ChartresFaculty
Facultad
Geometry
Luke 6:27
"But I say unto you which hear, Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you,"
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The main portal of Chartres is one of the most beautiful congregations of carved figures in the world [38]. The longer you look at it, the more moving incidents, the more vivid details you discover. I suppose the first thing that strikes anyone is the row of pillar people. In naturalistic terms, as bodies, ley are impossible, and the fact that one believes in them is a triumph of art. Figures had been made into columns since the Cnidian treasury at Delphi, but never so narrowly compressed and elongated as they are here - except perhaps at St Denis, because there is evidence that the master who carved them had worked for Suger before he came on to Chartres. He was not only sculptor of genius, but one of great originality. He must have begun carving when style was dominated by the violent twisting rhythms of Cluny and Toulouse; and he has created a style as still and restrained and classical as the Greek sculptors of the sixth century.
The man who carved the pillar of Souillac, although a great artist, cannot be called a representative of civilisation. We have no such doubts about the master-mason of Chartres. One can see that his classic style was a personal creation when one compares the figures by the master himself - all of them are in the central door - with those of his assistants who worked on the doors either side. They could follow the outline of his columnar figures, but when it came to draperies they reverted to the curls and spirals of southern Romanesque, which are meaningless in their new context, whereas the chief master's style is absolutely Greek in the simplicity and precision of every fold. Was it really Greek - I mean Greek in derivation? Were these reed-like draperies, the thin straight lines of the fluted folds, the zigzag hems, and the whole play of texture which so obviously recall a Greek archaic figure, arrived at independently? Or had the Chartres master seen some fragments of early Greek sculpture in the south of France? For various masons I am quite certain that he had.
There was far more Greek sculpture visible in the twelfth century than ayone used to realise. One can find dozens of examples of its being imitated. It even reached England : Henry of Blois, Bishop of Winchester, had a shipload of antiques sent to him. And this style was particularly appropriate to Chartres, because it was there that men first began seriously to study the two founders of Greek philosophy, Plato and Aristotle. John of Salisbury, Bishop f Chartres just after the west portal was finished, was a real humanist.
comparable to Erasmus. In the arch of the right-hand door the Greek philosophers are represented with their attributes: Aristotle, with the severe figure of Dialectic; Pythagoras, who discovered that the musical scale could be stated mathematically, with Music striking the bells; and so forth, all round the arch. Music meant a great deal to the men of the twelfth century, and round the arch of the central doorway a really extraordinary artist ~ perhaps the head master himself, cutting more sharply in harder stone - has shown the elders of the book of Revelation, with musical instruments, each so accurately depicted that one could reconstruct it and play it.
These figures give one an idea of the incomparable richness of the west portal, and the thought that underlies the whole scheme. But from the point of view of civilisation, the most important thing about the central doorway, more important even than its Greek derivation, is the character of the heads of the so-called kings and queens - no one knows exactly who they are [39]. Think of the people we encountered in the ninth and tenth centuries: vigorous, passionate, earnestly striving towards some kind of intellectual light, but fundamentally still barbarians ; that is to say, embodiments of will, their features moulded by the need to survive. Do not the kings and queens of Chartres show a new stage in the ascent of western man? Indeed I beUeve that the refinement, the look of selfless detachment and the spirituality of these heads is something entirely new in art. Beside them the gods and heroes of ancient Greece look arrogant, soulless and even slightly brutal. I fancy that the faces which look out at us from the past are the surest indication we have of the meaning of an epoch. Of course something depends on the insight of the artist who portrays them. If you pass from the heads of the master-mason to those of his more old-fashioned colleagues you are back in the slightly woozy world of Moissac. But good faces evoke good artists — and conversely a decline of portraiture usually means a decline of the face, a theory which can now be illustrated by photographs in the daily papers. The faces on the west portal of Chartres are amongst the most sincere and, in a true sense, the most aristocratic that Western Europe ever produced.
We know from the old chronicles something about the men whose state of mind these faces reveal. In the year 1144, they say, when the towers seemed to be rising as if by magic, the faithful harnessed themselves to the carts which were bringing stone, and dragged them from the quarry to the cathedral. The enthusiasm spread throughout France. Men and women came from far away carrying heavy burdens of provisions for the workmen -- wine, oil, corn. Amongst them were lords and ladies, pulling carts with the rest. There was perfect discipline, and a most profound silence. All hearts were united and each man forgave his enemies. This feeling of dedication to a great civilising ideal is even more overwhelming when we pass through the portal into the interior [40]. This is not only one of the two most beautiful covered spaces in the world (the other is St Sophia in Constantinople), but it is one that has a peculiar effect on the mind ; and the men who built it would have said that this was because it was the favourite earthly abode of the Virgin Mary.
Chartres contained the most famous of all relics of the Virgin, the actual tunic she had worn at the time of the Annunciation, which had been presented to Chartres by Charles the Bald in the year 876. From the first this relic had worked miracles, but only in the twelfth century did the cult of the Virgin appeal to the popular imagination. I suppose that in earlier centuries life was simply too rough. At any rate, if art is any guide, and in this series I am taking it as my guide, the Virgin played a very small part in the minds of men during the ninth and tenth centuries. She appears, of course, in incidents like the Aimunciation and the Adoration of the Magi, but representations of the Virgin and Child as objects of special devotion are extremely rare in Ottoman art. The earliest cult figure of the Virgin and Child of any size is a painted wooden statue in St Denis which must date from about 1130. The great Romanesque churches were dedicated to the saints whose relics they contained - St Sernin, St Etienne, St Lazarus, St Denis, St Mary Magdalene - none of them to the Virgin. Then, after Chartres the greatest churches in France were dedicated to her - Paris, Amiens, Laon, Rouen, Rheims.
What was the reason for this sudden change? I used to think that it must have been a result of the crusades : that the returning warriors brought back an admiration for the womanly virtues of gentleness and compassion, as opposed to the male virtues of courage and physical strength which they themselves represented. I am not so sure about this now; but it does seem to be confirmed by the fact that the first representations of the Virgin as an object of devotion are in a markedly Byzantine style, for example on a page of a manuscript from Citeaux, the community of St Bernard. St Bernard was one of the first men to speak of the Virgin as an ideal of beauty and a mediator between man and God. Dante was right to put into his mouth at the close of the Paradiso a hymn to the Virgin which I think one of the most beautiful pieces of poetry ever written.
But whatever the effect of St Bernard, a strong influence in spreading the cult of the Virgin was certainly the beauty and splendour of Chartres Cathedral. Its very construction was a kind of miracle. The old Romanesque church had been destroyed by a terrible fire in 1194: only the towers and the west front remained, and the people of Chartres feared that they had lost their precious relic. Then, when the debris was cleared away, it was found intact in the crypt. The Virgin's intention became clear - that a new church should be built, even more splendid than the last. Once more the chroniclers describe how people came from all over France to join in the work, how whole villages moved in order to help provide for the workmen; and of course there must have been many more of them this time, because the building was bigger and more elaborate, and required hundreds of masons, not to mention a small army of glass-makers who were to provide the hundred and seventy huge windows with stained glass. Perhaps it sounds sentimental, but I can't help feeling that this faith has given the interior of Chartres a unity and a spirit of devotion that exceeds even the other great churches of France, like Bourges and Le Mans.
However, one must add that all the faith in France couldn't have rebuilt the cathedral if the see of Chartres hadn't been extremely rich. After the fire, the Dean and Chapter decided to put aside three years' income for the rebuilding; and their income in modern terms has been reckoned to be about £750,000 a year. The Dean's personal income was £250,000 a year. Add to this that the see of Chartres was closely connected with the royal house of France, and one sees that, like most miracles, this one can be explained in material terms which, in fact, do not explain it at all.
The building is in the new architectural style to which Suger had given the impress of his authority at St Denis : what we call Gothic. Only at Chartres the architect was told to follow the foundations of the old Romanesque cathedral, and this meant that the Gothic vaulting had to cover a space far wider than ever before. It was a formidable problem of construction, and in order to solve it the architect has used the device known as lying buttresses - one of those happy strokes where necessity has led to an irchitectural invention of marvellous and fantastic beauty. Inside there s no trace of difficulty or calculation : the whole harmonious space seems to have grown up out of the earth according to some natural law of harmony.
So much has been written about the Gothic style that one feels inclined to take it for granted. But it remains one of the most remarkable of human achievements. Since the first expression of civilised life in architecture, say the pyramid of Sakara, man had thought of buildings as a weight on the ground. He had accepted their material nature and although he had tried to nake them transcend it by means of proportion or by the colour of precious marbles, he had always found himself limited by problems of stability and weight. In the end it kept him down to the earth. Now by the devices of the Gothic style - the shaft with its cluster of columns, passing without nterruption into the vault and the pointed arch — he could make stone seem weightless: the weightless expression of his spirit.
By the same means he could surround his space with glass. Sugtr said that he did this in order to get more light, but he found that these areas of glass could be made into an ideal means of impressing and instructing the faithful - far better than wall-painting because with a resonance, an effect on the senses, that the matt surface of a wall-painting could never have. 'Man may rise to the contemplation of the divine through the senses.' Well, nowhere else, I think, is this saying of the old pseudo-St Denis so wonderfully illustrated as it is in Chartres Cathedral. As one looks at the painted glass which completely surrounds one [7, on facing page], it seems almost to set up a vibration in the air. It is primarily a sensuous-emotional impact. As a matter of experience it is quite hard to find out what is going on in the various windows, even when one goes round with a crib prepared by some learned student of iconography ; and whether the faithful of the early thirteenth century were well enough informed to follow all these stories seems to me extremely doubtful. But then we know that the frie 2 e of the Parthenon was almost invisible when it was in its original position, and we must accept that in a non-utilitarian age people under the stress of some powerful emotion are prepared to make and do things for their own sakes or, as they would have said, to the glory of God.
Chartres is the epitome of the first great awakening in European civilisation. It is also the bridge between Romanesque and Gothic, between the world of Abelard and the world of St Thomas Aquinas, the world of' restless curiosity and the world of system and order. Great things were to be done in the next centuries of high Gothic, great feats of construction, both in architecture and in thought. But they all rested on the foundations of the twelfth century. That was the age which gave European civilisation its impetus. Our intellectual energy, our contact with the great minds of Greece, our ability to move and change, our belief that God may be approached through beauty, our feeling of compassion, our sense of the unity of Christendom - all this, and much more, appeared in those hundred marvellous years between the consecration of Cluny and the rebuilding of Chartres.
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