A Cathedral, A Garden And A Boat

About an hour south of Paris, on the way to the beautiful Loire Valley and visible for several miles, the magnificent Cathedral of Our Lady of Chartres presides over the picture post card town of Chartres.  It is unique among the Gothic cathedrals of France in several interesting ways. 

• After at least five previous churches had been built on the same site, with the two immediately preceding destroyed by fire, this immense structure was built in only 66 years -- while the construction of some similar cathedrals took literally centuries. This brief time span gives the building an integrity, a wholeness that some others lack due to multiple designers and evolution of design features. 
• Chartres' glorious 12th and 13th-century stained glass is almost all original, unlike that of most other cathedrals in Europe and Britain which has been replaced over the years.  In 1939, before the German invasion of France, Chartres' windows were removed and stored as the priceless heritage they are, then were replaced in the church after the war.  The intense blue of the glass even bears its own name, "Chartres blue."  
• The sculpted figures that adorn the portals of all entrances display Old Testament and New Testament figures, along with a healthy portion of Catholic saints and allegorical images. Many of these figures were sculpted far ahead of their artistic time and move from Romanesque visages to more realistic characters captured in stone as in later Renaissance art.  
• Chartres also employs flying buttresses, as at Notre Dame, which allows for the uplifting of the vault to an astounding height.  Chartres' elegance in structure and design became the model for many other cathedrals.
• If you haven't visited a Gothic cathedral, there's no way I, or any photo, can accurately depict its scale.  Here, from Wikipedia, are relevant statistics, but even they do not impart the vastness, the grandeur of standing within this structure that has been used as a house of worship for 800 years.

• length: 130 meters (430 ft)
• width: 32 meters (105 ft) / 46 meters (151 ft)
• nave: height 37 meters (121 ft); width 16.4 meters (54 ft)
• Ground area: 1875 square meters (117,060 sq ft)
• Height of south-west tower: 105 meters (344 ft)
• Height of north-west tower: 113 meters (371 ft)
• 176 stained-glass windows

In his book "Great Gothic Cathedrals of France", author Stan Parry writes:  "Chartres is often seen as the quintessential Gothic cathedral, in a class by itself, and is also revered as the foundation for the High Gothic architecture of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries.  It is the parent of Soissons, Reims, Metz, Beauvais, Cologne and Amiens -- the pinnacles of High Gothic.  None of the other great Gothic Cathedrals has escaped the ravages of time, war, or the fateful hand of the restorer as completely as has Chartres." 

I'm not a "details" person and do not have a bent for history -- when experiencing a cathedral such as Chartres I don't really care about the symbology of the art nor the origin of relics and artifacts.  My personal enjoyment rests in my imagination, contemplating  the vision of the nameless, long-dead architects and artisans who devoted their lives to creating this monument to the glory of God, and the faith and sacrifice of ordinary people that prompted construction of such a monument.  I see that faith as tangible, as undeniable, as the massive stone pillars around me.  I also find it poignant and amazing to stand where the faithful of the Middle Ages worshiped and to know they would find little changed from their sacred space to what I see in mine.

If you're interested, HERE is the link to Wiki's history of the Chartres Cathedral (interesting reading). It was too dark inside Chartres to get good pictures, and the scale is so large that my camera would have distorted the perspective.  If you want to see more of the cathedral, you can Google "chartres" under images.

 A celebrated, famous window of Mary.

 One of my favorite features of the cathedral is the collection of carvings that encircle the exterior of the choir, along an ambulatory, showing the life of Mary and the life of Jesus.  These figures are over six feet off the ground and I estimate them to be about seven feet high by five feet wide. This depicts the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist.



 
 Jardin Des Plantes, Paris
This beautiful botanical garden, which is bordered by the Seine and the Gare d'Austerlitz train station, reminds me of Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, to a smaller scale.  The Museum of Natural History is here, including galleries for paleontology, mineralogy, evolution, and a zoo and arboretum.  There are also wide expanses for Parisians to enjoy a bit of greenery in the midst of their city.  Since it is only early April (akin to California's February, judging by the blossoms,) I didn't see it in full flower, but some displays were breathtaking.

 This tree is at least 50 feet in circumference.






Saturday Afternoon On The Seine

After leaving the Jardin des Plantes, I intended to walk home along the Quai d'Austerlitz, but was instead waylaid by a tour boat on the Seine.  While it was still breezy (translation: cold) the sun was doing its best to warm the afternoon, and I stood in the back of the boat and took about a thousand pictures.  Although on a couple of different occasions I've taken the tour buses that run around Paris, I've never enjoyed the boat before and have never seen Paris from this vantage point -- beautiful!