A New Vision: Saint-Denis and French Church Architecture in the Twelfth Century

Old and New at Saint-Denis.

As the history of pilgrimage churches suggests, the reconstruction of the monastery church at Saint-Denis, begun in 1135 under the direction of Suger (1081–1151), abbot of Saint-Denis, initiated a new age of French architecture. Now nearly 400 years old, the original Carolingian church was too small for the many pilgrims who came to visit the relics of the saints and for the monks who needed more altars to accommodate an increasing number of worship services. To alleviate the crowding at the abbey, the first phase of work focused on enlarging the entrance and extending the nave of the eighth-century structure. Although echoing the general form of the old Carolingian west block, Suger's front looked to more recent Norman examples, such as the abbey of Saint-Etienne at Caen, the burial church of William the Conqueror, for a design that included three portals with two soaring towers. Including the first known example of a rose window—a large circular window in the façade of a church, usually decorated with a pattern of radiating tracery that frames stained glass depicting stories from the Bible and the lives of the saints—as well as battlements drawn from military architecture, the twelfth-century façade presented an impressive gateway into the church that was an original blend of old and new, castle and church forms. In the three short accounts that he wrote describing the stages of the construction project and the celebrations upon their completion (held in 1140 for the new west front and in 1144 for the dedication of the choir), Suger declared that his "first thought" was to make sure that the new work harmonized with the old building—believed to have been touched by Jesus himself. To match the interior forms of the eighth-century church, the abbot launched a search for stone to make columns. He considered importing them from Rome, but this proved too expensive and the problems of shipping were too difficult. Finally, a nearby quarry was found where stone for columns could be cut, shaped, and transported by river to Saint-Denis, allowing Suger to realize his architectural plans.

A Return to Columns.

Columns were rarely seen in Ottonian and Romanesque church architecture; for example, Speyer Cathedral in Germany and Saint-Sernin in Toulouse in France used complex piers to support their tall, heavy structures. As in the Carolingian abbey, the columns of Suger's Saint-Denis were intended to recall the churches of Rome, such at St. Peter's, St. Paul's, or St. John-in-the-Lateran, which had been built at the beginning of the age of Christian art and architecture. The columns not only emphasized the prestige of Saint-Denis by imitating famous models, but they also served as reminders that Denis, the saint buried at the abbey who was the first bishop of Paris and the special protector of French kings, had been sent from Rome, so it was thought, by St. Peter. The capitals atop the Saint-Denis columns turned away from the usual figural sculpture of Romanesque architectural decoration and instead adopted baskets of richly carved foliage that emulated the Corinthian order used in ancient Roman and early Christian architecture. This elimination of narrative and animal subjects from capitals was followed throughout northern France in churches influenced by Saint-Denis.

Light.

At the same time, Suger wanted a church that was filled with light. The choir, he wrote, included a "circular string of chapels, by virtue of which the whole [church] would shine with the wonderful and uninterrupted light of most luminous windows." Filling the width of the wall, the windows tell stories of biblical history, such as the birth of Jesus, or illustrate theological ideas. They were composed of richly colored stained glass that made light, interpreted by medieval writers as an image of God and a metaphor for spiritual realities, visible, almost tangible. The intended effect of the jewel-like colors, dominated by deep reds and blues, together with the sacred subjects, was to urge the viewer, in Suger's words, "onward from the material to the immaterial." These windows were made by the use of cartoons, large patterns that laid out the stories to be told. Then many pieces of colored glass were cut and fitted together by means of soft flexible channels made of lead (called cames), which held the glass in position; these were soldered to each other to create glass fabric that could endure for many centuries. Often the individual stories had written explanations in the glass that were very carefully crafted, though they were so far above the congregation that they can today be read only by means of binoculars.

The Architecture of the Saint-Denis Choir.

By demanding columns along with large stained glass windows, Abbot Suger forced his master mason to devise a strikingly original structure that was light, yet could achieve an impressive height. He described how his master mason had laid out the choir through arithmetic and geometry. The builder turned to new architectural techniques as well as new technology—most importantly, of the pointed arch and the ribbed groin vault. Although these forms had appeared in Romanesque buildings, they remained part of a massive, even overpowering structure. However, set on top of slender cylindrical columns and used to frame expansive window openings at Saint-Denis, they produced a completely different effect. First, because the pointed arch was flexible, it could be adjusted to create a uniform ceiling height and a fluid, integrated interior space. Looking through the twelfth-century ambulatory of Saint-Denis, the eye slides past the smooth, rounded columns and moves to the stained glass windows without interruption. (A wonderful rendition of stained glass and vaulting as seen by the contemporary medieval eye appears in a book of hours by the Master of Mary of Burgundy, Alexander Bening, now in Vienna.) Second, the pointed arch combined with the rib vault to direct weight to the corners of each structural compartment or bay in a system that was both architecturally efficient and conducive to maximum spaciousness. This upper-level structure rested on an overall plan that continued the well-established formula of an ambulatory with a series of radiating chapels, seen in Romanesque pilgrimage churches such as Saint-Sernin at Toulouse, but it achieved a new sense of unity. Instead of a collection of separate blocks that appear to be added to one another (at Saint-Sernin, for example, the semi-circular chapels, the curving ambulatory, and the apse are clearly distinguished from one another), Saint-Denis fused all of the parts of the choir into an integrated composition. The chapels form a continuously undulating exterior wall and, in the interior, their space merges with that of the outer choir aisle or ambulatory.

A Heavenly Vision.

Saint-Denis offered a new vision for church architecture. Upon entering the grand west façade and passing through the narthex with its architecture of stout piers and thick walls, visitors to the abbey found themselves in a building in which solid stone walls appeared to dissolve into surfaces of glass, and vaults were transformed into delicate, hovering canopies that framed broad, open spaces shimmering with colored light. Again, as abbot Suger wrote about the choir in his account "On the Consecration of the Church of Saint-Denis," "we made good progress—and, in the likeness of things divine, there was established to the joy of the whole earth, Mount Zion." In other words, the church was built as an image of heaven. The twelfth-century abbey of Saint-Denis, and the Gothic churches that followed it during the next three centuries, captured the aura of the celestial city of Jerusalem that would descend to earth at the end of time, described by St. John in Revelations, chapter 21: "And he (the angel) showed me the holy city of Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God, having the glory of God, its radiance like a most rare jewel, like a jasper, clear as crystal. The wall was built of jasper, while the city was pure gold, clear as glass. The foundations of the wall of the city were adorned with every jewel. And the twelve gates were twelve pearls, each of the gates made of a single pearl, and the street of the city was pure gold, transparent as glass."

sources

Jean Bony, French Gothic Architecture of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).

Caroline A. Bruzelius, The Thirteenth-Century Church at Saint Denis (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985).

Paula Gerson, ed., Abbot Suger and Saint-Denis: A Symposium (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1986).

Erwin Panofsky, ed. and trans., Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of Saint-Denis and Its Art Treasures (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979).