Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis helped define and popularize two things in his lifetime: the Gothic architectural style and the centralizing and peacekeeping mission of the Capetian monarchy, which enabled their rise to dominance in medieval France. Suger has been regarded as the first person to recognize, describe, and analyze the socio-political structure of Capetian France as a feudal hierarchy, a pyramid of tenure with the king at its top (Grant 3). He is also commonly seen as an influential ideologist, a man who glorified the Capetian monarchy. By extension, he is often cast as the creator of the idea of France as a kingdom. Suger is best known for his architectural reconstruction of the Saint Denis abbey church, of which his renovations’ purpose …show more content…
The dominant architectural style before Gothic was Romanesque, which was characterized by “thick, solid walls, round arches, barrel vaults and small windows,” whereas the new Gothic style employed techniques to give the impression of airiness, weightlessness, and pronounced verticality (Cowen 20). The term Romanesque was used to describe the medieval architectural style that was Roman-like in scale and mass. Romanesque cathedrals were similar to the Roman basilica plan, “with a long central hall, two side aisles, and a hemicycle (half circle) apse at one end” …show more content…
The west front particularly made a great impression on Suger’s ecclesiastical colleagues in northern France a century after Suger, who all engaged in a competition to erect the greatest cathedral in this new style, with wide portals, high clerestories, soaring buttresses, pointed arches, rose windows, ribbed vaulting, and magnificent sculptured façades. The new French style spread rapidly to England and Germany and even influenced Italian architecture. It was in the Ile-de-France, however, that Gothic architecture was the most predominant and where audacious, novel ideas were exhibited. It was not like in the Renaissance, where “the belief was that there was a right way to make a building” because in Gothic times, there were no accepted archetype (Gilgoff). Suger was heavily influenced by writings of Pseudo-Dionysius, the anonymous fifth-century Syrian monk whom he identified with Saint-Denis and the apostle of France to whom his church was dedicated to (Cantor 322). For Suger, the Dionysian neoplatonic philosophy had canonical authority. The mystical identification of the divinity with light was used to explain the function of the new windows in the clerestory of his church was to illuminate the alter with divine