Basilica of Saint-Denis
— the room where Gothic was invented.
Not only on a wall.
“The first true Gothic building in the world, finished under Abbot Suger in the 1140s, holds the tombs of nearly every king and queen of France from the tenth century to the eighteenth. The ambulatory windows were the first ever cut wide enough to let the light pour in. It still does, on a clear morning, across the recumbent stone of the dead kings.
Basilica of Saint-Denis, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Basilica of Saint-Denis stands in the commune of Saint-Denis, about six miles north of central Paris on the RER B line. Abbot Suger rebuilt the abbey choir and ambulatory between 1140 and 1144, producing what most historians treat as the first fully Gothic interior. The basilica was raised to cathedral rank in 1966 with the creation of the Diocese of Saint-Denis. It is not individually inscribed on the UNESCO list; it is protected as a French monument historique and managed by the Centre des monuments nationaux.
More than seventy recumbent royal effigies fill the transepts and ambulatory, the largest collection of royal tombs in Europe. Dagobert I, who founded the abbey in the 630s, lies near the choir. The tombs of Henri II and Catherine de Medici, of Louis XII and Anne of Brittany, of François I, and of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette (returned after 1815) all share the floor. Most of the original bodies were thrown into a common pit during the Revolution; the monuments themselves survived and were reassembled by Alexandre Lenoir.
Suger's innovation was structural: the pointed arch and the flying buttress let the walls thin and the windows widen. The ambulatory of 1144 was the first interior anywhere lit by walls of coloured glass rather than masonry. Much of the medieval glazing was destroyed in the Revolution and replaced in the nineteenth-century restoration by Viollet-le-Duc and François Debret, but the geometry that lets the light through is original. On a clear morning the colour falls across the white stone of the recumbent kings.