PAUL FRANKL died in his 84th year on 30 January 1962. On 29 January he had
closed the envelope which contained detailed comments on the sheets of plate proofs
of this book. It is sad that a book in the progress of which he took so fanatic an
interest should now have to come out as a memorial to him. He was - this can be
said without hesitation - one of the giants of GermanKunstwissenschaft. Never
did he write a book or a paper without wanting to get at something more than facts.
The essence of a style was what fascinated him from the beginning to the end. Five
books stand out in his œuvre and they show the variety and yet the consistency of
his work. He had been a pupil of Wölfflin at the time when Wölfflinpublished
his Die klassische Kunstand worked on his Grundbegriffe, i.e. when he was
engaged on definitions of the High Renaissance and then of Baroque in contrast to
Renaissance. This is where Paul Frankl started from. In 1914, nearly fifty years
ago and before the publication of Wölfflin Grundbegriffe, he brought out his
Entwicklungsphasen der neueren Baukunst, taking up, modifying, and further
elucidating the contrasts between the Renaissance and the periods that followed and
confining the investigation to architecture. Then in the years from the end of the
First World War to 1926 he worked on the volume of Burger and Brinckmann
Handbuchdealing with the Romanesque style under comparable categories. The
book is still the boldest synopsis of the style in existence. After this he felt ready to
put on paper his categories, not only those so far demonstrated in his two masterly
volumes. The result is theSystem der Kunstwissenschaft, published inauspiciously
at Brno (outside Nazi Germany) in 1938 and little read. When he had left Germany
and settled down at Princeton he went on working on a fourthmagnum opus: The
Gothic; Literary Sources and Interpretations through Eight Centuries. This
nine-hundred-page history of what the Gothic style has meant to many writers in
many countries came out very belatedly in 1960. Meanwhile I knew that he had
intended to continue his Romanesque volume by a Gothic one and so, in 1947, I
asked him to write the present book. It will, I hope, speak for itself as the work of
a man of great scholarship, energy, and courage. That he was a perfectionist I can
assure readers, and I want to place on record my gratitude to Mrs Jane B. Greene
and Dr Weitzmann-Fiedler, who helped him (and me) through the perilous stages
of interpretation and production. That he was also a most lovable man, the last
chapters of this book at least will convey an inkling of.

THE EDITOR

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