Gothic art made its debut in a unique setting. St. Denis was the patron of France, the missionary who first preached Christianity by the Seine, and who there had been martyred in the III century. On Montmartre is the crypt said to have been the burial place of the first Christian martyrs of Paris. In time there rose on the road outside the city a monastery dedicated to St. Denis, and thither were his relics transferred. Each of the three royal lines that have ruled France, Merovingian, Carolingian, and Capetian, chose the abbey of St. Denis as their final resting place and loaded it with favors. The first milestone on the highroad of Gothic art was the famous center of the nation’s life, and the initiator of the new system of building was the maker of the nation’s unity, Abbot Suger.
To Suger may be applied the mediæval term for an architect, Master of Works, maître de l’œuvre. He wrote an account of how he reconstructed his abbey, building it, he says, with the aid of his companions in the community and his brothers in the cloister. The people gave voluntarily of their labor. When a quarry with suitable stone was discovered at Pontoise, the whole countryside—men, women, and children being harnessed to the carts—dragged the blocks in pious enthusiasm to St. Denis.
The tomb of the martyred patron of Paris was a pilgrim shrine from earliest days. The same trait in human nature that, in 1915, sent Americans to gaze reverently at a relic of their national history, the Liberty Bell, when on a two weeks’ journey from the San Francisco Fair to Philadelphia, it was exhibited in different cities, made the early Christians of Gaul flock to revere the relics of the holy man who had brought them the light and liberty of the gospel. Religion then and all through the Middle Ages was fraught with patriotism.
For St. Denis’ abbey a Merovingian church had been built by Dagobert. Pépin and Charlemagne replaced it by a Carolingian church. By the XII century the abbatial had become inadequate for the pilgrim crowds; people were crushed to death on festival days, and Abbot Suger decided to rebuild. He began by demolishing a heavy vestibule which Charlemagne had put up as a kind of tomb over his father’s grave, for Pépin had begged to be buried face downward in penance, before the abbey church. Suger replaced that encumbering porch by what is to-day a narthex, or forechurch, formed by the two westernmost bays of the edifice. In the thirties of the XI century he started the new works. Romanesque feeling lingered in the sculpture, and the stout vault ribs crossed each other in round arches. By 1140 the west façade was finished and ceremoniously consecrated.
A month later, a still greater gathering met at St. Denis for the laying of the corner stone of the choir. To the sound of trumpets, Louis VII descended into the trench prepared for the foundation, and placed the first stone, and as the choir chanted of the jeweled walls of the heavenly city, Lapides pretiosi omnes muri tui, the king, profoundly moved, took from his finger a costly ring and threw it into the mortar, which had been mixed with holy water. Each baron and bishop, as he laid down a stone, did the same. Their vehement faith would turn to literal meaning the Psalmist’s dream of the celestial city.
In his choir, Suger united definitely the pointed arch with the intersecting ribs, and the ribs, now, were not the heavy ones used in his forechurch. All the arches at their crown were brought to the same height by a combination of stilting, pointing, or depressing them. In the outer aisle of his ambulatory, Suger introduced a fifth rib in each vault section, which welded the apse chapels with the procession path. For his inner aisle he employed what is called the broken-rib vault. First, the keystone was planted in the center and from it branched the four ribs, each regardless of making a straight diagonal. This became the generally accepted method for vaulting an ambulatory. Every part of his edifice Suger supervised with untiring energy. Owing to the waste of forest trees for machines of war, none of sufficient girth could be found for the outer roof covering. Suger lay brooding over this one night, then started up impetuously before dawn, took the measurements of the beams needed, and himself went into the dense forest. Before nine that morning he had found a giant tree; by noon ten others, and the timber was hauled in triumph to the abbey.
All France was talking of the new works at St. Denis. Never before had been such a gathering of skilled masons and sculptors, of goldsmiths and glassmakers. St. Denis’ school was to direct the glassmakers’ art through the second half of the XII century. Little is known of the origin of that art; the early basilicas of Christian Gaul had made use of pieces of colored glass framed together, and in the X century figures were represented. No work, however, previous to the XII century has survived. For the earlier fenestration the term “painted glass” is a misnomer, since each piece was colored in the mass, and only a few black lines were applied to denote the features, or the folds of the draperies. The artists of St. Denis obtained their relief effects by a skilled juxtaposition of tones; intensity of hue was increased by the employment of thick rough leaves of glass. Scarcely any white was used; in the ancient windows no spots spring out unpleasantly.
To St. Denis’ school succeeded that of Chartres, which predominated during the first part of the XIII century, while its second half was ruled by the school of Paris, when windows of the Sainte-Chapelle type were the rule. Gradually the craftsmen gave up their sound tradition that a window should be a transparent mosaic, subordinate to its architectural setting. They began to treat a window as an isolated picture and the art declined.
Abbot Suger’s school of glassmakers carried their art to its zenith. Not all the wonders of XIII-century fenestration equaled the unfathomable vibrant blue in the background of XII-century windows—a fugitive mystery whose secret has been entirely lost. The popular fancy was that Suger ground down sapphires to obtain his magic color.
All over the land the church builders desired windows like those of St. Denis. Suger’s own craftsmen went to Chartres to make the three big lancets in that cathedral’s western front. The St. Denis school influenced the superb Crucifixion window in Poitiers Cathedral, and others in the cathedrals of Angers and Le Mans and in the Trinité at Vendôme, also the Tree of Jesse window in York Cathedral. And, had the choir glass of Notre Dame at Paris survived, it would have been of the school of St. Denis.