Stained glass of the middle ages in England and France

by Hugh Arnold

Chartres.

Meanwhile, ever since the fire in 1194, the people of Chartres, careless of their personal losses, had been working in a flame of enthusiasm and devotion at the rebuilding of their Cathedral. Every one, nobles, merchants, craftsmen, and peasants, gave what they could. Some gave money, some materials, some provisions for the workmen. Those who had nothing else gave their labour, even harnessing themselves to carts to drag stone for the building. Heaven itself seemed to lend its aid, for it is said that Our Lady worked many miracles of healing at her shrine at Chartres, which soon became a thirteenth century Lourdes, to which pilgrims came from all countries, leaving offerings of money or jewels.

Finally, in 1210 the main part of the building seems to have been finished. "Entirely rebuilt in hewn stone," says William le Breton some years later, "the Cathedral of Chartres has nothing to fear from temporal fire from now till the day of judgment, and will save from eternal fire the many Christians who by their alms have contributed to its reconstruction."

The great church was now ready to receive its decoration: The altars, the painting, the sculpture were still to be done, and above all the one hundred and twenty-five great windows, with the three great roses, and forty-seven lesser ones had to be filled with the glass which still makes Chartres Cathedral one of the wonders of the world. In the year 1226 Saint Louis came to the throne. Eight years later he acquired the Comté of Chartres, and lent his powerful aid to the work, giving the great rose window in the north transept and the five lancets below it, as well as other windows. The King of Castile gave a window too, and following these royal donors a crowd of princes, seigneurs, and churchmen added their gifts, while forty-seven windows were given by the Guilds of Chartres alone. Yet even so it was thirty years more before the bulk of the work was completed, and the actual consecration did not take place, for some reason, till October 17, 1260, when it was performed with great pomp and rejoicing before Saint Louis and his family and an immense concourse of prelates, nobles, and common people.

There is nothing in the world quite like the Cathedral of Chartres. In the quality of its work Canterbury is as good or even better, but for the proper appreciation of the glass of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries it is necessary to have every window of the building filled with it in order that the eye may get used to the gloom and attuned to the pitch of the colour; and it is only at Chartres that this is even approximately the case. I know nothing like the effect on one of several hours spent in the building, the awe and wonder, mingled with a strange sort of exaltation, which it produces.

Even when its windows were complete, Canterbury can hardly have had quite the same effect, for its clerestory is much smaller, and it has not the splendid width of nave and choir which enables one to see the great clerestory windows of Chartres so well. In the thirteenth century the nave at Canterbury was still the old Norman nave of Lanfranc, of which the windows were, as an old drawing shows, comparatively small; nor indeed do we know for certain if they had coloured glass in them.

York is almost as complete as Chartres, but the glass there is nearly all of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and though it is in a sense quite as beautiful, with all its great windows twinkling with lovely colour, yet the subjects are too small to be seen from below, and there is nothing like the awe-inspiring majesty of the ranks of colossal saints which fill the clerestory of Chartres.

That the master or masters of Canterbury and Sens came to Chartres is, I think, certain; the Canterbury tradition is traceable in so much of the work. Here I imagine he or they ended their life's work, leaving their pupils and their pupils' successors to carry it on in the later style which they developed as they went along. One of these, no doubt, was that Clement of Chartres who signed his name in the window at Rouen which Mr. Saint has sketched in [Plate XIV.] I think I can trace his hand in some of the windows on the south side of the nave at Chartres, in the treatment of the mosaic diaper in which various shades of blue have been so skilfully blended as to produce, as at Rouen, a lovely play and ripple of colour over the whole surface of the window.

Perhaps the most notable development of the style at Chartres is the increase in the use of mosaic diaper, of the kind illustrated in [Plate VIII.], as a setting for the medallions, instead of the leafy scroll work formerly used.

At Canterbury the mosaic diaper setting is the exception, only occurring in one window; at Sens it is introduced tentatively, but at Chartres it is the rule. The scroll-work filling only occurs, I think, in three windows of the lower tier. One of these is the St. Eustace window already mentioned, which to me is strongly reminiscent of Canterbury work—more so, indeed, as far as the medallions go, than the similar one at Sens.