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Suger's Miracles, Branner's Bourges: Reflections on "Gothic Architecture" As Medieval Modernism Author(S): Marvin Trachtenberg Reviewed Work(S): Source: Gesta, Vol

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Suger's Miracles, Branner's Bourges: Reflections on Suger's Miracles, Branner's Bourges: Reflections on "Gothic Architecture" as Medieval Modernism Author(s): Marvin Trachtenberg Reviewed work(s): Source: Gesta, Vol. 39, No. 2, Robert Branner and the Gothic (2000), pp. 183-205 Published by: International Center of Medieval Art Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/767145 . Accessed: 15/03/2012 06:50 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. International Center of Medieval Art is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Gesta. http://www.jstor.org Suger's Miracles, Branner's Bourges: Reflections on "Gothic Architecture" as Medieval Modernism MARVIN TRACHTENBERG Institute of Fine Arts, New York University Abstract eval text and image: a highly focused reexaminationof Abbot Suger's controversial writings on the abbey of Saint-Denis, When it becomes clear that a given interpretative model and a new look at the that launched Robert set contains irreducible contradictions and is great building (or of criteria) Branner'scareer, the cathedral of incapable of resolving certain stubborn problems, it is time Bourges. for a new paradigm. Recognizing that scholarship on Gothic There is, however, an issue that first needs to be aired. architecture has long since reached this impasse, this study Some readers may wonder why I believe a redefinition nec- identifies new terms of understanding in the oppositional essary at all, for surely, one might imagine, the huge literature pair "modernism"and "historicism."These two transhistor- on the Gothic somehow terms for its under- ical are to numerous ad- provides adequate concepts found offer interpretative however, tells us other- vantages over such traditional categories as "skeletalform," standing. Historiographic analysis, "diaphaneity," "linearity," "diagonality," "square schema- wise. It is not that readings of the Gothic in the familiar terms tism," and the like, all of which are severely burdened by the of rib vaulting, skeletal structure, diaphaneity, diagonality, well known constrictive problematics of "style," among other linearity,baldachins, geometry, scholasticism and so forth are difficulties. Properly defined and understood, the modernism/ in themselves uninformativeor Rather, as historicism is shown to numerous necessarily wrong. paradigm offer advantages Louis Grodecki observed in 1977, none of the inter- in studying medieval architecture across a wide range of con- existing cerns, from descriptive, componential, and formal analysis to pretative models offers "a firm rigorous definition" of the social, intellectual, and contextual integration. The entire ap- Gothic.2 As a group they cannot be assembled into anything paratus of the great cathedrals is seen in a radically new, more than an unwieldy and finally self-contradictory inter- comprehensive way, and such intractable historical problems of and as that the "Gothic column" are re- pretative bricolage mainly nineteenth-century early of seemingly oxymoronic methods and discourse. This unsat- solved. Theproposed paradigm is further explored and tested twentieth-centuryanalytic regarding both word and image in medieval architecture, in a isfactory situation has not improved recently, in fact quite the new reading of the controversial texts of Abbot Suger on Saint- opposite. In the past two decades or so Gothic architectural Denis, and in a revised solution to the Bourges "problem." studies have turned sharply away from the broad questions that preoccupied earliergenerations (no matterhow limited or The great trans-Europeanarchitectural movement endur- irrelevant their methods may now seem) toward the study of ing some four centuries called "Gothic" has remained veiled the particular:the functions of individual spaces, questions of and perplexing despite many generations of solid and often patronage and liturgy, the specific social, political, material, brilliant scholarship. In an earlier essay I proposed a new con- and representationaldimensions of architecture.3In this recent ceptual frameworkthat I hoped might serve as a point of de- work (much of it highly laudable on its own terms) the old parture for understanding this enigmatic architecture.1This question, "What is Gothic?" which runs as a central theme adumbrationof my idea, however, occupied only a few intro- through Paul Frankl'sexhaustive survey of its long historiog- ductory pages of an article that was mainly dedicated to re- raphy, rarely is explicitly asked, because implicitly it is con- vising our conception of Italianarchitecture during the period. sidered somehow already answered, or conversely, because it This initiatory statementwas thus extremely compressed, and is deemed irrelevant and in any case impossible to answer.4I left much undefined,unresolved, and unexplored. The follow- refuse this attitude of semantic innocence or terminological ing pages are directed not to Italy but to the essentially French futility, and emphasize that our definition of "Gothic"remains genesis and primarydevelopment of the "Gothic."Here I re- a central point of reference in virtually all discussions of formulate,interrogate, clarify, and above all extend my argu- European monumental architecture of the twelfth through ment. I pursue certain necessary considerations regardingthe fifteenth centuries. The question hangs heavily in the air as problematics of its terminology as well as its many possible soon as the word "Gothic"emerges from our mouths or in our implications, some of which lead toward ratherradical histo- writings, not to mention our explications of the architectureto riographicand interpretativepositions. Following the study of nonspecialists and the public at large. We function as histo- a numberof key theoreticalissues, I will test the viability of the rians of this architecturalzone in a most curious way, con- new interpretativemodel through practical analysis of medi- stantly speaking of the "Gothic"as if we securely knew what GESTAXXXIX/2 ? The International Center of Medieval Art 2000 183 it was and that it actually existed, knowing all the while that in any case.' As with Gothic we tend to use this term either the one thing certain about the subject is our very lack of any unthinkinglyor disparagingly,that is, with the idea that it rep- such articulated consensus. Whether we like it or not, the resents, if anything, a rathernaive understandingof the pre- "Gothic"question remains with us, ratherlike an elephant in Gothic. I propose instead, in a mannersomewhat analogousto a room that won't go away no matterhow much we pretendto my etymological revaluationof "Gothic,"that the originalcore ignore it. meaning of the word "Romanesque"also has a certain pow- erful validity (at least for immediate purposes at this point in A new paradigm: Gothic as medieval modernism the argument). In fact, I would argue that it provides a more accurateassessment of the period it denotes than all later aca- Rather than reviewing how problematic are most of the demic analysis in terms of square-schematism,bay systems, concepts that we currentlyuse to study the period (especially radiating chapels and the like, which, like the usual terms for how they almost inevitably are shipwreckedon the rocks and "Gothic,"do not hold up under hard scrutiny in regardto ac- shoals of stubborn exceptions and contradictorymanifesta- curacy, compatibility,or comprehensivenessof applicationto tions of form), I shall directly interrogatethe term "Gothic" this highly varied architecture.Instead, the early nineteenth- itself, by asking why we persist in calling Europeanarchitec- century term Romanesque was on the mark, or nearly so, or ture of the twelfth throughfifteenth centuries after a barbarian at the very least more historically accurate generally than la- tribe of late antiquity.Are we here merely being creaturesof ter nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuryrumination on the meaningless, ingrainedhabit, or might the word "Gothic"not architecturein question.Pre-Gothic medieval architecturewas, contain a germ of etymological truth?I suggest that the word, quite simply, Roman-esque.It was, in other words, deeply his- despite the dimension of blatant absurdity in its usage, in- toricizing. That it often embodied "modernist"tendencies as volves a key to understandingthe period. Here we must look well is also true. In fact, perhaps the fairest characterization to the linguistic practice of the Renaissance, which first made of what we call the Romanesque period would be in terms of the connection between the word "Gothic" and the architec- a conflict, instability, an unresolved tension between the two ture in question. Essentially the connection is simple. In the opposing currentsof historicism and modernism,in which the eyes of the Renaissance, the Goths were the destroyers of former tended to predominate (although not in any progres- Rome and its architecture.They were, in other words, the lit- sive way or with any clear pattern).In this reading, the Gothic eral embodimentof anticlassicism. This belief, of course, was turn would amount to a shift in orientation, a move
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