Abbot Suger

Abbot Suger rebuilt the abbey church of Saint-Denis in the 1140s and, in doing so, invented Gothic architecture. Born around 1081 to a family of modest standing, he was given to the abbey as an oblate at about ten, where he was educated alongside the future Louis VI and formed a friendship that determined his career. He became abbot in 1122 and was a leading royal counsellor for the rest of his life, serving Louis VI and Louis VII and governing France as regent while the latter was on the Second Crusade from 1147 to 1149 — an administration efficient enough that he was called father of the country on the king's return. Saint-Denis held the relics of the patron saint of France and the royal burials, and the Carolingian church was too small for the crowds on feast days, with pilgrims injured in the crush. Suger rebuilt the west front from 1135 and the choir from 1140, consecrating it in 1144. The choir is where the change happens. By combining the pointed arch, the ribbed vault and the flying buttress — none of them new individually — the structure carries its load on a skeleton of piers rather than on continuous walls. The wall could then be replaced by glass, and the ambulatory chapels merge into a continuous ring of light. Suger's theology drove the engineering. He held, following the writings then attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite, that material light leads the mind toward divine light, and he recorded his intentions and expenditures in two treatises — rare first-hand evidence about a medieval building. He was attacked by Bernard of Clairvaux for extravagance. He died in 1151.

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