In the tympanum, over the door, is, first, Job on his hearth, with a
demon, for the trials and patience of Job foreshadowed the agony and
triumph of Christ, and, second, the Judgment of Solomon, the prototype
of Him who is called the Sun of Justice. The vaulting above contains
twelve angels doing homage to Christ, then, on the left, the story of
Samson, the story of Esther, and, on the right, the story of Gideon and
that of Judith. The fourth row tells the story of Tobias, and on the
outer edge are the twelve months of the year with the corresponding
signs of the Zodiac and the allegorical representations of summer and
winter, which should be compared with those of the western porch (_see_
p. 130).
Four large statues on the arcade outside this bay represent Ferdinand,
King of Castile, a great benefactor of the Cathedral, who was canonised
1671, two hundred years after his death, and whose body is
[Illustration: Interior North Porch.
_Facing Page_ 221.
]
preserved at Seville. He is accompanied by a Judge of Israel, Barak, M.
Bulteau suggests. On the right pier Tobias accompanies S. Louis. The
beautiful and appropriate portrait of that devoted patron of Notre-Dame
was fashioned in all probability shortly after the pilgrimage which he
made to Chartres in 1260, walking, in spite of extreme fatigue, barefoot
all the way from Nogent-le-Roi. He is represented, it will be noticed,
with bare feet here, either in allusion to this pilgrimage, or to his
annual practice of visiting barefoot, and in penitential garb, all the
churches of any town in which he might be on Good Friday. But there is
another incident in his life to which reference may be intended. In 1239
he and his brother Robert carried barefoot into Paris the instruments of
the Passion which he had redeemed from Venice.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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