Gargoyles in Gothic Cathedral Churches

Hawthorne wrote: "A Gothic cathedral is surely the most wonderful work which mortal man has yet achieved, so vast, so intricate, and so profoundly simple, with such strange, delightful recesses in its grand figure, so difficult to comprehend within one idea, and yet all so consonant that it ultimately draws the beholder and his universe into its harmony. It is the only thing in the world that is vast enough and rich enough" (Charney, 37.)

Hawthorne writes: “Within the multitudiousness of the gothic style, the grotesque has a special function. By juxtaposition, absurd and sublime images make an ironic commentary on each other and indicate unlooked-for possibilities at either end of the chain of being” (Charney, 43).