IN EARLY 2015, I VISITED CHARTRES CATHEDRAL ON BACK-TO-BACK days with my wife. We walked up the hill from the train station toward the sanctuary in the center of the old city. The curved cobblestone streets leading to the cathedral were lined with two- and three-story stucco buildings, and near the top, an ancient wall enclosed the church and its school, seminary, and archbishop’s palace. The twin spires stood watch.
Construction had begun in the early twelfth century to build a cathedral over the Romanesque church on the site that dated to the fourth century. For those who built it, the work was in effect an act of penitence, for them to feel assured of the forgiveness of their sins. The privilege to participate was granted only to those who were willing to forgive enemies. Any man who carried bitterness in his heart was deprived of the right.
At the west entrance, we entered through the lower-right quadrant of an aged wooden door, as tall as a giraffe. A frieze above displayed weathered stone sculptures that recalled the death and resurrection of Jesus, and over our door a carved image of infant Jesus on Mary’s lap professed the cathedral’s dedication to her, like the more than 180 other images of her that dress the building inside and out.
The dim light surprised us. Scaffolding draped with curtains extended along the sides of the nave and transept and reached up high from the floor to cover most of the windows. We could hear chiseling and scraping coming from behind the curtains. A sign announced that the stained glass was being restored as part of an EU–funded project. We could see only the low windows on the sides of the ambulatory and those forming a crown high above the altar at the far east end of the building.
My disappointment that so many windows were covered soon faded as an insight came to me: the sounds of the workmen and the covered scaffolding reminded me of how the windows had been removed in both world wars. I wondered what it must have been like for teams of workmen to be dismantling the windows and packing and hauling them in wartime inside the expanse of the cathedral. Now I could hear, in the clanking of tools and the voices of workmen hidden from sight, how it might have been done.
In the vast interior space—almost eight stories tall—lancet-shaped stained-glass windows occupied most of the ascending stone walls. The paramount purpose of the walls was not to support the roof but to feature—to extol—the great windows. Most were more than three stories tall. When the windows are uncovered, one’s eyes follow their two parallel rows wrapping around the building from west to east, circumventing the apse and returning to the west facade, where the great western rose window is poised over its three large lancet windows. In the center of each end of the transept, north and south, a rose window stands above its own set of five smaller lancets.
On a normal sunny day, with no scaffolding, a visitor who enters the cathedral is greeted by an ocean of light that changes during the day with the movement of the sun. Early in the morning, the visitor seems to be gaining access to the interior of a huge ship, with the high band of lancet windows glistening like a ship’s sails in sunlight. The light that strikes the high windows on the east end above the altar is so bright that it becomes saturated with colors, bleaching into a white brighter than the human eye can process. Then, as the visitor’s eyes pass to each successive window, the saturation subsides and the rich colors of the glass capture the light like a bright parasail aloft into the great space illuminating the sanctuary, first in a wash of transfiguring color and then moderating for the human eye to focus on the images of the windows’ story panels, which portray ancient tales and depict medieval benefactors who paid for the windows and artisans who forged the windows from sand and iron.
Almost a millennium ago, the windows taught vital lessons to masses of illiterate congregants eager to learn. To be in this place on a sunny day was like standing inside a jewel as it rotates through the day, the light evolving and transforming as it transits the sky, each movement altering light patterns reflecting off of surfaces inside the sanctuary, the movement and color changes continuously reinventing the experience every few minutes, dawn to dusk.
The cathedral’s wonders did not begin with the windows. Its location, on the hilltop with subterranean grottoes where Chartres now stands, was once the site of a sacred forest, a patch of holy ground where—according to mystics—powerful currents come out of the earth, and the cathedral itself has been a fountain of innovation in building, sculpture, window making, and other fields. The cathedral school at Chartres, which was founded in the twelfth century, has served as a European center of learning.
The cathedral also represents the evolution of high Gothic art, containing not only the windows but also around four thousand sculptures, whose faces show a new stage in Western culture. Rodin called it the “Acropolis of France.” The cathedral is the best preserved of all Europe’s Gothic cathedrals. Most of its sculptures are intact. The Royal Portal illustrates twelfth-century technical innovation of the column statue, combining support and decoration in a single stone block.
The cathedral for centuries has held precious relics that have brought a stream of pilgrims and money to Chartres.
The cathedral’s groundbreaking innovations included side doors in its transept, features created to display the array of windows to project light in a new way, higher vaults to provide more room for stained glass, and among the earliest flying buttresses for the same purpose. And its two towers, of different heights and differing architectural styles, illustrate an older symbolism, the dimensions of the taller tower relating to the solar calendar and those of the shorter to the lunar cycle. Their sun-moon and masculine-feminine symbolism echoes pagan traditions.
And the windows themselves tell thousands of stories. Malcolm Miller likens this cathedral to a modern public library. He said, “Its texts are written in the stained glass and sculpture of the 12th and 13th centuries. Printing had not yet been invented; paper did not exist in Europe. Most of the population could not read or write, but people knew how to ‘read’ a window. The lives of the saints were well known, and the educated could understand the more complex symbolic interpretations of the biblical texts.”
The windows’ colors are uniquely intense, especially the blue. The light pouring through the windows casts reflections in moving patterns throughout the day over the limestone walls, the floor, and the columns inside the cathedral. The blue, made eight hundred years ago, is said to no longer be replicable today. Even the purest and brightest natural colors, such as the madder-root orange, are actually blends of many colors, such as yellow, blue, red, and white. They can be distinguished under a microscope. By contrast, chemical colors often consist of only a single color.
The glass, although it appears flat, is not. Its uneven surface and impurities mixed with its coloring elements (gold for pure red, cobalt for blue, and manganese for purple) cause the glass to shimmer. These impurities highlight that in striving for perfection, imperfection, accident, and vulnerability play a vital role. The itinerant glassmakers lived close to forests, where they obtained their supplies of wood, resulting in the bumpy glass, full of bits of leaves and dust motes.
In all, the light at Chartres has special significance. Joan Gould describes it as inner space and outer light, not light in the twentieth-century sense showing us a view, but “light for its own sake, sent through windows that filter the colorless air of day and make the rainbow inside it visible to our eyes.”
I imagined a Sunday in late August 1939, when the cathedral and its priceless windows faced the peril of a threatened new German invasion. I could feel the history surrounding me. In the glow of candles and lingering scent of burnt incense, I imagined hearing shuffling feet of generations of congregants who’d passed through its portals for christenings, confirmations, marriages, funerals, and more and the thousands of craftsmen who’d devoted years to constructing this monument and the hundreds of artists who’d forged and fashioned and painted the windows. And now on this imagined August Sunday in 1939, war would threaten Chartres again—just as war had in 1918. Even a single bomb hitting any nearby site would obliterate the stained glass.
My wife and I strolled down one of the pair of ambulatories to the other end of the structure and back through the opposite passageway. In the limited light that filtered through the remaining stained glass, we smelled the incense and heard indistinct voices of priests and visitors faintly echoing through the building, and I felt the cool air on my face and the underlying peace of the ancient space.
We descended a flight of worn stone steps but were blocked by a locked heavy iron gate through which we peered down to the crypt through a long dark passageway with its stone floor, rubbed smooth by centuries of passing feet, and the long, low, barrel-vault ceiling.
We returned to the nave and bought our tickets to climb the 195 spiral steps of the north tower. As we climbed, I imagined Colonel Griffith must have seen and felt the same as he inched his way up slowly, his weapon aimed up, step by step, fearing German soldiers were hiding up there, ready to fire. We emerged onto the tower’s sunbathed balustrade, its dominant view before us. As we lingered at the top to drink in the sights, I ran my hand along the rough, cool vertical granite exterior and across the horizontal stone surface of the balcony banister, and then I reached up to touch one of the ancient stone gargoyles that overlooked the cathedral and the city and countryside below.
We took a few photos and then descended the same spiral stairwell. With each step down, I touched the surrounding stone wall, and I peered out through the series of small leaded tower windows that lined the stairwell to see the green copper roofs and plaza below. I imagined that these were the same things the colonel must have seen and touched and the sounds he listened for as he climbed down and tasted his relief from the fear he must have felt in his throat as he risked his life to save this monument.