Inventing the Exegetical Stained-Glass Window: Suger, Hugh, and a New Elite Art

Abstract

Abbot Suger's art program at St-Denis has long been credited with the reintroduction of “allegory” into Western art after centuries of disuse. A new understanding of that reintroduction is caught up in a web of previously unrecognized issues: that inventing the exegetical stained-glass window acted as a justification of the monastic use of art, that this claim was contradicted by new thought on art and the senses, that this new art appeared first not at St-Denis but elsewhere, and that the construction of a new elite art for the literate layperson emerged from all this.

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