[MUSIC] Welcome back to the Age of Cathedrals. In our last time together, we examined two fabliaux, comic tales which satirize the sexual indiscretions of priests. These are works which emphasized the urban values of the marketplace, cleverness and wit, thinking quickly on one's feet, timing, and persistence. And they're obscene, like some of the sculpture to be found on cathedrals, which as in the case of the rude boy on the archivolt around the tympanum of the South entrance to Chartres, also show traces of humor. Today we shall look more closely at the Cathedral of Chartres. The Cathedral of Notre Dame in Chartres is known for the elaborateness of its sculptural program, and both the richness and the depth of color of its stained glass. It is one of the jewels of the region, immediately adjacent to the Isle de France. Just far enough from Paris, that the revolutionary hammers that damaged so many of the cathedrals in and around the capitol did less harm here. As a great high church, Chartres shares may of the features we have seen at Saint Denis, and Notre Dame in Paris. One of the unique features of Chartres is that we possess literature about the building of the great church and the wonders performed there, in the form of short pieces from the 13th century by an otherwise unknown author. Jehan le Marchant or John the Merchant, who wrote a series of miracles of Our Lady of Chartres, much like the miracle of Theophilus that we discussed in relation to Notre Dame in Paris. You read several of Jehan le Marchant's miracles for this week. Chartres is distinguished first because of its size. As we read in Jehan le Marchant's miracle tale about the reconstruction of the cathedral, after the fire which destroyed the church in 1194, an envoy from the Pope urged the assembled clergy not only to rebuild, but to build a church bigger and better than ever. The envoy from the Pope admonished them greatly, as a cleric well versed in letters, to willingly and generously offer their goods and their castles toward the construction of a church, such as could not be found anywhere else in the world. So that the Virgin, pure and without sin, might be served properly there. When she takes possession of a place, it is good and right and only reasonable, that she be provided a rich house. Even our lady, modesty notwithstanding, wanted it this way. The holy glorious lady, who wanted to have a marvelous high, long, and wide church, such that its peer could not be found anywhere, asked her sweet son sweetly to work a miracle openly in her church at Chartres. Chartres is known for the dizzying height of its ribbed ogival vault. Here we look up at the ceiling over the choir, now at the transcept crossing. Notre Dame and Chartres has a long knave, and great balletic arrays of flying buttresses. Which appear lighter and lacier than previous renderings of external reinforcement without losing strength, because of the use of vertically grained spindles, like the great curved railings of which the arc is a bannister between the great counterweight of the exterior buttress, and the high springing of the knave and choir vaults. Chartres is a place full of mystery, and one of its distinguishing marks in the center of the knave is a great labyrinth which dates from around 1200, and is one of the only two remaining Gothic labyrinths, the other being at the cathedral in Amiens. The circumference of the labyrinth is 12.85 meters. The intricate meandering path within some 261 and a half meters. No one knows exactly what the labyrinth of Chartres represents. On one account it signifies the journey to Jerusalem, placed on the medieval maps, at the center of the world. Or, symbolically, the journey to the heavenly city of which the space of the cathedral is supposed to offer an aforetaste. According to another interpretation, the labyrinth symbolizes our journey through life, culminating not in death, but in a Christian context, eternal life and paradise. According to a late 17th century account, there once was a copper plaque at the center of the labyrinth, which represented the story of Theseus and the minotaur, with Ariadne beside them with her ball of thread. The plaque having been removed and melted down by enthusiastic revolutionaries in 1792. In classical mythology, Ariadne delivered the minotaur from the labyrinth by unwinding and rewinding a ball of thread. There may very well also be an architectural or structural significance to the labyrinth, whose center is exactly the same distance from the middle west door of the cathedral, as the door is from the center of the West Rose Window, making the distance between the center of the labyrinth and the center of the West Rose window the hypotenuse of an isosceles triangle.
