The monastery church, or even the towering cathedral, is not exactly a hot topic in today’s contemporary art. Around Christmas time, however, it’s harder to ignore the role that stained glass windows in medieval sanctuaries played in shaping the Western art tradition.
How did Gothic art arise, and who was responsible? The detective work could begin in 12th century France, at the ancient church of St-Denis in north Paris, according to the current issue of The Art Bulletin, which offers a cover story on stained glass.At St-Denis, burial site of French kings, the monastery's abbot merged the art styles of his day, including stained glass, and this synthesis rapidly spread the Gothic look across all of Europe. “Nothing less than a new conception of the religious work of art was taking place at St-Denis,” art historian Conrad Rudolph writes in Art Bulletin.
During the 1100s in Europe, the great monastery churches were embroiled in a certain amount of politics, and one of the most heated topics was the use of art in the vast monastery church network. Christians had always used art. Very simple and didactic stained glass, like murals, had been in use for 500 years already. The early Pope Gregory the Great gave the rationale: “Those who are illiterate may at least read by seeing on the walls what they cannot read in books.”
Over time, churches also began to fill up with pictures of monsters, grotesques, weird plants and animals, and human contortions, all of this spreading on walls, drain spouts, columns, and seen even in stained glass. Such crazy resplendence did not last, however. By the 12th century, monastic reformers had been cutting back on such distractions, arguing, as did the influential Bernard of Clairvaux (in 1125), that art in principle was a lower material experience. Art was an obstacle for monks on their spiritual journey to higher contemplation and virtues.
So along comes Abbot Suger, a young monk at St-Denis who became its abbot and, in 1135, began a great building program to expand the old Romanesque church (movig away from those Roman characteristics of heavy walls, towers, and pillars). As is well known, with his resources, Abbot Suger was able to bring together all the new architectural inventions of the era to create a more light-filled, vertical, and ornate kind of church—to be called Gothic, and to take Europe by storm.
With new architecture, Suger could make the leaded glass windows much larger, and it was only natural to want to make them more elaborate, educational, and stunning. But he had a political problem: how to expand this art without upsetting Bernard, who set the tone in monastery politics? Suger found the solution, historian Rudolph tells us, by cleverly using theology to justify the expansion of art. In short, Suger said that an elaborate window could be like a book. When monks looked at this kind of window art, they were studying scriptures, theology, and the virtues (which Bernard endorsed heartily). The information in the stained glass was “accessible only to the literati,” Suger explained. It was higher learning, not artistic distraction.
This was very much theological inside-baseball among the monks, as Rudolph shows, involving beliefs about the three (or four) stages of spiritual growth in a monk's life. For all we know, Abbot Suger simply liked stained glass, and by citing the theologian Hugh (another player), he began to suggest that even non-monks could spiritually benefit from the art.
In time, Suger and Hugh’s implicit argument won the day: non-literati could also grow spiritually by looking at sophisticated stained glass windows. Ordinary people, too, had spiritual stages that art could stimulate. And so it was that Abbot Suger’s art program, carried out systematically at St-Denis, opened the way for truly Gothic stained glass to appear in other churches. Over at Chartres Cathedral, for example, a slightly less elite window was innovated, producing 184 portals as if giant Gothic kaleidoscopes.
In his article, Rudolph takes us through a good deal of theological detective work. However, his broader conclusions about art history may be the most fascinating for today. Because Abbot Suger justified higher quality art as a service to both monks and the 12th century’s growing class of educated Europeans, he spurred a widespread revival of art. He renewed the populist vision of Gregory (over that of Bernard).
Rudolph also shows that today’s heated debated on “originality” in art is not new. Back in Suger’s day there was always a young theologian or two who claimed a radical new “invention” in the face of orthodoxy. Suger had sidestepped such revolutionist rhetoric. “Suger did little more than propose the same justifications for religious art that had been offered since the beginnings of Christianity,” Rudolph says. Abbot Suger's innovation was to pull together “previously existing elements to address contemporary needs.”
This was a quiet revolution in art. For ordinary people, the day soon came in most churches of Europe when their “field of vision was flooded with brilliant light, glowing color, obviously meaningful forms, bewildering detail, and unfathomable inscriptions.” They couldn’t necessarily read these theological books of stained glass—as it still goes today. But the art inspired. The rest is art history.
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