53. Plan of St. Peter and Mary Cathedral,
Cologne (Germany).

 

 

The old Hanse town of Lüneburg, which held a long-lasting monopoly on salt and thus became very wealthy, contains the most interesting examples of private Gothic brick building. Others can be found in Pomeranian and Brandenburg areas. These houses all have tall, stepped gables towering above the narrow form of their street-facing façades. In Germany and the Netherlands these stepped gables are an especially typical trait of Gothic private buildings, which was also later adopted by the Renaissance. Towards the end of the Gothic Middle Ages the common half-timbering method also sought artistic development, which would fully flourish only in the Renaissance, particularly in old Saxon towns such as Braunschweig, Halberstadt, Hannover, Hildesheim and others. Contrary to today’s sober, unimaginative, and uniform rows of private homes, each of these gabled houses tried to differ from its neighbours in individual construction. The same was true for private stone buildings, for which the fortress-like character of the medieval house had stronger emphasis, but which also featured a great variety of creations. The most convincing examples for this are the best preserved private home of the German Gothic, the Nassauer Haus in Nuremberg, which is more akin to a fortress than a family home, and the Steinerne Haus (Stone House) in Frankfurt on Main.

 

Artistically, the most significant town halls of northern German brick building are not only those of the Mark Brandenburg, but also the more extensive government buildings in Lübeck und Stralsund. With their majestic structures and magnificent ornamentation the citizens of the Hanse towns strove to publicly express their power, which was based on wealth, while remaining humbler with the construction of their private homes. During the fourteenth century this bourgeois pride had grown exponentially in many other German towns, too, until even the smallest community with a town charter had to have a monumental town hall as a landmark of their self-aggrandisement.