The Heyday of the Middle Ages

In the 1820s many German Romantics had come to see the Christian Middle Ages, rather than classical Greece, as the true golden age, and its clearest emblem as the Gothic cathedral. This picture is an argument for that idea. No real town appears in it. Ahlborn invented an ideal medieval city rising up a hillside, with an enormous Gothic church at its heart, spires and buttresses catching the light, everything ordered around faith and stone. The title says as much, the prime, the flowering, of the Middle Ages. It sets that Christian summit against the rival ideal of the age, ancient Greece at its height. The type of the soaring imaginary cathedral came from the Berlin architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, who had painted such visions about a decade earlier. Ahlborn worked this Gothic north out in Rome, and signed it there in the lower right, Wilh. Ahlborn, 1829.