Adam Sioud

The royal abbey of Saint-Denis sits on the plain northeast of Paris, where the first bishop of the city was buried after his martyrdom around the year 250. By the twelfth century it held the tombs of nearly every French king, and by 1144, through the ambition of one abbot, it held the first complete example of what we now call Gothic architecture.

That abbot was Suger, who presided over Saint-Denis from 1122 until his death in 1151. He had been given as an oblate around the age of ten, and served Louis VI and Louis VII as counselor, and France as regent during the Second Crusade. His epitaph, by Simon Chèvre d'Or: he refused in his smallness to be a small man.

The rebuilding of the abbey church occupied his final decade. The chapels of the facade were consecrated in June 1140, the foundation of the chevet laid a month later, and the chevet itself consecrated on June 11, 1144.

He wanted light. He replaced the heavy dividing walls of the ambulatory with slender columns. Rib vaults pushed the ceiling's weight outward through them. The walls, no longer loadbearing, became glass.

The colored windows of the radiating chapels cost more than the stone that held them. Suger placed his name in four images and seven inscriptions across the church. The identity of the author and the work, he wrote, provides everything needed for the worker. He hoped to leave something more lasting than bronze.

The light he chased became the common idiom of European cathedrals for two centuries after him.