1137–1270

Gothic cathedrals: Suger, Saint-Denis and Notre-Dame (1137–1270)

Shelley: Gothic first appeared in the rebuilding of the abbey of Saint-Denis, which Abbot Suger carried out in 1137–1144; Notre-Dame was built in 1163–1235, and in the century from 1170 to 1270 more than five hundred great Gothic churches were raised in France alone. Flying buttresses removed massive walls and made room for stained glass; light in it was a symbol of God and His ways to people. For Shelley the cathedral expresses the spiritual conflict of the Christian drama: man ascends, God descends; the striving upward, like the papacy, often ended in disaster.

Key points

• Shelley: Gothic first appeared in rebuilding the abbey of Saint-Denis; Suger carried out the work from 1137 to 1144 and wrote of it: “by God’s grace I am transported mystically from this lower world to the higher one”. Notre-Dame was built in 1163–1235; in 1170–1270 more than five hundred huge Gothic churches rose in France alone. Flying buttresses removed massive walls, and statues of saints were elongated as if straining toward heaven; Chartres rises like a thirty-storey skyscraper, Strasbourg forty, and such efforts more than once ended in collapsing towers. The Gothic cathedral points both ways – columns and spires up, God’s light coming down through windows that tell the story from Creation to Judgment; light is a constant symbol of God, and the cathedral expresses a spiritual conflict: man ascends – God descends. Shelley applies this imagery to the 12th–13th-century papacy, which like the cathedrals tried to attain the impossible and overreached

People

• Suger

Place

France, Paris, Saint-Denis