Suger's Miracles, Branner's Bourges: Reflections on Gothic Architecture as Medieval Modernism

Abstract

The study introduces the concept of "modernism" and "historicism" as an interpretative model for Gothic architecture, addressing the limitations of traditional categories such as "skeletal form," "diaphaneity," and "linearity." These concepts provide advantages in analyzing medieval architecture, including formal analysis and contextual integration. The paradigm is tested through a reexamination of Abbot Suger's writings on Saint-Denis and a revised solution to the Bourges problem.

Introduction

The "Gothic" architectural movement has remained perplexing despite extensive scholarship. An earlier essay proposed a new conceptual framework for understanding this architecture, but it was compressed and required further development. This study focuses on the French genesis of the "Gothic," reformulating and clarifying the argument, considering its terminology, implications, and interpretative positions. The viability of the new interpretative model will be tested through analysis of Abbot Suger's writings on Saint-Denis and the cathedral of Bourges.

The Necessity of Redefinition

The extensive literature on the Gothic lacks adequate terms for its understanding. Existing interpretative models, such as rib vaulting and skeletal structure, are not necessarily wrong but do not offer a firm definition of the Gothic. These models form an unwieldy bricolage of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century analytic methods. Recent studies have shifted away from broad questions toward specific aspects like functions of individual spaces and patronage, but the question "What is Gothic?" remains a central point of reference in discussions of European monumental architecture.

A new paradigm: Gothic as medieval modernism

Instead of reviewing the problematic concepts used to study the period, the term "Gothic" is interrogated by questioning why European architecture of the twelfth through fifteenth centuries is named after a barbarian tribe. The Renaissance first connected the word "Gothic" with the architecture, viewing the Goths as destroyers of Rome and its architecture, embodying anticlassicism. The Renaissance also used the term "lavori moderni" for the recent post/non-antique architectural phenomenon. Combining "Gothic" and "lavori moderni" suggests an architecture that is both modern and anticlassical, or modernist and antihistoricist. Therefore, if it were possible to rename later medieval architecture with a more accurate and less misinformative term, it would be "medieval modernism."

The term "medieval modernism" is clarified and justified, referring to something more concrete and conscious than a Focillonesque "spirit of modernism." Going back to the Romanesque period, the original core meaning of the word "Romanesque" also has a powerful validity. The early nineteenth-century term Romanesque was on the mark, or nearly so, of describing the period it denotes more accurately than later academic analysis, which, like the usual terms for "Gothic," do not hold up under hard scrutiny in regard to accuracy, compatibility, or comprehensiveness of application to this highly varied architecture. Pre-Gothic medieval architecture was quite simply, Roman-esque and deeply historicizing. The Romanesque period can be characterized as a conflict, instability, an unresolved tension between the two opposing currents of historicism and modernism, in which the former tended to predominate. The Gothic turn would amount to a shift in orientation, a move towards the resolution of the contest, away from historicism and in favor of an ascendant, eventually dominant modernism.

The components of historicism and modernism varied widely in usage and strength throughout Romanesque Europe and serves to invalidate the usual models of descriptive analysis, for churches of Rome, were so faithful to early Christian models, that they represent intractable exceptions to standard interpretative models. Normandy, on the other hand, was in certain aspects sometimes so strongly modernist that it could be reasonably included by Ernst Gall in his admirable book on early Gothic. More characteristic of the period are works like Autun Cathedral or its model, Cluny III, which embody a complex, often tense or conflicted relationship between historicizing elements, such as classicizing columns, pilasters, vaulting, ornament, and "normative" proportions and modernist tendencies towards the bay system, spatial fragmentation, schematization.

Speyer cathedral, which embodies a conflicted mix of historicism and modernism. The first version of Speyer cathedral took up the nearby form of buildings at Trier, turned it outside in, and suppressed the planar, columnar layer of bay-dividers. What’s particularly telling is that the second version a century later is more rather than less antique in spirit. Not only were huge Roman-scaled groin vaults erected, but the main piers received a double columnar articulation and were far more antique in proportion than their suppressed, attenuated forms. As a whole the structure may be seen as a grand cathedral of the Holy Roman Emperors, seeking legitimization from large-scale vaulted ancient interiors like the Baths of Caracalla or the Basilica of Maxentius.

The Romanesque period was considered a