"Finally, in the middle, the great doorway illustrates the subject round which the storied carving of the other doors all centres: the Glorification of Our Lord, as Saint John beheld it at Patmos; the Apocalypse, the last book of the Bible, spread open on the forefront of the basilica, above the grand entrance to the church.
"Jesus is seated, on His head the cruciform nimbus, robed in the linen talaris and draped in a mantle which hangs in a fall of close pleats; His bare feet rest on a stool, emblematical of the earth, according to Isaiah. With one
hand He blesses the world; in the other He holds the Book with the seven Seals. About him, in the oval glory or Vesica, we see the Tetramorph—the four evangelical emblems with closely fretted wings: the winged cherub, the lion, the eagle, and the ox, figuring St. Matthew, St. Mark, St. John, and St. Luke. Above are the twelve Apostles holding scrolls and books.
"And to complete the Apocalyptic vision, in the hollow mouldings of the arch are the twelve Angels and four and twenty Elders described by St. John, in white raiment and crowned with gold, playing on musical instruments, and singing in the perpetual adoration which some few souls, dwelling isolated in the midst of the indifference of this age, still carry on. They magnify the glory of the Most High, throwing themselves on their faces when the Evangelical Beasts, responding to the fervent and solemn prayers that go up from the earth, utter, in a voice that resounds above the roar of thunder, the word which in its four letters, its two syllables, sums up every duty of man to God—the humble, loving, obedient Amen.
"The text has been very closely followed by the image-maker, excepting with regard to the Beasts, for one detail is omitted; they are not represented with the eyes of which the prophet tells us they were 'full within.'
"Thus, regarding this whole front as a triptych, we find that in the left doorway we have the Ascension framed in the signs of the zodiac; in the middle, the triumph of Jesus as described by the Seer; on the right, the triumph of Mary, surrounded by certain of Her attributes. The whole constitutes the scheme to be carried out by the architect: the Glorification of the Incarnate Word.
"In fact, as the Abbé Clerval says in his important work on the cathedral of Chartres, 'we have the scenes of His life which prepared the way for His glory; we have this actual entrance into glory; and then His eternal glorification by the Angels, the Saints, and the Blessed Virgin.'
"From the point of view of artistic execution the work in the grand subject is crisp and splendid; the smaller figures are obscure and mutilated. The panel representing the Virgin Mary has suffered severely, and both it and that representing the Ascension are strangely rough and barbarous, quite inferior to the central tympanum, which
contains the most living, the most haunting, of many figures of Christ.
"Nowhere, indeed, in mediæval sculpture does the Redeemer appear as more saddened or more pitiful, or under a more solemn aspect. Seen in profile, His hair flowing over His shoulders, smooth in front and divided down the middle, with a nose slightly turned up and a heavy mouth under a thick moustache, with a short, curling beard and a long neck, He suggests not so much a Byzantine Christ, such as the artists of that time were wont to paint and carve, but a pre-Raphaelite Christ designed by a Fleming, or even derived from the Dutch, showing indeed that slightly earthy taint which reappeared at a later time with a less pure type of head, at the end of the fifteenth century, in the picture by Cornelis Van Oostzaanen, in the gallery at Cassel.