Stained Glass
The Dawn of the Gothic Era

Were there one man to be called "the father of Gothic architecture" it must be the man who was also called "the father of the French monarchy" – Suger, who, from 1122 to 1151, was the abbot of St Denis, near Paris. The date that Gothic architecture was born might be given as June 11, 1144, the day that Suger's beautiful creation, the abbey church of St Denis, was conscerated the presence of King Louis VII, the Queen, archbishops, bishops and abbots, many of whom returned home determined to imitate Suger's ideas.

Sugcr was a remarkable mail. Lowly born, he walked with kings. At school he met Louis VI (Louis the Fat) and became a lifelong friend and adviser. He also served Louis VII, unhappy husband of Eleanor of Aquitaine, and he governed France while Louis was away on the Second Crusade. He was a small mail, who dreamed grand and magnificent dreams. As head of the royal abbey of St Denis, Suger had the power and wealth to put these dreams into effect, for the greater glory of God, of the French monarchy and of himself.

Five years after he was made abbot, Suger set about the reform of the abbey, which had become materialistic and morally slack. But lie had no intention of making it a place only for monks. Unlike St Bernard of Clairvaux, the strict Cistercian, Suger wanted to welcome as many of the laity as possible to the abbey, with its relics of St Denis, the patron saint of France. Indeed, one of the reasons he gave for embarking on building a larger abbey, in about 1135, was to accommodate even greater crowds, Again unlike St Bernard, who fulminated against ostentation in Churches where "beauty is more admired than sanctity is revered", Suger believed that only the best objects that man could create were worthy of a house of God.

Suger obviously revelled in looking at beautiful things and he was no dilettante. His involvement in the new St Denis was total and practical. In the detailed record he kept of the rebuilding, there is a revealing account of how he handled the problem of finding beams long enough for the new roof‑since all the foresters had sworn that they could not find any tall trees ill the area. One morning at dawn, he called his carpenters together and – to the great amusement of the foresters – set off with them to fight a way through the undergrowth of the forest "with the courage of faith". By nine o'clock his faith had been rewarded; they had found the twelve tall trees they needed.

It was Sugcr himself who devised the subjects for the many new stained‑glass windows and arranged for them to be glazed "by the exquisite hands of many masters from different regions". The windows were a major element in Suger's plan, for, as he made clear in his voluminous writ­ings, he was deeply concerned with the symbolic and spiritual qualities of light. III building a Church which would be "pervaded by the wonderful and uninterrupted light of most radiant windows" his aim was "to illumine men's minds so that they may travel through it to an apprehension of God's light". III trying to achieve this he was helped by the technical innovations of the new style of architecture, later to be known as Gothic, which made it possible for a great proportion of wall space to be taken up with glass. Proud of his creation, it is little wonder that Suger had himself portrayed in one of the windows – in the act of giving a window.

The windows of St Denis were, unfortunately, largely destroyed in 1793 during the French Revolution. Some of these were restored by the French art historian Viollet‑le-Duc in 1848. Fragments and entire windows are also to be found in Churches and collections throughout Europe.

Suger's abbey rather spectacularly marked the beginning of a new period of architecture and of stained glass. But it did not result in the immediate death of Romanesque, not even in France. Only a little Romanesque glass has survived in French cathedrals, but it is of exceptional beauty. One of the earliest windows was that depicting the Ascension in Le Mans Cathedral, of which four panels still exist. A gracefully attenuated Virgin, her blue robes glowing against a red background, looks to the ascending Jesus (now missing from the window). On either side, against a blue background, a trio of apostles gazes upwards; below, on alternate red and blue backgrounds, to which their predominantly yellow and green draperies provide strong contrast, are six more apostles, their faces upturned. The simplicity and elegance of the figures clearly show Byzantine influence, but emotions are depicted in a traditionally Western manner. Compared with the Augsburg prophets, the Le Mans apostles are full of animation.

The outstanding example of French Romanesque glass is the large Crucifixion window, of about 1162, in Poitiers. A blue‑haired Christ is portrayed on a red crucifix In a typical Byzantine pose‑head to one side, trunk inclined from the hips. Above the central Crucifixion tableau there is a small Ascension scene, in which the groups of disciples and the Virgin are reminiscent of the Le Mans figures.

A later stage I n the development of French Romanesque glass is to be seen In the nave of Angers Cathedral. The subjects include the death of the Virgin, the life of St Catherine and the martyrdom of St Vincent. The wide stylized decorative borders are similar to those in Poitiers, but the figures are less elongated, their faces gentler and the folds of their garments more flowing.

The future of French stained glass, however, lay not in Romanesque, but in the new style which in St Denis was Abbé Suger's monument. As the year 1200 passed without the world being overwhelmed by yet another predicted Apocalypse, Europe, and particularly France, was entering the first golden age of stained glass.