St Denis

St Denis was once a village just north of Paris, known pretty much only for being home to the monastery of St-Denis, where the kings of France were buried. Now it is a somewhat disreputable suburb, known mostly for the same thing. Last weekend we went to visit.

As you can see, it's a little dismal outside but full of light inside.

What's exciting for me about St-Denis--and the main reason we visited--is that it's famous to medieval historians, so I've been reading about it for years. There are a few reasons for its fame. First, it is possibly the first church built in the Gothic style. Some elements of Gothic style appeared elsewhere first, but what was new at St-Denis was putting them all together, and the unique effect they create in concert. Pointed Gothic arches distribute weight differently than the round Romanesque arches of the early middle ages (you can see some of these on the church's facade--elements of the older style remain), so less wall was needed to hold up the weight of the ceiling. Flying buttresses on the outside of the church support the walls too, counteracting the outward push of that heavy roof. But why all this extra support for the walls? So they could be pierced with giant windows that would let in the light, filtered through stained-glass windows, of course! The big windows combine with other elements of the architecture, like the ribbed pillars and the vaulting (vaulting is basically the ceiling's three-dimensional version of the pointed arch, and has a similar effect on weight distribution), to give it an overall feeling of height, verticality, and upward movement.

Here's big- and small-scale Gothic ornamentation combined in the Ste-Chapelle, and similar details on the Tour St Jacques.

But wait! There's more! Statues got taller and thinner too, mirroring the height of the churches. Gothic ornamentation--like the motif of the pointed arch-top or the three- or four-lobed shape like a clover, which you can see above--started not only to be applied on a big scale as architectural elements, in window frames and church facades, but also to be repeated in decorative details on a small scale, on tombs, statues, and precious objects like reliquaries. Some art historians call the Gothic a "total" style for this reason. It's also called an "international" style, because after it became popular in France it spread rapidly all over medieval Europe.

Abbot Suger of St-Denis is the little monk supplicating at the feet of the Virgin Mary in the Annunciation on the right.

Of course the abbey church of St-Denis didn't directly cause all of that. But it may have provided the germ. Like many churches, St-Denis was rebuilt in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. What's unusual is that we know a lot about it, because the abbot who oversaw the twelfth-century renovations conveniently wrote a treatise about what was accomplished during his administration. Abbot Suger was given to the monastery as an oblate when he was only 10 years old, and tells us that he thinks of it as his mother--a mother to whom he wanted to give the gift of expensive church renovations(!). They are fitting, he says, because meditating on the sparkling light of the windows and the jewels in his renovated church helps to lift the mind to the light of God. We've been in a number of Gothic churches before now, and many bigger, but St-Denis still impresses me with all the light it lets in.

Look at how much of that wall isn't wall but rather window! St-Denis' rebuilding was also influential in making subsequent medieval architects realize that rose windows are awesome.

On one of our trips to the Louvre, I was excited to find that they still have some of the ancient jewels and relics which Suger mentions collecting and having set in gold! If you're in DC, you can see another one of these, a chalice re-set by Suger, at the National Gallery of Art.

 

You can see his name (SUgER) across the bottom.

As a patron saint of France, Saint Denis had a lot of significance for its monarchy. The story about this third-century bishop of Paris and martyr goes that after he was beheaded, he picked up his head and marched six miles from Montmartre (the "mount of martyrs") to St Denis, where he finally died, preaching all the while. This makes him easy to spot in art, incidentally. The church was, as I mentioned, the burial place of the kings of France since something like seventh century. So the monks of St-Denis were the main people charged with praying for the souls of the dead kings. They eventually became the official keepers of French royal history, too, which they wrote throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The oriflamme, the battle standard of the kings of France, was kept at St-Denis, and retroactively associated with the standard of Charlemage as mentioned in the Chanson de Roland. My work is about how another ruling dynasty--the ducal family of Normandy aka (after 1066) the kings of England--was commemorated in histories and in monks' memories, so it's super cool for me to visit this place which was a focal point for history-writing and -remembering in France.

A pre-revolutionary but post-medieval Oriflamme in St-Denis. Photo from my previous trip in 2010.

All of this is a bit odd to remember while standing in a mostly-empty church in the French Republic. These days St-Denis shows the commemoration of the kings mostly in housing their effigies:

I'm not sure I would recommend the longish trek by metro out to St-Denis--at the end, you have to pay to enter the back of the church, presumably because its upkeep has been handed over by the impoverished church (the monastery was suppressed and destroyed in the revolution, like all the others) to the Centre des Monuments Nationaux. But for me, it was fantastic to return and to share it with T.