Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres . many different places, — at Paris, Le Mans, Sens, Autun,Vezelay, Clermont-Ferrand, Moissac, Aries, — a score of them; for thesame piety has protected them more than once; but you will see noother so complete or so instructive, and you may search far before youwill find another equally good in workmanship. Study of the Chartresportal covers all the rest. The feeling and motive of all are nearly thesame, or vary only to suit the character of the patron saint; and thepoint of all is that this feeling is the architectural child of the firstcrusade. At Chartres one
Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres . many different places, — at Paris, Le Mans, Sens, Autun,Vezelay, Clermont-Ferrand, Moissac, Aries, — a score of them; for thesame piety has protected them more than once; but you will see noother so complete or so instructive, and you may search far before youwill find another equally good in workmanship. Study of the Chartresportal covers all the rest. The feeling and motive of all are nearly thesame, or vary only to suit the character of the patron saint; and thepoint of all is that this feeling is the architectural child of the firstcrusade. At Chartres one can read the first crusade in the portal, as atMont-Saint-Michel in the Aquilon and the promenoir. The Abbe Bulteau gives reason for assuming the year 1117 as theapproximate date of the sculpture about the west portal, and you sawat Mont-Saint-Michel, in the promenoir of Abbot Roger II, anaccurately dated work of the same decade; but whatever the date ofthe plan, the actual work and its spirit belong to 1145 or Ife^ CHARTRES: DETAIL OF WEST PORTAL JL I tHE NEW YORKtllBUC tJBUAUY \SY0K. l:.EN(^X ANl» TOWERS AND PORTALS 71 Some fifty years had passed since the crusaders streamed throughConstantinople to Antioch and Jerusalem, and they were daily goingand returning. You can see the ideas they brought back with the relicsand missals and enamels they bought in Byzantium. Over the centraldoor is the Christ, which might be sculptured after a Byzantineenamel, with its long nimbus or aureole or glory enclosing the wholefigure. Over the left door is an Ascension, bearing the same stamp; andover the right door, the seated Virgin, with her crown and her twoattendant archangels, is an empress. Here is the Church, the Way, andthe Life of the twelfth century that we have undertaken to feel, if notto understand! First comes the central doorway, and above it is the glory of Christ,as the church at Chartres understood Christ in the year 1150; for theglories of Christ were many
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookdecade1910, booksubjectmiddleages, bookyear1
