The Story of Chartres

by Cecil Headlam

which, chiselled like a silver bowl, encloses the choir, has been and continues to be horribly defaced and defiled by the ignorant vandalism of impious idiots and pious pilgrims, whose zeal has eaten them up and moves them to write or scratch their names upon the walls of this exquisite though unequal work.

More beautiful than the fourteenth-century screen of Notre-Dame de Paris, but inferior in unity and nobility of feeling to the Pourtoir of Amiens, this Clôture, although executed at various periods, is one in design. The plan of forty groups, representing the principal scenes in the life of the Virgin and the Gospel story was drawn up by the Chancellor of the Chapter, Mainterne, at the beginning of the sixteenth century. The work was begun in 1514 under Jehan de Beauce. It was continued in 1611 by Boudin. It was finished by various sculptors at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and the style naturally varies from late Gothic to Renaissance. The earliest work is the best.

It comprises the first twelve groups in the south ambulatory. These were wrought by or under the supervision of Jehan Soulas, a Parisian sculptor, engaged for that purpose by the Chapter (1518). For Jehan de Beauce, being an architect and not a sculptor, was responsible only for the framework, and not for the groups of figures. But that framework is a masterpiece of delicate grace and prolific imagination. A wealth of ornament, of foliage and arabesques, of mythical personages and fantastic beasts, covers the base and the innumerable columns about it. The stone openwork above and the canopies are exquisite in their lightness and finish. Before he died in 1529 Jehan de Beauce had passed completely under the influence of the Renaissance. The elegant and ingenious clock tower, which breaks the series of niches on the south side of the clôture, with its decorative Titus and Vespasian, and so forth, gives evidence of this. The elaborate clockwork with which it was originally provided, and which showed the days, hours, months, time of sunrise and sunset, and signs of the Zodiac, was destroyed in 1793. The initial F, with a crown, which appears on the vertical band, refers to the then reigning François I.

Apart from the infinite variety of other ornamental details in which the framework is so rich, there are thirty-five medallions on the base. The first on the south side refers to the Siege of Chartres by Rollo in 911; the next fifteen to the lives of David, Daniel, Moses, Samson, Abraham and Jonas; the next twelve to mythological subjects—Labours of Hercules—and the last seven are heads of Roman emperors.

The pillars of the screen carry statuettes of founders and bishops, of whom we have already mentioned S. Fulbert and S. Ives at the eastern extremity. The small doors in their beautiful frames give access to rooms of which four were once chapels, and two others served for the night-watchers.

The first group in the south ambulatory represents the angel appearing to S. Joachim, who is watching his flocks with two shepherds and a dog, and announcing the birth of the Virgin. This and the three following groups are certainly the work of Jehan Soulas (1520).

The second group shows S. Anne receiving a similar message from an invisible angel, to whom she listens with the most intent absorption. The servant, whose attention has also been arrested, is portrayed with equally vivid realism. The sculptor was evidently a master of exact observation. There is something Flemish in his closeness to life. The third group, where the aged couple meet and embrace before the Golden Gate, shows a minute and vivid understanding of the gestures of old age, and the attitude of the servant is admirably suggestive of her naïve, sympathetic delight. There is something Flemish, again, in the homely details with which (4) the Birth of the Virgin is portrayed. S. Anne lies on a curtained couch in the background, attended by a servant, whilst another prepares to wash the Infant.

The next eight groups owe much to Jehan Soulas, but they cannot be ascribed with certainty to his chisel. They show (5) the Virgin Mary ascending the steps of the Temple with S. Joachim and S. Anne, (6) the Marriage of the Virgin, (7) the Annunciation, (8) the Visitation.

The ninth group, next to the Renaissance clock, is of extraordinary excellence. It is conceived in a spirit of the most bold and vivid realism, absolutely justified in the result. Mary is sewing and reading a book; Joseph asleep (and not his eyes only but his whole body proclaims profound slumber), learns in a dream the immaculate conception of the Virgin. Then follow three excellent groups—the Adoration of the Shepherds and Angels, the Circumcision and the Adoration of the Magi. In the latter the figure of the Virgin is particularly noteworthy. On the threshold of the Renaissance the sculptor has suddenly left the uninspired style of his day and gone back to the mystic ideal charm of the thirteenth century.

The next two scenes, the Presentation in the Temple (13), and the Massacre of the Innocents (14), with the Flight into Egypt in the background, were finished by François Marchand, of Orléans, in 1542, and, in spite of mutilation and restoration, they reveal the beginnings of the influence which the Italian Renaissance was to exercise upon French art. The Baptism of Christ in the Jordan (15), which follows, is by Nicholas Guybert, who lacked the draughtsmanship and anatomical study of Marchand, but was inspired with a devotional feeling quite foreign to the seventeenth-century work of Thomas Boudin, (16, 17, 18) the Temptation, the Canaanitish woman, the Transfiguration (1612). The Woman taken in Adultery (19) is the work of Jean de Dieu (1681), and (20) the Man born Blind, that of Pierre Legros (1683).