The Crusade of European Christians to overtake Jerusalem and Constantinople is famous. There was another crusade at the time, though, a "cathedral crusade" between the mid eleventh and fourteenth centuries. In France alone over eighty cathedrals were built, not to mention large and small churches. Arguably the greatest of all the cathedrals is the one at Chartres, beneath the vaults of which, according to Napoleon, even the atheist would feel uneasy. To examine just how Chartres works and how it can impress anyone with a sense of reverential awe is the purpose of _Universe of Stone: A Biography of Chartres Cathedral_ (Harper) by Philip Ball. Ball, who has written about diverse subjects like Renaissance medicine, water, and the history of pigment making, says that understanding Chartres is made difficult by all the centuries that have laid on since its construction and all the different academic and philosophical views that have often made confusing issues even less clear. Ball writes, "It is only by embedding the church in the culture of the twelfth century - its philosophies, its schools and its politics, its trades and technologies, its religious debates - that we can begin to make sense of what we see (and what we feel) when we pass through the Royal Portal of the west front." His book accomplishes this goal, clearly laying out spiritual, social, and technological trends of the era in a thoughtful and entertainingly discursive book of architectural history.There is much we do not know about how the cathedral was built. We do know that it was built quickly, in the first 26 years of the thirteenth century. We don't know the architect who planned it all out, or if an architect actually did so, nor how educated the planners and builders were. There are no plans or models. We do know that it represented a change from Romanesque to Gothic architecture. Romanesque builders piled stones for the chief purpose of having them not fall down, and their resulting vast walls and narrow windows were a reflection of darkness and monastic seclusion. Chartres was in the vanguard of Gothic construction, changing the way the church regarded itself. It is not likely that the builders had in mind a celebration of the light of reason, but it is not far-fetched to imagine that the increase of light and banishment of the old gloom both reflected and inspired a process from fearing God to investigating with wonder God's works. Most of the hundreds of stone carvings in Chartres were done by masons who knew the stones would then be hoisted to a high nook where human eyes could never again see them. Only upon the invention of powerful spyglasses, tools the masons could never have imagined, were these sculptures seen again. The erection of the cathedral was not always so idealistic, however. Ball makes clear that those who worked on it expected to get paid, and that the those who got paid did not like the idea of volunteers doing the work for free in religious ecstasy. There is a legend of the "cult of the carts", whereby spontaneous fervor caused laymen to harness themselves to bring stones from far away, but much more likely is that any such show was organized by the clerics. Certainly, surviving accounts show that all unskilled manual work went for a fee, despite any bouts of fervent free labor.Ball writes that Chartres is "nearly a pristine document, miraculously preserved from a distant world, bearing a message that is barely diluted." There has been a bit of remodeling and a huge baroque sculpture of the Assumption in the choir, and it is alarming that what Ball calls "the arrogance of eighteenth-century artistic chauvinism" permitted the interior to be completely whitewashed. The building never did get finished according to original intentions, because it got only two spires rather than the nine that were proposed, but it still has a unity and a clarity that few structures of the time can claim. It was also a showpiece for the era's understanding of flying buttresses, pointed arches, and ribbed vaulting, all of which are pictured and diagrammed here, along with illustrations of what might go wrong if stresses on the structures were not in balance. If you can't get there to see the cathedral itself, Ball's book is the perfect vehicle for informed armchair traveling.For anyone who has stood in awe of the splendid architecture of Notre Dame de Paris, Saint Denis, or Chartres itself, this is a delightful book. In his engaging and smooth prose, Philip Ball guides the reader through the religious, social, and philosophical milieu that produced the quintessentially Gothic cathedral at Chartres. The essence of Gothic architecture is hotly disputed (Ball navigates neatly through the variety of scholarly opinion), but it certainly incorporated into a unified whole a number of different elements that had previously existed--all for the purpose, it seems, of achieving a soaring height and lightness inside, heaven on earth. Contrary to what the name suggests, Gothic was really a French style, and Ball discusses Chartres in the context of the nearby and near-contemporary cathedrals, especially St Denis, Sens, Soissons, and Strasbourg. (He occasionally brings up the adaptations of the Gothic style further afield.)Like many other important churches, Notre Dame de Chartres was erected on an even more ancient sacred site: a sacred well (not a druidic temple, which is a Renaissance misinterpretation of Caesar's writing). The earliest churches that stood over Chartres's sacred well (which can still be seen in the crypt beneath the cathedral) were wooden and burnt down repeatedly: rebuilding was undertaken in 743, 858, 1020 (at which point the bishop Fulbert decided to make it an impressive Romanesque cathedral), 1134, and finally in 1194. At this point, it was decided to rebuild in the new Gothic style--a style introduced in the west front and choir of St Denis that had been completed a half-century before.In a long middle section reminiscent of Ross King's Brunelleschi's Dome, Ball keeps the reader waiting to find out the answers to some key questions: Who built it? How long did it take? He explains thoroughly the intellectual context of the Gothic cathedral and its material features in alternating sections not in chronological order.The monastic trends of the era are pointed out, together with the structure of the cathedral's ministry (and the tension between Chartres's and the local bishop); and the cathedral's original interior colors, ochre and white, are revealed. The Aristotelian, Platonic, and Augustinian foundations of medieval philosophy and theology are laid; and important figures such as Bernard of Clairvaux and Peter Abelard are profiled. The state of the art in medieval science is discussed, and its incarnation at the cathedral school in Chartres; and Geoffrey of Leves and Bernard and Thierry of Chartres are profiled. The roles of architects, masters, and builders are discussed, together with their building materials (chiefly limestone in the Isle-de-France); Villard de Honnecourt and his drawings are discussed, as are the uses of military technology in building projects. The engineering challenges of a Gothic cathedral are presented, including forces and stability, cracking and buttressing. (It seems that the argument over whether to buttress or to vault first was never really settled.) And in a chapter reminiscent of Ross King's on pigments in Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling, the making of colored glass is discussed, and it is revealed why blue and red were the dominant colors in medieval stained-glass windows.In the second-to-last chapter, Ball describes the actual building of the cathedral at Chartres, and he debunks the legend of the townspeople putting their shoulders to carts of stones in a frenzy of enthusiasm. As for the cost of the project, Ball estimates that perhaps 5% of the total cost (around 4000 livres) came from the town; maybe another 5% from the French king; a little could be expected from pilgrims who came to see the town's prized relic, the Blessed Virgin's Sancta Camisa; but most of the funds probably came from the bishop's own salary and the rents on church lands. Ball addresses the age-old question of the order of construction--east to west? west to east?--amusingly, observing as evidence against the west-to-east theory that "the nave doesn't so much join up with the west end as crash into it." The question hasn't been settled, but in any case it seems that the architects had thought they would be able to replace Bishop Fulbert's two western towers. (Just one remains--the southwest, less elaborate one.) But funds ran out, and it was in retrospect a happy accident, because it forced the architects to simplify the design (nine spires were originally planned), thereby unifying it and providing a template for the great cathedrals that followed. One wonders how things might have turned out otherwise--would the great Gothic cathedrals all be like the colossal Duomo in Milan?This was a very enjoyable book, filled with great pictures and diagrams (unfortunately not indexed, though) and eventually answering those key questions: No one knows who the masters or architects were, but there were probably a number of them. And it took just 26 years to build, much less than the century or so needed for Amiens or Reims. This is a great book for the traveler--armchair or otherwise--who is interested in Chartres or medieval architecture.
|
adam-recommended.com - Universe of Stone: A Biography of Chartres Cathedral - Comparison Shopping and Read Reviews Index | Sitemap
