CHOIR AND NAVE OF NOTRE DAME, LOOKING WEST. NAVE OF SAINT GERMAIN DES PRÉS.
decorated with crochets (furled leaves) and tipped with fleurons or bunches of budding leaves.
High heavenward sprang spires from the western end of the churches, this western façade forming an imposing entrance to the nave through whose length the choir and altar at the eastern end, beyond the transepts, looked mysteriously far away. From the roof at the junction of the nave and the transepts a slender spire called a flèche (arrow) shot upward with exquisite grace.
The introduction of ogival architecture had a sudden and revolutionary effect upon the art of painting. Before the twelfth century mural decorations and the illumination of manuscripts had been the only instances in France. When the broad expanses of wall above the semicircular Romanesque arches vanished with the coming of the pointed arch there was no place left except the windows for the depiction of the lives of the saints, of scenes from Old Testament history and from the life of Christ. Glass then became the artist’s medium.
The most illustrious examples of the new style to be found in modern Paris are the cathedral of Notre Dame, the refectory of Saint Martin-des-Champs, and the Sainte Chapelle built by Saint Louis in the thirteenth century.
The cornerstone of Notre Dame was laid by Pope Alexander III in the reign of Louis VII (1163.) The new cathedral covered the spot where the Nautae had erected their altar to Jupiter, replaced the many times repaired Merovingian cathedral of Notre Dame, and attached itself to the ancient church of Saint Étienne, the original cathedral of Paris which stood where Notre Dame’s sacristy now rises. This old edifice was not taken down until the new was sufficiently advanced for the altar to be consecrated, so that service beneath the cathedral roof never was interrupted even for a day. The relics were removed to a new Saint Étienne’s, built on Mont Sainte Geneviève.
Construction went on briskly through Louis’ reign and the four decades of Philip Augustus’s and the three years of his successor’s, Louis VIII, and work ended on the superb edifice in the twentieth year of the rule of Saint Louis. It was a “quick job”—eighty-four years—as building went in those days. The great mass never has been completed, for the spires of the original plan have not been added. It has had its days of decay and of restoration, the last attempt having returned its elaborate west façade as closely as possible to its appearance in Philip Augustus’s day when it was finished.
Inside and out it is magnificently harmonious,