The Complex Phenomenon of Gothic Cathedral Movement

The Abbey was founded during the seventh century at the burial web site of St. Denis, who had led the conversion in the nation to Christianity, and by the twelfth century it was "the royal abbey par excellence in France." The rebuilding was initiated around 1135 by Abbot Suger (1081-1151) whose writings are famous for their account with the aesthetics with the emerging Gothic style. In explaining the symbolism on the church Suger started out on the prevailing notion that an earthly church signified the spiritual church and followed well-liked schemes of symbolic interpretation--ranging in the value of numbers for the mystical qualities of light. His explanations sought to justify the splendor of his own church--much as he had also sought to justify the need for expansion by describing the crowds of pilgrims who could not fit to the old church. But these explanations did not, for ones most part, have any specific connection towards the Gothic additions to St. Denis.

Frankl noted that this was not unusual since medieval writers who interpreted the symbolism of architecture "never paid any attention to stylistic differences." Like most medieval writers, therefore, Suger did not "refer to traditions of structural form" or indicate any way wherever his allegorical interpretations had an effect on architectural form. The only aspect of his discussion that can relate at all towards the architec.

But a more recent study has rejected such direct parallels between features of Gothic architecture and Scholastic argumentation. Radding and Clark perceived a shared mental habit among Scholastics and builders but felt that this was a matter of mental processes, i.e., "how difficulties have been conceived of and solved," which led to works of argumentation and architecture that don't display direct parallels. In Panofsky's argument the subtlety of detail in the jobs of each Scholastics and Gothic builders resulted from their shared interest in applying a "postulate of clarification for clarification's sake," or, as Radding and Clark put it, a "desire for refinement for its unique sake." But there was, instead, a shift in intellectual procedure in each Scholastics and builders inside twelfth century exactly where the pursuit of individual questions or difficulties was replaced by the attempt to produce "whole systems of merchandise to intellectual and artistic problems." The scholars abandoned the glossing of individual texts and also the formulation of particular answers to particular theological propositions for the construction of a systematic response exactly where the answer to every question necessarily impinged on each other question. The parallel development in architecture that required a similar shift in cognitive processes was the work of builders "who, now endeavoring to devise increasingly complex and integrated spaces, observed themselves obtaining to model little details with an eye to the results each decision would have on a whole." As Radding and Clark conceive of this change, the Gothic builder, starting in the anonymous architect with the east end of St. Denis.

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