CHAPTER III

The Early and Classic Gothic Style

c. 1150-1:. 1250

y N 1140 the foundation stone was laid for the new choir of St.
I Denis Abbey near Paris (fig. 21). It was consecrated in 1144. Abbot
-•-Suger, the mighty counsellor of two kings of France, was the soul
of the enterprise. There are few buildings in Europe so revolutionary
in their conception and so rapid and unhesitating in their execution.
Four years was an exceptionally short time in the I2th century for
rebuilding the choir of a large
abbey church. Whoever de-
signed the choir of St. Denis,
one can safely say, invented
the Gothic style, although
Gothic features had existed
before, scattered here and
there, and, in the centre of
France, the provinces around
St. Denis, even developed with
a certain consistency.

The features which make up
the Gothic style are well
enough known, too well in
fact, because most people for-
get that a style is not an
aggregate of features, but an
integral whole. Still, it may be
just as well to recapitulate them and re-examine their meaning. They
are the pointed arch, the flying buttress and the rib-vault. The pointed
arch conveys weight down on to walls or piers at a more reasonable
angle than the semicircular arch, and had for this purpose already
been used frequently in the Romanesque buildings of Burgundy
and Poitou. The other and at least equally important advantage of
the pointecl arch, the advantage that it enables masons to vault bays
of other than square plan without getting into trouble about level
heights for their arches, had not been understood in the West before
EJL—4 %3i

21. ST. DENIS: ABBEY CHURCH, CONSE-
CRATED 1144.