In Form in Gothic, his provocative meditation on the art and architecture of the late Middle Ages, the German art historian and aesthetician Wilhelm Worringer concluded that the world of Northern man “yielded itself to him in all acuteness with its thousand details and accidents.” Worringer continued:

It is this acuteness in the comprehension of actuality which differentiates Northern from Classical culture: the latter, avoiding the arbitrariness of actuality, builds itself up entirely on nature and her inner orderliness.

Yet while Northern man was transfixed by the intricacy and irregularity of the actual, he remained immune, according to Worringer, to its corporeal, material aspects. Classical culture may have sought “inner orderliness” rather than unpredictable complexity, but it still celebrated the physical: glorifying the body in its art, making the visible transfer of weight crucial to the aesthetic of its buildings, and endowing its deities, despite their superhuman powers and attributes, with many of the susceptibilities of ordinary mortals.

Classical culture, in short, was fundamentally sensuous; Northern culture was wholly anti-sensuous and therefore spiritual. Classical culture’s natural means of expression was through mass, whether as illusion or in literal stone, while the Northern sensibility found its embodiment in what Worringer called “the ceaseless melody of Northern line.” Gothic art, the art of the late Middle Ages, was, in Worringer’s view, quintessentially Northern. It is an art of edges, weightless thrusts, and disembodied, convoluted rhythms, an art of multiplicity, irregularities, and details; Gothic art dissembles the physicality