The biggest churches in the world: Anglo-Norman eleventh-century cathedrals | Hacker News Reader

The biggest churches in the world: Anglo-Norman eleventh-century cathedrals

stainedglassattitudes.wordpress.com

167 pointssolvent108 comments

Cathedrals are fascinating storehouses of religious and general historical knowledge. If you're ever in the vicinity of a British cathedral, taking a decent guided tour is well worth the time, as the building will likely have gone through around a thousand years of slow (or dramatic) change, intimately linked to the history of the local area.

In Hereford, for instance, the font has a lockable cover to stop locals stealing the holy water to make magic potions, the west end collapsed and was rebuilt, and the town's crest is surrounded by saltires, as the city endured a siege by an army of Scots which was finally broken by the arrival of the king.

Meanwhile St. Alban's was built from stone reclaimed from Roman buildings at the nearby site of Verulamium.

I live in Mérida, Yucatán, and our cathedral was built in the 1500s out of blocks taken from older Mayan temples. So you can go inside and see Mayan heiroglyphics on the walls!

The are a lot of old temples in that area. I've seen houses build out of those stones.

I've been meaning to visit Hereford Cathedral. Most famously it's home to the Mappa Mundi, a very large map of the world circa 1300. As well as the world's largest collection of chained books.

Winchester is another good example, with some corners of it being the original Norman building. You can see chests purportedly bearing the bones of the Saxon and Danish kings, bullet holes from the 17thC civil war in the pillars, and Jane Austen's grave.

While you're there, read up about William Walker too. An amazing story.

Peterborough Cathedral is very grand and beautiful, but all human figures, sculpted and painted, have their faces removed (chipped off or painted) from Reformation days.

Unfortunately that's common in a lot of places. Many of the cathedrals were actually used to billet roundhead troops, and they seem to have spent their free time doing that sort of thing.

It's an interesting piece of history at least.

There's a good time team on Salisbury Cathedral that's worth a watch, sadly the quality of the uploaded version is only 360p

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=so8WBdhsUnw

Salisbury is magnificent (though Gothic/13th c. - it replaced the Norman cathedral at Old Sarum.) Not to mention the town and Stonehenge as well!

Don't know if anything similar exist in the UK, but the Danish national museum have a website where you can read about every single church in Denmark. [0] It is mostly scans for books released through the years, but they give a lot of nice information like what old things the church process and what kind of church it is. An example could be this 220 page pdf about the Holmen church. [1]

They also have a interesting webpage about chalk paintings in Danish church a lot of images from all over [2]

[0]: http://danmarkskirker.natmus.dk/

[1]: http://danmarkskirker.natmus.dk/koebenhavn-by/holmens-kirke/

[2]: https://natmus.dk/salg-og-ydelser/museumsfaglige-ydelser/kir...

Not official, and it only covers East Anglia, but I really like this site http://www.suffolkchurches.co.uk/churchlists.htm (and its sister sites covering Norfolk, Cambridgeshire, etc). It's just one person, who's visited churches and put up his photos and descriptions as, I think, a personal hobby site, but I really like the writing style. http://www.suffolkchurches.co.uk/Blythburgh.htm is probably a good example at the grander end of the scale, or at the other end http://www.suffolkchurches.co.uk/lwenham.htm which is a small out-of-the-way church near where I grew up, which has some surviving 13thC wall paintings.

One thing that always amazes me was how these cathedrals were build. The techniques were amazing, even more so for the time. And then there is the way those specialized workers and architects were treated and paid. Some of that resembled modern workers rights, e.g. free weekends, limited working hours, safety. I guess it always helps to be part of very skilled, very limited group of workers that is very high demand.

I heartily recommend all Macauley books, but in this context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral_(children%27s_book)

Also for a historical fiction take, Ken Follett’s “Pillars of the Earth”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pillars_of_the_Earth

Just finished it yesterday by coincidence. Amazing book though Some of the violence was a bit too detailed for my liking

What impresses me is that many of these cathedrals were built slowly over many many years. Sometimes hundreds of years. Each new king or ruler would start a new "wing" of the cathedral and many times the construction would outlive their rule.

Indeed. Generational work was often involved. Don't see that much anymore.

Suburbs? : )

I've studied in a city with the tallest (christian) church tower (Ulm [0]). I regularily went up the tower, there was a place where you could sit and read and contemplate. I loved it. And because there were a lot of steps, not too many people went there.

The most impressive inside of a church to me was Sagrada Família which looks like being in a forrest (or in some Elven structure from Tolkien).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulm_Minster / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_structures_bui...

I thought the Sagrada Familia looked better when it was unfinished. Now it's painted, it looks like something halfway between a particularly elaborate Christmas cake and a Terry Pratchett cover from the 1990s.

I was there 25 years ago, went up one of the towers. Was a magical place even though, or perhaps because, it was very much unfinished.

Surely it still isn't finished? I thought it was expected to be finished in 2026. Do you have any urls showing the current state?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagrada_Fam%C3%ADlia

I was admiring the Sagrada Familia one day about ten years ago, and was astonished when a chap in a high-vis vest walked past me and started chipping away modifying some stonework with a chisel. He didn't look overly enthused, just getting on with his job.

The Sagrada Familia is a marvel, and deserves to be finished, but it was somehow magical to be there while it was (long-windedly) being built, worked on by skilled artisans probably not too different from someone working on the cathedral in my own home town in the 1090s.

> my own home town in the 1090s.

There are quite a few to choose from: Ely, Durham, Canterbury, Winchester, etc., and of course others around Europe.

There seems to have been a new impetus to the construction in the last ten or so years. No idea of the schedule though. I guess I should have said "more unfinished".

It looks like it’s been carved out of bone

When was that? I distinctly remember the Ulm cathedral tower stairs in late 1970s to have a dangerous spot with missing railings on either side of narrow and worn brick stairs running along a pane-less window, truly for believers only, and outright unthinkable by today's standards for public trespassing areas. Going all the way to the top of eg Freiburg Münschter also has a thrill to it for those scared of height.

It was in the 90s and I can't remember such spots, but the last 20m (?) are very narrow and steep and not a lot of light.

...while the outside resembles a termite mound:

https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/83175924339644023/

(hat tip: Daniel Dennett)

Ken Follet's Pillars of the Earth [1] deals with this subject, the building of a cathedral in the fictitious city of "Kingsbridge" in the middle ages. It is, of course, heavily romanticised and weaves the tale of the construction of the cathedral through with a number of family tales but it nevertheless is an interesting read.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pillars_of_the_Earth

It's a fantastic read. And a great introduction to the world of cathedrals along with medieval society and its various factions. The tv show is good too!

Can't confirm. The book is good, but the show is beyond pathetic. Better not touch it.

also a video game! https://store.ste ampowered.com/app/ 234270/Ken_Folletts_The_Pillars_of_the_Earth/

In order to understand how the architecture of middle ages and modern intertwined between Christian and Muslim worlds, please check this excellent video [1].

It's never ceased to amaze me by the fact that now most of the mosques now look more like Christian's Hagia Sophia and churches now looks more like Muslim Spanish Moors' Mezquita.

Also it's often an oblivious fact that Norman also conquered Sicily (after Muslim's cosmopolitan Emirate of Sicily) and obviously they had learnt a lot from the Islamic architecture that they brought and implemented the concepts to Britain and other parts of Europe [2].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvnVi5G5SQA

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emirate_of_Sicily

>churches now looks more like Muslim Spanish Moors' Mezquita

I've never seen any church that looks like that. The only Eastern architectural plan I can think of as having been exported West is the round style of the Dome of the Rock after it became a Templar headquarter.

>obviously they had learnt a lot from the Islamic architecture that they brought and implemented the concepts to Britain and other parts of Europe

There's nothing obvious about it. I see very little, if anything, in 11th c. Romance architecture (including Norman) that isn't just a spin on previous Carolingian types.

Islamic influence North of the Alps and Pyrenees seems restricted to decorative arts and fashion.

The elephant in the Mediterranean room is Rome, all the monumental architecture, including Islamic buildings, builds on Roman architectural knowledge a lot, adding its own decorations and elements.

We tend to forget that the entire North Africa and huge regions of the Near East, including today's Syria and Jordan, were Roman provincies for long centuries. This cultural bedrock did not go away during later conquests, it only eroded away very slowly.

You should also credit Persian architecture, from which Islamic tradition drew equally (although, for obvious reasons, less around the Med than in Asia).

In many cases the first version of the churches were literally built from a preexisting Roman building, recycling the stone. E.g. York Minster.

The main thing I can think of is the pointed arch. That appeared in Gothic cathedrals but not the earlier Romanesque ones, and is supposed to originate in Islamic architecture.

The way through which the pointed arch travelled to Western Europe is still up to debate. My understanding is that it was used decoratively in Islamic architecture, and that a load-bearing form existed in the Near-East but not fully realised. Single, isolated load-bearing pointed arches are still found in Turkey, Syria or Iraq in gates and bridges that predate Gothic architecture.

In my opinion that basic design was picked up during the Crusades and expounded upon due to the specific constraints of Christian architecture, that is building up rather than wide.

In the end I believe it makes far more sense that they saw something abroad used in large civil engineering and made use of out it, rather than picking a decorative feature of Islamic architecture for structural features.

I've been to the Mezquita-Catedral in Cordóba. It's a fascinating building and I do agree that it sort of forms a pair with Hagia Sophia, but I'm having a hard time seeing any influences it may have had on Western church architecture.

Other than the gothic altar section built square in the middle of the building it is very much a mosque with a completely different floor plan from the typical cross-shaped churches common in Western Europe since Romanic times. Even the typical round arches were already outdated in the West at that point in time.

As an aside, the name of the city is Córdoba - not "Cordóba" which would be the default pronunciation with no accent.

That said, Spanish / Moorish middle-age architecture is among the best and most beautiful in my opinion. Seeing how the later Christians borrowed so heavily from Islamic architecture and tradition shows that good ideas survive the test of time.

>churches now looks more like Muslim Spanish Moors' Mezquita

Have you never seen a church before??

Fun fact: Russian 'main' Orthodox church of Christ the Saviour looks like a cheap Taj Mahal imitation. [1]

[1]: https://img.likeness.ru/41/35/4135/1388229357.jpg

Russian Orthodox churches actually draw the same inspiration as most mosques. Roman church architecture started with this as inspiration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheon,_Rome

A famous example of the development is the Hagia Sophia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagia_Sophia

There's many examples of Byzantine era architecture which were the inspiration for Islamic mosques (many actually being converted into mosques): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_architecture

Now, if you know the history of the Russian Orthodox Church, or rather how Slavs became Orthodox in the first place, you'd know it's because the first Rus kingdom made contact with Byzantine Greeks and converted to Orthodoxy, hence the Greek influence in Russian (indeed all Slavic) churches.

Anyhow, the specific architectural style of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour dates back to the 11th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_church_architecture

The inspiration of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour was also said to be the Hagia Sophia, although IMO it looks more like early Russian cathedrals. Also, not sure about the angle you chose, but Christ the Saviour looks quite different from the Taj Mahal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral_of_Christ_the_Saviou...

Both do draw from the same architectural tradition, but the Taj Mahal's inspiration goes like this:

Pantheon/Roman Architecture -> Hagia Sophia/Byzantine architecture -> Islamic invasions -> Persian Architecture -> Mughal Architecture

Whereas Russian Church designs came from the same initial source but diverged in the 11th century:

Pantheon/Roman Architecture -> Hagia Sophia/Byzantine architecture -> Rus Empire conversion -> Russian Church architecture.

If anything, Russian churches do draw a bit of inspiration from western church architecture of the Renaissance (there's a well-know period of time where the Tsars attempted to westernise Russia), see St. Peter's Basilica: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Peter%27s_Basilica#/media/...

Mike, thanks for the lengthy excursion into history, but for me it is not new information (and actually being from Russia I'm used to seeing russian churches all the time).

And the thing is, traditional stock russian churches are rather different from Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, the latter being a rebuilt copy of a late 19th century design. And being such a late design (by the standards of our churches), it is hard to unsee that all major details of it are borrowed from Taj Majal: the dome, the ancillary domes, the proportions of major details. Famous Russian painter Vereshchagin (of the Apotheosis of War [1] fame) openly criticized the project for being a 'direct recreation of a Taj Mahal church from Acra'

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Apotheosis_of_War

> the dome, the ancillary domes, the proportions of major details.

I mean, 5 domed churches are pretty common. Domed buildings with a similar proportion are pretty common. Here's an example that pre-dates the Taj Mahal by 100 years: https://www.advantour.com/russia/rostov/assumption-cathedral...

Similar proportions albeit slightly smaller and taller main dome (and slightly larger ancillary domes), but the curvature of the main dome is slightly more similar to the Taj Mahal's main dome. Christ the Saviour Cathedral is probably somewhere between this and the Taj Mahal for proportions.

> Famous Russian painter Vereshchagin (of the Apotheosis of War [1] fame) openly criticized the project for being a 'direct recreation of a Taj Mahal church from Acra'

Self-hating Russians (Slavs in general actually) has always been a thing. Self-hating Russian artists and writers in the 19th century was definitely a thing.

IMO, Slavs' self-hating nature and distrust of, well, everyone, is a mostly good trait but sometimes prevents them from seeing the positive side of things (my family is Ukrainian but I grew up in the west).

The universe became conscious in the form of humans and asked ‘who made me?’

These historical artifacts are a beautiful testimony to this profound question that we can only contemplate for a small amount of time before we turn back into stardust.

Not the place for apologetics on either side, but I've never grasped how the idea that we weren't created can be logically persuasive.

Emotionally persuasive, maybe.

Belief in being created requires belief in some being (your creator, or their creator, etc...), _not_ being created - the prime mover. Unless you believe in an infinite regress of creators I guess.

Doesn't the same infinite regress exist in physics? I know they argue that it's meaningless to ask what came "before" when the universe and time didn't exist, but the idea it all just started out of nothing or has always been seems to me as unsatisfactory as "God did it".

Absolutely. If you say something came before the universe, then you need a new word to describe that, and what was previous called the universe is no longer (by definition/need for a term to encapsulate all). Personally I don't believe physics is yet equipped to answer such questions, nor can it be until we understand time (and so probably quantum gravity, due to relativity).

But you can’t use the word ‘before’ since time didn’t exist.

These are concepts that probably humans can’t grok because we are so wedded to time.

God as a the Ground of Being in the words of the Christian Existentialists. God is not separate from creation, God as Verb, God as transcendent and so on. The completion of the chain of ordinals. There is a lot of theology on how you don’t need a chain of creators. “Begotten not made.” While we humans are clearly not transcendent or immanent, most people don’t try to nail down what they believe as God into a little piece of reality, but as something more pervasive. Loving all everywhere and subtly encouraging all beings into doing their best at each moment.

By definition we were ‘created’. The argument is over whether it was meaningless random creation (atheism) or whether there is meaning beyond the veil (theism).

Infinite regress of creators sounds the most compelling to me. Wouldn't God also wonder why he exists?

I'm a very (small "o") orthodox Christian and consequently I don't think that God wonders why He exists, but I do think that is a very insightful question!

So would argue that God is ‘to be’ and therefore would not wonder.

Infinite regression of creators: Mormonism

No argument on either side is particularly logically persuasive, so the best we can strive for is plausible.

Something akin to "Dust Theory" from Permutation City is a semi-plausible theory of non-creation (although, as it's fiction and must at least pretend to entertain a plot, some happenings in the book are much more far-fetched).

Edit: although on second thought maybe the book's actually more of a theory of creation, and we're the insects. I don't know.

Permutation City's dust theory was the first idea that made me think: oh maybe something like that. It ties in with the whole "why isn't there just nothing" - total nothingness is a state as well. Probable, coherent states "exist" (maybe).

I think a better question than "who made us" is "where are we?"

> The universe became conscious in the form of humans and asked ‘who made me?’

Or, more subtly, "who is making me?":

> Distinction: A sequence of changers can be ordered essentially or accidentally. These are called per se and per accidens sequences.

> A sequence is ordered accidentally if each changer in the sequence possesses the power to change another regardless whether any prior changer is still acting. For example: a woman may possess the power to give birth regardless whether her mother is still alive. She possesses the power of birthing in and of her own self.

> A sequence is ordered essentially if each changer in the sequence possesses the power to change another only if a preceding changer is acting concurrently upon it. For example, a clarinet does not have the power to play Mozart's Clarinet Concerto in A in and of itself. It will only play if Sharon Kam is playing upon it concurrently.¹ A mover like the clarinet is called an "instrumental" mover, happily so since the clarinet is literally an instrument! In a similar wise, TOF's very own clarinet will not make music by itself. Unfortunately, it does not seem to make music even when TOF is playing it, although he has summoned ducks in this fashion.²

[…]

> 1. An instrumental changer cannot transmit a change unless a primary changer is acting concurrently upon it.

> 2. An infinite regress has no primary changer.

> 3. There cannot be an infinite regress of instrumental changers.

* https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2014/09/first-way-part-ii-two-l...

You do not keep yourself in existence, i.e., you do not prevent yourself from going *poof* into nothingness. Something "underlies" your existence and keeps you 'going'. And something underlies that, and something… But it has to stop somewhere. A bad analogy: in a sky scraper the 99th floor keeps the 100th floor in the air, and then 98th keeps the 99th, …. But at some point there needs to be bedrock.

The eventual Prime Mover is what theologians refer to as God: that which nothing else can exist without.

Interesting factoids (well, perhaps just to me, as I live about 10 minutes walk away) - Lincoln Cathedral (photo in the article) was for several hundred years the tallest building on Earth, and even now the tallest point (given that it's on a hill) looking east until you get to the Urals.

The cathedral with the highest nave (ie height of ceiling in the main worship area) is the Hagia Sophia. Its nave is ~7.5m/25ft higher than any other cathedral.

Although it still stands, it is technically not a church anymore. The Romans took it for a while and then the Turks. It had been a museum and last year became a mosque again.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagia_Sophia

>ie height of ceiling in the main worship area

That's not what a nave is. "Nave" quite literally means "boat". It refers to the elongated, cage-like, spined structure of basilical and later on Latin cross plans.

Saint Sophia can't have the highest nave because it doesn't have one to begin with, it has a dome. They're very different structures.

The word nave is in fact used for other things than Western church architecture. But, if you want to keep records for the highest naves and define them to be only Western naves, you win :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nave

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Orthodox_church_archit...

The Romans took it for a while

Do you mean the conquest of the 4th crusade? Those people weren't romans, arguably nobody was by the 13th century - perhaps if anyone, the locals had a better claim to it than the conquerors.

The Eastern Roman Empire fell in 1453 when the Seljuk Turks conquered Constantinople. The Ottoman Emperor's titles included Kaysar-i-Rum. I can't remember the dates but when the Greeks were conquering Crete their co-linguists described the conquerors as Hellenes while they were Romans.

If you go by the criterion of (primary) self-identification there were Romans until the 1800s at least. By unbroken institutional continuity with the bureaucracy of Empire you can argue over whether it ended in 1453 or 1922.

Sure, but if you take an even mildly expansive definition of 'Roman' then Romans just straight up built the Hagia Sophia and the crusaders of the 4th crusade are even less Roman so maybe we're mostly longwindedly agreeing?

Difference of emphasis. You seem to think the "Byzantines" were in some important sense not Roman, or that there's room for argument that they weren't. I disagree. They knew themselves as Romans for the excelent reason that they were citizens of the Empire.

from the other perspective, the only ones not calling them roman are 'us' ... so there's that

I mean, you could go further; there’s a not-totally-bonkers argument that the Catholic Church still provides continuity today.

1922? What institutions were that of the Empire?

The Empire of Rum [Rome], with its Kaysar [Caesar], ended in that year. The Ottoman Empire was abolished then.

1922 is the year Kaiser Karl I. of Austria-Hungary died.

There was a thing called the Holy Roman Empire. [0] An Orthodox seminary professor remarked that it was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire - so you may be onto something. Although I took a history of Christianity course in uni, it was taught by a RC priest, and there were no lessons about the crusades. You did get me curious though, maybe I'll get a book about that whole situation at the time.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Roman_Empire

I’m bemused how you could possibly have a third-level course on the general history of Christianity that skipped the crusades.

I wonder if the source of the confusion is this sort of terminology

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_Empire

it sort of sounds like a synonym for Roman, it was one of the (curiously few!) conquests of Constantinople, etc. It just wasn't actually Roman anything.

from that page:

> In a famous assessment of the name, the political philosopher Voltaire remarked sardonically: "This body which was called and which still calls itself the Holy Roman Empire was in no way holy, nor Roman, nor an empire."

It's also beautiful. It's pretty interesting to how it's been modified from a church to a mosque, too. Typically mosques are oriented so that when you pray towards Mecca, you're also naturally oriented towards the back of the building. Since Hagia Sophia was originally a church, it's not quite oriented towards Mecca. The carpet is rotated a few degrees clockwise, so you pray a few degrees off of the natural orientation of the architecture. I had the opportunity to visit about a month ago => https://www.instagram.com/p/CTY85M-IhBu/.

Many of the mosques in Turkey are just gorgeous. If you're in Turkey at some point, a day trip from Istanbul to see 4 biggest mosques in Edirne is very much worth it.

The Hagia Sophia is World Wonder. Its size resembles a small mountain, the scale on the inside is just unbelievable!

The blue mosque across the park there is also a feat of engineering. Highly recommended!

In the Chester, Saint John photo (4th one) you can clearly see a non-grouted horizontal line across the stone walls. I’ve seen this in many cathedrals and was wondering 1) what it’s for and 2) if that’s part of the original construction. My guess is that it’s some sort of contemporary mitigation to avoid cracks?

The electricity cable, running across the three identical half-cylinder pillars?

oh my, you're right, next time I'll bring my glasses!

I always thought this was the normal size for churches until I left home (I grew up by St Albans Cathedral, also known as the Abbey amongst locals as the church previously had a monastery. You can still see where it was attached before it was demolished). I'm stuck between feeling disappointed that I can't visit churches like these where I currently live and privileged that I grew up near one!

100 years later than most mentioned but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cologne_Cathedral is now the largest gothic cathedral.

I was on a trip with my wife, and we had a two-hour layover in Köln (Cologne). We decided to make a run for the cathedral during that time. We sprinted from the airport to the train station, and rode all the way to Hauptbahnhof (central station) which is right next to the cathedral. We got maybe 15 minutes to gawk at the size of that thing before we had to run back to the train station.

Definitely take a day to go see that thing if you get the chance. It's impressive. I'd be sad we didn't get to see it if we were not already so exhausted from seeing so many amazing things in Europe on that trip!

It's a miraculous gift to humanity that this thing survived the allied bombing in WWII. Much of the rest of the city was levelled.

Too get an idea of just how close we came to losing this treasure, check out this photo of the city after the bombing:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7f/Koeln_19...

Notice the bridge just a few hundred meters away.

Some video exists too - George Stevens film..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hwy8SzVmWGc

Köln from 2:40

I grew up in this village[1] and went to this church when I was young. The church is though to date to early 12th century but there have always been a church there since Anglo Saxon times.

I'm no longer a believer but I absolutely love history.

[1] https://rogatevillage.net/church-history/

I used to live near a church that quartered troops during the English civil war, it dated back to the 1100s.

The new village I’ve moved to has a practically new church, only the 1600s. My own house however is more impressive - I have the original deeds going back to 1831, which is quite humbling looking through them.

The pub in the village has been around since the 15th century. You can see original parts of the old building inside. There's a legend that smugglers used the pub for their clandestine activities and also there was a famous murder of a customs officer too.

It's interesting how much "ceremonial" buildings are important to architectural advancement. Pyramids, towers, temples, churches, cathedrals, palaces.

It's a historical oddity, when factories, shipyards, skyscrapers and other utilitarian structures surpass them.

I think its political more than ceremonial. And you can now find the same effect in skyscrapers.

Neither ceremonial nor political, but religious. (Religion is also more fundamental than politics.)

Skyscrapers are precisely the OP's point: they're not religious. In previous centuries, the tallest buildings were religious. They were at the center of town. Or of course you can interpret skyscrapers as cathedrals of the new religion.

IMO, the (archeological) designation of "ceremonial" applies to all these. Distinctions between religion, politics, culture and such are often only visible once you are culturally fluent.

Roman Temples tended to have all these roles. Ceremony & Religion. Political activity. Treasury/mint activities. Etc.

It was recently reported that the stained glass at Canterbury cathedral may be older than originally thought to be, potentially dating back to the early 1150s. It's quite awe-inspiring to think they are nearly a thousand years old.

I'm fascinated and amazed that 11th century engineering was so advanced.

But why couldn't they draw or paint worth shit? Art from the middle-ages looks like it was done by their six year old kids.

They had amazing art. What you may be referring to is the notion of craftsmanship. There was no mass reproduction, but individual people (of all skill levels) made by hand their own art, incorporating it into every day objects and adding decorations to even various bricks that make up a wall or putting reliefs in what (to us) would be random places. This can be seen with a little walk around Venice, for example. You'll see gargoyles staring at you from back alleys, from stones on the street, from awnings on houses, the tops of keyholes in gates or attached to lamps hanging in the street. Little bits of art everywhere, made by millions of people. Most of that would not meet the critera for realism and technical proficiency of academic art, but the overall effect is one of great beauty.

You also see this with the painstaking illuminations on books -- the monks didn't just copy the books, they drew, adding their own art, throughout the book. Now maybe they were trained in copying and Latin and not in drawing, but they still drew everywhere they could draw. In the margins of pages, around letters, along the spine and between paragraphs. It was an explosion of art, from the carvings a carpenter would add to the handle of a water bucket to the carvings a smith added to the side of a spoon, or adding flowers to a dresser and turning door handles into bees or serpents, or the thousands of little statues and figurines filling churches. Then we have stained glass -- not even a simple window would do, the window had to be made with hundreds of drawings in it and different colored glass. The floors with different colors and carvings on tiles. Drapery with elaborate figures sown into it. Art, art, everywhere, there was art, only they considered it craftsmanship.

No, I'm talking about drawings and paintings, just like I said.

I share your appreciation for, say, the 12th century frescos in the Apse of Sant Climent de Taüll [1], but there's nothing remotely good about the draftsmanship in any way. The best of early medieval painters are solidly outclassed by the primary schoolers of the industrial revolution.

Illuminations, you say? Like the famous drawings in the St. Albans Psalter? [2] Or the great Saxon Benedictional of St. Athelwold? [3] No sense of perspective, or even any recognition of a third dimension. And what the fuck is going on with the anatomy?

Would you frame anything from the Babmurg Apocalypse and put it on your wall? The French [4] and the Germans [5] were no better, and things didn't improve in the 13th century [6].

And then, seemingly overnight, the Renaissance happened and we had masters like Michelangelo setting standards for the rest of history. Explain that?

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apse_of_Sant_Climent,_Ta%C3%BC...

2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Albans_Psalter#/media/File...

3 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benedictional_of_St._%C3%86the...

4 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottonian_art#/media/File:11th-...

5 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolingian_art#/media/File:Eb...

6 - https://artgallery.yale.edu/collections/objects/286

Unpopular opinion: these cathedrals represent a horrifying waste of human capital, time, and talent. The cathedrals consumed a significant level of GDP during the times they were built. Imagine if those funds had been put into science instead - we may have seen the Renaissance in the 1300's. Every human life would have been qualitatively better.

I thought the biggest in terms of tallest ist the Dom in Ulm, Germany and the biggest as regards the m2 size the Cathedral in Seville.

These things are basements compared to some mosques I’ve seen.

I don’t know if this was intentional, but I found it hilarious that while browsing this incognito on the iPhone, all the ads were for KY-Jelly.

I can't help thinking that the people who built this thought "bigger church means god with bigger dick".

That says more about you than the people who built cathedrals.

I feel sorry for you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com