Originally published in Germany in 1914 under the title

Die E11twick/1111gsphnse11 der 11e11eren Bn11k1111sf.

Translated with permission of Verlag B. G. Teubner, Stuttgart.
Copyright @ 1968 by
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be
reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or by any information storage and retrieval
system, without permission in writing from the
publisher.
Set in Linofilm Palatino and printed and
bound in the United States of America by Halliday Lithograph Corp.

ISBN 0 262 06024 8 (hardcover)

ISBN O 262 56013 5 (paperback)

Second printing, first MIT Press paperback edition, Jw1e 1973

Library of Congress catalog card number: 68-18236

Respectfully dedicated to Heinrich Wolfflin

Foreword
Paul Frankl, one of the last survivors of the golden age of German art history, died in
Princeton, New Jersey, in 1962 at the age of eighty-three. He was born in Prague, and
took his doctoral degree in Munich in 1910. After publishing his dis­sertation on fifteenth-
century stained glass in southern Ger­many and a small handbook on early Renaissance
architecture in Italy (1912), he began writing Die Entwicklungsplrnsen der neueren
Baukunst, which appears here for the first time in translation. It was presented in 1914 as
his Habitationsschrift (the work traditionally required in Germany of candidates for a
university post) to the renowned professor of art history at Munich, Heinrich Wi:ilfflin. It is
characteristic of Frankl's intel­lectual independence that his book although in many ways
inspired by Wolfflin's early architectural study, Renaissance und Barack (1888), was
essentially an attack on, or at least a vigorous criticism of Wi:ilfflin's thesis and method.
Appointed to a chair at Halle University in 1921, Frankl began to work on the subject that
was to be his major interest during the next forty years-medieval architecture. Like Wi:ilf­
flin, he believed that the specialist had a responsibility to in­form the general reader, and
his major books are historical surveys: Die friihmittelalterliche und romanische Baukunst
(1926), The Gothic: Literary Sources and Interpretations Through Eight Centuries (1960),
and Gothic Architecture (1962). In 1934 Frankl was dismissed from the University by the
Nazis, and during the next four years he was occupied in preparing the manu­script for
Das System der Kunstwissenschaft (1938), a monumen­tal theoretical work of over a
thousand pages. In 1938 he came to the United States. In 1940 he accepted a research
position at the Institute for Advanced Study, at Princeton, which he held until his death.
Much of Frankl's influence as a teacher and scholar is due to his lifelong concern for
historical and critical theory. He was convinced that history is a philosophical discipline and
that the historian should present his data within a framework of explicitly stated principles.
The ideas expressed first in Die Entwicklungsplrnsen became the core of Das System der
Kunst­wissenschaft, which Frankl felt to be his most important contri­bution to scholarship.
It was the greatest disappointment of his career that his colleagues and the younger art
historians were so put off by the length and impenetrable language of Das System that it
had no impact on the field, and in his last years­until the day before his death-he was
confidently engaged in writing a shorter and more accessible version. Another cause of the
failure of Das System was an antagonism toward theory and abstraction that developed in
the second generation of modern art historians and still survives today. On this account,
the translation of Die Entwicklungsphasen, written over half a
century ago, can be a timely proof of the effectiveness and necessity of analysis based on
a theoretical position.
In Principles of Architectural History, Frankl proposes two interlocking systems, one critical,
the other historical.
The critical system establishes four categories for the an­alysis of architectural
monuments:

1." spatial composition

2. " treatment of mass and surface
3. " treatment of light, color, and other optical effects
4. " relation of design to social functions

These subdivisions depart from those more commonly used in architectural criticism based
on three categories established by the Roman architectural theorist Vitruvius: Firmitas (the
use of materials and structural technique in design), Commoditas (the accommodation of
the building's use to its design), and Venustas (the aesthetic and symbolic aspect of
design). Perhaps because he is examining the evolution of an architectural epoch not
radically affected by structural innovation, Frankl chooses to de-emphasize Firmitas; he
retains the concept of Commoditas in his fourth category but interprets it more vividly than
his predecessors. Venustas he expands into three categories. The first category, spatial
composition, is an important innovation of the turn of the century in German architectural
criticism. The historians Brinckmann, Rieg!, and especially Schmarsow estab­lished the
foundations on which Frankl's analysis is based. Critics of the nineteenth century, a period
in which almost all architects concocted designs out of the vocabulary of past styles,
experienced buildings not as spatial environments but as evoc­ative forms and surfaces.
Frankl recognizes this experience in the second category, which is the focus of Wi:ilfflin's
system in Renaissance und Barack. The new image of the architect as pri­marily a creator
of spaces that elicit aesthetic responses parallels the principles of the radical modern
designers working before· the First World War, although there is no evidence that these
principles directly influenced the historians. Frankl was prob­ably more attuned to the
architects of the Jugendstil than to the pioneers of the Modern Movement.
Frankl's third category is also indebted to innovations in contemporary European thought,
primarily in the young sci­ence of psychology, to which he refers in the introduction to
Chapter 3. While his observations on architectural space are based on an intellectual
analysis of the abstract image of the ground plan, his "visible form" is based on the
sensuous expe­rience that emerges only as one moves round and through a building, that
changes with every step, and is affected by the position and intensity of the light sources.
In earlier criticism, buildings had been characterized from the point of view of an
[viii]
observer standing motionless and looking at a fai;ade or an interior from the position a
photographer might choose to ob­tain the most favorable single view. Frankl's innovation
recon­structs the kinetic experience of the observer who arrives at a single image as the
product of many partial images. This is the only way to analyze adequately later Baroque
and Rococo build­ings, and it is not surprising that the method of Frankl's prede­cessors
was both the result and the cause of their preference for the more static design of
Renaissance architecture. Frankl's "visible form" draws into the orbit of architectural
criticism an analysis of the processes of perception that had revolution­ized the approach
to the figural arts at the close of the nineteenth century, through the theories of
Hildebrandt, Fiedler, and Rieg! (whose distinction between "haptic" and "optic" experi­
ences must have influenced Frankl's separation of "corporeal" and "visible" form). Frankl's
statement at the beginning of Chapter 3:
We interpret as three-dimensional every single image of an object that we receive from
any one viewpoint, but what is essential in viewing architecture is that we accept these
isolated images as merely preliminary arrangements, not as ends in themselves. To see
architecture means to draw together into a single mental image the series of three-
dimensionally interpreted images that are presented to us as we walk through interior
spaces and round their exterior shell. When I speak of the architectural image, I mean this
one mental image.
reminds us that the principles of Gestalt psychology were for­mulated in Germany during
the years in which this book was written.
The final category, "purposive intention" (Zweckgesin­nung), offers a critical tool that
Wi:ilfflin had excluded from his formalist system: the analysis of the relationship of
buildings to the social institutions for which they are conceived. As Frankl says, the
occasional earlier writers who recognized the signifi­cance of cultural history for
architectural criticism had been content to introduce their discussion of a building or a style
with a summary of the historical events of the preceding years­a device that seldom
furthered an understanding of the actual relationship between social processes and
architecture. Frankl focuses attention on one aspect of this relationship: the way in which
the spatial conception of a building, its furnishings, and ornament are suited to the
activities for which they are de­signed. His formulation of the problem raises the interpreta­
tion of Vitruvian "commodity" to a high intellectual level at which meaningful connections
can be made between art and other aspects of a culture. This principle also was
stimulated by changes in his environment: the emergence of "functional­ism" as central to
modern architectural theory and the impact of sociology and anthropology on the writing of
history. An
earlier but less effective attempt had been made by Henry Adams in Mont-St.-Michel and
Chartres (1905). Frankl does not consider the symbolic function of architectural spaces,
forms, and ornament-the "iconography" of architecture-which was to become an important
feature of more recent criticism, partly through the influence of his most distinguished
student, Richard Krautheimer.
The historical framework within which these criteria are tested subdivides post-medieval
architecture into four "phases":

1. " 1420-1550, with examples chosen primarily from the work of Italian architects from
Brunelleschi to Antonio da San Gallo the Younger
2." 1550-1700, encompassing, like the remaining phases, the whole of European
architecture
3." the eighteenth century
4. the nineteenth century

Frankl thus ignores the widely accepted differentiation be­tween the styles of 1420-1500
("early" Renaissance) and of 1500-1550 ("high" Renaissance), which later historians have
represented as quite distinct. Following Wi:ilfflin, he suggests that the architecture of the
later 15oo's already shows the char­acteristics typical of the following century and should
be classed as "Baroque," although he is reluctant to use this term, which was then still so
charged with negative overtones. The third phase encompasses primarily the Rococo
style, and the last phase, the many architectural modes of the nineteenth century.
Frankl's summary treatment of the fourth phase is probably due to the difficulties he
encountered in attempting to rep­resent nineteenth-century architecture as a stage in the
evolu­tion of Renaissance style, a thesis he accepted from another influential predecessor,
Heinrich von Geymiiller. Today, from a distance of another half century and with the aid of
volumi­nous scholarship on the architecture of the last two hundred years, we generally
identify the twilight of the Renaissance tradition with the Rococo and Neo-Palladian styles
of the later eighteenth century. If Frankl had revised this text in his later years, he probably
would have eliminated his fourth phase.
Within each of the four critical categories, the four historical phases are examined in turn
with a further subdivision, where required, between religious and secular architecture.
As in Wi:ilfflin's essay, the historical evolution of forms fol­lows a predetermined path, so
that the individual architect can only adjust to rules somehow imposed upon him by the
logic of preceding steps. Although the architect is mentioned by name, when known, he
does not appear to be responsible for the dynamics of style: the true protagonists of
Frankl's four phases are immanent style-forces (Riegl's Kunstwollen). "The development of
style," he says, "is an intellectual process over-
riding national characteristics and individual artists." But the development is not simply
linear: it proceeds by the action and counteraction of "polar opposites." An instance of this
Hegelian scheme at work would be the transition from the organization of spaces by
addition in the first phase to organization by division in the second.
As the architect is the servant of pervasive historical forces, so we, as observers, are
servants of the aesthetic forces of archi­tecture. In a Gothic cathedral, "If an ambulatory
encircles the polygonal choir, the entire movement within the space catches the spectator
in an endless whirl. He has no thought of return, and the path forward pulls him toward an
unattainable goal in infinity." In the central-plan church of the Renaissance, on the other
hand, "Just as the pure group [of spaces] permits no one to enter, it permits no one to
leave; we must remain forever in this central point." Spatial organization creates
personified forces capable of their own movement or stasis independent of and obviously
superior to the action we may choose within the building.
This idealist criticism in the tradition of German nine­teenth-century philosophy implies that
the aesthetic values in a work of art exist even if we are not present to receive them; when
we are present, they can be received properly only in the one correct way. Recent
criticism, under the impact of modern perception psychology and of the major trends of
twentieth­century philosophy, has repudiated this position and gives far greater attention to
the contribution of the observer to an aes­thetic experience, interpreted as a kind of
dialogue between subject and object. But the philosophical presuppositions of Wolfflin and
Frankl have had a powerful influence on architec­tural analysis that has not waned: the
characterization of the Gothic cathedral just quoted remains the model for today's
handbook writers and college lecturers, who rarely read philo­sophical and psychological
treatises and are often unaware of the theoretical roots of their descriptions.
The personification of disembodied forces acting in space is paralleled by the reading of
the masses of Renaissance archi­tecture in terms of the human body: "The Gothic
cathedral takes root in the earth like a plant and spreads its upward

surging forces out through thin stalks to its ribs .... A building

of the first phase of post-medieval architecture is rather like a man. It is not rooted to the
earth but stands with its socle firmly

upon the earth's surface .... " The metaphor allows us to think

of structural members as bones and muscles and wall surfaces as skin; the excitement we
derive from certain buildings comes from a bodily identification with the apparent play of
their forces. This is precisely the explanation of the psychological roots of our experience
of Renaissance architecture proposed in another, more celebrated, architectural criticism
published in 1914, Geoffrey Scott's The Architecture of Humanism. Scott
carries the argument a step further than Frankl, proposing that the humaneness of
Renaissance and Baroque architecture makes it superior to that of other periods. Frankl
avoids comparative judgments of styles, but his book, like Scott's, helped to_ induce his
reluctant contemporaries to approach Baroque architecture sympathetically.
Since the time of Frankl and Scott there have been no en- compassing historical-critical
treatments of Renaissance and Baroque architecture,* although a large literature has
accumu­lated that attempts to gain recognition of a Mannerist style of architecture in the
period 1520-1600, between Frankl's first and second phases. The writings of the more
positivist generation following Frankl attempted to arrive at definitions of style as the result
of examining the evidence in individual buildings and drawings, and in writings on
architecture, so that mono­graphs on individual architects and essays on the style_ of a
single generation have replaced the grander but more arbitrary systems represented by
the Principles.
A number of the superficial obstacles to appreciation . . of Frankl's text that existed in the
original edition have been removed in the translation. The arrangement of the material in
the long first chapter has been clarified by new subheadings. Many of the references to
buildings that are not to be found in the well-known handbooks are accompanied by
additional illustrations. Above all, the imaginative translation of Frankl's difficult and often
private language enables the reader to perceive the brilliance of the over-all conception
and of the many individual analyses. In addition to the broad concepts, there are in these
pages more valuable and more varied models of practical criticism for the professional
critic or amateur_ f architecture than in any book of its kind I know. We may cnh­cize it
for one or another aspect, but in over fifty years we have not managed to produce a work
that surpasses it in vitality

and significance.
James S. Ackerman
Cambridge, Massachusetts February 1968

*The Wolfflin-Frankl tradition was continued, however, in Sigfried Giedion's book on the
architecture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Space, Time and Architecture (1st
ed. 1941).
Translator's Note
Paul Frankl's Entwicklungsphasen der neueren Baukunst was written more than half a
century ago for a limited audience of scholars. The scholar must still read the original: this
transla­tion is intended for a more general public. For this reason I have tried to make
Frankl's thesis more palatable by omitting anything (including most of his Introduction) that
does not contribute directly to the development of his main argument; rearranging or
rewriting his misplaced or badly stated pas­sages where necessary; correcting his poorly
edited text in the light of subsequent scholarship; eliminating all obsolete biblio­graphic
references (without consistently adding newer ref­erences); and, finally, augmenting the
sparse photographs. Most of these changes have been made silently; I believe none alters
Frankl's intention. The notes within square brackets are mine.
A direct translation of the German title would have been both unwieldy and misleading.
Frankl wrote this work in an­swer to Renaissance und Barack, by Heinrich Wolfflin, whose
ideas are better known to English-speaking readers through one of his later works,
Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe, trans­lated as Principles of Art History. The title of the
present book, Principles of Architectural History, was chosen to make clear the association
between these two scholars.
Further information about the buildings mentioned here can be found in the volumes of the
Pelican History of Art, edited by Nikolaus Pevsner, that discuss European architecture of
the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries.
This translation would not exist without the encourage­ment of James S. Ackerman, who
suggested it. I am grateful to Hermann G. Pundt for checking an early draft, and to Richard
Betts for correcting many errors in what might have been the final draft.
J. F. O'G.
Preface
This book contains the tentative results of a study that began when I first picked up
Heinrich Wolfflin's Renaissance und Barock1 more than a dozen years ago. Although I did
not consider myself capable of investigating the problem of stylistic development as
fruitfully as Wolfflin had, and although, as a mere novice, I could do no more than try to
see buildings through his eyes, I felt from the beginning that he had not completely solved
the problem. Since then I have studied his book intensely at least once a year, acquainted
myself with the material by traveling and by reading other works, and tried to clarify the
problem myself. My most important tools were the analysis of buildings according to four
basic elements: space, corporeality, light, and purpose, and the conception of the
Renaissance and Baroque as polar opposites.
I subsequently found essential support for both these methods, first in the writings of
August Schmarsow, which explore the basic elements of art, and then in Wolfflin's sum­
mer lectures at Munich in 1912, in which he developed his systematic quest for polarity. I
benefited greatly from both witho':1t losing my own independence or making my ow

...

the same kind judgment will be conferred upon this work, if it should prove to be a bad
one.
The discussion in this book demands not an extensive knowledge of the literature but a
great knowledge of monu­ments. Anyone who has not seen most of the churches and
palaces mentioned in the first chapter-and if possible he should have seen them often-will
find the reading difficult. Anyone for whom geometric descriptions are tedious and irksome
is fundamentally unsuited for research in the history of architec­ture: he should confine
himself to the remaining chapters. If these still seem difficult morsels to swallow, then I
hope that the fare I offer, if not easy to chew, might nonetheless prove nourishing.
Paul Frankl
Gauting, near Munich
June 1913
Introduction1
To study stylistic change in architecture, that is, to estab­lish the polar opposites
separating the successive phases of one epoch, which is our main aim here, we must
focus upon the comparable elements in the art of building and determine categories of
similar features that remain constant over a period of time.
When we compare church fa<;ades, we must be aware that this concept is subject to the
higher concept of fa<;:ade in general. As soon as we disregard the special features of a
church fa<;:ade, the common characteristics of all fa<;:ades (palace, church, villa) will
become apparent, and the differences be­tween street and courtyard fa<;:ades will
disappear. Fa<;:ade itself is only the exterior elevation; it must display characteris­tics of
style that can be observed from inside as well as outside. These general characteristics
are also present on the ceiling and on the floor, despite their own peculiarities. Internal and
external walls, floors, and roofs can all be included under the general concept of the
tectonic shell. Corporeality is their common element; it completely distinguishes them from
color and light, the merely visible, which forms a second category, and from the space they
enclose, which forms a third.
The visual impression, the image produced by differences of light and color, is primary in
our perception of a building. We empirically reinterpret this image into a conception of
corporeality, and this defines the form of the space within, whether we read it from outside
or stand in the interior. But optical appearance, corporeality, and space do not alone make
a building. Distinctions between church, palace, villa, and city hall are based upon specific,
typical 'forms, which crystal­lize for specific purposes. The forms are not retained for
specific purposes, but are necessarily the products of purpose. The molded space is the
theater for certain human activities, and these are the focus of our perception. Once we
have reinter­preted the optical image into a conception of space enclosed by mass, we
read its purpose from the spatial form. We thus grasp its spiritual import, its content, its
meaning. The designing architect works in the opposite direction, of course. He begins
with the building program. As he lays out the pattern of activ­ities it demands, he produces
a framework of circulation around which the rooms are arranged. When he has found his
spatial form for this program, he begins to model the enclosing mass. Light and color are
his last considerations. But this sequence can be altered in various ways during the design
process. Lighting and the perspective image interact, and this can have a decisive effect
upon the ultimate spatial form. The sequence is unimportant. We are interested only in the
fact that space, light, corporeality, and purpose are the most general concepts we can find.
They best characterize the differences between
[2] Introduction
buildings. They are so different that there is no danger of repetition when we discuss them.
We are looking for the polar opposites of spatial form that separate the successive phases
of one epoch and for the polar opposites within the other categories as well. But we are
concerned only with the architecture of the post-medieval epoch. I had better explain what
I mean by this term.
Renaissance architecture has been defined in many ways, but Geymiiller's definition is the
broadest. In various works he has described it as a combination of antique and Gothic
forms extending in time from Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, in the thirteenth century, up to
his own day, say 1900. I must reject part of this description.
In the early fifteenth century Brunelleschi consciously broke with the Gothic tradition and
erected whole buildings in imitation of antique forms. He was imitated in turn by
contemporary architects, and a new development was born. This new development was
possible because the same ideas that led Brunelleschi to a revival of antique architecture
were shared by his educated contemporaries. If architecture is the molded theater of
human activity, of the joys and sorrows of a society, an architectural style can begin only
when a culture has reached a state of maturity. Philosophy, religion, politics, and science-
the whole of Renaissance culture-had to be ready before the fine arts could give them
expression. "Renais­sance Man" preceded the Renaissance artist. Of course Renais­
sance culture did not appear overnight, but the architectural historian can leave the
problem of its development to other disciplines. The Renaissance begins for him at that
moment in the middle of the Gothic tradition when Brunelleschi erected buildings that
corresponded to the new spirit.
I cannot accept Geymiiller's inclusion of Gothic forms in his definition of Renaissance
architecture. Michelangelo's St. Peter's in the Vatican is no synthesis of antique orders and
Gothic vaulting, no rebirth of ancient or medieval architecture, but an entirely new creation.
Although Leonardo and Bramante produced designs for Milan Cathedral, and although
Gothic vestiges can be found in the works of Brunelleschi and Miche­lozzo, the entire
development indicates as clearly as do the sources that the Gothic was considered
vanquished and was detested.
I agree with Geymiiller, however, that after Brunelleschi there is no break in the tradition.
The Renaissance began in Florence and spread through Tuscany to Rome, and from
there throughout the Christian world. It took on a new aspect each time it crossed a border,
of course, but it followed a basically continuous development according to its own inner
logic. In the course of time its newly conquered territories became equally important as
centers of stylistic development, until finally the crises of change occurred no longer in
Rome
but in Paris, Antwerp, or the many princely courts in Germany. We can study this
development as a whole or in its local variations.
The development of style is an intellectual process over­riding national characteristics and
individual artists. It is a great man who can cope with the problems of his time, but the
greatest genius is no more than the servant of this intellectual process.
I think it unnecessary to deal with the peculiarities of geography or race in this book. I shall
discuss the entire continuous development from Brunelleschi to the end of the nineteenth
century as one unit. I shall include not only Italy and France but the whole of Christianity.
Local variations in the development might be of importance in other studies, or in the
ultimate narration of the development, but they are unimportant here.
I refuse to call this entire period the Renaissance. This term is now firmly established for
the first phase. If I include the Baroque in the Renaissance, I cannot characterize the two
as polar opposites. I have chosen to call the entire period of architectural history between
1420 and 1900 simply "post­medieval." This seems harmless enough. The terms for the
individual phases (Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, Neoclas­sicism) are easier to do
without than is commonly believed. I shall avoid them until I have defined each phase by
stylistic polarity.
The reader now knows what to expect, and what not to expect. I restrict myself to post-
medieval architecture in this work because it is provisional. I am investigating older epochs
using the same method2 and hope eventually to achieve insight into the organism of
stylistic development by comparing all epochs and their development. I have no doubt that
my sub­sequent studies will be made easier because of this one and that this one will
need correction once I have completed them.3