The north porch, which was always in the Middle Ages dedicated to the Virgin, is peopled by 705 statues, who are the characters of a vast poem in stone. The subject of this poem is the ‘Glorification of Mary.’ ‘It recounts,’ says M. Bulteau, ‘the carnal and spiritual genealogy of the Virgin, her prerogatives, her acquaintances, her virtues, her occupations, her life, death, assumption and crowning in heaven.’ Then come the personages and the biblical scenes which have foreshadowed the Messiah and His Mother; S. John the Baptist and S. Peter, who inaugurated the Christian era; and to connect this vast whole with the Church of Chartres, S. Potentian, S. Modesta and the donors of the porch, S. Louis at their head. The Creation, the Earth, the Sea and the Heavens, Time also, and its seasons, assist at this glorification of the Mother of God, and appear to render her respectful homage. We have had occasion to notice before (p. 27) the prominent position which S. Anne is allotted in the iconography of this Cathedral, and we have explained that the reason is that Chartres possessed a precious relic of that saint. For, after the sack of Constantinople in 1204, the Emperor Baldwin sent the head of S. Anne, the Virgin’s mother, to Chartres, ‘in order that the head of the mother might rest in the house of the daughter.’ Departing, therefore, from the almost invariable custom by which the Virgin is represented on the pier between the two sections of the central door, the sculptors have here given us a colossal statue of S. Anne carrying the little Mary in her arms. Beneath her feet are the remains of a group in which S. Joachim, feeding his sheep, was depicted receiving from the angel Gabriel the announcement of the future birth of Mary. Ranged on either side of this central doorway are ten large statues, beneath canopies and wearing haloes. They are the personages of the Old Testament who have prefigured the birth of Jesus Christ, His passion, His death, His resurrection and His eternal priesthood. They emphasise once more the parallelism of the Old Testament and the New; the New hidden in the Old; the Old made manifest in the New. The same thought is symbolised by the figurative image of the Son which the five statues on the left carry, and the effigy of our Lord which is borne by those on the right. For thereby the prophecy and its accomplishment is symbolised. The cathedrals of Paris, Amiens, Rouen, Sens, Bourges, Senlis and Reims, and all the great cathedrals of the thirteenth century, in fact, show the same persons surrounding the Virgin.