Across medieval Europe, people of all ages and backgrounds united in daily labours that echoed the biblical construction of Babel’s great ‘tower with its top in the heavens’, as described in Genesis. They harnessed themselves like animals to wagons, dragging stone from quarries and hauling wood, grain, and other provisions, while an ever-present hum of song reverberated off the stones as they toiled. All this effort was to build the great Gothic cathedrals.
As the churches physically rose from the ground during this building fever, so too they grew in prominence and appearance. Usurping the ‘Romanesque’ – that solid, robust, earthbound architecture indebted to classical antecedents – the great age of cathedral-building in Europe’s Middle Ages would become associated, stylistically, with something quite different, summed up in a single word: ‘Gothic’. No one called it that at the time, however. In the 16th century, critics scoffed at this architectural approach, identified with the barbarian ‘Goths’ of the Germanic lands, who had overthrown the culture of ancient Rome in the 4th to 5th century AD. In 1550, the ‘Father of Art History’, Giorgio Vasari, lambasted the style as ‘monstrous, barbarous and disorderly’, whose ‘vulgarity’ contrasted starkly with Greek and Latin sources. In reality, Gothic had nothing to do with Goths. But as a description of a coherent set of stylistic approaches and the era in which they thrived, ‘Gothic’ retained its potency and currency. Indeed, it is now virtually inseparable from our image of the word ‘cathedral’.
Of course, the Gothic style did not explode, fully formed. Much Romanesque remained, particularly the round arch, fundamentally based on the mathematics of a circle. Change began with one French visionary, who has, for the past century or so, been credited as the ‘Father of Gothic’. That man was Abbot Suger of the Abbey Church of St-Denis, located just a few miles north of Paris. The church was the custodian of and depository for the regalia for French coronations that took place at Reims, so naturally its abbot commanded a significant place in the political and royal scene. It was no surprise then that during the renovation of St-Denis from 1137, Suger looked to a style that proclaimed the church’s central importance to the still fledgling French realm of the Capetian kings. Suger’s (and his builders’) quest for innovation resulted in, among other things, the pointed arch, which was both stronger and more flexible than its rounded counterpart. And yet, the pointed arch was nothing new. The world had seen it before – it was in widespread use in the Sasanian Empire (AD 224–651) in Persia, for example. Adopted again in the 12th century, however, the pointed arch allowed buildings to be raised to once-impossible heights, in a new era of expectation where nothing under 100m would be considered fitting for a House of God. Although Suger’s master mason is unknown to us (whether by chance or purpose), between mason and abbot a new combination of styles was shaped.
Retreading old trails