Academy of Notre Dame

Transcription

We're in the town of Chartres looking at Notre Dame de Chartres which is one of the great medieval cathedrals, but it's got a complicated history. This site was a sacred space. According to legend there was a druidic temple here. We don't know if it's true of course, but we do know is that there probably was a Roman temple here. And ultimately it was converted into a Christian space maybe third century. And at that point we actually have some historical record. And by the time we get to around 1000 A.D. we know that there was a substantial church. A church that was always associated with the Virgin Mary, and in the ninth century, the church received a special gift by way of Constantinople, a relic of the tunic of the Virgin Mary. So a relic is an object that is believed to have special spiritual power. It could be a part of a saint, or it could be a piece of clothing or something in some very direct way related to a spiritual figure. So for instance, the crown of thorns that Christ wore, or in this case, the tunic that is believed Mary wore when she gave birth to Christ. Relics were critically important, because they were believed to actually have a kind of spiritual power that could benefit those who paid reverence to it. And what this meant was that people would travel enormous distances to go and pay homage to these relics often bringing gifts and offerings. Sometimes these would be jewels. Sometimes it would be money, donations. And the sites of important relics became really quite wealthy. And there were these pilgrimage routes, and for the first time Europe is stable enough politically so that it was actually relatively safe to travel. Now we have no idea whether or not this in fact the tunic that Mary wore. What's important is that it was believed to be that. And therefore had very special saving and protective powers. But something terrible happened. The great Romanesque church that housed the tunic, that pilgrims came to from far and wide, burned to the ground. In 1194. And the shroud was lost. Well, they thought the shroud was lost. And it's a terrible moment, because without the shroud, the town lost its protection. The people felt abandoned by Mary. But lo and behold, three days later, the tunic was discovered unharmed. In the crypt below the church. It was seen as a miracle. Instead of the Virgin Mary having forsaken the town, instead of this being evidence of her anger, now it was clear that the Virgin simply wanted to get the old church out of the way so that in 1194 the town of Chartes could raise a church that was equal to her importance in its splendor. The architect of Chartes whose name we don't know, built the church on the foundations of what was left of the Romanesque church that had been here. But by this time, architecture in the West had changed. And we had moved from a Romanesque style to a Gothic style. And this church is one of the most pre-eminent examples, and probably the most unified example, of the Gothic in France. We're talking about a new focus on opening up the walls of the church and a new focus on geometry. God created the world according to measure. And the church could mirror the measure, the numbers with which God had created the universe. And so by being in that space, created with that measure, we would feel closer to God. We would have an approximation of the divine realm. So what is sometime referred to as Chartes I, the westwork, the part that survived the fire of 1194, that was built earlier, that part feels so much more massive. The architect is not yet shedding the fears that went along with the Romanesque where the walls had to be solid, had to be massive. Well, stone roofs weigh a lot. They sure do. And so you can see that the building is pierced only with the smallest windows. The facade is divided into threes in two directions. A reference to the Trinity, but I think more importantly organized according to the Golden Ratio. And a notion of creating a sense of perfect proportion. Let's walk a little closer. Let's take a look at the jamb figures on the royal portal. [hammers ringing] You can actually hear some of the masons working, doing some repairs on the church. The jamb figures are the figures on either side of the doorway. They're very columnar, each attached to columns. Probably the kings and queens of the Old Testament. They're really Gothic. They're not people like we are. They're clearly representations of spiritual beings. You can tell that, because as you said they're incredibly long. Virtually architectural columns except they support nothing. They don't really seem to have a sense of weight. If you look down at their feet, they sort of dangle down a little bit. They don't really have bodies. They have drapery with folds indicated by lines carved into the stone and in some cases indicating a knee or a hip. But there is really no sense of a monumental, three-dimensional body under that drapery. I'm taken by the pure aesthetic beauty of these figures to represent these figures as gatekeepers, somebody that can hasten our entry into the spiritual realm. Precisely. As we walk in, the figures tower above us. They look paternal, kindly, and they look down at us but also past us. So they seem to occupy both the heavenly realm and the physical realm at the same time and provide a kind of transition into the spiritual realm inside the church.