The Rise of Gothic Art and Architecture

The transition from Romanesque to Gothic architecture is conventionally traced to the rebuilding of the choir of the royal abbey church of Saint-Denis, near Paris, between 1140 and 1144, under its ambitious abbot, Suger. Suger combined pointed arches and ribbed groin vaults, both already known individually in Romanesque building, in a new structural system that channeled the weight of the vaults down through slender piers rather than thick continuous walls, allowing the walls themselves to be opened up with large stained-glass windows. Suger justified this dramatic increase in interior luminosity through a theological program influenced by the writings attributed to Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, a mystical theologian who described the created world, and light above all, as a means by which the human mind could be lifted toward contemplation of the divine. Suger wrote that the new choir was meant to fill the church with "lux nova," a new and wondrous light, so that the material beauty of the building itself would guide worshippers toward an immaterial understanding of God. This fusion of structural innovation and theological ambition at a single royal monastery marks, for most historians, the symbolic birth of the Gothic style, which then spread rapidly through the Île-de-France and beyond.