Architecture: A Very Short Introduction

When a site is revered in this way, it is often seen as necessary to build something expensive and well designed at the site, as a way of showing how important the place is. The cathedral at Chartres is a good example of the same set of feelings and ways of behaving, but adapted into the culture of a different time and place. It was built in France during the 12th century, over the site of a sacred spring that had apparently been a place of worship from long before Christian times. The cathedral was placed over the spring, but its authority was enhanced by the presence of a portable relic: a length of silk fabric that the Virgin Mary was wearing when she gave birth to Christ. It is still on display in the cathedral today, though it no longer has the cultural importance that it had during the Middle Ages. The building that was put up here was extraordinary. There was an attempt to rebuild the church, but there was a fire before the work was completed, and the authorities concluded that this was because the building was not magnificent enough, so it was reconsidered, and the building was finished in an even more extravagant manner. This was one of the first large-scale buildings in ‘Gothic’ style, with pointed arches and large areas of stained glass windows. It was here that the spire was invented — a really remarkable leap of the imagination at the time. Here it seemed not only technically possible, but also worth the effort, to make a huge neatly finished tapering pile of stones, and hold it up in the air above the town, visible from the farmland for miles around. The idea spread. The spire served no very clear utilitarian purpose, but was a new way of amazing people. The natural scenery at Chartres is pleasant enough, but unspectacular, and the architecture helped to make up for the lack of natural drama by housing the sacred institution in an arresting way. The interior of the church is also remarkable. It took up the idea that had been worked out in Paris by a team of masons working for the Abbot Suger at Saint-Denis. (The area of Saint-Denis is now best known as the place where the Stade de France is located, the arena at which France won the football World Cup in 1998, and it is easy to reach on the Métro.) It is supposed to have been founded at the spot where Denis, the first bishop of Paris, walked to, carrying his head, after he had been executed for his faith on the hill at Montmartre — a vigorous walk for someone in his condition. Again the church there has an ancient foundation, but it was very richly endowed and had high status because it is the burial place for many of the kings of France. It was here that a way of arranging the stone vaults was devised that allowed large areas of stained glass to predominate, shored up from outside by flying buttresses that arc through the air to lean against the building, helping to shore it up. By using these props, a good deal of masonry could be left out of the walls, without disastrously weakening them. They were taken to an extreme in the cathedral at Bourges (Figure 8) which from some angles looks as if it is nothing but flying buttresses. What happens on the inside here is spectacular, as the whole building is flooded with light coming in through the coloured windows. At Bourges the images in the stained glass are particularly clear, and the familiar stories they tell can be recognized and followed as clearly as if they were a comic book with speech-bubbles. Here too the interior space is vast, as there are two sets of aisles running right round the building, with a row of windows letting light into each of them and then another set directly illuminating the central nave. These large vertical windows, together with the stretches of sloping roof in between, stack up together to make a building that is enormously high. It is so spectacularly convincing that, looking at it, one forgets that it is the natural inclination of stones to make low mounds of rubble. Here the stones have been persuaded to leap into the air, and (even more remarkably) to stay there. The point to be made here is that at Bourges we have a completely unremarkable site, on fairly flat ground, that has been turned into something special mainly by building. And this cathedral stands in a tradition of making light-filled spaces that began two generations earlier at Saint-Denis. The abbey church there is a fine and spectacular building, but it is not large compared with the cathedrals at Paris (Notre Dame), Chartres, and Bourges that were built later, so if we study the buildings carefully, paying attention to the order in which things happened, we can see how the ideas developed and were used with increasing confidence and daring. It would not have been possible for an ancient Greek mason to have decided to build something like Bourges. It would have been, in the first instance, absolutely inconceivable, because the ideas would not have been available to him. It depended on various imaginative leaps, each one of which was in its time as great as that involved in inventing the first spire. And then beyond that, even if he could have had the idea, he would not have been able to imagine how on earth it would be possible to build it. Even if he could have done that, he would not have been able to persuade his contemporaries to believe in him and to finance his efforts, which would most likely have led to huge sums of money just ending up as collapsed rubble. Something like the cathedral at Bourges cannot happen overnight as the whim of an individual, but depends on a cultural and technical background that makes it possible to imagine and realize such things. Another point to notice is that the Gothic style was never adopted with great enthusiasm in the south. There is a fine Gothic cathedral at Milan in the north of Italy, but it is isolated, and the churches with pointed arches and vaults in the south of France and Italy tend not to take on the idea of large windows, but retained the flat walls of the earlier Romanesque style, often using these flat wall surfaces for paintings. One reason for this could be that the spaces enclosed by so much glass would overheat uncomfortably in the summer. Bourges is the most southerly of the really glassy cathedrals.