How France Built Her Cathedrals: A Study in the Twelfth and Thirteenth CenturiesO'Reilly, Elizabeth Boyle
History
How France Built Her Cathedrals: A Study in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries
O'Reilly, Elizabeth Boyle
Architecture, Gothic; Cathedrals -- France
Suger wrote inscriptions for his abbey windows to make their symbolism
clearer. Owing to the vicissitudes of seven hundred years, few of the
St. Denis lights have survived. Four are now reset in the central apse
chapel and in that to its north. In a medallion at the base of one of
these windows Suger himself is represented holding a scroll bearing his
name. The medallion figures are of the hieratic Byzantine type. Every
window has a closely woven pattern; each losenge has its own border, and
a rich jeweled border surrounds the whole lancet. Bracing bars of iron
run straight across the pictured story. Slowly, with infinite patience,
worked those old XII-century artists, and never has their handicraft
been surpassed as sheer splendor of ornamentation.
After three years and three months of passionate work, the choir of St.
Denis was finished, and on June 11, 1144, the dedication day, the relics
were installed. That date, forever memorable in the annals of
architecture, may be called the consecration of the national art. At the
ceremony assisted Louis VII with his queen, Aliénor of Aquitaine, whose
strange destiny was to make her patroness of that entirely different
phase of Gothic called the Plantagenet school. The chief barons were
present at the dedication, as well as five archbishops and some fourteen
bishops. They looked and wondered, and not a few of them returned home
to imitate. The bishops of Noyon and Senlis hastened to rebuild their
cathedrals in the new way, and some of Suger's masons passed into the
service of the former prelate. Bishop Geoffrey de Lèves went back to
Chartres to build the most beautiful tower in the world, and the
sculptors who had made Suger's western portals (now no longer extant)
worked on the three west doors of Chartres.
On the day of St. Denis' dedication, Abbot Suger, small and frail in
person, but towering in personality, was honored on every side. When the
abbot of great Cluny, Peter the Venerable, passed from the marvels of
the new church to Suger's narrow cell, he cried out in honest distress:
"This man condemns us all. He builds, not for himself, but for God
alone!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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