May 14, 2008
chartres
Chartres cathedral is a marvel but also a mystery. Nobody knows who designed it or what they were trying to express. Begun in 1200 and finished in 1226, it was the crowning example of the gothic style and marked, Philip Ball suggests in this lucid and resplendent book, a shift in the way the western world thought about God, the universe and man's place in it. Romanesque churches with their vast walls and narrow windows had been dark and inward-looking, and signified, he argues, monastic seclusion. Chartres changed all that. Its walls were diaphanous membranes of glass set in cobwebs of stone. On the outside, flying buttresses propped them up to prevent them collapsing under the soaring vaults of the roof. It was “transparent logic”, a celebration of the light of reason, banishing the old gloom, and progressing from an age when God was feared to one where his works could be understood.That, at any rate, is the theory.
more from the Times Online here.
Posted by Morgan Meis at 07:35 PM | Permalink
Comments
It does sound like a fascinating new book, but the reviewer misses the point. Whoever hopes to understand Chartres -- or almost any Gothic cathedral -- needs to try to understand the cult of Mary. _Alone of All Her Sex_, by Marina Warner, a deep and engaging work of Mariology from the 1970s, is still the book to read.
Additionally, Chartres was completed very fast, within the first quarter of the 13th century -- this stimulated real coherence in design and execution. So that it's "all of a piece" rather than a hodgepodge, like Beauvais Cathedral, that took centuries, that was indeed never completed.
The siting of Chartres has literally everything to do with how it looks, with how bishops and builders can only have intended that it look. You arrive from Paris by road and make out the cathedral from a very great distance. The houses and rooftops you see in the photo here do not signify from that distance -- you see only the vast plain of the Beauce, and the silhouette of the cathedral, which takes on detail as you approach. Chartres was a pilgrimage site in the cult of Mary -- consider how it might have been to see it before you for a few days as you made for it on foot across a plain at 3 miles an hour. The city of Chartres is in the lee of the hill on which the cathedral is built. The majesty of this, from afar and from up close, can escape no one.
I wish someone /would/ write intelligently about the contribution of Muslim architecture and building techniques to the Gothic cathedrals of France and England. It appears to have been dealt with rather hastily here.
Finally, the Rose Window at Chartres Cathedral has been written about for hundreds of years -- it is a deeply mathy, mystical subject and it ought not to be left out of even the most cursory review. Certsainly in any discussion of intention and design, the Rose Window must be dealt with.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | May 15, 2008 12:10:57 AM
That picture looks like it was taken with a laptop webcam. A low quality one. Surely such a stunning structure deserves a better picture. See here for some examples: http://flickr.com/search/?q=Chartres+cathedral&z=t
Posted by: Mathew Eugene | May 15, 2008 3:14:06 AM
Post a comment