Text: Structuring the Gothic Past: the Abbey Church of Saint-Denis in NineteenthCentury Architectural Scholarship
The abbey church of Saint-Denis, with a west façade dating from 1137-1140 and
a crypt and ambulatory dated from 1140-1144, casts an imposing shadow over the
historiography of medieval architecture. While contemporary scholars have increasingly
problematized the idea of a single Gothic “origin,” Saint-Denis is popularly viewed as the
site where various structural, spatial, and iconographical components synthesized to
result in the Gothic style. In every major survey of art history, the Gothic chapter begins
with Saint-Denis. Current medieval architectural historians usually present a more
nuanced picture within their specialist work, but at the introductory level of the
discipline, Saint-Denis is shorthand for “first Gothic.” In chronological survey texts of
Gothic architecture, Saint-Denis is identified as the first Gothic building: Henri Focillon,
Otto von Simson, Paul Frankl, Robert Branner, Louis Grodecki, Whitney Stoddard,
William Clark, Dieter Kimpel, Christopher Wilson, Eric Fernie, and Conrad Rudolph
have all pointed to Saint-Denis as the first fully Gothic building; in the examples from the
80s, 90s, and later, the statement is usually qualified with “it is generally agreed that…”
or “most scholars concur…”1 The promotional literature from the Centre des Monuments
Nationaux, the body overseeing Saint-Denis, identifies it as the site where Gothic was
born. Even the Wikipedia entry for Saint-Denis emphasizes its position as the first
Gothic structure.
1
Von Simson, The Gothic Cathedral, 156n; Wilson, The Gothic Cathedral, 31 and 43; Branner, Gothic
Architecture, 14; Grodecki, Gothic Architecture, 27-8; Bony, French Gothic Architecture of the Twelfth
and Thirteenth Centuries, 61; Frankl, Gothic Architecture, 60-1; Clark and Radding, Medieval
Architecture, Medieval Learning, 63-76, Fernie and Rudolph in A Companion to Medieval Art.
1 Because architectural historians have used Saint-Denis as the introductory
monument in the story of Gothic, the components of Saint-Denis—the tripartite façade,
rose window, pointed arches, rib vaults, and open plan—have framed subsequent
definitions of the style. From the time of Vasari, art historians have created narratives to
explain change in art; these kinds of narratives tend to trace a progressive line from one
age to the next, emphasizing “firsts” whose innovation would influence subsequent
generations. It is not surprising that the narrative of medieval architecture would identify
a locus from which Gothic would spring. Yet even according to the most traditional
notions of Gothic there are other contenders that could rival Saint-Denis for this first
position: the cathedral of Sens, the abbey church of Saint-Germer-de-Fly, the abbey
church of Saint-Martin-des-Champs. So how did Saint-Denis emerge as the recipient of
the title?
Saint-Denis was not always enshrined as a stylistic exemplar. While revered for
its historical and religious associations (it was the French royal necropolis and the
onetime owner of the relics of France’s national saint), Saint-Denis, though recognized as
a Gothic building, was not emphasized by the French as the first to establish the Gothic
style until the mid-nineteenth century. For French scholars, Saint-Denis’s promotion to
the initial link in the chain of Gothic dates to the mid-nineteenth century, after its primacy
had been recognized by scholars from other countries and several decades after the
manifestation of a renewed interest in medieval forms in France. The circumstances of
the redefinition of Saint-Denis as the first Gothic building demonstrate the significance of
rupture and loss in the formation of new paradigms.
2 In the late eighteenth century, the study of Gothic centered on the search for
underlying principles of the style; antiquarians sought the origins of the pointed arches
and rib vaults they identified as central to Gothic’s definition. Both English and German
antiquarians claimed the primacy of their homelands in the invention of Gothic—the
English first as inventors of the pointed arch through the device of overlapping wall
arcades, then as developed according to national character, while Goethe developed a
rival claim for Gothic as arising from German spirit. Eighteenth-century French
antiquarians had relatively little interest in the style of medieval artifacts and made no
such claim. When French authors discussed Saint-Denis, it was as a historical site or a
symbol of royal power, as in the works of Bernard de Montfaucon (whose Les
monuments de la monarchie française [1729-1733] recorded the jamb figures of SaintDenis because he took them for French royalty), not as the origin of a stylistic and
structural change that would revolutionize medieval artistic practices.
If eighteenth-century authors did not point to Saint-Denis as the originator of a
new style, it was not because they did not know the age of the building. The construction
dates had been recorded in the writings of Abbot Suger, the famed patron of the twelfthcentury construction. In De Administratione, Suger explicitly states that the west end
was consecrated in 1140, and the chevet was consecrated in 1144. His writings were
available at the abbey throughout the later Middle Ages and beyond; medieval copies still
exist today. These were consulted by several later historians of the abbey, who had easy
access to the documents as monks at Saint-Denis. Dom Jacques Doublet, writing in 1625,
quotes extensively from Suger’s work. Doublet was aware of the attribution of the west
and east ends of the building to Suger’s abbacy, and notes that the construction of the
3 chevet took, as Suger had said, three years and three months. Dom Michel Félibien’s
1706 history also refers to the dates of construction, and Félibien realized that the 1144
date related to the existing chapels of the chevet, which, he explained, were what
remained of Suger’s work.2 Unlike Suger’s own writings, these books were published in
Paris and thus more accessible to other scholars. However, both Doublet and Félibien
recount the history of the abbey, its privileges, its relics and their histories…but had very
little interest in medieval structural forms. In their works, Saint-Denis is significant as a
religious and historical repository.
Unexpectedly, the first scholar to note the possibility of Saint-Denis as the earliest
Gothic structure was English. James Dallaway seems to have been the first to emphasize
the dates of Saint-Denis’s construction in an English publication, noting the 1140 date in
Observations on English Architecture in 1806.3 G.D. Whittington’s A Historical Survey
of the Ecclesiastical Antiquities of France, published posthumously in 1809 but based on
travels several years prior, claimed that Saint-Denis’s Gothic pointed arches predated the
use of Gothic forms elsewhere: “When it is remembered that the works of Suger were all
executed before the middle of the 12th century, and that the Chevet of St. Denis was
indisputably finished in the year 1144, our belief that English artists were prior to those
of other nations in the use of the pointed arch, must be considerably shaken.”4
Whittington based his dates on those recorded by Félibien. His work emerged from an
English scholarly milieu that had been focused for more than a decade on comparative
study of buildings to determine the origin and succession of the Gothic style. As prior
authors had been almost entirely focused on English monuments, Whittington’s claim
2
Félibien, 173.
James Dallaway, Observations (1806): 46.
4
G.D. Whittington, Historical Survey (2nd ed., 1811): 136.
3
4 that France invented Gothic prompted arguments in the journals of British antiquarians:
John Carter, an esteemed Gothicist affronted at the very idea of French primacy,
published a long critique of Whittington in the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1809, while
articles supporting Whittington’s thesis appeared in the Quarterly Review in 1809, and
the Critical Review and the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1810. This debate attracted little
notice outside of England. German scholars rediscovered Whittington’s observation in
the early 1840s. Franz Kugler’s Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte, first published in 1842;
and Franz Mertens’s “Paris Baugeschichtlich im Mittelalte” and Karl Schnaase’s
Geschichte der Bildenden Künste im Mittelalter, both of 1843, all establish Saint-Denis
as the earliest Gothic structure.5
French scholars, on the other hand, did not yet promote Saint-Denis to the same
position. While Whittington was writing in England, Jean-Baptiste-Louis-Georges
Seroux d’Agincourt was writing Histoire de l’art par ses monuments, published
posthumously in 1823. Compared to contemporary English antiquarians, Seroux
d’Agincourt’s view of Gothic is significantly broader, and he places its origins in ninthcentury Italy. His book, the earliest French work to emphasize a chronological history of
art, gives no special status to Saint-Denis. Guidebooks about Saint-Denis written in the
1810s and 20s describe the history of the abbey, the life of Saint Denis, and describe the
royal tombs at length (especially their revolutionary despoilment), but devote much less
space to describing the building. The Norman antiquarian Arcisse de Caumont’s Cours
d’antiquités monumentales, first published in 1830, also gives no special role to SaintDenis; in fact, while de Caumont had contacts in English antiquarian circles, he makes no
mention of Abbot Suger or the twelfth-century construction dates.
5
Mertens in Förster’s Allgemeine Bauzeitung 500-1; Schnaase 60-1.
5 Not until the middle of the nineteenth century was Saint-Denis chosen by French
scholars as the crucible of Gothic. While it seems odd that nationalism would not prompt
the French to leap at the chance to emphasize the role of their country in the creation of a
new style, the French would have viewed Saint-Denis through rather a different
framework than the English or the Germans, for whom the building was a curiosity apart
from their own national historical narratives. In France, Saint-Denis encapsulated the ties
between royal and religious tradition; only after Saint-Denis ceased serving its traditional
religious and ceremonial functions did scholars evaluate its structural and formal
qualities. The change in Saint-Denis’s status from site of royal and religious history to
artistic site resulted from two entwined issues: first, the historical rupture resulting from
the French Revolution; secondly, the process of restoration following the accession of
Napoleon and continuing during the reigns of Louis XVIII, Charles X, and LouisPhilippe. The Revolution abruptly changed Saint-Denis’s position: after twelve hundred
years of unbroken service, suddenly, this ancient Benedictine abbey was owned by the
state. Nationalized ownership opened the possibility of Saint-Denis being viewed as a
shared French, as opposed to religious or royal, monument.6 The rapid political and
social changes of the Revolution also created a new sense of separation from the past. At
Saint-Denis, which went from an abbey church to a parish church to a Temple of Reason
to an abandoned near-ruin stripped of its royal funerary monuments in the space of seven
years, the difference between the building as it appeared and the realm of the past must
have seemed stark. This was especially true because Saint-Denis showed new signs of
wear—metal stripped for reuse, broken windows, birds flying indoors—associated with
6
André Chastel, “La Notion de patrimoine,” Les Lieux de mémoire, Volume II: la Nation. Pierre Nora, ed.
(Paris: Gallimard, 1986) 405-50. On the revolution as shifting perception of monuments to collective
symbols: 411.
6 buildings abandoned for much longer periods of time, as if its aging process had
accelerated.7 Absent of tombs, stripped of liturgical furnishings, and unused, the
architecture could be viewed in isolation; Whittington would have seen the building in
this state. For the French, this break created a possibility to reframe Saint-Denis as
something other than a repository of the ancien regime, although the rapid pace of
ideological changes associated with the Revolution, the Empire, and the Bourbon
restoration—during which the altars were reconsecrated and the royal tombs were
reinstated—meant that Saint-Denis’s meaning remained unfixed.
While the initial destruction caused by the Revolution was associated with the
symbolism of the building—citizens destroyed religious and royal symbols while
requisitioning items of value—that destruction, in turn, created a sense of age and of
distance that helped neutralize the threat of those religious and royal ties. The destruction
also engendered the need for restoration. Napoleon spurred the first project in 1806,
considering Saint-Denis as a place to establish his mausoleum. Jacques Legrand was
placed in charge of the works, and his alterations included painting wall surfaces with
imperial symbols and repaving the floors in black-and-white marble. The work continued
under Jacques Cellerier when Legrand died in 1808. Cellerier built a long chapel on the
south side of the nave to serve as parish church, replacing the south nave wall in the
process. Napoleon visited in 1811 and was dissatisfied with the progress, so more work
began: the floors were raised two meters to level the nave and crossing, destroying the
crossing pier bases; dado arcading was removed, and the ambulatory stairways were
brought into line with the crossing piers.
7
On revolutionary changes to the building and damages: Bruzelius, 17.
7 François Debret, an architect trained at the École des Beaux-Arts, took over the
position of architect-in-chief of the restoration in 1813, at a time when Saint-Denis was
overseen by the Conseil des Bâtiments Civils (Council of Civic Buildings). A classicist
at heart, he emphasized the unity of the space. He also added new structures, intending to
make the building once again usable as a church: a new vestiary for the choirboys, the
completion of the aforementioned chapel. He also shored up the buttresses, removed and
recut surface stones, reroofed the aisles to clear the glazed triforium, rebuilt the roof with
iron trusses, and replaced the stained glass of the nave, transept, and upper chevet. When
the Bourbons were restored, the Imperial insignia were painted over and replaced by
fleurs-de-lis and Ls; this design lasted until 1831, when the fleur de lis was outlawed in
public monuments, and abstract ornament replaced the royal symbols. From 1816,
Debret also reinstalled the funerary monuments returned from the Musée des Monuments
Français.
After 1837, Debret was primarily focused on restoring the west façade. In that
year, the north tower of that façade had been struck by lightning, and Debret rebuilt the
damaged structure before beginning work on the rest of the façade and the portals. But
Debret’s new tower overloaded its foundations, and the stone showed signs of serious
stress, threatening failure; in 1846, the head of the Council of Civic Buildings declared
that the tower must be dismantled. Debret was removed from office the same year,
replaced by Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, who oversaw the doomed tower’s
removal.
After a period of approval (or at least tolerance) of Debret’s work in the 1810s
and 20s, criticism of his restoration appeared in the early 1830s and sharply increased
8 during the tower debacle. Whereas guidebooks of previous decade praised the unified
interior space and exterior massing, in 1833, Ludovic Vitet, the Inspector-General of
national monuments, suggested restraint in restoration. In 1841, faced with the news that
the tower threatened the stability of the façade, the Commission des Monuments
Historiques publicly attacked Debret's work. The 1830s were a turning point for the
appreciation of Gothic in France; fueled by the idea of ancient buildings as cumulative
creations of society presented in Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris of 1831, as well as
growing antiquarian interest and concern over the management of national heritage, the
government created the Commission des Monuments Historiques in 1837 to record and
oversee the preservation of buildings of historical significance. A new appreciation for
Gothic made Debret’s changes seem more serious; certainly Hugo’s ideas of restoration,
which counted changes due to fashion as causing irredeemable damage, influenced the
way that such alterations might be perceived by the public. Caroline Bruzelius attributes
the 1839 foundation of the periodical Annales Archéologiques to concern over Debret’s
work and a desire to arm the public with information about the design of authentic
medieval forms.
In the case of Saint-Denis’s position as the first Gothic building, the impetus
seems to have been the work on the façade. While Debret’s previous work had been
extensive, it had been primarily interior while his new tower stood on the most obvious
point of the building. It was not a surface change; the tower threatened the entire public
face of the building with destruction. The necessity of dismantling Debret’s tower left
the building with an obvious loss, an asymmetry. This was not a side wall to be torn
down and rebuilt with little public knowledge. To his critics, the replacement and
9 removal of the tower represented in shorthand Debret’s lack of respect for authentic
medieval fabric in an era increasingly concerned with preserving authenticity. If the
Revolution had resulted in the building’s abandonment, and the Napoleonic restorations
had encased the structure in classicizing trappings, Debret’s work eliminated
recognizable parts of the building. Prior discussions of Saint-Denis’s significance
described the architecture, but focused on the items the building contained: its tombs, its
relics, its historical associations. The continued existence of these things did not rely on
the continued existence of the church itself. If the architecture of Saint-Denis were to be
preserved, the value needed to be inherent in the architecture, not only in the site’s
furnishings or history. It is at the time of the tower’s dismantling and its aftermath that
the first references to Saint-Denis as the birthplace of Gothic appear in French journals.
The reaction to the tower’s failure in architectural circles demonstrates the
significance of its loss. The editor of the Annales Archéologiques, Adolphe Didron ainé,
was no supporter of Debret; in 1845, he mentioned the “scandalous” work at Saint-Denis
in a report on the restoration of Notre-Dame; later in the same volume, he refers to the
lamentable new sculpture of the Saint-Denis’s portals. Didron authored a series of
scathing notices on Saint-Denis for the Annales Archéologiques; five installments
appeared in 1846 alone, the year the tower was designated for removal and Debret’s last
year as the chief architect of the restoration. In the August issue, Didron states that
[trans] “everyone knows the conclusion of the long, unhappy torture inflicted on this
monument. The façade, scraped, pierced, torn, remade, bowed by the weight of its own
spire.”8 Prosper Merimée, attached to both the Council of Civic Buildings and the
Monuments Historiques, added his voice to the criticism with an editorial in the July
8
A. Didron, “Achèvement des restaurations de Saint-Denis,” Annales Archéologiques (August 1846): 108.
10 1846 issue, suggesting that the government had not wanted to see the true cause of the
disaster and claiming that the tower’s demolition would cause the general public to
believe that preservation of historic monuments was a lost cause.9
The span of time during which this transition from example of Gothic to first
Gothic occurred can be identified in the work of Daniel Ramée, author of the first
universal survey of the history of architecture in French. In the second volume of
Ramée’s Manuel de l’histoire générale de l’architecture, first published in 1843, Ramée
gives Saint-Denis priority over England in the use of the pointed arch, making reference
to Félibién to support the consecration date of the choir. He doesn’t emphasize the
building as the first example of Gothic. Saint Denis is instead one of a number of
monuments between Romanesque and Gothic: “In the works of Suger at Saint-Denis, we
again see the rounded arch mixed with the pointed arch.”10 When the second edition of
this work appeared in 1862, Saint-Denis had become the earliest gothic building: “It is in
every place admitted that the church of Saint-Denis used for the first time the arch
derived from two segments of a circle, which originated from vaults twice as wide as
long. The system of architecture vulgarly called Gothic was little by little derived from
the elaboration of this arch…made progressively in the space of the next seventy-five
years.”11 Ramée later refers to the logical system used by Suger at Saint-Denis and
derived from the pointed arch, distinguishing the Gothic style of Saint Denis from earlier,
unsystematic uses of the pointed arch in Sicily, where the pointed arch was “only a
9
Prosper Merimée, “Rapport sur les monuments historiques,” Annales Archéologiques (July 1846): 9.
Ramée, 211.
11
Ramée, 917-918.
10
11 simple form” and not Gothic.12 Within the space of nineteen years, Saint-Denis had
become the birthplace of a style.
At the end of the 1840s or beginning of the 1850s, attention turned from outrage
over the devastation of the building to renewed interest in preserving it under Viollet-leDuc’s supervision as chief architect. Felix de Verneilh claimed a French origin for Gothic
in an 1845 article from the Annales Archéologiques, citing Saint-Denis as one among
several early examples. In 1855, de Verneilh proposed that Saint-Denis and Chartres
were the first “true Gothic” cathedrals.13 By 1863, he could title an article on Saint-Denis
in the Annales Archéologiques “Le Premier des Monuments Gothiques” (the first of the
Gothic monuments); he emphasizes that Saint-Denis is Gothic, not transitional in style,
and takes issue with Viollet-le-Duc, who had expressed some doubt as to the accuracy of
Suger’s dates. De Verneilh mentions the German scholars of the 1840s who had pointed
to Saint-Denis’s primacy, and notes that the contemporary English architectural press
also recognized Saint-Denis’s position, or, more correctly, pointed out that the French
recognized it. He quotes from the introduction to the 1862 edition of Thomas Rickman’s
popular Attempt to Discriminate the Styles of Architecture in England, which states that
Saint-Denis was recognized by all French architectural historians as the oldest seed of
Gothic architecture.
The claims for Saint-Denis as the original Gothic monument were supported by
wider theories about Gothic, including those of Jules Quicherat. His publications of the
1850s, emphasizing that Gothic was more than just pointed arches or rib vaults (elements
12
13
Ramée, 1016.
Felix de Verneilh, “Lettre à M. Caumont,” Bulletin Monumental 21 (1855): 112
12 that earlier buildings also possessed), could be used to underscore the unique position of
Saint-Denis as a leap forward from Romanesque.
Viollet-le-Duc’s own scholarship—in some ways self-serving—positioned France
as the place where various elements had synthesized into a Gothic system as early as
1845; according to him, language and architecture were the two true expressions of a
nation.14 Ultimately, he would tie the origins of Gothic to French national genius. He
had few good words for the man he succeeded as Architect-in-Chief at Saint-Denis,
describing the scraped walls, recut sculpture, and undermined support of the church in the
Revue Archéologique in 1861.15 In his influential Dictionnaire Raisonné de
l’Architecture Francais, which began publication in 1854, Viollet-le-Duc pinpoints
Saint-Denis as the first location where the Gothic vault is synthesized; by 1859, English
scholars referenced Viollet-le-Duc’s theory that the eastern parts of Notre-Dame and
Saint-Denis were the “earliest germ” of the Gothic system.16 His Entretiens sur
l’Architecture of 1863 also points to Saint-Denis as the place where “the architectural
revolution was completed; not only was the rounded arch abandoned, but the system of
architecture called Gothic was found.” It was a structure of a kind never before built, a
“bold and sudden stroke of original genius.”17 The generation of French scholars
following Viollet-le-Duc cemented Saint-Denis’s reputation, and in the works of Louis
Gonse and Anthyme Saint-Paul, Saint-Denis is the Gothic synthesis whose roots and
influence they reconstruct. Saint-Denis’s reputation as the first Gothic building had
spread from specialist literature to the public at large at least by 1878, when Suger’s
14
Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, “De l’art étranger et de l’art national,” Annales Archéologiques 2 (1845): 308.
Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, “L'Église Imperiale de Saint Denis,” Revue archéologique 3 (1861): 301-20; 34553
16
Sylvanus Urban, “Correspondence,” Gentleman’s Magazine (February 1859): 176.
17
Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, trans. Henry van Brunt, Discourses on Architecture (Boston: 1875): 265-6, 287
15
13 building is referred to as the originator of Gothic in the Baedeker guide to Paris. For a
century and a half, this truism has been part of the discipline of medieval architecture,
and while it saved Saint-Denis, it has also restricted the ways we frame Gothic.
14