The cathedral builders: from Saint-Denis to Beauvais

Suger, or light as a programme

It all begins with a complaint. The abbot of Saint-Denis, Suger, writes that his Carolingian church is too small, that on feast days the crowd is crushed inside, it is said, to the point that women are passed out over people’s heads, and that he has resolved to rebuild it. He begins with the façade, from 1135 to 1140, then tackles the chevet: first stone in 1140, consecration on 11 June 1144 before Louis VII and, it is said, Eleanor, in the presence of an assembly of bishops. This chevet is a combination rather than an invention. The rib vault, two diagonal ribs that carry the weight of the vault down onto four points, existed in Normandy and in England; the pointed arch, in Burgundy; the buttress, everywhere. Suger brings them together and draws a new consequence from them: since the loads come down through points, the wall can become a window. His radiating chapels form a single crown of glass, and he has it inscribed that the church “shines, brightened in its middle”. He is also, in the De consecratione and the De administratione, one of the few patrons of the Middle Ages to have told the story of his building work.