How France Built Her Cathedrals: A Study in the Twelfth and Thirteenth CenturiesO'Reilly, Elizabeth Boyle
History
How France Built Her Cathedrals: A Study in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries
O'Reilly, Elizabeth Boyle
Architecture, Gothic; Cathedrals -- France
Even after the opening of the XIII century the St. Denis school exerted
influence, as is shown by the Charlemagne-Roland windows in Chartres'
ambulatory, whose outline was taken from a crusader window of Suger's
abbey. The majority of Chartres' windows belong to the early XIII
century, when the city was mistress of the vitrine art and supplied the
cathedrals of Bourges, Rouen, Sens, Laon, Auxerre, Tours, Le Mans,
Poitiers, and even Canterbury. In the nave's north aisle, the St.
Eustace window (the third) is held to be of faultless artistry. The
large lancets which light the aisles scintillate as with precious
jewels. Only some five or six have floral scrolls filling the spaces
between the medallions and the deep border that surrounds each window;
in France a geometric pattern for such interstices was more frequent.
At the base of each window is what is called its signature--a medallion
which usually represents the avocation of the donors, whether kings,
knights, priests, butchers, shoemakers, furriers, or water carriers.
Thus below the Charlemagne-Roland windows tradesmen display rich fur
mantles, and we know that the _pelletiers_ were the donors. Splendid
were the gifts of the old artisan guilds. The tanners presented an
apse-chapel window in honor of St. Thomas Becket, the vintners one that
related the story of Noe, planter of vines. An overpowering sensation it
must have been for those mediæval workmen to worship beneath the vaults
they themselves had helped to build, under the windows they had
contributed. Kings and knights were their fellow donors, but in the
cathedrals of France the gifts of the lowly were the most plentiful, a
Christian quality which endured till the XVI-century disunion.
To Chartres St. Louis gave a window in honor of St. Denis, patron of his
kingdom. The splendid red northern rose, "The Rose of France," is a
glorification of Our Lady. The donjons of Castile adorn it in honor of
the queen regent. Directly opposite is the big south rose presented by
Blanche's enemy, Pierre Mauclerc, who tried to kidnap Louis IX from his
mother, but who was to die fighting the infidels under his cousin the
king, as did Pierre de Courtenay, another donor of a window at Chartres.
Pierre de Dreux, it is said, began the porch before the southern
entrance to commemorate his marriage with the heiress of Brittany, a
granddaughter of Henry II, Plantagenet. Like every door of this church
of the resplendent entranceways, it is a mass of sculpture. Mauclerc was
grandson of the builder of St. Yved at Braine, and brother of Archbishop
Henri de Dreux, who donated windows to his cathedral at Rheims. Below
the Dreux rose at Chartres, four of the Prophets are borne on the
shoulders of the four Evangelists, for never could those generations,
enamored of symmetry, resist the opportunity to weave together the Old
and New Testaments.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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