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cathedral
The spiritual mobility of the Gothic age can be traced in the visual arts and architecture. It is a period in which the interest of the artist shifts from grand symbols and metaphysical concatations of Classical and of Romanesque art to the portrayal of the immediately experienced and the particular. Organic life comes to be respected and the individual things of experienced reality becomes subjects.
One searches nature no longer merely for analogies of a super-natural reality, but rather for traces of one's own world and reflections of one's thoughts. Gothic naturalism manifests itself in the representation of human and natural form.
It is a shifting of the philosophical basis of the medieval world-view by the substitution of a nominalist for a realist metaphysic. Nominalism reflected the dissolution of authoritarian forms of community and the triumph of a social life built out of infinite individual gradations over one based on unconditional subordination of the individual. Nominalism was dynamic, liberal and progressive in outlook.
composite systems
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