Top Highlights

• While lux refers to the natural light emitted from the sun, lumen is light as it interacts with the material world, and splendor is reflected light. For Suger and those who followed in his footsteps, the point was not to simply flood the entire church with as much light as possible but to harness lux, lumen, and splendor in specific ways. The addit...
• Light was seen as literally being of the divine realm, and Suger took great care to eliminate any obstruction to the calculated flow of the divine light throughout Saint-Denis.
• Another example of guiding light in Gothic cathedrals is at Chartres Cathedral, where the side aisles form a bright outline of the nave, drawing viewers along the widest nave of any cathedral in France
• For Suger, and other like-minded medieval theologians, light itself was divine and could be used to elevate human consciousness from an earthly realm to a heavenly one
• Gothic churches could achieve new heights with a lightness and a gracefulness often absent from sturdy Romanesque structures.

Domain