Almost at the same time asa suger’s re building of Saint-Denis, the cathedral of Sens, the first cathedral in Gothic style, was built. Its main nave is still of squat proportions, less upward-striving than many a late-Romanesque minster, and originally, before the windows of the clerestory had been erected and the spaces between the vaulting filled in, it seemed even more solid. Nevertheless, the rib vaulting, and the way in which its sinews run together like a bundle of shafts and continue to the ground, is thoroughly Gothic. The logical coherence of the Gothic style of construction is already there, seemingly at one stroke.
Whence came the idea, and also the technical knowledge, without which no one would have been able to build these audacious arches? Certain elements are already present in Romanesque architecture, but the decisive model derives from far away, namely from Islamic art, with which the Franks had for long (since the beginning of the Christian reconquest of Spain) been in touch, and which now from many sides, at the time of the crusades, exerted an influence on the European world of forms. It is important to remember that from the year i too Jerusalem was the capital of a Frankish kingdom, and that the Order of Templars, which was founded in 1118 under the spiritual protection of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, raised on both sides of the Mediterranean its own army of building workers.
In Moorish Spain, in Cordoba and Toledo, there were cupolas supported on intersecting stone ribs. Closer to the Gothic style, however, are certain cupolas that are found in North Africa and, in their purest form, in Persia. They are characterized not only by being loosely set on a framework of ribs, but by spanning therein several surfaces or facets. In this way the ribs are scarcely visible on the inside of the cupola, but appear on the outside — usually a timber-clad roof—as pectinate ridges, which support the vaulting by their curved span. This unusual building technique, which differs from that of Gothic, arose because the cupolas, with their ribs, were built over a basket-like framework made of twigs. This could not be done in stone; in the case of stone, the ribs had first to be constructed for themselves, and only when they were entirely firm could the shells be placed on or between them. The ribs were thus transmuted from purely spanning to bearing elements.
That one should find the model for Gothic vaulting in medieval Persia is not surprising: French culture of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries readily adopted forms from the Islamic world, with which it was in touch, and especially those forms that were of Persian origin. This elective affinity is to be seen not least in the knightly epics of both sides. The generally Islamic influence, however, is prevalent in almost all the knightly forms of the medieval West; minnesingers and trouba-dours were stimulated by Arabo-Persian models, and the Christian knightly orders themselves would have been inconceivable without their Islamic predecessors, which based themselves on the Koranic precept for the Holy War.
What Gothic architecture has in common with its Islamic prototype is its joy in the geometrical play of lines, as well as its endeavour to overcome any impression of mass and weight. Both characteristics came increasingly to the fore as the Gothic style developed, right up to the geometrical web of late-Gothic vaulting. What is completely foreign to the Islamic prototype, however, is the way in which the Gothic style incorporates the roof, stretched between the ribs of the vault, into the rest of the building. The 'braided' cupola of Islamic buildings seems to hover; it is only imperceptibly supported by the walls. Gothic vaulting, on the other hand, delivers its arches and ribs directly onto the pilasters and, through them, right down to the ground. This way of doing things was already present in French Romanesque architecture, in the clear articulation of the pilasters, directly linked to the ribs and the wall arcades of the cross vaulting. The architectural logic was already there and, in the Gothic style, the pillars corresponded exactly to the ribs of the vault as they converged downwards into a single bundle. It was because of this downward continuation of the ribs into the pillars that the walls became analogous to the shells between the ribs of the vaulting. Like these shells, the walls were little more than delicate partitions spanning the space between the pillars. The walls only assumed this character to the full when, thanks to the buttresses providing support from without, they finally became as it were translucent tapestries. Until that occurred, the interior of the cathedrals, throughout the whole of the early Gothic period, retained something of the weighty structure of Romanesque churches, even if the apparently elastic power of the arches, and the shafts rising to the vault in an unbroken stream and descending again to the ground as it were in a downpour, conferred on the whole building a hitherto unknown rhythm and tension, which, in place of the contemplative repose of Romanesque architecture, proclaimed a new upward flight of the will.
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