La Frontera del Gótico: James Fergusson y la arquitectura española

Abstract

The surveys of art history written by anglophone scholars picture a map of the Gothic architecture that leaves Spain out. This paper inquiries into when, how and why this marginalization begun, tracing it back to the Victorian historian of architecture James Fergusson. On the one hand, Fergusson argued that the Spanish monuments were imperfect imitations of European models. On the other hand, he claimed that the Spaniards were a semitic race, lacking artistic genius and unable to create any architecture of worth. These formal and ethnological arguments led him to conclude that the southern border of the map of Gothic architecture should end at the Pyrenees and exclude Spain. At a deeper level, however, what was really at stake was not the extension of the map of the gothic, but of Western Europe, and whether Spain deserved to be included in it.