410, based on its relationship to components of the actual facade.10

Such dating also makes sense in view of the competition between greatspire projects. The two-tower plan appears to date from the decade 1380-90, when the only large openwork spire completed or substantivelyunderway was that of Freiburg im Breisgau. By roughly 1400, however,work had begun on the spire projects of Ulm, Prague, Meissen, andStrasbourg, and the scale of the tower at Vienna’s Stephansdom had grownsignificantly under Wenzel Parler. Even the slowly growing south tower ofCologne Cathedral had reached an impressive height by that time. Smallwonder, therefore, that the designers of the Regensburg lodge wereinterested in developing their own optimal great spire scheme.11

Although closely related to the earlier two-tower drawing, this secondideal design makes no concession to the extant fabric of the Regensburgfacade.12 The drawing shows the full width and height of the projectedfacade, leaving no place for the stump of the south tower. The wholedesign serves the central spire, making this perhaps the most assertivelycomposed spire design ever developed. The lower part of the facade issimply a visual sockel, a small horizontally-oriented base against which tomeasure the colossal height of the spire. The sloping form of the side aisleroofs, echoed by the richly cusped flying buttresses above, contribute to afocus on the axis of the spire. A similar geometry occurs at Ulm, but theeffect is very different there because the side aisles are treated as anafterthought, without the formal elaboration of the tower bay. In theRegensburg drawing, the entire composition is articulated in the same richmanner, and a continuous balustrade unifies the tower bay with the aisles.The boxy and conservatively detailed mass of the south tower clearly hasno place in this carefully calibrated composition.

A number of details of this remarkable single-spire design must beconsidered in order to properly evaluate its relationship to subsequent 10 Earlier the drawing had been dated anywhere from 1380 to 1480. For a review of thedating argument, see Fuchs, "Zwei Aufriss-Zeichnungen," in Morsbach, Dom zuRegensburg, 227-29.11 It is hard to know exactly how tall the single spire in this drawing was meant to be.Assuming that the window in the second story of the tower corresponds to the actual heightof the nave, the spire height works out to roughly 120 meters. If one assumes that the portalsalign with the axes of the aisles, a spire of roughly 160 meters results, which would havemade it the tallest spire yet designed. The latter number seems more likely, both in view ofthe grand pretensions of the design, and the fixed width of the cathedral vessel. Thewindow height on the facade, however, might be larger than in the nave itself, as atStrasbourg.12 The second drawing was probably penned by a different hand than the first, but clearlythere are many stylistic similarities between the two drawings in terms of cusp use, tripletmotifs, and overall texturing. See Fuchs, "Zwei Aufriss-Zeichnungen," in Morsbach, Domzu Regensburg, 227-28.


history of Regensburg Cathedral. Among the most peculiar features of thedrawing is its provision for a salient porch of triangular plan in front of thecentral tower portal. This porch can be understood as the extension of the"visual sockel" principle into the third dimension. Seen from a rakingangle, the porch would provide the same counterpoint to the explosiveverticality of the tower that the side-aisle roofs do when viewed head-on. Itwould appear almost as if one of the terminal walls of the aisle had swunginto the space in front of the tower, rotating on the axis of the spire. Thetriangular porch thus seems to emerge from the designer's perceptivetreatment of three-dimensionality and projection, skills that manifestthemselves in other aspects of the drawing as well.

In the lower zone of the drawing, the designer displays familiarity with awide variety of sources and formal types. Although he clearly knew of ogeearches, which he employs over the aisle portals, nearly all the other gablesin the drawing are straight-sided. This is true even in the terminal walls ofthe aisles, which in other respects appear heavily indebted to theMartinsfenster zone of Ulrich von Ensingen's Plan A for Ulm. The traceryin the small chapel over the porch derives from Prague, however. The gridof free-standing cusped arches in front of the nave window appears to haveno full-scale architectural precedent, recalling instead such works of micro-architecture as the altarpiece of the Chartreuse de Champmol in Dijon,executed only a few years earlier.

The transition from square to octagon in this drawing differs from othermedieval spire designs because it occurs low in the overall structure of thespire. The octagonal geometry of the upper portions is fully exposedhalfway up the drawing. While Freiburg has a single octagonal tower story,and Cologne one and a half--counting the transitional story as a half--theRegensburg drawing proposes two and a half octagonal stories before thespire cone even begins. The succession of so many freely rising octagonalstories makes the Regensburg design look more like a tabernacle than likea conventional great spire. This close kinship with micro-architecturebecomes even more readily apparent in the upper zone of the drawing,where three successive tiers of decorative flying buttresses veil theopenwork spire underneath, creating an overall form closely comparable tothat of the Schöner Brunnen in Nuremberg (fig. 8-11). No such form hadyet been built at colossal scale foreseen in the drawing, and, indeed, noneever would be.

It is nevertheless interesting to observe that the Regensburg schemepresents analogies with other roughly contemporary full-scale spiredesigns, as well as with micro-architecture. The application of flying


buttresses to the spire cone in the drawing parallels the application ofstaircase turrets to the spire cone of Strasbourg Cathedral. In both cases,the accretion of extra elements produced novel silhouettes withoutcompletely forsaking the proven and prestigious openwork spire format.The Regensburg drawing also includes two crow's nest observation decks,amplifying a formal theme seen in the work of Ulrich von Ensingen andhis successors, and in the spire of Meissen Cathedral. Like the openworkspires of Meissen and Vienna, moreover, the spire in the Regensburgdrawing features free-flowing tracery without the crisp horizontal divisionsseen in Cologne Plan F, the Freiburg spire, and the work of the Ensingersand their followers. By incorporating these influences from full-scale spiredesign with the buttressing pyramid format popularized in the micro-architectural sphere, the Regensburg designer created one of the mostimpressive spire schemes in history.

Unfortunately, the identity of the Regensburg master remains unknown.13

His treatment of the salient triangular tower porch, his sculpturesquetreatment of the transitional zone between the square tower story and theoctagonal spire zone, and his impressively accurate use of projectivegeometry in rendering the diagonal facets of the spire pyramid all suggestthat he was strongly attuned to the three-dimensional implications of hisdecisions as a draftsman. His use of flying buttresses and richly cuspedarches, meanwhile, suggests a close familiarity with goldwork and micro-architecture. It may be significant, therefore, that the sculptors of theRegensburg workshop were enjoying their moment of greatest success andprominence in the years around 1400.14 Perhaps the master of the single-spire plan travelled in this circle rather than among the older architectsresponsible for the south tower. The line of descent from the south towerto the ideal two-tower drawing to the single-spire plan, however, showsthat the designer was aware of architectural precedents from Regensburgitself as well as from Prague, Nuremberg and Ulm.

The intended function of the single-spire drawing remains as uncertain asthe identity of its creator. Even more than the related two-tower plan, thisdrawing returned the Regensburg lodge to the vanguard of architecturaldesign. Realization of this project would have made Regensburg Cathedralone of the greatest landmarks in medieval Europe. In practice, however, theRegensburg chapter was too poor to finance such a colossal undertaking. 13 Norbert Nussbaum proposes that Liebhart der Myner, who was present in Regensburg in1395, may have been responsible for the two-tower drawing. He does not consider whetherLiebhart might also have been involved with the single-tower drawing, which he dates to1450. See Deutsche Kirchenbaukunst der Gotik: Entwicklung und Bauformen (Cologne,1985), 200-201.14 Fuchs, "Zwei Aufriss-Zeichnungen," in Morsbach, Dom zu Regensburg, 229.


Moreover, demolition of the recently completed south tower to make wayfor a new project would have been politically difficult, even if money hadbeen readily available. The master responsible for the drawing was surelyaware of these problems, and his design should perhaps be understood asan architectural fantasy rather than a realistic proposal to the cathedralchapter. Even so, the drawing would have advertised the sophistication ofthe Regensburg workshop, which was perhaps its function all along.

Whatever the circumstances of its production, the single-spire plan madea strong impression on the workshop culture of Regensburg. Although itcould not be realized in its entirety, the drawing provided a source ofinnovative motifs that subsequent builders adopted on a piecemeal basis.The earlier two-tower drawing was exploited similarly. Throughout thefifteenth century, these two ideal designs for the facade remainedtouchstones for the Regensburg workshop, which sought to evokesomething of their effects with the limited resources at hand. This adoptionof motifs often resulted in distortions of the original idea. By 1410 or so areduced version of the triangular entrance porch had been constructed infront of the cathedral's main portal.15 The kernel of the original idea wasthus preserved, although it no longer functioned as an accent to the axialityof a single tower.

Borrowings from the ideal drawings continued even after the Regensburgworkshop came under the direction of the Roritzer family in the seconddecade of the fifteenth century. Between 1420 and 1430 the lowest story ofthe north tower was completed, with a zig-zag motif over the windowsderived from the gablets in the single-spire drawing, and perhaps alsoinfluenced by the chevrons at the base of its spire cone.16 The second storyof the tower was built by 1440, with a richly crocketed ogee arch andtracery triplets similar to those in the drawings yet integrated into anoverall framework derived from the earlier south tower. In the second halfof the century the western wall of the upper nave was constructed, withtwin windows that evidently represent a compression into the wall plane ofthe diagonally planted windows that appeared in the triangular porticochapel in the single-spire drawing. The so-called Acorn Tower at the centerof the main facade gable, completed in 1487, derives from the analogousturret in the two-tower drawing, despite their dissimilar styles ofarticulation. The facade as built thus represents a compromise between theinfluence of the two ideal plans and the insistent presence of the blockysouth tower, conformity with which dictated the outlines of the design. 15 See Fuchs, "Zwei Aufriss-Zeichnungen," in Morsbach, Dom zu Regensburg, 229; orHubel, Cathedral of Regensburg, 27.16 Completion dates come from Hubel, Cathedral of Regensburg, 9.


The continuing appeal of the two idealized facade drawings may haveboth depended on and contributed to nostalgia for the decades around1400. Regensburg's fortunes had declined over the course of the fifteenthcentury, with plague, political infighting, and economic downturn alltaking their toll.17 In 1400, however, Regensburg still enjoyed a relativelystrong economy, and the reputation of the city's sculptors had reached itsapogee. In practice, the chapter was not wealthy enough to implement thevisionary single-spire scheme, but this may have been forgotten a fewdecades later. If it was believed that this plan had been a practical proposalrather than a fantasy, the implied wealth of Regensburg in 1400 must haveseemed great indeed. Ultimately, the impact of the ideal facade plansprobably stemmed more from their intrinsic quality than from theirassociations with a time of prosperity. The two-tower drawing hadpresented an image of richness formerly undreamed of in the Regensburglodge, and the single-spire design had welded up-to-date architecturaldecoration and influences from micro-architecture into a boldly innovativesynthesis of undeniable power. Although it may well have been conceivedas a fantasy, it eloquently bears witness to the vitality of German spiredesign in the years around 1400.

Significantly, the Regensburg single-spire drawing presents a scheme forthe large-scale implementation of the buttressing pyramid spire format thatwas not only the most ambitious design exercise of its type, but also oneof the last. As its creator no doubt recognized, the technical obstacles to itsrealization would have been substantial. The dissolution of structure into adiaphanous skeleton of flying buttresses could proceed far more easily inthe design of small-scale tabernacles than it could in the design of realbuildings. The proliferation of increasingly elaborate buttressing pyramidsin later fifteenth century micro-architecture, therefore, was not matched byparallel developments in the design of full-scale spires. To a certain extent,in fact, elaborate sacrament houses and shrines began to displace spires asfoci of virtuoso artistic display. Because such micro-architecturalmonuments could not play the same public and urban roles that greatspires did, however, spire construction remained a crucial part of Germanicarchitectural culture throughout the Gothic era. Many of the mostambitious spire designers continued to explore the openwork spire themepioneered at Cologne and Freiburg, as discussed previously, while othersdeveloped innovative tower terminations that could be effectively realizedat large scale far more readily than diaphanous buttressing pyramids couldbe.

17 Hubel, Cathedral of Regensburg, 9.


Domes and WreathsAmong the most interesting of these alternative tower terminations werethose based on dome and wreath forms. Both of these formats resulted infairly compact massing, at least compared to traditional spires andmicroarchitectural buttressing pyramids. Of the two motifs, the dome wasof course far the older, since interlacing wreathes of arches emerged ontothe architectural scene only in the Late Gothic era, over a millennium afterthe construction of the Pantheon, the Baths of Caracalla, and other majordomed monuments of the Roman World. Significantly, though, few of thedomical canopies constructed in the Gothic era drew directly on thisRoman pagan tradition of heavy masonry construction. More relevant asprototypes were the timber domes built at the Church of the HolySepulchre in Jerusalem, and at the nearby Dome of the Rock, the Muslimshrine that was conflated in the Middle Ages with Solomon’s temple.Domical timber canopies were also built atop the masonry domes of manyByzantine churches, in a tradition echoed already in the thirteenth centuryat the Venetian church of Saint Mark. In the imagination of many northernartists, therefore, the dome form evoked Jerusalem, Byzantium, and theexoticism of the East, rather than the Classical Roman world. At the

8-12 Altenberg an der Lahn, monastery church, detail of wall painting.


monastery church of Altenberg ander Lahn, for example, paintersworking around 1300 used domicalforms as crowns over the figures ofthe apostles flanking the coronationof the Virgin (fig. 8-12).18 Over acentury later, Jan van Eyck useddomed forms in his representationof the Heavenly Jerusalem in theGhent Altarpiece (fig. 8-13). Assuch examples begin to suggest,the use of domes in northern latemedieval art had little to do withthe Italianate Renaissance impulseto systematically revive the formallanguage of classical antiquity.Indeed, the first dome-like towerterminations actually built in theGothic world, those of St. Mariaam Gestade in Vienna and St.Bartholomäus in Frankfurt, werec lea r ly mean t to evokecontemporary aristocratic crowns.In both formal and iconographical

terms, such crownlike forms have as much in common with the wreaths ofinterlacing arches seen in Gothic micro-architecture as they do with ancientor Renaissance domes.

The earliest scheme for a dome-like tower termination in the northernGothic world was probably that of St. Maria am Gestade, designed by theHabsburg court architect Master Michael around 1400 (fig. 8-14). Severaldecades earlier, an unusual seven-sided tower had been begun at thesoutheast corner of the church's choir. When its fairly plain lower storieswere under construction in the late 1350s, a small openwork spire like thatof Strassengel was probably the foreseen termination.19 The present 18 See Pablo de la Riestra, “Chapiteles bulbosos y casquetes en las torres alemanas entre elgótico tardío y el barroco,” Norba-Arte 16 (1996): 183-201.19 The most recent and authoritative source on Michael’s work is Hassmann, MeisterMichael. On the tower of St. Maria am Gestade, see especially pp. 308-18, whereHassmann provides a thorough overview of other cupolae-like structures that Michael mayhave known or contributed to, including the small wayside marker of Hainburg, the westtower termination of Melk Abbey, and the staircase turret of Deutsch-Altenburg, amongothers. The cupolae of St. Maria am Gestade, therefore, were not completely unique intheir day.

8-13 Jan van Eyck, Ghent Altarpiece,detail of inner lower panel.


domical structure, however, was added to the tower only in the earlyfifteenth century, by which time Master Michael had introduced the cupolaform to the workshop.

The first cupolae built at St. Maria am Gestade were the solid butdramatically cantilevered canopies over the western and southern entryporches of the nave. Because these canopies curve upwards slightly at theirsummits to support a stone Kreuzblume, each of them presents thesilhouette of a nearly semicircular arch with an ogee tip. Such arches, infact, define the lower margin of each canopy. Peter Parler, moreover, hadused arches of this format extensively in the articulation of PragueCathedral's upper choir. Thus, while it is possible that Master Michael wasfamiliar with representations of cupolae in northern painting, or that hemay have known Italian medieval experiments with the dome form, it

8-14 Vienna, St. Maria amGestade, tower and cupola.

8-15 Duke Rudolph IV Habsburg, “TheFounder.”


seems equally plausible that he may have developed his cupola designssimply by extrapolating from a common Parlerian arch form.20 The cupolais a natural three-dimensional extension of the ogee arch, just as the domeis that of the round arch, or the cone that of a straight-sided gable. Therows of crockets along the corners of the entrace cupolae at St. Maria amGestade underline their close relation to Gothic arch forms, and theirrelative independence of classicizing prototypes. These canopies wereprobably constructed during the main building campaign on the navewalls, which lasted from 1398 to 1414. The vaguely similar but talleropenwork cupola of the tower, however, was constructed only betweenroughly 1419 and 1429. Master Michael was probably dead by that time,since he is last mentioned at work in 1402.

Stylistic similarities between the articulation of the tower cupola at St.Maria am Gestade and the slender spire of the Stephansdom stronglysuggest that the former was constructed by members of the Stephansdomworkshop, under the leadership of Peter Prachatitz. The openwork traceryof the cupola, the pinnacles at its base, and the pattern of gable chevronswrapping about its middle, all recall features seen in the Stephansdomspire. The cupola form itself, though, was without parallel at theStephansdom. It therefore appears likely that the present form of the towercupola reflects a mixture of influences from Master Michael, who hadprobably determined the overall tower format already in the 1390s, andPeter Prachatitz, who was responsible for its construction and detailing.

One of the most striking aspects of the tower cupola at St. Maria amGestade is its crownlike appearance. With its zig-zagging belt of gables, itresembles the gabled crown of the Habsburgs in particular (fig. 8-15).Since Master Michael served as court architect to the Habsburg ArchdukeAlbert III, it is tempting to imagine that he foresaw this detail and itssymbolism already in the 1390s when he began work on the church. If so,then Peter Prachatitz was borrowing from Master Michael when heemployed the same zig-zag gable motif in the spire of the Stephansdom. Itis difficult to sort out the currents of artistic exchange between theStephansdom and St. Maria am Gestade tower projects in this case,especially since the great gable of the Stephansdom appears to have beenforeseen even in the early Freiburg-like plan for its south tower, as noted inchapter 6. Whatever the details of the tower's conception may have been,its crownlike appearance would have been unmistakable to its fifteenth-century audience. 20 Hassmann (Meister Michael, 315) suggests that Michael may have known AndreaOrcagna’s tabernacle in Florence’s Orsanmichele, or the crossing dome of Pisa Cathedral,but such appeals to Italian influence seem unnecessary to explain Michael’s work.


FrankfurtThe idea of the tower termination as a crown wasexplored not only in Vienna, but also in Frankfurt,the site of imperial elections, where the western towerof the parish church of Saint Bartholomäus wasdesigned by Madern Gerthener, one of the mostinnovative builders of the early fifteenth century. Thehistory of this tower’s slow construction underlinesthe extent to which major spire projects dependedupon a sense of common purpose at the local level.21

The Frankfurt project began auspiciously in 1415 as ajoint venture of the city government and the clergy ofSt. Bartholomäus. The city government, in fact,permitted the demolition of the old city hall to makeway for the foundations of the massive tower, whichwas destined to house not only the parish belfry, butalso the civic belfry and the city watchman.22

Gerthener, the initiating architect of the tower project,worked for both the city and the church. Gerthener,moreover, worked as both a sculptor and an architect,and his tower scheme appears to have been informedby an intimate acquaintance with Franco-Flemishsculpture and manuscript illumination.23 By its verynature, however, the Frankfurt tower project dependedon German traditions of spire design and on burgherpatronage. Gerthener's design for the tower thusrepresents an unusual synthesis of genres and media,incorporating influences from France, Germany andthe Low Countries, from the courtly and civicspheres, and from architecture and painting.

Gerthener's drawing of the tower, Frankfurt Plan A,displays this mixture of influences both in its forms

21 Much of the information in this section is drawn from Friedhelm Wilhelm Fischer's Diespätgotische Kirchenbaukunst am Mittelrhein, 1410-1520 (Heidelberg, 1962), esp. 42-50.See also Ernst-Dietrich Haberland, Madern Gerthener, “Der Stadt Frankfurd Werkmeister”(Frankfurt-am-Main, 1992), esp. 39-49.22 Martin Warnke, Geschichte der deutschen Kunst, vol 2 , Spätmittelalter und FrüheNeuzeit, 1400-1750 (Munich, 1999), 42.23 Since the style of his sculptures recalls the work of André Beauneveu, Jean de Berry'ssculptor-turned-illuminator, Fischer has proposed that Beauneveu’s influence may help toexplain Gerthener’s familiarity with Franco-Flemish manuscript illumination. SeeSpätgotische Kirchenbaukunst, 48.

8-16 Frankfurt,Plan A.


and in its techniques of execution (fig. 8-16). Drawn in three colors of ink,with details in perspective, Plan A seems to have been a presentationrendering rather than a shop drawing. By drawing on techniques frommanuscript illumination, Gerthener made his design legible and attractiveto lay audiences. The tower envisioned by Gerthener consisted of threeprincipal parts: a solid four-square base, an octagonal tower, and a cupola.Although this design lacks the vertical thrust of Ulrich von Ensingen'swork, the tapering of its silhouette combined with the subtlety of itsarticulation has an undeniable elegance.

The massive and simply detailed tower base acts as a stylistic foil to themore complex upper stories. The flat surface of the tower's western face isnot even relieved by doors--these are located on the tower's flanks. Aslender window slices down the middle of the tower's first story, its tracerymore Flemish than German.24 About halfway up this blocklike story, twinpanels of blind tracery near the edges of each tower face subtly announcethe emergence of the corner pinnacles. Slightly higher up, these pinnaclesare wrapped by interlacing ogee arches, elements popular in the laterfifteenth century but little known in Gerthener's day.25 The second story ofthe tower base appears nearly as tall and massive as the first, but itsarticulation is more lively, with bladed flanges flanking another windowwith quasi-Flamboyant tracery. Slender triplets of blind tracery articulatethe edges of the tower faces, displaced inward with respect to the cornerpinnacles launched from the story below.26 The foursquare section of thetower terminates, in Gerthener's design, in a balustrade of quatrefoilrosettes, whose conservatism reflects French influence.

In the octagonal section of the tower, the influence of German great spiredesign predominates. With its narrow proportions, the single-storied towercore resembles that of Freiburg im Breisgau. The free-standing cornerbuttresses recall the corner pinnacles of Cologne's Plan F. These buttressescarry two tiers of small flying buttresses that abut the tower core. This useof flying buttresses would subsequently become popular in Brabantinespire design, but in 1415 it was novel. The treatment of the buttress motifhere, in fact, is far different than that seen in the roughly contemporaryRegensburg single-spire drawing. Where the Regensburg drawing, with itsmultiple tiers of exceedingly slender buttress uprights, recalls fragilemicro-architectural monuments, the Frankfurt design appears more robust

24 Fischer, Spätgotische Kirchenbaukunst, 46.25 Fischer (Spätgotische Kirchenbaukunst, 46) attributes their presence to Parler influence,without citing a particular instance.26 Similar articulation strategies may be seen in the brick towers of St. Martin in Landshutand the Frauenkirche in Munich.


and traditionally architectural. Perhaps Gerthener was evoking the source ofthe Cologne corner pinnacles, the flying buttress uprights of the Colognechoir. The detailing of Gerthener's proposed tower core, moreover, wasrather conservative, with straight-sided gables and simple pinnacles thatwould not have looked out of place at Freiburg nearly a century earlier.

The most unusual element of Gerthener's design was its cupola. Despiteits lantern and terminal pinnacle, the domed form dominates the upperreaches of the composition. This departure from the traditions of spiredesign deserves to be understood in light of Gerthener's exposure to thepainting and illumination workshops of Berry and Burgundy. Cupolas anddomes of various sorts were relatively common in the architecturalfantasies of French miniaturists, and such precedents clearly informedGerthener's design for the Frankfurt tower.27 Because St. Bartholomäuswas the electoral church of the German kings, moreover, Gerthener and hispatrons probably chose a crownlike tower cupola to display theirconnection with the rituals of kingship. Whatever the iconographicalsignificance of its cupola, Gerthener's Plan A deserves recognition as asophisticated synthesis of manuscript illumination and spire design.

Gerthener's vision dominated the subsequent history of the Frankfurttower workshop, but changes to his design were introduced as work slowedover the course of the fifteenth century. The united support of the citycouncil and the parish had permitted rapid construction in Gerthener's day,with the first story of the tower being completed in 1423, after only eightyears' work. Gerthener's successor Leonhard Murer von Schopfeimmodified the details of Gerthener's design in his Plan B (fig. 8-17),bringing both the tracery forms and the style of draftsmanship more intoline with contemporary German architectural practice. A surviving groundplan for the tower also probably dates to his tenure as master (fig. 8-18).By the time of Leonhard's death in 1434, he had completed most of thesecond story of the tower.28

Work slowed dramatically at this point, as the alliance of the parish andthe city government began to dissolve. The growth of civic powerthreatened the clergy of St. Bartholomäus, who were reluctant to permit theestablishment of other parishes in the city. Evidently fearing that they werelosing control over even their own building, the clergy hired their ownarchitect rather than working with the city government, a particularly 27 Fischer notes that the domed crossing tower of Passau Cathedral was being erected atroughly the same time, but in that case the influence was from Italy rather than Burgundy(Spätgotische Kirchenbaukunst, 48). Passau may have influenced Munich’s Frauenkirche,where the domed western towers were completed by ca. 1525. See Alexander von Knorre,Turmvollendungen Deutscher gotischer Kirchen im 19. Jahrhundert (Cologne, 1974), 4.28 Fischer, Spätgotische Kirchenbaukunst, 42.


willful gesture given the significant role thatcivic monies had played in the project. In thenext half-century, the parish was scarcely able tocomplete the square-planned lower part of thetower, even though its construction was wellunderway in Gerthener's day.29

At this point the city council evidently becamefrustrated with the pace of tower construction.Having been equal partners in initiating thetower project, and having contributed large sumsto what was to have been in effect a civic as wellas religious monument, the wealthy citygovernment had both the reason and the meansto assert its influence. In 1483 they calledMatthäus Böblinger from Ulm to Frankfurt as aconsultant. Thanks to Böblinger's input, HansFluck von Ingelheim was hired to complete thetower. He erected the vault of the second story,bringing construction of the square part to aclose, and he began to build the tower octagonand its buttresses. By 1491, however, he wasdriven away by arguments with the parish clergy,who hired Nicholas Queck, the master of MainzCathedral, in his place. Queck's task, it appears,was to spare the parish further commitments tothe tower project by dramatically reducing costs.He developed a new plan for the tower, Plan C,in which the flying buttresses are dramaticallysimplified and the cupola eliminated entirely.The city council protested, forcing Queck toleave Frankfurt in 1497 despite his complaints tothe archbishop of Mainz. He was replaced byJakob Bach von Ettlingen, the personal architectof the Palatine Elector of Heidelberg. Under

29 The first master hired by the parish alone was Michael Kurze, a native of Ulm whoworked in Frankfurt from 1434 to 1438. His successor Jost Schilder directed operations until1463, at which point he was called to work in Strasbourg. In 1447 Schilder supervisedinstallation of the tower's bells, but the second story of the tower remained incomplete evenat the end of his long tenure. Between 1463 and 1472 Master Bartholomaus von Schopfeimcould proceed with construction only sporadically, as revenue became available to theparish. Over the next decade, no work at all was done on the tower by his successor JörgÖstreicher. Fischer, Spätgotische Kirchenbaukunst, 42.

8-17 Frankfurt, Plan B.


Bach, the workshop regainedsomething of its old form. Hereturned to Gerthener's design, thecity council having declared that"the old plan is the best."30 In 1507the parish at last accepted Bach asmaster, and, despite continuingfriction between the two factions,he completed both the toweroctagon and the cupola by 1513.Although the lantern and terminalpinnacle were not yet in place, thismarked the end of the medievalconstruction project.31 The towerowes its present configuration tothe restorations carried out in thenineteenth century, whichsubs tan t ia l ly accord withGerthener's Plan A (fig. 8-19).32

The crown-like tower terminations designed for Frankfurt’s St.Bartholomäus and Vienna’s St. Maria am Gestade were strikingly unusualin their early fifteenth-century context. Over the course of the fifteenthcentury, further alternatives to the traditional pyramidal spire form wouldbe developed, especially in the Low Countries. As the following chapterexplains, many of these Brabantine and Flemish belfry designs recallGerthener’s Frankfurt design both in their overall proportions and in theiruse of flying buttresses alongside the tower core. Direct sequels to thecupola forms seen in Vienna and Frankfurt, however, were rare. In theGerman-speaking world, meanwhile, the decades around 1500 witnesssednew experiments in the use of wreath and dome forms as towerterminations.

30 Fischer, Spätgotische Kirchenbaukunst, 44.31 According to Fischer (Spätgotische Kirchenbaukunst, 44), the city council in 1513ordered that the crane be taken down from the tower and a watchman's perch installed. It isnot clear why the council, whose goal all along seems to have been completion of the towerin accordance with Plan A, was suddenly willing to abandon Gerthener's vision in this lastinexpensive detail.32 The building had fallen into disrepair even before the fire of 1867, which triggered therestoration work.

8-18 Frankfurt, St. Bartholomäus,ground plan of tower.


Augsburg and its milieuAugsburg, in the late fifteenthcentury, emerged as one of theprincipal centers of suchexper imenta t ion . BurkhardEngelberg, the city's most notedlate Gothic designer, intended tocrown the great church of SaintsUlrich and Afra with twin wreathedtowers, which would rise alongsidethe choir, as a woodcut from 1516shows (fig. 8-20).33 Theseinterlaced wreaths of ogee archeshad much in common with thoseseen in earlier micro-architecturalmonuments, such as the sacramenthouse of Schwäbisch Hall. InEngelberg's scheme, though, thewreaths would have stood alone,without the vertical elements thatmade sacrament houses and othersuch shrines resemble traditionalpyramidal spires. Like MadernGerthener, therefore, Engelberg wasable to contrive a novel towertermination format withoutabandoning the formal vocabularyof Late Gothic design.

A far more direct challenge to theGothic design tradition came withthe revival of interest in true domeforms, even though this revivalinitially had little to do with thespread of Italianate Renaissanceclassicism. Instead, interest in theholy sites of Jerusalem appears tohave played a stronger role.34 A1486 woodcut illustration of

33 Bischoff, Burkhard Engelberg, 244.34 De la Riestra, “Chapiteles bulbosos,” 184-88.

8-19 Frankfurt, St. Bartholomäus,view of tower from west.


Jerusalem by Erhard Reuwich, for example, shows the Dome of the Rock,identified as the Temple of Solomon, inaccurately equipped with aswelling onion dome (fig. 8-21). Two decades later, in 1506, a shrinerepresenting the Holy Sepulchre was built in the Augsburg church of SaintAna, incorporating a prominently swelling dome, far wider at its equatorthan at its base (fig. 8-22). Both the onion dome and the swelling domeformats would enjoy widespread popularity as tower terminations in thesixteenth century.

Among the first tower schemes to incorporate these new forms were thosedeveloped by the Augsburg carpenter and sculptor Adolf Daucher, who in1514 and 1515 produced a series of models showing his designs for the so-called Luginsland tower. One of these, in particular, terminates in an ogee-profiled dome like an onion dome seen from the equator upwards (fig. 8-

8-20 Augsburg, church of Saints Ulrich and Afra,woodcut of Burkhard Engelberg’s scheme for thecompleted church.


23). Although Daucher was one of the first northern sculptors to exploreItalianate Renaissance forms, these models are not explicitly classicizing intheir formal vocabulary. Daucher's embrace of simple irreducible formslike the dome and the cylinder, however, involved a rejection of theprinciples of partiality and subdivision that had long been central to Gothicdesign in general, and to Gothic spire design in particular.

Ideas from both Engelberg and Daucher appear to have informedEngelberg's former assistant Hans Hieber, who in 1520 created an elaboratemodel of the pilgrimage church of Schöne Maria, which was to have beenbuilt in Regensburg (fig. 8-24).35 The twin towers flanking the east end ofthe nave, with their wreathed octagonal crowns, clearly derive fromEngelberg's designs for the towers of Saints Ulrich and Afra. Each of them,however, terminates in a series of three progressively smaller spheres,recalling the the terminal sphere in Daucher's Luginsland tower model. Theflattened onion-shaped half-domes of the cylindral excedrae flanking thechurch's hexagonal choir, moreover, resemble those in Daucher's model.Altogether, therefore, Hieber's design for Schöne Maria represents a

35 Franz Bischoff, “Les Maquettes d’architecture,” in Recht, ed., Bâtisseurs,” 287-90.

8-21 Jerusalem, Dome of the Rock,from a woodcut by Erhard Reuwich.

8-22 Augsburg, church of Saint Ana,Jerusalem shrine.


fascinating synthesis of the formal experiments undertaken in Augsburg inthe years around 1500.

Even in the southwestern quadrant of the Empire, where more traditionalapproaches to openwork spire design prevailed, the early sixteenth centurywitnessed a growing interest in domical forms, as Lorenz Reder's drawingof the planned Constance westwork demonstrates (fig. 7-25). The unusualopenwork onion dome seen in this drawing may slightly predate Daucher'smodels of the Luginsland tower, but Reder, who was clearly familiar withthe work of Burkhard Engelberg, may well have been attuned to the newideas about tower articulation that were being developed in Augsburg.36

Reder's openwork dome had no direct sequels, except for the simplerstructures later erected on the Constance westwork itself. This tepidreception is not altogether surprising, since the treatment of the dome as

36 Fischer, “Neu entdeckter Turmriss,” 28-30.

8-23 Augsburg,Luginsland, towermodel.

8-24 Regensburg, Schöne Maria, model.


openwork raises both technical and aesthetic problems. It would have beendifficult, structurally speaking, to construct the nearly horizontal haunchesof an openwork dome, at least without some sort of supporting structurefrom below. In visual terms, meanwhile, the openwork articulationexpressed quintessentially Gothic tendencies to create complex, striving,organic, diaphanous structures, tendencies opposed to the clarity andsolidity generally characteristic of domes. As these problems suggest, theopenwork articulation could coexist only rather uneasily with thealternative tower termination formats explored in the closing decades of theGothic era. Daucher's streamlined models, by contrast, embody the taste ofa newly emergent sensibility that has often been associated with the adventof the Renaissance in the north. Significantly, however, streamlined andsimplified tower terminations of various sorts had enjoyed popularity inthe German world well before the pivotal decades around 1500.

Streamlined and Reductive Tower TerminationsThroughout the history of Gothic architecture, competing impulses towardsconvolution and concision had coexisted, sometimes side by side. Ingeneral, there tended to be a rough correlation between the complexity of abuilding and its ecclesiastical or social rank. Mendicant churches, forexample, tended to be simpler in their articulation than cathedrals. Withthe emergence of free cities as major patrons of church and spireconstruction, though, these lines could become somewhat blurred, as thecathedralesque grandeur of the great parish churches in Freiburg and Ulmdemonstrates. The elaborate spires considered in this book, naturally, werebuilt in workshops whose members and patrons aspired to such grandeur.Even within such workshops, there could be gradations in complexity. Insome cases, this could result from changes in taste over time. In both theCologne Cathedral choir and the Freiburg west tower, for instance, theupper stories are far more complex in their articulation than the lower ones.In other cases, such contrasts arose from the architect's self-consciouschoices. Madern Gerthener, for example, clearly intended to contrast therichness of the Frankfurt tower octagon and cupola with the starksimplicity of the square tower base below.

The west facade of Magdeburg Cathedral provides a good example of howsuch mannered contrasts between richness and simplicity could affect lateGothic spire design (8-25). The cathedral's massive west block, whicharchitecturally expressed the power of the local archbishops, grew over a


long series of campaigns.37 Thesimple and boxy north tower wasbegun in the mid-thirteenthcentury, with construction of itssouthern pendant following severaldecades later; the overall form ofthis facade block followed fromthat of twelfth-century facades likethat of the Neuwerkkirche inGoslar, and it would later go on toinfluence the design of the MeissenCathedral facade.38

By circa 1300, a master familiarwith the complex and sophisticatedstyle of the Strasbourg andCologne cathedral workshops hadbegun to construct an elaborateportal zone between the austeretowers at Magdeburg, establishinga pattern of formal contrasts thatwould affect all subsequent workon the facade.39 In the latefourteenth century, a Prague-trainedmaster named Kunzel Vrankenfordadded a Parlerian balustrade to thisrichly articulated central zone. Kunzel, who likely knew of the blockybelfry story then being built between the towers of the StrasbourgCathedral facade, was probably the first designer to contemplate adding asimilar story between the towers at Magdeburg, but actual construction ofthis zone followed only later in the fifteenth century.40 Major campaignson the Magdeburg facade were promoted by Archbishop Ernst von Wettinand his immediate successor Albrecht von Brandenburg, during whose

37 The massive facade and large nave were begun in the episcopate of the ambitiousArchbishop Wilbrand; work on the facade was actively promoted by Archbishop BurkhardIII, whose attempts to repress the rights of the Magdeburg citizenry ended with his murderin the local City Hall dungeon in 1325. See Hans-Joachim Mrusek, Drei deutsche Dome(Munich, 1983), 194-96.38 See Michael Kirsten, "Typus und Stil der Westturmfront des 14 Jahrhunderts," in Hütter etal., Das Portal, 84-87.39 See Jaroslav Bureš, “Der Westbau der Magdeburger Doms: Ein Beitrag zu denAusstrahlungen der kölnischen und strassburgischen Hüttenkunst nach Niedersachsen,”Jahrbuch des Zentralinstituts für Kunstgeschichte, 3 (1987): 77-107.40 Bureš, “Der Westbau,” 98-101.

8-25 Magdeburg Cathedral, westfacade.


episcopate the towers and their ratherstumpy spires were completed in 1520.41

The master responsible for building thesespires, Bastian Binder, evidently felt thatthe character of the facade called for aconcise solution, whose solidity andmurality would complement that of theboxy towers below. Slender flyingbuttresses with complex profiles do flankthe octagonal cores of the uppermost towerstories, but the fragility of these buttressesactually underlines the massiveness of thetower cores, which are pierced only byslender lancet windows. Thus, while theMagdeburg facade includes richly decorativeelements, the ensemble as a whole conveysan impression of great solidity and formalclarity; its visual power differs qualitativelyfrom that of openwork spires and other suchdiaphanous structures.

The impulse towards streamlining andconcision was particularly marked inbuildings of lower ecclesiastical andarchitectural rank than Magdeburg Cathedral,a large basilica that served as the seat of avenerable and prestigious archdiocese. Hallchurches, significantly, were rarely crownedwith elaborately decorated spires; theStephansdom in Vienna stands as the onlytruly dramatic exception to this rule. AtNördlingen, for example, sheer tower sizeeventually won out over complexity. Theparish church of Saint George inNördlingen, a hall church, was begun in1427 by Ulrich von Ensingen's son-in-lawHans Kuhn. In the middle decades of thefifteenth century many builders of variousbackgrounds contributed to the church's

41 Mrusek, Drei Dome, 198. See also Ernst Schubert, Der Magdeburg Dom (Vienna, 1974),36-37.

8-26 Nördlingen,St. George.


construction, but links with the Ensingertradtion remained close, in part because thechurch was meant to have a great westerntower, comparable to although smaller thanthat of Ulm. In 1472, therefore, MoritzEnsinger presented the city council with a planfor the tower, which he foresaw with fivemasonry stories and a wooden openwork spire.In practice, however, master Heinrich Echsercompleted the tower in 1490 with sevenstories and no spire at all (8-26). The resultingstructure, with its great height and solidmassing, serves as a prominent and impressivevisual focus for the town and surrroundingregion, but it lacks the airiness, vertical élan,and geometrical complexity of the Ensingers'openwork spires. Unlike the facade ofMagdeburg Cathedral, moreover, it has nozones of decorative elaboration to serve asfoils to the austerity of the tower.

Streamlined or reductive tower formsnecessarily enjoyed greater popularity thancomplex spires in regions, such as Bavaria andthe Baltic coast, where good building stonewas not readily available. In Lübeck, forexample, two huge but simple wooden spireswere built early in the fourteenth century tocrown the massive facade of the Marienkirche,an enormous brick basilica built in asimplified cathedralesque manner. In thatrelatively early instance, formal streamliningresulted principally from material constraints.In the later years of Gothic, though, the formalconcision characteristic of brick constructionemerged as an aesthetic ideal in its own right,especially in the design of hall churches withstarkly simple exterior massing. The towersand spires of such buildings, naturally, tend tobe less elaborately detailed than most of the"great spires" considered in this book.

8-27 Landshut,St. Martin.


The tallest of these simple streamlined spires was that of St. Martin inLandshut, itself one of the largest hall churches built in the Gothic era (8-27).42 The construction of St. Martin reflected the pride both of the localcitizenry, and of the local branch of the Bavarian ducal family, theWittelsbachs. The first campaign on the church, in which the slender choirwas built to the designs of Hans Krumenauer beginning in 1385, wasfueled primarily by civic pride. Over time, however, the Wittelsbachsbegan to play a more prominent role, especially after they suppressed arevolt by the wealthy citizens in 1410. Perhaps because of this tensepolitical situation, work on St. Martin proceeded only relatively slowly inthe middle decades of the fifteenth century. Hans von Burghausen, aprolific architect supported by the Wittelsbachs, established the strikingdesign of the nave, with its slender columns, but he was unable tocomplete even the walls of the vessel before his death in 1432. It was onlyeight years later that his nephew and successor Hans Stethaimer undertookconstruction of foundations for the church's massive western tower. By1475 the tower had risen to the height of the nave, permitting thecompletion of the nave vaulting in time for the wedding of the WittelsbachPrince George with Princess Jadwiga of Poland. The pairing of the ducaland civic arms in the nave bosses suggests that a sense of commonarchitectural purpose had returned to Landshut by then. In the decades thatfollowed, the brick tower rose steadily; its simple pyramidal spire wascompleted in roughly 1500. A free-standing wreath of interlacing ogeearches at its base alludes to the sophisticated forms of German Late Gothicmicroarchitecture, but this small dose of ornament does little to counter thespire's spartan appearance. With an overall height of 133 meters, theLandshut tower is undeniably impressive, and it remains the tallest bricktower in the world today. In technical and artistic terms, however, it doesnot rank with the even larger and far more elaborate spires completeddecades earlier at Strasbourg and Vienna, or with their progenitor inFreiburg and its other major derivatives.43

42 See Peter Kurmann and Brigitte Kurmann-Schwarz, St. Martin zu Landshut: Hans vonBurghausen und seine Kirchen, vol. 1 (Landshut, 1985), esp. 38-39. See also Warnke,Spätmittelalter, 33-37.43 This fact undercuts Warnke's argument (Spätmittelalter, 43) that aristocrats such as theWittelsbachs were more effective than city governments as patrons of large-scale spireconstruction. Warnke's discussion depends on a contrast between the aristocratically-sponsored "successes" at Landshut and Munich, on the one hand, and the "failed" civicprojects at Ulm and Frankfurt. This biased sample makes no mention of the important civiccontributions to the successful projects at Freiburg, Strasbourg, and Vienna, nor does itmention the failure of episcopal and aristocratic initiatives such as those in Cologne andPrague. Construction of the Ulm tower was stopped for technical rather than socio-politcalreasons, moreover, and the Frankfurt tower was substantially completed in the Middle Ages.Most importantly, though, the Landshut and Munich tower projects involved fairly simple


The twin towers of the Frauenkirche in Munich, with their curiousbulbous terminations, represent an even more radical alternative to thetraditional great spire type (fig. 8-28). In these curious structures, the domeformat that had been more tentatively explored in German tower designsince the early fifteenth century found expression in a concise and forcefulidiom closely related to that seen in Landshut's St. Martin.

Like that church, moreover, Munich's Frauenkirche grew as the fruit ofboth civic funding and aristocratic initiative, coming this time from theWittelsbach Duke Albert IV, the Wise. The bulk of the church was built tothe designs of master Jörg Ganghofer between 1468 and 1488, aremarkably short time given the size of the church. This rapid pace ofconstruction attests both to the strong financial support the project received

designs that lacked the formal and technical sophistication of the openwork tradition. Thesuccessful completion of these structures, therefore, was a far less impressive achievementthan the construction of spires like those of Freiburg, Strasbourg, or Vienna.

8-28 Munich, Frauenkirche.


from indulgences and taxes, and tothe extreme simplicity of thearchitecture in question. TheFrauenkirche is a brick-walled hallwhose planar exterior surfaces areunrelieved even by salientbuttresses. The twin-towered facadeincorporates some decorativebrickwork, and the towers dochange in section from square tooctagonal, but the overallimpression is one of overwhelmingforce ra ther than formalsophistication. Significantly,though, the bulbous towerterminations were added only in1525.44 By that time relatedexperiments with domical formshad been undertaken in nearbyAugsburg, and the hegemony ofnorthern Gothic architectural culturewas beginning to erode in the faceof Italianate Renaissance ideas.There is nothing explicitly classicalabout the Munich cupolae, but theirstark formal irreducibil i tydistinguishes them from traditionalgreat spires, and even from earlierGothic cupolae like those ofFrankfurt's St. Bartholomäus or

Vienna's St. Maria am Gestade. The completion of the Munich cupolaethus marked one sign that the heyday of German Gothic spire constructionwas drawing to a close.

44 It remains unclear how early the cupolae were conceived, however. Pablo de la Riestra,citing the recent work of Hans Ramisch, argues that the cupolae were already part ofGanghofer's original plan of 1468 (“Chapiteles bulbosos,” 192). Warnke argues, however,that they were designed only in the 16th century (Spätmittelalter, 38-39). Warnke notes theclose relationship between their form and that of the “Temple of Solomon” shown inReuwich’s woodcut illustration for Bernard von Breydenbach’s Jerusalem travelogue, andhe also cites a 1489 debate about whether to accept a tower model made by Wibold, themaster carpenter associated with the project. This debate about dating has significantimplications for the originality of the cupola design: if indeed they were conceived before1500, they would predate most of the comparable dome designs developed in Augsburg.

8-29 Heilbronn, St. Kilian, tower.


The end of this golden age of spire construction, like the end of theGothic era more broadly, resulted from the intersection of many complexfactors. In purely artistic terms, the growing prestige of Italianate neo-classical design surely played a role in making the striving forms of Gothicspires appear obsolete. In the rare instances when German architectsattempted to create spirelike forms out of Italianate components, the resultswere less than compelling. In 1513, for example, Hans Schweiner stackedsuccessively smaller octagonal stories together to create the tapering towertermination of St. Kilian in Heilbronn, but the inherent modularity of theclassical vocabulary keeps his design from achieving the vertical élan oftraditional Gothic spires (fig. 8-29).

Ultimately, changing social conditions probably proved even moredangerous to the spire-building enterprise than the importation of Italianateforms. Free cities had been the most effective patrons of large-scale spireconstruction in the German empire, but their power diminished in thesixteenth century as the power of local princes grew. This fact, togetherwith the chaos of the Reformation and the Peasant’s War, served to erodethe stable base of civic patronage on which the most ambitious spireprojects depended. These artistic and social changes, of course, did nothappen overnight. The growth of interest in classical forms, for example,did not prevent German builders from drawing actively on Gothictraditions throughout the sixteenth century, and even beyond. Nevertheless,large-scale spire Gothic spire construction in Germany had effectivelyground to a halt by 1520. By that time, the spectacular achievements ofGermanic spire builders had affected not only the skylines of many citiesin the Empire, but also the architecture culture of late medieval Europemore generally.

Divergent Currents in German Late Gothic Spire Design 1

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