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Early Gothic Saint-Denis: Restorations and Survivals

University of California Press

Often called the cradle of Gothic art, Saint-Denis provides documentation crucial to an understanding of the formative period of the Gothic style in the Ile-de-France. In the 1130s and 1140s, Abbot Suger (1122–1151) sponsored building campaigns at Saint-Denis that sparked the new aesthetic. Constructional, formal, and theological ideas expressed in the architecture, monumental sculpture, and figurate glass of the windows in Suger's buildings quickly disseminated, developed, and resolved themselves into what we call today the Gothic style.1 Scholars now agree that the three portals at Saint-Denis began the series of Early Gothic portails royaux. An innovation at Saint-Denis, twenty statue-columns, now lost, once flanked the portals. Representing mostly royal personages, such column-figures became the hallmark of Early Gothic portals. The less firmly dated but better preserved and more famous portail royal of the west facade at Chartres followed within the decade.

The sculptural programs on Gothic portals present in microcosm the Christian universe from the six days of Creation and the Fall of Man to the dreadful Day of Judgment. The building itself stood for the Heavenly Jerusalem, and the portals were the gates to paradise. During the Gothic period, such formulations of medieval thought attained great sophistication and complexity.

Yet the scholarly literature disputes whether the sculpture of the western portals at Saint-Denis culminated the High Romanesque period or, instead, merits the designation Gothic.2 Although categorical definitions do not resolve the question, this study aims at clarifying distinctions between Romanesque and Early Gothic portal sculpture. In fact, the sculptural program of the western portals introduced concepts and aesthetic attitudes that distinguish it from High Romanesque portal programs. Even though many stylizations found in the figurate sculpture at Saint-Denis perpetuated motifs borrowed from the

vocabulary of Romanesque drapery conventions, the artists ceased to use individual figures as vehicles for agitated surface-patterns. Such Romanesque designs yielded to arrangements stabilized by gravity and responsive to pose and gesture. To a marked degree the handling of the fabrics reflected weight and texture, and draperies increasingly suggested the volume and form of the body beneath. The figures evinced a new restraint in gesture and movement, and out of respect for the integrity of the human form, the Saint-Denis artists no longer allowed anatomically impossible poses. The anatomical verisimilitude of the nude figures indicated the artists' knowledge of and interest in musculature and bone structure—a reflection of the dawning of Gothic humanism, which brought with it a new respect for the individual. Displaying considerable sophistication, the Saint-Denis artists also increased the salience of the figures as the distance from the eye level of the viewer increased. Thus they began to correct for optical perspective and, by overlapping some of the forms, even achieved the illusion of depth.

Especially in the central portal (Plate I) a new calm and a didactic clarity of composition replaced the excitement and turbulence of Romanesque compositions. Appealing to the emotions, those turbulent, monumental representations of the Last Judgment deserve the epithet “epics of chaos.”3 But appealing instead to the intellect, the sculptural program of the three western portals at Saint-Denis presented a complex iconographical statement reflecting theological ideas then current in the Ile-de-France. Never in Romanesque portal programs do we find such complexities to challenge and inform the mind as those at Saint-Denis. Then, too, we no longer find the horror vacui characteristic of the crowded Romanesque compositions, where figures were often compressed to conform to the frames. Instead, negative spaces helped to organize interrelated themes and to emphasize the dominant ideas strategically located on the central axis. In the well-organized schema of the central portal, each part of the sculptural ensemble contributed to a unified statement. Indeed, when read in conjunction with the lateral portals, the interrelated themes acquired a significance and importance much greater than the sum of the parts. Unity emerges as one of the major characteristics of the Gothic style, whether architectural, sculptural, or iconographical. Thus, on compositional, formal, and iconographical grounds, the sculptural program of the central portal merits the designation Early Gothic rather than High Romanesque, even as we

recognize the survival of Romanesque conventions that do not always live harmoniously with the new aesthetic concepts.

Innovations distinguishing the Saint-Denis portal from High Romanesque representations of the Last Judgment, such as those at Moissac (1115) and Autun (1130s), occurred in what one critic has called a “creative environment,” achieved at Saint-Denis by the planning and patronage of Abbot Suger.4 In 1091 Suger, aged ten and of humble origins, had been given by his parents to the abbey as an oblate. He was educated at the monastic school of Saint-Denis-de-l'Estrée—presumably for a short time in company with the heir to the French throne, the future Louis VI le Gros (1108–1137). Early on, Suger displayed the aptitude for administration and diplomacy that toward the end of his life earned him the post of coregent of France. He held the office from 1147 to 1149 during the absence of King Louis VII (1137–1180) on the ill-fated Second Crusade.5 In two campaigns to enlarge and embellish the church, Suger achieved ambitions he had cherished even while a pupil. We know of his hopes and intentions from the record of his administration that he wrote “to save for the memory of posterity… those increments which the generous munificence of Almighty God had bestowed on the church” during his prelacy.6

As abbot and patron, Suger initiated campaigns to enlarge the church first to the west, then to the east. In the beginning, he left undisturbed the particularly venerated Carolingian nave, which he and his contemporaries believed had been built under the patronage of King Dagobert I (629–638). They had confused the eighth-century structure then extant with the seventh-century building, begun in circa 620. According to tradition, on the eve of the dedication ceremonies, Christ had descended miraculously to consecrate the nave of the earlier church.7 After praising the “inestimable splendor” of the extant Carolingian structure, Suger stated that it was wanting only in size, for it could no longer accommodate the crowds that came on feast days to “seek the intercession of the saints.”8 Dramatizing the deficiency, he described how “no one among the countless thousands of people because of their very density could move a foot…[or do] anything but stand like a marble statue, stay benumbed or, as a last resort, scream.” Women, he added, “squeezed by the mass of strong men as in a winepress, exhibited bloodless faces as in imagined death…[and] cried out horribly as though in labor.”9

Suger's westwork, or narthex, with its innovative triple-portal facade, was dedicated on 9...