Why is Goth all dark and macabre?

[js_africanus]

So I’m reading “Florence: A Portrait”, slowly, and in the prologue I come across a photo of the most amazing building: The Campanile of the Duomo. It’s a bell tower, evidently. My first thought is, “Why in the effing heck have I never heard of this piece of architecture?!” Then I get to the text associated with the photo and I read,

Only the nineteenth century lacked one dominant authenic style. It was that century which completed the facade [of the Duomo], but in a fairly deadly pastiche Gothic, not improved by being juxtaposed to the genuine Gothic of the Campanile, designed largely by a painter, Giotto, and solemnly founded in the summer of 1334.

Now, granted neither the Duomo nor its Campanile are all pink & kitty cats & balloons, but they aren’t really this either. How did that transformation take place? Why did it take place?

[hazel-rah]

Go here and click on “name” on the left-hand menu. It’s the most rigorous tracing you’re likely to find of where the term “goth” came from that applies to the people SNL was making fun of.

[Bryan_Ekers]

Sorry, I’m just picturing Gothette, the smurf with the spiked collar.

[Larry_Mudd]

I imagine that the “goth” in the gothic subculture is “gothic” in the literary sense.

19th century Gothic romances & especially Gothic horror are categorically gloomy.

[Lamia]

And I believe Gothic literature is so named because of the prominent Gothic architectural settings (see The Hunchback of Notre Dame).