2 the ogive has no structural value, even if it gives the opposite impression; rather, it is
the webs of the ogival vault that have the structural value;
3 the ogive had a structural value in the course of construction, functioning as a sort of
provisional framework; later, the interplay of thrusts and counterthrusts was picked up
by the webs and by the other elements of the structure, and in theory the ogives of the
cross vaulting could have been eliminated.^5
No matter which interpretation one might adhere to, no one has ever doubted that the
ogives of the cross vaulting denoted a structural function—support reduced to the pure
interplay of thrusts and counterthrusts along slender, nervous elements; the controversy
turns rather on the referent of that denotation: is the denoted function an illusion? Even if
it is illusory, then, the communicative value of the ogival ribbing remains unquestionable;
indeed if the ribbing had been articulated only to communicate the function, and not to
permit it, that value would, while perhaps appearing more valid, simply be more
intentional. (Likewise, it cannot be denied that the word unicorn is a sign, even though
the unicorn does not exist, and even though its non-existence might have been no surprise
to those using the term.)
While they were debating the functional value of ogival ribbing, however, historians
and interpreters of all periods realized that the code of the Gothic had also a ‘symbolic’
dimension (in other words, that the elements of the Gothic cathedral had some complexes
of secondary functions to them); one knew that the ogival vault and the wall pierced with
great windows had something connotative to communicate. Now what that something
might be has been defined time and again, on the basis of elaborate connotative subcodes
founded on the cultural conventions and intellectual patrimony of given groups and given
periods and determined by particular ideological perspectives, with which they are
congruent.
There is, for example, the standard romantic and proto-romantic interpretation,
whereby the structure of the Gothic cathedral was intended to reproduce the vault of
Celtic forests, and thus the pre-Roman world, barbaric and primitive, of druidical
religiosity. And in the medieval period, legions of commentators and allegorists put
themselves to defining, according to codes of formidable precision and subtlety, the
individual meanings of every single architectural element; it will suffice to refer the
reader to the catalogue drawn up, centuries later, by Joris Karl Juysmans in his La
cathédrale.
But there is, after all, a singular document we could mention—a code’s very
constitution—and that is the justification Suger gives of the cathedral in his De rebus in
administratione sua gestis, in the twelfth century.^6 There he lets it be understood, in prose
and in verse, that the light that penetrates in streams from the windows into the dark
naves (or the structure of the walls that permits the light to be offered such ample access)
must represent the very effusiveness of the divine creative energy, a notion quite in
keeping with certain Neoplatonic texts and based on a codified equivalence between light
and participation in the divine essence.^7
We could say with some assurance, then, that for men of the twelfth century the
Gothic windows and glazing (and in general the space of the naves traversed by streams
of light) connoted ‘participation’ (in the technical sense given the term in medieval
Neoplatonism); but the history of the interpretation of the Gothic teaches us that over the
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