The term Gothic was unknown to the architects of the Middle Ages who practiced the style. They called their idiom – marked by soaring walls with vast windows – the ‘French Style,’ for the country form which it sprang, through the midwifery of a Benedictine Abbot named Suger in the year 1144. That was when Suger unveiled the rebuilt abbey and church of St. Denis, outside Paris.
Designed by an architect whose name is lost to history, St. Denis combines the pointed arch with the ribbed vault to support vast amounts of weight, thus relieving walls of their traditional burden of holding up the roof – in a seemingly miraculous new way. In tandem, these innovations meant that the church walls could be thinner and punctured by many large windows that would allow sunlight, tinted by stained glass, to stream inside as never before. This marvel both inspired worshippers and attracted travelers, thus enriching Suger’s abbey.
Within a century, bishoprics throughout Europe wanted to emulate St. Denis’ success by erecting French-style cathedrals of their own. The Cathedral at Chartres added the use of flying buttresses, allowing the building to soar 120 feet into the air. In Britain, the spire of Salisbury Cathedral stretches 404 feet into the sky.
By the 1500s, the French style had nearly run its course; the term Gothic was coined by Renaissance architects as an insult that equated the idiom’s excessive ornamentation to the supposed vulgarity of the Barbarian Goth tribes of northern Europe.
Gothic architecture with music of Francis Poulenc: Gloria – Domine Deus
