The Gothic Cathedral

By the early twelfth century, Western Europe was covered with Romanesque churches: solid buildings with round arches, thick walls and small windows. The change began at the royal abbey of Saint-Denis, just north of Paris. Abbot Suger rebuilt its choir in the early 1140s, and when it was consecrated in 1144 visitors saw a new kind of space, with slender columns, pointed arches, ribbed vaults and a ring of chapels filled with coloured glass. Suger wrote of the “wonderful and uninterrupted light” of the new work, which he understood as a path from material beauty to God.

None of the individual elements was new. Pointed arches and ribbed vaults had appeared earlier in Burgundy, Normandy and England, and pointed arches were long known in the Islamic world. What was new was their combination into a system. Pointed arches channelled weight more steeply downwards, ribs concentrated the load of the vault onto a few points, and flying buttresses carried the remaining thrust outside the building. The walls between were no longer needed for support and could become windows.

Within decades, bishops and chapters across northern France were rebuilding their cathedrals in the new manner, at Sens, Laon and Paris, where Notre-Dame was begun in 1163. After a fire in 1194, Chartres was rebuilt with tall clerestory windows and a full set of flying buttresses, and the cathedrals of Reims and Amiens followed in the early thirteenth century. The ambition to build ever higher reached its limit at Beauvais, where part of the choir vault, about 48 metres high, collapsed in 1284. Building a cathedral was an enormous undertaking, paid for by bishops, clergy, kings, guilds and the gifts of pilgrims, and many took generations.

Construction was directed by a master mason, who combined the roles of architect, engineer and site manager. Masters worked from full-size drawings scratched on plaster floors and from templates for each type of stone, and some of their drawings on parchment survive, such as the great elevations of the façade of Cologne. Teams of quarrymen, masons, carpenters, glaziers and labourers worked mainly in the building season from spring to autumn, protecting unfinished walls through the winter. Cranes powered by treadwheels lifted stone to the upper levels, and wooden centring held each arch in place until its keystone was set. Because work stopped and started as money ran out or came in, many cathedrals show changes of style from one end to the other, recording the decades or centuries it took to finish them.

A medieval cathedral had several jobs at once. It was the bishop’s church, where he presided at the great feasts, ordained priests and kept his chair. It was the home of a community of clergy, the canons of the cathedral chapter, who sang the cycle of daily services, the Divine Office, in the choir stalls from before dawn to evening. And it was the mother church of the diocese, where people from the whole region came for festivals, processions and markets held in its shadow.

The layout followed these uses. The canons and the high altar occupied the eastern end, often closed off by a screen, while lay people gathered in the nave. Side chapels held altars where priests said Masses for the dead, often endowed by wealthy families or guilds. Many cathedrals housed important relics, such as the tunic of the Virgin Mary at Chartres or the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury, and the ambulatory and radiating chapels allowed streams of pilgrims to visit them.

The building was also meant to teach. Sculpture on the portals and stained glass in the windows told Bible stories, the lives of saints and the moral order of the world, from the Last Judgement over the central door to scenes of farmers and craftsmen at work. Medieval commentators described the cathedral as an image of the heavenly Jerusalem described in the Book of Revelation. Today most Gothic cathedrals remain places of worship, Catholic in France, Spain and Italy, Anglican in England and Lutheran in much of Germany and Scandinavia, as well as museums of art and history visited by millions.

Contemporaries called the new style opus francigenum, “French work”, and it spread from the Île-de-France across Europe, changing as it travelled. English builders preferred long, low buildings with square east ends and great central towers, and they developed their own phases, known today as Early English, Decorated and Perpendicular. Salisbury, built largely in one campaign from 1220, is the classic example of the first, while the fan vaults of later English churches are a uniquely English invention.

In Germany, builders favoured hall churches, in which the aisles rise as high as the nave. Along the Baltic coast, where stone was scarce, Brick Gothic produced towering churches such as St Mary’s in Lübeck. Spanish cathedrals, such as Burgos, Toledo and Seville, grew vast and richly decorated, and Italian Gothic, as at Milan and Siena, kept broad interiors and coloured marble façades instead of soaring height.

Gothic fell out of fashion after the Renaissance, but it never quite disappeared, and in the nineteenth century it returned as a deliberate revival. Cologne Cathedral, left unfinished for three centuries, was completed in 1880 from medieval drawings. New Gothic churches and cathedrals rose across Britain, North America and the colonies, from St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York to Washington National Cathedral, completed in 1990. The style became, for many people, simply what a church looks like.