I found you on Tik Tok and now I listen to your videos when I'm about to go to sleep bc your voice is super relaxing and history is a big interest of mine (:

My dumb goth ass thought this was gonna be about peter murphy and siouxsie sioux. Now I’m learning about buildings and shit. Love that for me.

Hi, Prof. Clark. I am much enjoying your art history lectures and found your early era lectures have really added to my understanding (which is some) of this vast discipline.

I am English and have always learnt that a chapter house was the formal meeting place for the clergy of the cathedral (hence such and such chapter of an organisation). This chimes with the round nature of the structure.

Having ChatGPTed it, I discover that they did also read a chapter of the Bible at the start of meetings but I should imagine they did that most of the time. Certainly, someone would be reading the Bible in the refrectory during meals.

Hope that helps add a nugget-ette of information.

Vale!

In chapter houses, a chapter of the rules of the monastery, usually those of St. Benedict, was read, and sometimes discussed, daily.  Chapter houses are round, so that the monks could sit in a round arrangement of seats, which was considered more egalitarian.

I acc learned something 😳😳😳

❤

can you do a video on the terminology you use? something like "the basics of art history terminology" haha. I love your videos so much!

At Ulm only the three lower levels of the tower are medieval. The spire that you are commenting there is 19th century work. You could have shown the tower of Freiburg-in-Brisgau instead which is entirely medieval and even more beautiful.

Thanks so much for your wonderful videos!  I am learning to paint and your scholarship is really amazing and helps me to improve my work and make it so much more innovative and high quality!

One might wonder if Sienna cathedral is gothic at all: compound piers are distinctive first of the Romanesque style.

Volume is way too low.

Paris didn't create the rayonnant style in the 1250's. Saint-Denis' reconstruction in the 1230's was already in that style  -the nave, the transept, the upper parts of the choir. It is rather Saint-Denis which is considered as the origin of the rayonnant style at least in all studies I am aware of. Where can one read that it comes from Paris? Must be some really old interesting book that I don't possess.

Toledo was retaken in 1085, not in the 13th century.... much Islamic influence is detectable already on Romanesque architecture, already through the conquest of Sicily by the Normans.

"Very unique and very different from anything that the French would have done". Hmmm. In fact you do also have hall churches in France: check out the cathedral of Poitiers. You find it even in Romanesque churches of the Poitou, hall churches in a sense, are firstly a French phenomenon.

A cathedral is not a monastery. Wells is not a monastery. Cathedrals did have cloisters for the canons, even in France at least from the time of Charlemagne - they have mostly been destroyed later, have survived perhaps better in England but that doesn't make them monasteries. A monastery is for monks not for canons. I mean priest canons not canons to fire with.

Ulm is not a hall-type church - you are looking there only at the side-aisles.

Sorry but the rose of the Sainte Chapelle is not rayonnant, it is flamboyant and of a much later period than the chapel itself: it is from around 1485, not from the 1240s. You have on it the monogram of Charles VIII. Funny you don't recognize its flames, whereas you go on later explaining the flamboyant and present this rose as the pike of the rayonnant style... Also it was so predictable that you'll make this mistake, having seen several of your videos now on gothic. Still nice that you make these videos, you could avoid however these very amateur mistakes if you read more into the monuments you are presenting.

How much of "islamic" culture and art actually belongs to Persian culture which dates back to 30,000 years bc?  Islam was  begun in something like 500 AD as a rebellion against Christianity in the middle east by an illiterate highwayman, to be kind.  I first learned of this from American immigrants from Iran who identify as Persian, with it's 30,0l00 history as opposed or Iranians, with it's less than 200 year history (manufactured by the west), or Islamic with its' nearly equal meager history of 1500 years, manufactured by an illiterate highwayman with probable epilepsy.