Gothic : Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil and Ruin

The birth of Gothic can be said to date to the eruption of Vesuvius in 1631, an event so powerful it created a new landscape. Indeed, it was the desolate and savage landscape paintings of the seventeenth-century artist Salvator Rosa, with their precipices, ruined castles, dark caves, and contorted trees, that provided the original visual and imaginative frame of the genre. In England, under Rosa's influence, William Kent created the first Gothic garden when he planted a dead tree on the grounds of Kensington Palace.