Sainte-Chapelle
Louis IX’s palace chapel is made almost entirely of glass. In the upper chapel slender columns carry the vaults, and between them fifteen stained-glass windows, fifteen metres high, fill the walls with more than a thousand scenes from the Bible. This is Rayonnant, the most refined style of Gothic.
In 1239 King Louis IX, later canonised, bought Christ’s Crown of Thorns from the emperor in Constantinople for a sum far greater than the chapel cost to build. The chapel was built in just six years as a reliquary for the relic, inside the king’s palace on the Île de la Cité. It has two storeys: a lower chapel for the servants of the court and an upper one for the king and the relic.
In the upper chapel the masonry has shrunk to a skeleton. The walls are windows, held up by buttresses on the outside and iron bands that tie the window surfaces together. The stained glass tells the story of the Bible from Genesis to the journey of the Crown of Thorns to Paris, and almost two thirds of it is medieval original. The space became the model for palace chapels all over Europe and shows the Gothic idea of light as an image of the divine in its purest form.