Gothic Glow
How a canny abbot and an unknown architect let in the light
Suger's detractors frowned at the lavishness of his spruced-up church, but the abbot defended his renovations as necessary to accommodate the swelling crowds that St.-Denis was drawing on feast days. "The narrowness of the place forced the women to run toward the altar upon the heads of men as upon a pavement," Suger wrote of the old structure, "with much anguish and noisy confusion." The abbot was exaggerating, but 12th-century France did see a sharp spike in church attendance. As town lords and bishops (the same man often held both positions) stamped out the lawlessness that marked Europe in earlier centuries, members of the upper class felt safe enough to embark on pilgrimages. They often trekked south through France to Spain's Santiago de Compostela, the traditional burial place of the apostle James, stopping at churches along the way.
Building boom. The worshipers contributed to an economic boom that helped spread the innovations of St.-Denis in a wave of cathedral building. On religious feast days, while churches lured worshipers with displays of holy relics (some churches sent relics on full-fledged European fundraising tours), tradespeople set up shop outside. "Merchants knew there were crowds on feast days, so they'd go--and more people would attend feast days because more merchants were there," says Robin Oggins, a history professor at Binghamton University and author of Cathedrals. "Some of it was religious, some of it was curiosity, and some of it was good shopping." A surge in agricultural production, the advent of currencies, and increased trade also fed the boom, and the church, which owned virtually all the means of production--from land to mills to wine presses--was able to cash in to fund its "cathedral crusade." From 1050 to 1350, some experts estimate, more stone went into church building in France than was used in all the monuments of ancient Egypt.
It was the rebuilding of the Chartres Cathedral, wrecked by fire in 1194, that propelled France into the High Gothic Age. Completed in roughly 30 years, Chartres soared to 120 feet, more than twice the height of most earlier cathedrals. While high ceilings traditionally drew extra support from spur buttresses--thick stone reinforcements that crawl up the church's exterior--Chartres relied on flying buttresses, stone braces that jump from the cathedral's upper stories to rows of supporting piers set back from the building. By displacing the ceiling's weight onto exterior supports, flying buttresses freed up wall space for giant stained-glass windows that depicted religious scenes replete with images of Middle Age guildsmen, like bakers and wheelwrights. Long believed to be funded by the guilds, the windows may have actually been advertisements by the church, shrewdly trying to draw support from prosperous guild members.
The cathedral's towering interior achieved a new unity of design, with pillars of bundled columns leading seamlessly into the ceiling's individual ribs. Such inventiveness was repeated across northern France, as cathedrals built or rebuilt at Sens, Paris, and Bourges exhibited audaciously novel designs. "It's not like the Renaissance, where the belief was that there's a right way to make a building, and you had to discover that way," says Stephen Murray, professor of art history at Columbia University. "In Gothic times, there was no accepted archetype." Murray attributes some of the stunning originality displayed in the cathedrals to a Freudian dynamic in local stone mason guilds, which encompassed generations of fathers and sons. "Sons tend to mimic their fathers," he says, "and then subvert them."
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