The Stained Glass of Chartres
Chartres Cathedral has over 150 surviving medieval stained-glass windows, famous for their deep blue colour. The windows told the stories of the Bible to those who could not read.
Gothic architecture built high and thin to let in light – the walls became almost entirely glass.
The Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Chartres, south-west of Paris, holds a relic said to be the tunic of the Virgin Mary. This made the town a major place of pilgrimage. In 1194 the older cathedral burned down. The west front and the relic survived. A new church was built at great speed, and most of it was complete by the 1220s. It was consecrated in 1260. The building was paid for by bishops, clergy, nobility and the townspeople. It went up so quickly that the cathedral has an unusually unified style.
The cathedral has about 170 windows, and most of the glass dates from 1200–1240. This makes Chartres the most completely preserved collection of medieval stained glass. Three windows in the west front are older, from the mid-12th century, and survived the fire. Among them is the Tree of Jesse, which shows the family tree of Jesus. The famous image of the Virgin, Notre-Dame de la Belle Verrière, is also largely older glass that was rescued and set into a new window. Altogether the glass covers some 2,500 square metres.
The windows tell of biblical events, legends of the saints and the life of Mary. The stories are often read from the bottom up, panel by panel. At the bottom of many windows craftsmen can be seen at work: bakers, butchers, wine merchants, shoemakers. They have been interpreted as donors, but the extent to which the guilds actually paid for the windows is debated. Another window tells the parable of the Prodigal Son, and several depict the legends of Charlemagne.
Three great rose windows dominate. The north rose shows Mary with the Christ Child surrounded by prophets and kings. It is attributed to Queen Blanche of Castile, and lilies and castles allude to France and Castile. The south rose shows Christ in Glory, and the west rose the Last Judgement. The rose windows are over ten metres in diameter.
The glass was coloured by mixing metal oxides into the molten mass. Cobalt gave the deep blue known as Chartres blue. The coloured pieces were cut out and joined with lead cames. Details such as faces and folds were painted with a dark paint, grisaille, which was fired onto the glass. The glass is uneven in thickness and full of small bubbles, which refract the light and make the colours glow.
The new building techniques of the Gothic made the windows possible. Flying buttresses on the outside took up the thrust of the vaults, so that the walls could be opened up for large expanses of glass. The interior is filled with a subdued, coloured light. Medieval theologians linked light with God, and the windows were meant to give the visitor a foretaste of the heavenly Jerusalem. The light changes during the day, and the colours shift with the weather and the season.
During both world wars the glass was taken down and hidden. Since 1979 the cathedral has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site. From 2009 an extensive cleaning and renovation of the interior was carried out, in which the walls were painted a light colour. The work has been controversial among art historians. The cleaning of the windows has also shown how bright and clear the colours originally were.