The art program of Abbot Suger at the monastery of Saint-Denis in the mid-twelfth century has long been credited with the reintroduction of “allegory” into Western European visual art after centuries of disuse. While such sweeping claims...
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The art program of Abbot Suger at the monastery of Saint-Denis in the mid-twelfth century has long been credited with the reintroduction of “allegory” into Western European visual art after centuries of disuse. While such sweeping claims can no longer be considered to be the case in regard to the exegetical level of allegory per se, Suger’s program does very much seem to be the principal initial source of a new elite art–at first in the very public claims of an exegetically based monumental art “accessible only to the litterati,” that is, understandable only to the spiritually literate choir monk, and then, later, in the widespread use of a more or less similar art by a segment of the newly emerging urban class on the basis of a certain participation in religious literary culture.
In this study, I show how Suger invented a new exegetical art that, in its complexity, claimed to function on the same level as scriptural study and so claimed to be acceptable in the context of the current controversy over monastic art spearheaded by Bernard of Clairvaux, in which art was seen by some as a spiritual distraction to the monk. I show how Suger’s claims were based on the traditional dichotomy of the uninitiate (the layperson) and the initiate (the monk), but how this two-level spiritual hierarchy was contradicted by new thought on the use of art and the senses in the form of a three-level spiritual hierarchy that excluded the users of such art from the highest level. I consider what this can tell us not only about the works of art at Saint-Denis but also about the nature of visual art in this crucible of intellectual and artistic activity–monasticism–during a remarkable period of artistic change by relating differing understandings of this three-level hierarchy to a representative spectrum of contemporary monastic images. I demonstrate the presence of Hugh of Saint Victor or his thought in the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit panel of the so-called Allegorical Window and so, to whatever degree, in the window program in general. And I argue that this new systematized and fully exegetical art appeared first not at Saint-Denis around fifteen to twenty years before the consecration of the east end of Suger’s new church in the highly successful large-scale image of The Mystic Ark, painted at Saint Victor in Paris around 1125 to 1130, although Saint-Denis remains the principal source for its eventual widespread employment in Western European artistic culture.
Unintended by Suger, however, the special potential of his particular conception of a fully exegetical, monumental, publicly accessible, and systematically deployed work of art in the medium of the stained glass window gradually became apparent beyond the highly circumscribed confines of monastic culture in the emergence of a new elite art for the literate lay user–as seen, for example, in the Good Samaritan Window of Chartres Cathedral. These new exegetical stained glass windows acted as both vehicles and even sites of “textual communities,” that is, a voluntary association based not upon the ability to read, although some members were literate, but upon the ability to interpret a text recognized as authoritative that forms the basis of a shared belief. The social dynamics of twelfth-century France were changing dramatically and the increasingly better educated public, no longer content to remain at the lowest level of the spiritual hierarchy, wanted to participate more actively in the acquisition of elite spiritual knowledge. In borrowing this strongly literarily and exegetically based art for religious exercises, this aspect of lay spirituality grew out of monastic spirituality, and both Suger and Hugh took part–however indirectly–in the construction of a new elite art for the properly literate and the spiritually literate lay person, an essentially new form of visual art that would become a fundamental part of artistic culture in the West for centuries to come.
I investigate what the consequences of this particular reintroduction of exegesis were at this time of great demographic transformation. I suggest that, in the early and mid twelfth century, the relatively restricted elite images such as the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit panel were beyond the intellectual understanding of the uninitiate in the two-level hierarchy of the initiate and the uninitiate and so tended to affirm the social distinction between the two groups and thus reinforce the social structure because the uninitiate would have recognized that the monks knew the meaning of these images even if they did not. However, with the increasing lay literacy of the later twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, the case with the new elite public art of the same time–even if it were seen as operating in the three-level spiritual hierarchy–seems to be quite different. For the relatively public, new elite images such as the Good Samaritan Window of Chartres with their textual communities would seem to have contributed to the social transformation of medieval society in that, at least in the beginning, they would have challenged the centuries-old monopoly on literacy of the various wings of the Church and so played a part, however small, in the visible emergence of the literate new urban elite, broadly understood. At the same time, they would have intensified the distinction between this literate new urban elite and what might be called the illiterate lower class–both of them formerly conceived of as forming the same social group. In this way, far from reinforcing the current social structure, works of art like these would seem to have contributed to the dynamic of change that pervaded contemporary society.
Finally, I ask what the invention of the exegetical stained glass window at Saint-Denis, one of the most original art programs of Western culture, reveals about the nature of originality in the twelfth century. And I reconsider the roles of Suger and, now, Hugh in the invention of the exegetical stained glass window and in the construction of a new elite art more broadly speaking.
