“A personal and new synthesis, bringing together a deep knowledge of historiography and a strong theoretical reflection based on empirical scholarship.”

Le Monde

“A masterly, and very personal, analysis of gothic art.”

L’Histoire on the French edition

“This interpretation of gothic art, which deals not only with architecture, but also with spirituality and theology, is extraordinarily rich.”

L'Express

“Recht seeks to understand the dual evolution of changing theological positions—including such factors as private devotion and even religious taste—and modes of representation. Central to his idea is that the notions of seeing, in theological and also lay understandings, coincided with changes in representation; that ‘believing and seeing,’ as the title declares, are part of the same cultural system and, moreover, contingent on one another for the success of representation. . . . Recht’s book is especially at its most engaging when it opens up the treatment of images to suggest that ways of seeing, believing, and making constitute all together ‘l’art des cathedrales.’”

Art Bulletin | on the French edition

"An ambitious, broad-ranging study of the role and function of the image within the medieval church. Roland Recht, here in a translation by Mary Whitehall, brings together two subjects that are usually studied separately, architecture and sacred images, and he proposes that the latter cannot be understood or experienced without the former, in both spatial and liturgical terms. . . . Recht unfolds his analysis of the complex and multiple functions of medieval church sculpture within the many-sided prism of ambient space, ritual and liturgy and doctrine, enabling viewers who inhabit a different visual and spiritual world to recreate some part of the role of the image for the medieval viewer. . . .

This volume is of fundamental importance to the study of medieval art, and should become part of the intellectual apparatus of all who concern themselves with the religious image."

Caroline Bruzelius | Times Higher Education

"Readers will be rewarded by Recht’s brilliant analysis of Gothic architectural polychromy, stained glass, and stone sculpture, and should find the unity of Recht’s ’vision’ of the Gothic ultimately convincing."

Choice

"An intriguing study of Gothic accompanied by investigation of many critical questions in the discipline, written by an observant and thoughtful scholar."

Charlotte A. Stanford | Bryn Mawr Classical Review

"What has often been reduced to pious simplicity . . . is now rediscovered as vibrant, sophisticated, and flexibly intellectual. Whatever viewpoint one brings to Gothic architecture, one’s understanding of medieval art will be challenged and enhanced by Recht’s scholarly, measured panorama."

Matthew Alderman | First Things