How a Gothic Cathedral Was Built: from Quarry to Spire

A Gothic cathedral was built by skilled stonecutters and masons under a master mason, often over many decades or centuries. Wooden centering was used to raise arches and vaults, together with hoists driven by people, and drawings and wooden templates. The money came from the church, the town, the nobility and pilgrims.

Facts

Commission, money and site

A cathedral is a bishop’s church, and the building often began with the bishop and chapter wanting to replace an older church that had burned or become too small. At Chartres the Romanesque church was destroyed by fire in 1194, and the new one was finished in about thirty years, unusually quickly, helped by large gifts and by pilgrims who came to see the Virgin’s veil, a relic. Chartres is therefore unusually uniform.

Normally it took considerably longer. Notre-Dame in Paris was begun in 1163 and was essentially finished around 1345, and Cologne Cathedral was begun in 1248 but completed only in 1880 after a pause of several hundred years. In the meantime taste and economy changed, so buildings often become a mixture of styles. Money came from the church’s income, the nobility and the town, but also from gifts and indulgences.

Master mason, plan and lodge

The master mason planned the building, led the work and had everything drawn and constructed. The Gothic architect was often trained as a stonecutter, and the knowledge was geometrical: plan, façade and vault ribs were constructed with compasses and ruler. There was no simple scale of measurement, so proportions were used. In the thirteenth century Villard de Honnecourt sketched working methods and machines in a sketchbook that survives. The plan of the building was often drawn directly on a plaster floor.

The craftsmen were organised in lodges, a kind of workshop beside the building where stonecutters worked under a shelter. Each cutter put his mark on the stones in order to be paid. Later guilds grew from the fellowship of the lodges. Work took place roughly between spring and autumn, and in winter the walls were covered to protect them from frost.

From quarry to vault

The stone was quarried in nearby quarries and transported on carts or river barges. Stonecutters shaped the blocks to wooden templates so that each stone fitted exactly. Masons laid them with lime mortar, and the building rose with the help of wooden scaffolding projecting from the wall, whose holes are often still visible today. Heavy blocks were hoisted by treadwheel cranes, large wheels in which workers walked as in a hamster wheel.

The most exciting moment was the closing of the vault. First a centering, a temporary wooden form, was built, and on it the stones for the arch or vault were laid. When the keystone at the top was in place and the mortar had hardened, the centering could be removed. The weight of the vault pushed outwards, and that is why flying buttresses and buttresses came about; read more in the guide to vaults and arches and about the difference from Romanesque. The first Gothic church, Saint-Denis, was built by Abbot Suger in the 1140s.

Glass, sculpture and completion

While the walls rose the windows were made. Glass painters made the great painted windows of coloured glass and lead from cartoons, and in Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, from 1248, they fill almost the whole wall surface. Sculptors made portals, gargoyles and figures, and the interior was painted in clear colours. The cathedral was a Bible for those who could not read.

In Sweden work on Uppsala Cathedral began around 1270 on French models, with a French master mason, and it was finished only in the fifteenth century. Other great examples are Reims and Amiens. Read more about the building type under the cathedral, about how to recognise Gothic and about the parts of a church. The period is described under the Middle Ages.

How to recognise it

Exercise

What was used to support a vault while it was being built?