Artistic Change at St-Denis: Abbot Suger's Program and the Early Twelfth-Century Controversy over Art (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1990) (original) (raw)

In Artistic Change at St-Denis: Abbot Suger's Program and the Early Twelfth-Century Controversy over Art (Princeton University Press, 1990), I apply the conclusions of my earlier study of the social theory of medieval art as presented in The "Things of Greater Importance": Bernard of Clairvaux's Apologia and the Medieval Attitude Toward Art (University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1990) to a complex and previously only partially understood case--that is, I test the practicality of my earlier study. The art program of the monastery of Saint-Denis, just outside Paris, under Abbot Suger (1122-1151) is of enormous importance in the history of art, being considered to be the origin of Gothic architecture, sculpture, and stained glass. Suger's writings, upon which I base my study, are among the most famous in the history of art. In applying the issues of the early twelfth-century controversy over art to this program, it becomes clear that the situation at Saint-Denis was more complex than previously thought. For example, rather than being the artistic expression of centuries-old Pseudo-Dionysian light mysticism, as has been believed, it can be shown that the artistic change initiated at Saint-Denis was a middle-ground reaction to the current controversy over art, especially to the criticism that art acted as a spiritual distraction to the monk. And far from being the product of the personal idiosyncrasies of Suger, as has often said, the well known obscurity of the art of Saint-Denis was an intentional obscurity whose purpose was to provide an art so complex that it could be used as a justification of monastic art in its claim to function on the same level as scriptural study, which was unquestioned as a legitimate monastic pursuit. It was in this sense that Suger wrote that his art was "accessible only to the litterati"--and not to the visiting illiterate pilgrim--previous scholarship not realizing that, in the vocabulary of early twelfth-century monasticism, litteratus is a technical term referring to the literate choir monk. At the same time, however, I also show that Suger's claim can be fully understood only with recognition of the inherent contradiction that these same artworks were in fact fully accessible visually, if not intellectually, to the visiting illiterate lay pilgrim as well--a contradiction of which Suger was fully aware. My conclusions, which have become broadly accepted, have fundamentally changed our view of the best-known moment of artistic change in medieval art history.