Cathédrale de Chartres; Civilization, Medieval; Mont-Saint-Michel (Abbey : France)
The window must have been ordered at once, because Count Thibaut,
"le Jeune ou le Lepreux," died himself within a year, April 22,
1218, thus giving an exact date for one of the choir windows.
Probably it was one of the latest, because the earliest to be
provided would have been certainly those of the central apsidal
chapel. According to the rule laid down by Viollet-le-Duc, the
windows in which blue strongly predominates, like the Saint
Sylvester, are likely to be earlier than those with a prevailing
tone of red. We must take for granted that some of these great
legendary windows were in place as early as 1210, because, in
October of that year, Philip Augustus attended mass here. There are
some two dozen of these windows in the choir alone, each of which
may well have represented a year's work in the slow processes of
that day, and we can hardly suppose that the workshops of 1200 were
on a scale such as to allow of more than two to have been in hand at
once. Thirty or forty years later, when the Sainte Chapelle was
built, the workshops must have been vastly enlarged, but with the
enlargement, the glass deteriorated. Therefore, if the architecture
were so far advanced in the year 1200 as to allow of beginning work
on the glass, in the apse, the year 1225 is none too late to allow
for its completion in the choir.
Dates are stupidly annoying;--what we want is not dates but taste;--
yet we are uncomfortable without them. Except the Perche window,
none of the lower ones in the choir helps at all; but the clere-
story is more useful. There they run in pairs, each pair surmounted
by a rose. The first pair (numbers 27 and 28) next the north
transept, shows the Virgin of France, supported, according to the
Abbes Bulteau and Clerval, by the arms of Bishop Reynault de Moucon,
who was Bishop of Chartres at the time of the great fire in 1194 and
died in 1217. The window number 28 shows two groups of peasants on
pilgrimage; below, on his knees, Robert of Berou, as donor:
"ROBERTUS DE BEROU: CARN. CANCELLARIUS." The Cartulary of the
Cathedral contains an entry (Bulteau, i, 123): "The 26th February,
1216, died Robert de Berou, Chancellor, who has given us a window."
The Cartulary mentions several previous gifts of windows by canons
or other dignitaries of the Church in the year 1215.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account