Gothic style at Saint-Denis

The story

An abbot who wanted more light

At the gates of Paris stood, and still stands, the abbey of Saint-Denis, the monastery where Saint Denis, the first bishop of Paris, and many kings of France were buried. From 1122 its abbot was a monk named Suger, the son of a modest family, who had become a friend and adviser of King Louis VI and then of Louis VII. Suger governed the kingdom when the king was away, and he was also very devout.

The abbey church was old, dark, and too small for the crowds of pilgrims who came to see the relics. Suger decided to rebuild it. He did not just want a bigger church: he wanted a church full of light. He was influenced by the ideas of a writer of ancient times, who in the Middle Ages was confused with Saint Denis, according to whom light is the highest way in which man can come close to God. A bright church, he thought, would make people feel the divine presence.

The technical novelties

To bring light into the church, Suger's architects used together several solutions that already existed, but were scattered about. The first was the pointed arch, instead of a round one: it rises higher and pushes less to the sides. The second was the rib vault, that is, a vault with stone ribs that support the covering, like the frame of an umbrella. The third was the possibility of lightening the walls: instead of thick solid walls, they made slimmer supports, and between them they opened wide windows.

Later, when Gothic churches became taller, flying buttresses were added outside, light supports that hold up the walls and pass the weight on to external buttresses. Inside, the windows were filled with coloured glass, held together by strips of lead: the stained-glass windows told sacred stories, and the light passing through them filled the church with blue, red and gold.

1144

The choir of Saint-Denis, that is, the part of the church behind the altar, was consecrated on 11 June 1144, in the presence of King Louis VII, his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine and many bishops. It was considered a marvel: Suger wrote an account of it, in which he described with enthusiasm the glass, the precious stones and the gold of the altar. That is why we know so much about his ideas today. The façade had already been finished in 1140.

The new style spread quickly. In 1163 the building of Notre-Dame in Paris began; after the fire of 1194 Chartres Cathedral, famous for its stained glass, was rebuilt; then came Reims, Amiens, Bourges, Strasbourg and Cologne. The name “Gothic” was not given at the time: it was invented in the Renaissance by Italians such as Vasari, who used it with contempt, because they considered it a barbarous style, of the Goths, a Germanic people.

At Saint-Denis Suger had windows put in that told the life of Jesus and stories from the Bible. One of the most famous is the Tree of Jesse, which shows the ancestors of Christ as the branches of a tree. To make coloured glass, powdered minerals were added to the molten sand: cobalt gave blue, copper gave red. Then the pieces were cut and joined with lead.

Building sites lasting centuries

A Gothic cathedral took tens or hundreds of years. Whoever began a building site did not know whether he would see the end. Masons, stonecutters, sculptors, carpenters, glaziers and blacksmiths worked there. Treadwheel cranes were used, driven by the strength of men walking inside them. Sometimes the builders went too far: in 1284 the vaults of the choir of Beauvais Cathedral, among the highest in Europe, collapsed.