Chartres Cathedral Architecture: Gothic Art History Explained

[00:00:01]Chartres Cathedral like so many other gothic churches is dedicated to Mary the mother of Christ and they used the term no true dom which means our lady as the dedication of the church a cathedral is the church of a bishop cathedral means seat throne chair and it's where the bishop has his seat it's not just any large church so when you're talking about a cathedral generally a city would only have one cathedral you could say it's the cathedral of in the name of the city in this case Chartres in France or you can say not know - Adam of Chartres Notre Dame de Chartres because even the name the dedication or the fact it's the only theater in town will identify it Chartres Cathedral is very remarkable for a number of reasons it combines both early gothic and it's West facade and high gothic in the rest of the church the nave the choir the exterior it was erected obviously in two centuries the early gothic from the 12th century about the mid through the rest of the century and the high gothic section during the 13th century it also is the church that has the largest number of surviving stained-glass windows we're now looking at the West facade which for the most part is early gothic except you may notice there's two different towers and we'll talk about that in a minute there was already there had been a church a Carolingian church that was built on this site and then another church that was built and in 1134 there was a fire the damage the West facade so they rebuild it and you can see certain characteristics of the Gothic you also say this is that this is very early Yaffe so for example there's more wall that you'll be seen then if you look to later churches such as a meal or Rams and this of course is the fact that it is is still early you'll see the characteristic of verticality even the buttresses seem to push their way up and of course the to tower facade with the two two pinnacles rising up toward heaven at the base you have three doorways and we'll be taking a look at the sculpture of that gosh shortly and then three tall windows that break up the facade open it up to light these are known as Lancet windows Lancet windows are basically tall slim windows and then above it is the great rose Rose windows are a characteristic of Gothic and we'll be talking more about those they're called Rose windows yes because they they appear to look like a flower they're circular the different parts radiate from it and they're often associated associated with the Virgin Mary because she was she was given the title of the Rose of Sharon the lily the lily of the valley which comes from Song of Solomon and during the 12th century Song of Solomon was symbolically applied to the Virgin Mary it became a symbol of Christ's love for his mother and it already been a symbol of Christ's love for the church and since Mary was very often symbolically associated with the church he has since personified the church it was a because it was just shifting your metaphor a little bit and so Song of Solomon became symbolic and phrases from it like a Rose of Sharon a little lily of the valley are applied to the Virgin there are two towers of course at Chartres Cathedral and the North Tower is was erected much later they sure just take a long time to build and also sometimes funding is available and sometimes it isn't so sometimes there's a hiatus between when they're working on one part and another and so you may have different parts from different centuries the North Tower actually was not built until the 16th century and so it's a very very late Gothic style called the flamboyant gothic and the flamboyant gothic you can see if you look at the tracery in that window you see that the shapes almost look like flames and that's where the name comes from it's very decorative very elaborate and as you can see there's just decoration all over it and so it's the late gothic of the flamboyant gothic but for the most part Chartres is early gothic and high gothic with when we look at the West facade we want to look at the Rose window and as you can see when you're looking close to it you can see where the glass is and you can also see that it almost looks like a flat plate that's been perforated with the glass and so this very early type of Rose window we call plate tracery tracery is the decorative forms they look almost look like lines only of course they're made of masonry that decorate windows and other aspects of the church and so when you're looking at this your see a lot of stone as time progresses these rose windows have less stone and more glass more color more light of course this is the development from the early to the high and then of course eventually the late Gothic look in the inset in the interior here high gothic is in the interior and the exterior which we'll also be looking at there was another fire short not too long after they got the West facade built there was a fire in 1194 and it destroyed the rest of the church except for the West facade so in the 13th century they rebuilt the rest of the Church of Chartres Cathedral they left the West facade still early gothic and put their efforts into rebuilding the church now one of the reasons that they were so excited about rebuilding the church was the fact that a miracle had happened the great relic of Chartres is the tunic of the Virgin clothing as she wore and this was in the crypt which of course is called a sacred basement but it was stored in the crypt and when the church burnt down and of course there was a long time before the ashes would cool enough that people could go in and start moving the remains of trying to find anything they assumed that her tunic had been burnt up and miracle of miracles they found it safe in the crypt and unharmed and that miracle meant that people were very excited and we're willing to give time labor money to recreate this church that is dedicated to Mary and and has an important relic of hers were believed to be of hers you can decide yourself of the Church of Chartres typifies Gothic style it has a large stained glass windows it has the pointed ribbed vaults has the colonists that rise up to the to the ribs and of course divided the church into Bay's it has flying buttresses which we're going to take a look at in a moment and the three part nave elevation of arcade triforium and Clare story and one of the interesting things about this church for me what I'm teaching is when I used to teach survey one of course the Gothic was right at the end and you sometimes be running out of time and I couldn't teach a lot of Gothic cathedrals and if I was really pressed for time I'd say okay I'll teach Chartres because I can show both early and high gothic and it's you know just sort of a wonderful church just to summarize and so I'm going to be using it that way here too we're now looking at the exterior of Chartres Cathedral and the viewpoint is an aerial view from the east side from the apse and forth by now the apps that expanded into a choir so when you look at it let's look at a few things first we can see the two towers erected in different centuries we can also see that there is both a long nave and a transept and on the side that we can see there is a another facade with Rose window three portals and of course there was sculpture decoration on all three of the facades west set north and south you can also look at the East End the apps and/or the choir end and you can make out the chapels that radiate but it's a little hard because there are these flying buttresses as we call them and we'll discuss those in a minute but it makes it hard to see the structure of the building there's a lot of decoration and iris in the Middle Ages nobody would be getting an aerial view and be able to see the rooftop and you'd be standing on the ground and looking at this I might also mention that when you look at these medieval churches they were always the highest Church in town the highest building in town and some places Chartres has a law I understand that they can't build any buildings higher than this other places of course they built skyscrapers but what you have to imagine is what you actually do see when you would when you go towards Chartres you're looking over fields whether you're going by train or by road and you can see the spires rising up in the distance and you can see the church rising up over the city you know this really dominates the city it is the most important building it is not only the religious center but it's also the social center a civic center if you will of life in a medieval town so that idea that we taught me before where I wrote about before about unity as one of the characteristics of a gothic Church you can kind of see how the decoration makes it very difficult to find all the little parts and to separate them out the way you would just automatically do with a Romanesque Church so now let's take a closer look at those flying buttresses what is a flying buttress well think back to the Romanesque churches where you have heavy masonry vaults that needed to be supported with very thick walls and sometimes even beyond the thickness of the wall they would attach on the exterior even more masonry a buttress to literally buttress the building now one of the great innovations of the Gothic period is to figure out a way of doing this where you can still allow light to enter which can support higher buildings and is actually a very attractive architectural element and that is the flying buttress so instead of having the buttress right up against the windows right up against the wall they push it back it might touch at a lower part of the wall or even be further back and what joins the buttress to the church to the vaulting are these masonry arcs or arches and as they start out relatively thick and as time goes by they become much thinner you have on top of these pinnacles sculpture that makes it even heavier and weighs it down but it doesn't look heavy it looks like someone must have thought that these arches look like wings and that's why they call them flying buttresses they look light and airy and because you don't have the heavy wall right up against all the windows light can get in and so this will make the interior of course much lighter which is one of the things that the Gothic builders definitely wanted to do how does this work well think about a pointed fault some of the thrust or the weight is going down into the wall but other parts of it a try are almost as though it's trying to spring the arch apart push it aside we use this word thrust we could also I suppose use the word pressure sometimes weight so the pressures of the architecture seem to want to push it apart well you need to push in to keep it from springing apart and that's what buttresses do but in this case the but the the buttress the weight is displaced and so although the buttresses for the budget is further back and it actually can support higher buildings and give them much more open effect so that thrust or that weight is being transmitted to the buttress via these arcs now here we're looking at some buttresses for Chartres Cathedral these are early flying buttresses you can see there's still quite a bit of masonry there they are open and if you look at that one section which looks like it has columns with an arcade running through it but as time progresses the flying buttresses will get even thinner and they provide the exterior support for the vaults and they allow the light to enter into these windows you can see the flying buttresses attach to the choir or the apse end and you have these very very tall thin windows let in lots of light they seem to fill up almost all the area of the wall except of course where the buttress is and so by having perforations you're allow more light to get in to that and here's another example where you're seeing them sort of down below part of the buttress is attached to the lower wall and then you look up and next to the clerestory where you have these great large windows that's where you see your perforations the other example may not be Chartres looks to me like it's a later gothic Church but you can see how the the arches are getting thinner there seem to be less stonework in the bud in the arcs or the flying part the wing like parts of the buttresses and yet it still does the job in fact the churches go higher and higher now we're going into the interior we're going to look at the plan and when you look at the plan of Chartres Cathedral you'll notice that it is a cross shaped plan but perhaps not as obviously as a Santiago or too loose or many of the Romanesque churches it does have a transept it's right sort of in the middle but the transept is almost swallowed up by the choir end which has gotten which has gotten much larger there are even some gothic churches like notre-dame du Paradis where if you look at the plan you really cannot you know we can barely see the transept because it's really become incorporated into the church so this is Society of Gothic unity once again as opposed to the articulation of separation of parts with the Romanesque churches the there are entrance ways very elaborate three portals with lots of carving on the west end and also on the north and the south size on the transept when you if you were to enter through the West in it went west and you would see that we have a single side aisle on either side those two side aisles you go down and you also see that in the transept and then when you get to the other side of the transept you see this huge area where you have double side aisles and they lead you right into the ambulatory and into the choir and when you look at if you go around the ambulatory in the East End you'll see the radiating chapels but they look a little bit different you'll notice that some of the chapels are shallow and some of them are a little larger they share walls you could stand in the ambulatory and probably see into several of them other gothic churches even get more unified where their chapels will share the same wall and you once again you have this very unified shape you can also say this word crossing in the middle the crossing is literally what it sounds like where the transept crosses the nave and there's usually something fairly elaborate there with the vaulting some churches of course would have a tower but with a lot of the Gothic churches you have just some interesting arrangement of the vaulting and as you can see here it's a square section rather than the oblong sections that lead up to it I might also point something out to you about the volta you see these little Criss crosses those refer to the ribs you can look over and see in the picture the ribbed vaulting and if you look at each bay and you count the spaces between the ribs you'll see there's one two three four triangular spaces and so we call this a Quadra Quatro Quatro partite vault a four-part vault and you there are other other types now here we're looking at the nave elevation and we've our diagram and we're also looking up it's kind of interesting because the diagram is more in proportion to what is actually there but since we're standing at the bottom and I had a former student actually took this photograph for me and I think he was using some kind of special lens but it anyway you can see that when we're looking up we get a somewhat different perspective on things and that feeling of verticality is so extremely so so let's go back and forth between the actual elevation and the diagram to see different parts of this start on the ground level and of course we have an arcade which has these pointed arches compound piers with capitals and from the pier these Colin 'its partial columns little thin tall thin columns a clustered together spring up it seems almost like they're growing perhaps and so you have multiple colin 'it's reaching from the arcade level right up to the springing of the vault and of course that adds as feeling of energy and verticality these multiple small verticals then we have a triforium level the triforium we you know remember whether we saw this before in Burgundy you saw this in Clooney and I suspect that one of the reasons it was developed was because they wanted Clooney to be taller and they want these gothic churches to be taller and they don't they they need to have some support but they wanted to look more open so what do you do well here you have a triforium which is the open areas it looks like the wall is perforated I mean the wall you know isn't there but you can see in some of these pictures when you look in there is a wall behind it so the archway becomes a kind of screen that hides the actual structure of the building and the actual masonry that's that's actually there and makes it look very open perforated and then you look up to the great Clair stories these are much much much larger than any Clara stories you would ever seen in the Romanesque period and this of course is another characteristic of the Gothic that is very large stained-glass windows you'll notice that the windows take up that whole upper level that whole Claire story level between the Tri 4:00 a.m. and the vaulting and it's subdivided you have mo Lian's and tracery and what look like little rose windows at the top but essentially you've got this glass area that lets in a tremendous amount of light and it is colored light and I mentioned that stained glass windows were characteristic of the Gothic I don't mean there weren't any stained glass windows in the Romanesque period although there's very very tiny survival of that but it was the Gothic period with their large windows that they would fill with this glass that we end that we do associate with the stained glass Claire story and other windows I should mention that a lot of times when you're looking at pictures of Gothic cathedrals there's a couple of things to be aware of most of them have lost their glass they once had colored glass when you look at the picture at Amiens for example the nave Claire story level you know you have clear glass and of course that changes the field that's much harsher and showing you a photograph that it tries to give you the feeling of having colored glass and colored light coming into the church the other thing to remember is that these churches were painted so there was a lot of color I mentioned that with Romanesque they were painted these churches were painted it would have been very very colorful so here we're looking at different views you can see many of the same things perhaps not quite a skewed of perspective usually in the choir you have even more openings and so you have this whole series of windows that lets a tremendous amount of light you can see the colonists on the piers that just add more verticality more energy and then kind of hide the heaviness there and you can see the three part elevation which we've already talked about and now here's that famous picture and you see this in a number of books and someone has been able to capture the light where you can actually see some of the reflections of the light some of the colored light striking the stone and giving it a tint of color you have to imagine of course it's been so much more intense the clerestory large clerestory stained glass colored light filling the church and we've talked about light before we say Christ is the light of the world in many men religions light symbolizes or stands for or as a metaphor for the spiritual realm or for divinity this goes clear back to Sun gods of course and sometimes the spirit there's a late gothic him later than this but it talks about the Incarnation and Christ enters Mary's body and still leaves the virgin intact and how does that happen and the analogy is to light going through a window because the light penetrates the window without breaking the window so the Mary could remain a virgin still even though the Holy Spirit has impregnated her so it's used in that case as a kind of metaphor but this whole idea of light referring to heaven to Christ spirituality is both intellectually and emotionally part of these Gothic churches and it's very clear that the patrons and the builders wanted to let in more light and you'll remember the passage that I had you read for the discussion forum abot Suchet now he was talking about light reflecting off golden vessels and other things in the church but it applies very well to the light of the stained glass window too and he says that the the mind ascends from the material from the the light from the windows the light reflecting off gold to the true light which is Christ and so many many people when they're in a Gothic church they do feel like they're having religious experience the pointed arches the all of the vertical elements make your soul you know you feel like you're soaring toward heaven and that's the effect you're supposed to be getting here we see it since we're looking upward everything's going up and you see the the elements we've talked about the large clear story the triforium the arcade and of course the verticality and now we're going to look right up into the ribbed folding now when we talk about ribs we're talking about these masonry they look like lines let's just essentially they're sections of masonry and when they build the church they actually I think you saw this in the PowerPoint that had diagrams of Gothic church building and gothic vaulting what they would do is they would take wood and they would build a framework for the arch at one bay wide and they'd raise this up on scaffolding and they would put the masonry and the mortar over for the ribs over the framework and let it stay there until its ride and then they could move it on to the next Bay and then they would fill in the ceilings with stone you also have course those Gables healings above wooden rafters we're looking at this they actually talked the talk about the ceiling itself between the ribs as webbing and the idea that these ribs are the structural members that actually support the ceiling of the roof