Rheims has been a city of importance since the time of the Romans. The cathedral, wherein for nearly 1,000 years the kings of France were crowned, has been fittingly described as “the most perfect example in grandeur and grace of Gothic style in existence.”
Hincmar, a mighty archbishop of the ninth century, once declared that Rheims was “by the appointment of Heaven a royal city.”
The words are at once historical and prophetic. Here Clovis was baptized by St. Remigius, and here in the cathedral in 1429, Charles VII of France was crowned through the efforts of Joan of Arc.
According to the historians of art, Rheims is royal in another sense. In no city in Europe have the life and thought of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance found such perfect expression in architecture. From early Gothic to Romanesque, and from Romanesque to Renaissance, the buildings of Rheims reveal better than any records the city’s historical development. Of all the buildings illustrative of their various periods there were said to be no better examples than the cathedral and the church of St. Jacques, fine monuments of early Gothic; the later Gothic edifice of the archbishop’s palace, and, finally, the city hall, a handsome work of the best period of French Renaissance.
CATHEDRAL OF NOTRE DAME
No one really knows who designed and built the cathedral. The first stones were laid in 1211, and the building, with the exception of the superb west façade, was completed in the thirteenth century. The façade, which dates from the fourteenth century, was adorned with three exquisite recessed portals containing, in a more or less good state of preservation, over five hundred statues. Of the entire structure, we read in “Cathedrals of the Isle de France”: “Nothing can exceed the majesty of its deeply recessed portals, the beauty of the rose window that surmounts them, or the elegance of the gallery that completes the façade.”
The Christian World!