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composite systems
Gothic composition is mainly additive and in this far removed from the spatial and temporal unity of the classical and Romanesque work that preceded it. The principal of "continuous" representation, the inclination to review, as in film or cinematic space, all the particular phases of an event, the readiness to overlay what Edwin Panofsky called the "pregnant moment" with an expansive wealth of detail comes to the forward in this cyclical type of composition.
The new artistic urge often left cathedrals being left unfinished or, if finished, portraying that they are somehow incomplete, and indeed impossible to complete, due in part to the process of endless, indeterminable development. This impulse into the unlimited, this inability to be content with any conclusion is familiar to contemporary society. The High Middle ages with a dynamic sense of life, it's great unrest, dissolving traditional modes of thought, it's nominalistic turning to the multiplicity of changing and transitory particulars, are most directly apprehended.
desire and technique
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