The Road Goes Ever On: Chartres Basics

Friday, May 17, 2013

Chartres Basics

We spent the better part of two days at Chartres cathedral, Notre Dame de Chartres. Of course, we had been there before, more than a few times. And we have been fortifying ourselves regarding cathedrals by watching William Cook's Cathedral lectures in the Teaching Company's "Great Courses" series. Cook does three separate episodes on Chartres. It is not the oldest nor the biggest nor the most beautiful nor the most elaborate cathedral. But it is the first place where all the aspects of classic high Gothic came together--12th and 13th century architecture, windows, sculpture, and intellectual matters--and where they are still best preserved, especially the windows, of which Chartres has perhaps 100 of its originals. So we spent a couple days there and took hundreds of pix. Some few, relatively speaking, will appear in this and the following posts.

Main, west facade; a Romanesque tower and a Gothic tower;
the original Carolingian cathedral was ransacked by the
Vikings in the 9th or 10th century, so a Romanesque building
was started in the 11th; all but the west end was destroyed in
a fire in the 12th century; when the cathedral's relic, Mary's
veil, was recovered intact from the fire, it was taken as a sign
she wanted a new and better cathedral built, and so the
Chartres we know now was begun, and completed, more or
less, in the 13th; so how did Mary's veil get to Chartres, you
ask? It was given to the Bishop by Charles the Bald,
Charlemagne's grand-son; Charlemagne had gotten it from
the Patriarch's (of the eastern church) daughter, to whom Big
C had proposed marriage; so it is said

Up closer of the west porch, portal, etc.

Buttresses between the west end and the south transept

View of chapels from the port bow

Nave view; very great height; two side aisles, triforia, clerestory windows,
4-part ribbed vaulting, cruciform shape, ambulatory with numerous chapels:
the basic Gothic package; here you can begin to see some of the cleaning
that has been done, mostly of the most important/popular bits

Elevation

High windows over the apse

Chartres blue

A detail favorite of Vicki's in the St. Nicholas window: the infant St. Nick
refusing his mother's breast--hey, it was Friday, and you're supposed to fast--
you can see God's hand coming from down heaven, offering an approving
"atta boy"; we have a special fondness for St. Nick, in addition to the Xmas
thing, since we ran into him in his home town of Myra, Turkey, and at Bari,
Italy, where lie his remains after the Roman Christians stole them from the
Orthodox Christians

And one other: many of the windows are gifts of one group
or another, which typically are represented at the base of
the window--here we are at the stone masons' window (one
of them); they're building a church, doing some sculpture...

Mary's veil, in one of the port bow chapels

Non-Gothic altar decor; much of the interior sculpture is of a
much later period

Much of the church, especially in the nave, remains uncleaned...the old Chartres
cathedral that is all that many of us know of the place (and many generations
before us); they have cleaned some windows as well as some stone, but frankly,
I think the gleaming white stone diminishes the windows; FWIW

My favorite, the south rose window and its lancets,
depicting Bishop Fulbert's 11th century observation
that we are dwarves standing on the shoulders of
giants...

Up closer of the rose window, Revelation; it's the most elaborate of Chartres'
rose windows

The south rose windows and lancets, including

The ever popular Tree of Jesse

On the south side, perhaps the most famous of the windows
at Chartres, the 12th century Blue Virgin, Notre-Dame de la
Belle Verriere

And for you Chartres veterans, yes, Malcolm Miller is still there, doing his
thing, only now 10 euros p/p and only at noon-time (Rebecca: the guy plucking
flowers behind Miller is the wandering minstrel)