Savannah Cathedral – Fairy-tale Architecture Art

Description

City tours are often a great way to get to know a new city, and my time on the Georgia coast was so brief that I’m not sure I would have even seen Savannah cathedral if I hadn’t taken one of those little trolley tours of the historic city. In fact, every tour guide I heard pass the cathedral near Lafayette Square promised that the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist was a world class church on par with the old Gothic cathedrals of Europe.

As you can tell from this textured artwork, it is a beautiful church with great architectural proportions that are without question an homage to the old French Gothic cathedrals. However, it is a much newer church. Savannah’s cathedral was originally built in the 1870s and then nearly destroyed by fire in 1898. The church we see today was faithful to what had come before but not completed until 1920.

As its so much more recent, I feel it’s a bit of a disservice to compare it to medieval churches. Instead, it’s a fabulous example of Gothic Revival or Neo-Gothic churches.It reminds me very much of a fairy-tale image of old world Europe, something you might find in the pages of a whimsical children’s book – an idealized look at the old world.

That very much informed how i approached this picture of the Savannah Cathedral, I wanted it to have the feel of a classic illustration or very detailed old painting, the type executed more commonly before the era of photography. The result is a fantasy in both architecture and art.

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