Ark of God

Summary of talk given at the Leeds Medieval Conference, July 2003
“A chronology for French High Gothic: Consequences of The Ark of God.”

In 2002 I published the first part of The Creation of Gothic Architecture an Illustrated Thesaurus: The Ark of God. Part A is titled ‘The Evolution of Foliate Capitals in the Paris Basin 1170 to 1250’. It contains illustrations of ten thousand foliate capitals from the Paris Basin carved between 1170 and 1250. Three hundred documents are also included that show that during the seventy years covered by these two volumes only parts of seventeen buildings can be dated with any certainty. Forty-five other buildings have texts with varying degrees of relevance and uncertainty as to time or place. Everything written on the creation of Gothic architecture depends on them. Such a miniscule foundation has resulted in many unfortunate assumptions.
I used the foliage that is clearly dated by the documents to define the carving manner of each decade. These definitions were then applied to all those churches and parts of churches for which there was little or no documentation, Fig. 1. Thus the one single item of foliage, common to every one of these buildings, could be used to lay the foundation for a chronology for over 400 churches. These included all those that form the substance of historical analysis.
Three major conclusions came from this study that affect our understanding of the evolution of Gothic architecture.
The first was that during only one decade, the 1170s, the design of foliate carving in the Greater Seine valley was transformed from the formal style that Denise Jalabert called generalisée to a more natural style of carving, Figs 2 and 3 (Denise Jalabert, La flore sculptée des monuments du Moyen Age en France, Paris, 1965). This provides a reliable watershed date whereby every building in the Paris Basin with only formal capitals should be dated before 1170±, and all those with only natural capitals should be dated after 1180±.
The second was that Gothic was not created solely in the great cathedral workshops from which ideas spread outwards to the minor sites, but ideas were most often begun in the smaller buildings long before being used in the cathedrals. This contradicts earlier beliefs that, for example, ideas generated in Reims were ‘passed on to a large number of new shops that it formed and colonized’ and that after 1160 ‘Gothic is the style of the Ile-de-France’ (Robert Branner, Saint Louis and the Court Style, London, 1965, 28; Otto von Simson, The Gothic Cathedral, New York, 1964, 64).
The third was that after 1160 the bulk of architectural innovation came from the great abbeys to the north and east of Paris – the Soissonais, the Reimois and the Laonnais – rather than the cathedral workshops. That these were some of the major Benedictine and Cistercian houses in the region suggests that new concepts may have been consciously evolved in the intellectual atmosphere found in many of the abbeys.
In addition it showed that a number of key chronological assumptions used by medieval historians may be out of date – in particular:
a) Chartres was not the originator of the High Gothic format, but the child of twenty years of experimentation: Preuilly abbey (first great rose window 1160s), Braine (aisle capitals 1181±), Longpont (stretched aisles 1180s), Soissons cathedral (begun 1182± and tall clerestory decided 1192±), Orbais (tall clerestory 1195±).
b) The nave capitals of Notre-Dame in Paris were carved in the 1190s, not a decade earlier, and do not date the first flying buttresses. In an earlier article I have shown that flying buttresses first appeared in the 1150s (James, “Evidence for flying buttresses before 1180″, JSAH, 1992, 261-287).
c) The architecture of the Ile-de-France was not as important as is claimed as in most buildings after the 1150s the clerestory is pulled downwards and often reduced to a small oculus (John James, The Template-makers of the Paris Basin, Leura, 1989, 112-116). As most histories are more interested in following the tall-and-thin story being pursued in other regions, squat has been unkindly condemned as having ‘no proper understanding of the major problems of the day’ – yet who decides what is a ‘major problem’ if not the locals? (Jean Bony, “The resistance to Chartres in early thirteenth century architecture”, British Archaeological Journal, 1957-58, 40-41) While the rest of the Basin was pushing upwards, the Parisis was determinedly hunkering lower.
d) The axial chapel in the abbey of Saint-Remi contained most elements of what was to become the High Gothic style, though with no great height in the aisles or gallery (1165±). The foliage shows that the clerestory walls and timbers of the main roof were all in place by 1176±. The chapel fits between huge supports for flyers, full-width windows and minimal-sized shaft members that are as thin as any built over the next fifty years. There is full dissolution of the wall face behind the passage screen and the dado arcades. The vaulting capitals are placed above the sills producing a miniaturized version of the tall clerestory.
e) When Rayonnant emerged it collected almost no ideas from the Royal Domain, but imported its major vocabulary from the north and east where they had been invented over the previous sixty years. These ideas were first assembled in the royal chapel of Saint-Germain-en-Laye (completed 1238) – Oulchy (plate tracery 1150s), Saint-Remi (linked triforium 1170±), Couvrelles (window behind triforium 1180±), Essômes (bar tracery 1209±), Avenay-Val-d’Or (tre-foil arches 1210s), Vaudoy (fully glazed triforium 1217±), Chartres (tracery extended beyond the frame of the rose 1233±).
In short, we can say that the evolution of Gothic was not a process that exploded out of a few powerful city workshops to seed ideas elsewhere. Creativity was a continuous process and could have begun anywhere, and the great cathedrals were the culmination of decades of prior experimentation that occurred mainly in the abbeys to the north-east of the Paris Basin.