The Decision to Build Notre-Dame

The cathedral already standing on the island could have been repaired or extended. The decision taken around 1160 was to replace it, and building began in 1163 on a scale that required clearing structures, laying out a new approach street and committing resources far beyond one lifetime. What went up is early Gothic: rib vaults carrying the load onto piers rather than onto continuous wall, and buttressing carried outside the building so that the wall between the supports could be opened for glass.

The usual account connects that engineering to a theology of light, associated with Abbot Suger at Saint-Denis a generation earlier and with the tradition running from the writings attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite, in which material light is a way toward the uncreated. Some historians now hold that Suger own motives were less philosophical than that account allows, and the atlas notes the qualification. What is not in dispute is that the buildings were understood by those who commissioned them as arguments and not merely as shelters. Maurice de Sully died in 1196 with the work well advanced and unfinished, which was the normal condition of a great church. The fire of 2019 and the reconstruction that followed are the latest chapter of a fabric that has never stopped being rebuilt.

Sources Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St.-Denis and Its Art TreasuresErwin Panofsky (editor and translator); revised by Gerda Panofsky-Soergel with Panofsky, Suger and St DenisPeter Kidson