The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (46 page)

Pilgrim hordes flocked to St.-Denis. “The distress of the women,” Suger reported, “was so great and so intolerable that you could see the horror how they, squeezed in by the mass of strong men as in a winepress, exhibited bloodless faces as in imagined death; how they cried out horribly as though in labour; how several of them, miserably trodden under foot [but then] lifted by the pious assistance of men above the heads of the crowd, marched forward as though upon a pavement.” Suger made his abbey a royal archive and wrote a life of Louis VI. Best of all, he left us his own history of the planning, construction, and consecration of the rebuilt abbey church of St.-Denis, which has earned him a pioneer’s place in the history of historical writing.

The royal proclamation making St.-Denis the religious capital announced the auspicious moment for rebuilding and enlarging the church. Suger began a fund-raising campaign in no way inferior to the efforts of our times. Only one quarter of the renovation funds would come from the abbey’s regular revenues. The rest Suger gathered from the increased profits of properties he had improved, from the revenues of fairs, and from donors who had been promised the personal intercession of Saint Denis if they made a handsome gift. Incidentally, donors might receive the title
frankus S. Dionysii
, once suggested as the origin of the name France. The campaign went on for thirteen years before the work was begun. When Louis VII succeeded his father in 1137, Suger was no longer close to the royal administration, and so had the leisure for writing history and rebuilding the abbey church.

In Suger’s day, luckily for the future of the arts in Europe, the Ile-de-France—a region in north-central France that had long been the political center—had no special architectural style of its own. Planning a grand new church, Suger had to start from scratch. Not being an architect, he had the further advantage of freedom from professional inhibitions or conventional rules. His two imagined “models,” Hagia Sophia in Constantinople and the biblical Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, he had never seen. Happily, with the free vision of the amateur and the miraculous collaboration of God, Suger could embody the upward-leading theology of his patron saint in his new church of St.-Denis. And at the same time he created the hallmarks of the Gothic—ribbed vaults, which supported the vaulted roof without heavy supporting walls, three portals of richly carved decoration and a rose window at the west, ambulatories and chapels radiant with the light of stained-glass windows, and the structure of the chevet (ambulatory, chancel, and chapels) supported on points of masonry rather than on solid walls. The worshiper within sensed only a skeletal structure dramatized by stained-glass light.

To accomplish this purpose the church would be rebuilt in three stages by a plan that evolved in Suger’s mind gradually, in response to the resources. He first imagined importing columns from Rome “through the Mediterranean, thence through the English Sea and the tortuous windings of the River Seine.” But this proved unnecessary. “Through a gift of God a new quarry, yielding very strong stone, was discovered such as in quality and quantity had never been found in these regions. There arrived a skillful crowd of masons, stonecutters, sculptors and other workmen, so that—thus and otherwise—Divinity relieved us of our fears.”

The west or entrance end, begun in 1137 and completed in 1140, lengthening the old nave by 40 percent, was built of stone from the miraculous quarry. It was a symbol of royal authority, just as the eastern end announced the authority of the clergy. There a striking new feature, a rose window of stained glass, was placed over the middle of three richly carved stone portals. Crenellations atop the façade emphasized St.-Denis as the embattled protector of the monarchy. The three entrance arches, which for Suger represented the Trinity, also recalled the Arch of Constantine in Rome, through which the triumphant emperor passed in purification on the way to be received as a divinity.

Before completing the towers of the west façade, Suger abruptly turned to the choir at the east end, leaving the connecting nave till later. In 1140 he began the most original, intricate and audacious part of his plan, the first truly Gothic structure. The choir was completed in only three years and three months. The Norman and Romanesque styles had been marked by massive piers and columns, heavy walls, rounded arches, barrel vaults and a few windows, with sharply defined interior space. That was an architecture of rotundity, solidity, and containment, for the fortress-church, the Church militant. The new luminous skeleton of stone proclaimed a Church no longer on the defensive, but reaching prayerfully up to God and triumphantly to the world in an architecture of light. The simple engineering device that Suger introduced in his choir and that made this possible was the ribbed-vault. With slender ribs of stone to support the vault, the walls could be opened into more and larger windows. Suger used these ribs to separate the nine adjoining chapels lit by sixteen stained-glass windows, beaming many-colored light to be reflected on the polished mosaic floor and on the dazzling altar of gold and gems. “The entire sanctuary,” Suger boasted, “is thus pervaded by a wonderful and continuous light entering through the most sacred windows.”

It is no wonder that awed pilgrims and worshipers called these French works (
opere francigena
) the modern architecture (
opus modernum
). Suger’s west entrance—the narthex, with its sharply defined forms—arches of stone sculpture, rose window and crenellations, was only a prologue to the fully Gothic choir where a slender frame of stone invited polychrome
light. Suger’s choir above contrasted to the solid walls, groined vaults, and enclosed spaces of the Romanesque crypt below.

The two ends of the reconstructed church were to be connected by a nave, which Suger included in his plan but never completed. The legend that Christ had personally hallowed the original walls made Suger reluctant to demolish them for rebuilding. He had first decorated the walls of the nave with murals that found no place in the new Gothic architecture of transparent walls. This third stage of rebuilding, to be finished after Suger’s death, would carry the ribbed vaults and luminous walls of the choir into the body of the church. The nave of Notre-Dame in Paris shows what he probably had in mind.

God helped again when the huge wooden beams needed to tie the structure together could not be found. Suger led the search into the woods. “By the ninth hour or sooner we had, through the thickets, the depths of the forests and the dense, thorny tangles, marked down twelve timbers (for so many were necessary) to the astonishment of all, especially those on the spot … to the praise and glory of our Lord Jesus, Who protecting them from the hands of plunderers, had reserved them for Himself and the Holy Martyrs as He wished to do.” A terrifying storm during construction destroyed the best houses and stone towers in the neighborhood, but “was unable to damage these isolated and newly made arches tottering in mid-air, because it was repulsed by the power of God.” All who worked at the building, Suger explained, would rise above earthly theology and be glorified by reaching toward a vision of the harmony of God. The builders would themselves be “edified.” Dazzled by his success in fulfilling Dionysius’ hopes Suger described his feelings when finally he gazed on the main altar.

At the consecration of the church and dedication of the choir on June 14, 1144, King Louis VII led a procession of the relics in the presence of Eleanor of Aquitaine, five archbishops, and the nobles of the realm. So they reenacted the legendary first consecration of the Church when Christ himself had led a celestial hierarchy of saints and angels. The ceremony now sealed
the bond between the king and Saint-Denis, and peace between King Louis VII and his feudal vassals.

Over Suger’s futile objections, Bernard persuaded Louis as a penance to undertake a Crusade to the Holy Land. Going off on this disastrous Second Crusade the king left his crown and the royal administration in the hands of Suger. During the king’s absence the versatile abbot reformed the government and the system of taxation, suppressed civil war, and so became (in Louis VII’s phrase) Père de la Patrie. When the beaten and humiliated king returned, sadly estranged from his wife, Eleanor, Suger resisted temptation and gave back the crown. By the time of his death in 1151 the indefatigable Suger embodied the long and glorious Capetian kingship in St.-Denis, which became the archetype of the French cathedrals brilliantly visible later in Paris, Chartres, Reims, and Amiens.

The light coming through stained-glass windows became a hallmark of the Gothic in later medieval churches. Here, too, Suger was a pioneer. The stained-glass windows for which St.-Denis was to be the prototype preceded by nearly a century the great technical advances of the glassmaker’s craft, which would produce thinner flatter sheets and a wider range of colors. But these advances would tempt stained-glass artists to compete with painters, and so lose the primitive vigor seen in the St.-Denis windows. Happily, the glass of the early twelfth century had just the crudities to give it a varying textural interest of its own. Just as in architecture, there was yet no local style of stained glass in the Ile-de-France. Along with the bronze founders, jewelers, and enamel workers from the valleys of the Rhine and the Meuse, the masons and stone carvers from northern and southwestern France, and the mosaicists from Italy, whom he had come to know in his diplomatic travels, Suger collected “many masters” of stained glass from many regions. His international workshop produced lighting effects that outshone the occasional small windows of Carolingian and Romanesque buildings. And for the first time the windows of St.-Denis used a series of medallions to tell a story. These narrative windows illuminated the life of Moses, told allegories from the Epistles of Saint Paul, and depicted the Tree of Jesse (including a figure of Suger prostrate before the Virgin).

“The dull mind rises to truth through that which is material,” Suger had inscribed on bronzed doors of the west entrance. “And, in seeing this light, is resurrected from its former subversion.” In the next century a French bishop, Gulielmus Durandus of Mende (1237?–1296), in his
Rationale Divinorum Officiorum
, expounded the unique function of stained glass in this architecture of light. “The glass windows in a church are Holy Scriptures which expel the wind and the rain, that is all things hurtful, but transmit the light of the true Sun, that is God into the hearts of the faithful.”

That light somehow never reached the revolutionary mobs from Paris who arrived at St.-Denis in October 1793. Following their command to “destroy pitilessly” this monument of royal power, they set about pillaging the work of Suger. A French painter, Hubert Robert (1733–1808), romanticized their sabotage in
La violation des caveaux de Saint-Denis
. After the building had fallen into neglect, desecrated by birds of passage and pouring rain, what glittering stained-glass windows were left became a special target for the “preservers” of antiquities. Now it would be hard to say whether St.-Denis suffered more from the enemies or from the admirers of the Gothic. Windows that had survived the Huguenots and the Revolution were mostly destroyed by the industrious Alexandre Lenoir (1762–1839) in 1799, the self-appointed savior of French art who removed from St.-Denis 140 panels of the original stained glass ostensibly for his Musée des Monuments Français in Paris. Only thirty-one were replaced. The rest were either smashed in oxcart transit to Paris or sold by him to foreign collectors.

Ironically, Lenoir’s work of “preservation” did much to inspire Chateaubriand’s glorification of Christianity in
Le Génie du Christianisme
(1802) and nourished the Romantic movement, which led to the classic misrepresentation of the Gothic spirit. Just as Piranesi had transformed the fragments of the classic into dark romantic imaginings, so Chateaubriand inverted Suger’s Gothic into the opposite of the upward-leading theology of light.

Goethe, who called architecture “frozen music,” took up Chateaubriand’s lead and found his own Gothic tones in the German forests. And the great figures of French literature joined the litany. Victor Hugo (1802–1885), in his
Hunchback of Notre-Dame
, made the disfigured Gothic church his architectural Quasimodo. And the historian Jules Michelet (1798–1874) saw Nature as the progenitor of the Gothic.

I
T
is no accident that a lifelong refugee from his native city should have created an epic of everyman’s exile from life to death. The year 1300, which the energetic Pope Boniface VIII had designated as the first centenary Holy Year of Jubilee for the Roman Catholic Church, was one of ill omen for the thirty-one-year-old Dante (1265–1321). In that year he had been elected to the highest office in the Republic of Florence. “All my woes and all my misfortunes,” Dante observed, “had their origin in my unlucky election.” A victim in the cross fire between pope and emperor, he was exiled in 1302 on trumped-up charges of corruption in office, conspiracy against the pope, and treason to the Republic of Florence. Warned that if he returned he would be burned at the stake, he never again in the remaining two decades of his life dared set foot in his beloved Florence.