Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres . aris scheme, easy tounderstand and imitate, but itcarried even a sort of violence— a wrench — in its system,as though the Virgin hadsaid, with her grand Byzan-tine air: — I will it! At Chartres, said Viol-let-le-Duc, the choir of the Cathedral presents a plan which doesno great honour to its architect. There is want of accord betweenthe circular apse and the parallel sides of the sanctuary; the spac-ings of the columns of the second collateral are loose {laches); thevaults quite poorly combined; and in spite of the great width ofthe spaces between the columns o
Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres . aris scheme, easy tounderstand and imitate, but itcarried even a sort of violence— a wrench — in its system,as though the Virgin hadsaid, with her grand Byzan-tine air: — I will it! At Chartres, said Viol-let-le-Duc, the choir of the Cathedral presents a plan which doesno great honour to its architect. There is want of accord betweenthe circular apse and the parallel sides of the sanctuary; the spac-ings of the columns of the second collateral are loose {laches); thevaults quite poorly combined; and in spite of the great width ofthe spaces between the columns of the second aisle, the architect hadstill to narrow those between the interior columns. The plan shows that, from the first, the architect must have delib-erately rejected the Paris scheme; he must have begun by narrowingthe spaces between his inner columns; then, with a sort of violence,he fitted on his second row of columns; and, finally, he showed hismotive by constructing an outer wall of an original or unusual Chartres ROSES AND APSES 123 Any woman would see at once the secret of all this ingenuity and ef-fort. The Chartres apse, enormous in size and width, is exquisitelylighted. Here, as everywhere throughout the church, the windowsgive the law, but here they actually take place of law. The Virgin her-self saw to the lighting of her own boudoir. According to Viollet-le-Duc, Chartres differs from all the other great cathedrals by being builtnot for its nave or even for its choir, but for its apse; it was plannednot for the people or the court, but for the Queen; not a church buta shrine; and the shrine is the apse where the Queen arranged herlight to please herself and not her architect, who had already beensacrificed at the westernportal and who had a freehand only in the naveand transepts where theQueen never went, andwhich, from her ownapartment, she did noteven see. This is, in effect, whatViollet-le-Duc says inhis professional language,which is perhaps
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookdecade1910, booksubjectmiddleages, bookyear1
