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    Podtours of the great French cathedrals and their cities
    Podtours of the great French cathedrals and their cities
    Podtours of the great French cathedrals and their cities
    Ebook423 pages7 hours

    Podtours of the great French cathedrals and their cities

    By AM Kirkby

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    About this ebook

    France was where the Gothic style was invented, and the great cathedrals of Paris and the Ile de France bear witness to the huge changes in art, architecture, and society that happened in the Middle Ages. These self-guided tours take you around a number of French cities - Laon, Chartres, Reims, Bourges, Rouen, Beauvais and Amiens - as well as the cathedral of Notre Dame, the Sainte Chapelle, and basilica of Saint-Denis in Paris. They show how the architecture works and describe the philosophy behind it, as well as finding a few curiosities along the way.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAM Kirkby
    Release dateMay 18, 2016
    ISBN9781311083586
    Podtours of the great French cathedrals and their cities
    Author

    AM Kirkby

    A M Kirkby writes a wide range of fiction, including fantasy, SF and historical novels and short stories.

    Read more from Am Kirkby

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      Book preview

      Podtours of the great French cathedrals and their cities - AM Kirkby

      Podtours of the Great French Cathedrals and their Cities

      AM Kirkby

      Smashwords edition

      Copyright AM Kirkby 2007-2016

      Table of contents

      Introduction

      Amiens

      Beauvais

      Bourges

      Chartres

      Laon

      Digression: The labours of the months

      Paris - Notre Dame and the Sainte Chapelle

      Saint-Denis

      Reims

      Rouen

      Introduction

      Gothic is an international architectural style. There's Spanish Gothic and Italian Gothic, there's English Gothic - the Early English, Decorated, and Perpendicular styles - there's the intricate Manueline Gothic of Portugal and the ornate late German Gothic. There's even Victorian railway station Gothic and, of course, American Gothic. But it was the French who developed this style of architecture, around the year 1100, and it's the great French cathedrals which preserve the style in its most classical form.

      These Podtours were originally written as audio tours, with the intention of taking you round the cathedrals and pointing out each aspect of interest - but most importantly showing how the Gothic cathedrals actually work, in terms of their architecture; how it's put together, how the construction was carried out, how the space is articulated and was, originally, used by clergy and lay people, and how a contemporary viewer might have understood the architecture, and the stories in the stained glass, sculptures and paintings.

      Directions to follow, and names of places or interesting sights, are given in bold.

      Each tour stands on its own. That means there's a certain amount of repetition, if you take them all; but it lets you take one tour without reading the rest.

      Unlike many monasteries, which sought the solitude of nature, every cathedral was at the heart of a city - it was in and of that city, and often, benefactions from major landowners and local nobility formed a key part of the furnishings of the great church. So the tours also take you out to other parts of the city, and in a couple of cases you'll be able to see where the cathedral builders moonlighted on private houses, or where parish churches copied the style of the mother church.

      I make no apology for also including other sights when they seem interesting enough, even if they're not Gothic. The idea isn't just to understand something about the great Gothic cathedrals, after all, but also to have a bit of fun.

      Amiens

      Amiens is the biggest and perhaps the most masterful of all the Gothic cathedrals of France – it's after the first, experimental generation, but before decadence began to set in. So you could see it as the 'classical' Gothic cathedral – the most typical, the most complete, and the most completely formed. It's also one of the largest, and one of the few cathedrals to be built almost completely in a single relatively short construction campaign, according to a single unitary plan.

      A good way to start your tour is on the cathedral parvis, the open space in front of the cathedral. Amiens in the Middle Ages was a wealthy trading city, its fortunes made by the cloth industry. It produced waide, or guède in modern French - but known to English speakers as woad, a fine blue dye. 'Amiens blue' was the best dye of its day, and traders from Amiens traded all the way to England – they had a special deal with Norwich, for instance, where they paid a reduced rate of tax compared to other traders.

      As well as woad, Amiens traded in corn, wine and cloth, and an annual fair was held right here, on the parvis – the Foire Saint-Jean. There's still a fair in midsummer here, but it's more a fun fair and free festival than the great trading market it used to be.

      It was Amiens' economic prosperity that made the building of this cathedral possible. Fire gutted the old cathedral in 1218, and the new church was started just two years later.

      (It's surprising, you know, how many cathedrals burned down around this time. And in most cases, the relics and the treasury survived the fire. How very convenient. I can't help thinking that some of the bishops – who all wanted to compete to build the most splendid and up to date cathedral – might have known more about those conflagrations than they were letting on.)

      Unusually, building began at the west end, not the east. It was far more usual for churches to be started with the east end, where the clergy held their services, and the rest of the church, where lay people could circulate, was completed later as it was considered less important. Because Amiens began at the west, the façade we can see in front of us now dates right from the beginning of the construction. The cathedral took nearly sixty years to finish - we know its completion date, 1288, from the labyrinth in the centre of the pavement, which was laid to celebrate and record the completion of the work.

      But before going into the cathedral, let's just look at the houses opposite the cathedral, for a moment. They're not actually medieval – they were built in the nineteenth century by a medievalist architect called Douillet. While you can probably tell they're not original, he did make one very good decision; instead of building a large block, he decided to create a range of individual buildings of great variety of style, materials and size, recreating the appeal of the spontaneous, small scale architecture of the medieval city. The middle houses, unfortunately, were bombed in the war and have been rebuilt in a more classical style, but the two corner houses are still Douillet's.

      We owe a lot to architects like Douillet, who rediscovered and revalued medieval architecture during the course of the nineteenth century. In the eighteenth century, the Gothic style was despised, and 'enlightened' clerics committed just as much vandalism as the Revolutionaries of 1782. They knocked down Gothic choirs and chapels to replace them with often lifeless classical work. It was people like Douillet and the great Viollet-le-Duc who rediscovered the Gothic, and saved many of the great buildings of France for us. Okay, what we see is often not authentic Gothic, but a nineteenth century dream about what Gothic ought to have been like – but it's a lot better than the alternatives. And I find the corner house, with its half timber façade and lozenge patterned brick, really quite charming.

      (If you go up the road on the right of the cathedral, by the way, you'll find rue Porion, and there you can see how the canons of the cathedral lived in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Their houses have great charm and were undoubtedly quite comfortable – but they're definitely not Gothic.)

      Now let's take a close look at the façade of the cathedral. It's an important monument in French art as it is the only thirteenth century façade that was entirely built in a single campaign of building. For instance Chartres, an exceptional work of sculpture, included parts of the earlier façade that had survived the fire that destroyed most of the rest of cathedral, while Reims was redesigned at a later date, and the statues originally intended for the main façade were moved to one of the side doors.

      The façade here in Amiens is contemporary with, or perhaps a little later than, the front of Notre Dame in Paris, and it's a little earlier than Reims. In fact it's quite likely that the same sculptors worked on all three, first at Paris, then here, and moving on to Reims afterwards. Groups of masons in the Middle Ages moved where the work was – that's one of the ways in which architectural and artistic styles were communicated.

      And if you know Paris, you'll see there's a sort of family resemblance, with the three deep gabled porches below, and the gallery of the kings running right across higher up. The difference, though, is that this façade isn't monumentally square like Paris; it's high, and really impressive in its aspiration.

      It's also a bit of a fake. Take a more careful look now and I'll show you how. At Paris, as at the earlier cathedrals, the towers are square, and extend back over the first bay of each aisle, and this looks very much the same at first sight. But here, the towers are just narrow oblongs, separate from the main fabric of the church – they've been added on, just to be seen, over the porch, rather than over the first bay of the nave. If you go round to the side to look, you'll see how they're thinner in that direction – and the rich architectural articulation of the façade isn't extended round the sides of the towers. So the architect has really only created a screen, rather than a fully rounded work.

      The gallery, which runs across the whole façade, emphasises the regularity of the architecture. There is also a continuous base running right the way across, unbroken, with quatrefoils holding small carved scenes, above which the statues of prophets march all the way across the façade. In earlier cathedrals, they'd been restricted to the porches – but here, they take over the entire front, again, integrating the whole façade in a very regular and highly articulated work of sculpture as well as architecture. Each zone is horizontally differentiated, and yet the variety of planes, the recesses and projections, break up the surface – a typically High Gothic characteristic. Look how the open arcade below the gallery of the kings creates depth and transparency, opening up the space behind the façade; and how the porches, too, create a feeling of depth.

      The whole of the west façade was designed by the first master mason, Robert de Luzarches - at least, the three great porches, the gallery, and the overall outline; and this was all complete by 1236, when bishop Geoffroy d'Eu died. By 1243, just 23 years after it was started, the façade was complete up to the rose window. Only the upper stages of the towers are later additions.

      There's one note that doesn't quite ring true, and it's the rose window. Although a rose window was always part of the original plan, the tracery you see today is a later replacement. Its complex, composite curves show that it's a work of the sixteenth century, much more curvilinear and sinuous than the earlier Gothic style of the rest of the façade.

      Now let's try to read the façade, because as well as being architecture, it's a statement of religious faith – a theological work, which the clerics of the day would read almost like a book. It's a sermon preached in stone, if you like, or you could see it as part of an encyclopedia of Creation. And it's also a self-referential work, because what it's about is the structure of the Church – the Church as an institution, that is, rather than a building.

      Look at the large figures that march across the bottom of the façade – these are the prophets representing the Old Testament, and then saints and New Testament figures such as the apostles, the Virgin and Simeon. Metaphorically, then, we're meant to understand that the church is built on the basis of the prophets and the apostles – they are its foundation stones. Then above are the kings, 22 separate figures watching over the church – they represent authority, the hierarchy, and also the kings of France. And right at the bottom, in the quatrefoils within the porches, we see ordinary life – the seasons, the virtues and vices; the everyday world that is ruled by the laws of the church. Another way of looking at those quatrefoils would have been to see them as examples of the way God created the cycles of time in the world - the regular procession of the seasons, of the months, of the movements of the sun, moon and stars.

      On the right is the door of the Virgin, and the decoration each side shows scenes from the life of Jesus; the figures in the doorway are all connected with his early life. Then in the left hand doorway are saints connected with Amiens, like St Firmin, bringing the church up to date with the Middle Ages. And finally, the central door shows the Last Judgment – so the whole façade runs from the deep past, through the present, to the future. You could also read the ensemble as demonstrating different facets of the church – the authority and power of the church through Saint Firmin, the intercession and mercy of Mary, and the last judgment, the redemption of sinners, the transformation of the soul, in the centre.

      And here in the central door the façade focuses on the figure on the trumeau, the middle pillar; here is Jesus, 'le Beau Dieu' as he's known here – the handsome God - crushing a basilisk and asp under his feet. In fact there are three separate representations of Jesus on this portal – the 'Beau Dieu' on the trumeau, Christ showing his wounds (a sacramental Christ) above, and the Christ of the Apocalypse in the Last Judgment. So the whole façade is brought to a point in the figure of Jesus.

      So this façade, seen in this way, becomes an overwhelmingly complete schema of Christian doctrine – an encyclopedia of the church. It's a marvellously comprehensive, uniform piece of work. My only complaint would be that the uniformity of style makes it rather lifeless compared to, say, Reims and Chartres... perhaps to get it done in just 23 years, the sculptors worked rather too fast?

      Let's look at some of the details now, starting with the porch on the left.

      This is Saint Firmin's door – you can see his figure on the trumeau, treading on Sebastian, the Roman official who had him executed. The tympanum above the door shows the story of how Firmin's body was found and brought to the cathedral. (I always enjoy medieval stories about the finding of relics - quite often, in fact, that turned out to be the stealing of relics; the church was a business, and relics were a big business. If you had the right relics, pilgrims would beat a path to your door, bringing their money with them.) In the middle band, illustrated with fantastic architecture, you can see the body of Saint Firmin in his sarcophagus, and you can also see bishop Savin or Saulve of Amiens digging him up. He's helped by the four local bishops of Therouanne, Beauvais, Cambrai, and Noyon – the architecture here represents their cities. You could see these as the earthly cities – representing the authority of the church as a landowner and source of justice. Now when you go across to the door of the Virgin you'll see the heavenly city and the ark of the covenant, so there's a nice symmetry here.

      Then you see Firmin's body being brought to Amiens in the reliquary. And this is a sweet legend; the trees and flowers miraculously budded and bloomed in the middle of winter. Behind the reliquary you can see a young man holding a flowering branch, and with a crown of greenery. He's not a green man – not quite – but he represents the same theme, I think – the springtime, the delightful freshness of nature, and that particular feeling for leaves and trees that seems to go with the Gothic style.

      Now just before we look at the other sculptures, take a quick look at the base of the trumeau underneath St Firmin's statue. It's really badly eroded. And that should tip us off that the rest of the façade has been pretty heavily restored.

      Okay, now let's look at the quatrefoils on the base. Here we can see the Zodiac and the labours of the months – signs of the daily life we're leaving for the realm of eternity as we enter the cathedral. This is the door that represents everyday human life, even down to Saint Firmin – the local saint, part of local life.And the jamb figures here, too, number among them local saints like Sainte Ulphe, Honore, and Saint Sauve, the bishop who brought Firmin's relics here. That's quite typical for a north door - Paris has the labours of the months in the same place, and they're there at Chartres too.

      In fact the quatrefoils are some of the best carving on the entire façade, the rather awkward shape well used as a formal device to give shape to the scenes included.

      Look on the left to find Cancer, the crab – very realistically portrayed – together with a figure of a man harvesting hay with a scythe. We're starting, then, in June – nice and hot, and the beginning of the summer. And look how nicely the curve of the blade has been made to fit into the curve of the quatrefoil frame. This sculptor seems to have been very sensitive to formal patterns like this. Next, we have Leo the lion with a sly grin, and another harvest scene – this man is using a sickle to harvest the corn, and you can see the sheaves stacked up on the left hand side. Like the man who precedes him, he has stripped down to his underwear – baggy shorts or 'braies', as they were called, tied by a drawstring.

      Next, we see the sign of Virgo, and it's time for threshing the corn that was harvested last month. It seems to have cooled down now, as this man is wearing a tunic. Then we have the gathering of fruit, and next, the grape treading for the vintage, with two barrels standing on the left. You'll notice that the scorpion for Scorpio isn't a very realistic one – he has a head like a little dog. Medieval artists didn't have the opportunity to see real scorpions, so these are rather strange creatures – just like medieval images of elephants which often look more like bulls with a watering-can attachment. And finally, under the sign of Sagittarius, we see a man out in the fields, sowing seed in the autumn, ready for next year. These are all typical images of the months concerned, so anyone passing this porch would have easily recognised them.

      Now on the other side of the door the year resumes with the sign of Capricorn, December through to January. Here we see the pig being butchered – on the right is a pickling tub, because of course without the possibility of refrigeration, salting the meat was the only way to keep it edible throughout the winter. And you can see a side of the butchered animal hanging up, too. It's an unusual image because usually, we just see the pig killing – here, we see the details of what's done with the meat afterwards. Then for Aquarius we see the feast – Janus, a two-headed man served by two pages at the table. What's nice here is that the artist has brought together two signs of the first month that are more commonly found separately – the Janus figure for the new year, and the feasting that carried on from Christmas Day to the feast of the three Kings on January the 6th.

      The feast is over, but the winter is still here in the next image, a man at the fire warming himself. This is the typical image for February, but I like the details here – he's taken his shoes off, and is putting another log on the fire. By March, it's warm enough to go out and we see a peasant digging in the vineyard. This is another beautifully judged formal design, with a fine curling plant on either side to fit the quatrefoil. Then we have a falconer, out hunting, and finally for May a man holding a garland - and a little bird singing in the right hand tree.

      Now what on earth is the next quatrefoil doing; a hedgehog inside a cathedral, with a bird in the roof space above? It's actually a representation of the words of one of the prophets. All the critics say it's from Zephaniah, describing the desertion of the city of Jerusalem. But in fact, I think it's taken from Isaiah chapter 34, because he describes the city as the haunt of bitterns and porcupines – and that's what we have here, more or less. Zephaniah mentions bitterns and cormorants, but he never says anything about a porcupine.

      Now let's just move round the corner and you can see another prophecy of the deserted city. Here are the ruins, cracking and tumbling, inhabited by strange figures. And let's hear from Isaiah - from generation to generation shall it lie waste, none shall pass through it for ever and ever. . And demons and monsters shall meet, and the hairy ones shall cry out one to another, there hath the lamia lain down, and found rest for herself.

      This is another one of the images of the city that are found all over this façade. Here, we see the city broken and deserted – the antithesis, as it were, of the heavenly city, the New Jerusalem. This is the city broken by sin, the distopia, the reverse side. It's a warning. Now I don't want to take this thought too far, but we can see the Gothic cathedral as tied up with a new urbanism – with the growth of the city. The Romanesque age was dominated by the monasteries, often sited far away from the centres of population; but the Gothic age is dominated by the cathedral, which is by definition the church of a city. And the emergence of the Gothic style is linked to the growth of the free communes and the urban tradesmen who created a new middle class. So these images of the city are very relevant to the medieval life of the time.

      Then we also see Daniel in the lions' den. The lions don't look very dangerous and Daniel seems to be petting one on the head. You can see, too, the prophet Habakkuk who is being carried by an angel to bring Daniel his food while he's imprisoned with the lions.

      Now let's look at the central doorway. Here, guarding the main door, are the wise and foolish Virgins, from the New Testament parable. The wise Virgins are on the left, holding their lamps – they have saved their oil, and when the bridegroom arrives – that is, when Christ appears at the last Judgment – they can light their lamps to welcome him. On the right – that is, the left side of Jesus, the less honourable side in medieval etiquette – you see the foolish Virgins. They've used all their oil already; they have none left. So they let the lamps dangle – you can see there's nothing inside. They are images of the soul, whether it's ready for the last Judgment, or whether – if you've frittered away your time on earth – it's going to hell. So they're a comment on the scene in the tympanum, which shows that universal judgment taking place.

      At the very top of the last Judgment scene we see Jesus. Now here's a typically Gothic treatment. The earlier Church saw Jesus as the pantocrator, the ruler of the universe, a triumphant, royally dressed figure, and Romanesque Christs tend to continue that trend, enthroned and dominating. But here, you see instead the Christ who has suffered – you can see he is showing his wounds, holding both hands up, the palms towards us. That's very much a Gothic iconography. At the sides kneel the Virgin Mary and saint John, and on the outside, angels holding the cross and the spear – symbols of the Passion, so again, that goes along with the vision of the Christ who suffered.

      Then below we see the last Judgment taking place, in iconography not very different from Chartres or Paris. In the middle, at the bottom, you can see Saint Michael, holding a scale in which he weighs each soul to decide whether it should go to hell or heaven. There's a nice humorous touch here – a little devil is trying to put his thumb in the scales. Obviously he hopes that if he drags down that side of the balance, Saint Michael will decide the soul goes to hell. But he's losing the battle. The soul is going to be saved after all. Because if you look in the 'good' side of the scales, what's in it is not the dead soul, but a lamb – the lamb of God. So there's a theological message here – that the lamb of God outweighs our sins; we are saved not by our own goodness, according to this view, but by Jesus' sacrifice. It's a neat way of making the point.

      To each side you can see the dead bodies rising from their tombs on the last day – each side of St Michael, and each side of the door, the four angels are blowing on their trumpets to wake the dead.

      To each side, the dead rise. And then in the middle level you see the souls that have been duly sorted by Saint Michael, making their way to their destinations – the blessed on the left towards heaven, and the damned towards hell mouth on the right. There's a neat detail here; the blessed are clothed in fine robes, while the damned souls are still naked.

      At then right at the top, above the canopy, you can see the third image of Christ in this porch – the Christ of the Apocalypse, with swords coming out of his mouth. The book of the Apocalypse probably doesn't get read much these days, but it was one of the defining texts of medieval Christendom and gave rise to a great deal of iconography - people would have recognised many of its themes. You can see angels on each side holding the sun and moon; this is a judgment of cosmic scale, the end of the universe.

      Come back down to the bottom of the façade and the inner quatrefoil panels here show us the virtues and the vices. The outer panels, though, show us Biblical episodes; for instance the god of the new covenant, after Noah's flood, making a promise never to send another – we see him with the rainbow. And there's also a panel with revolving wheels – the vision of Ezekiel, who saw wheels within wheels revolving in the heavens, and it's directly under the statue of Ezekiel. So here, the quatrefoils are commenting on the figures above.

      The virtues and vices, of course, relate directly to the theme of the last Judgment. It's as if the sculptor is showing us below, the rules, and above, the result of obedience or disobedience. Do this, and you'll be saved; do that, and you'll be damned. In each pair of quatrefoils we see the virtue above, personified as a woman holding a shield that shows the symbol of the quality, on top, and a scene showing the vice in action below.

      So first on the left, for instance, is humility, with a dove; below, we see pride – and since pride comes before a fall, he's shown tumbling from his horse. Or a little further on you can find charity, shown clothing the naked beggar, with a lamb on her shield – and underneath, a woman putting money in her chest – a miser, obviously. On the other side faith has a cross on her shield, and underneath is despair, a suicide, falling on his sword. Or there's fortitude, in armour, with the symbol of a lion; and below, cowardice – a delightful scene of an armed knight, praying to be delivered from the evil rabbit. Anyone who's seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail will be amused by this one.

      By the way, look carefully at the little half-quatrefoils right up by the door on the right hand side, just beside fortitude and cowardice. The bottom one has a nice little scene of the wolf and the crane which comes right from Aesop's fables. The wolf gets a bone stuck in his throat, and promises the crane a reward if it can help. The crane sticks his big beak down the wolf's throat and hey presto! there goes the bone. So the crane asks for his reward. The wolf's answer? 'You're lucky I don't eat you up. That's your reward.'

      The virtues and vices, like the gallery of the kings, are an iconographical scheme that derives from Paris and the Chartres transepts – so again, Amiens is building on the work of earlier masons.

      Now let's look at the right door, before we go into the cathedral.

      Here we have the madonna on the trumeau, and the story of Adam and Eve is shown below. This is a typical medieval juxtaposition of images; mankind was damned through the fall of Eve, and then saved through Mary – one woman who gave death, the other giving life.

      Intriguingly, the story of the Fall is shown boustrophedon, that is, zig-zag-ways– you have to read from right to left, then left to right, then in the reverse direction again. So at the top, right, Adam is created; then on the left Eve is made out of his rib; below, on the left, Eve takes the apple; on the right God finds them, and they hide. Finally, at the bottom, right, they are thrown out of Eden, and left, they clothe themselves in skins, Eve learns to spin and Adam to dig. Because they are no longer in Eden, they have to work for a living.

      Above, in the tympanum over the door, the Coronation of the Virgin is shown at the top – below, her dormition or falling asleep, and her entombment, and then right at the bottom, there are the prophets. You can see one with a crescent moon on his headdress; that's Aaron, the priest, and you can see the Ark of the Covenant here, too.

      The statues each side of the door show us Solomon and Sheba on the left, and then the three Magi. On the right, there are three pairs - – the annunciation, with the archangel Gabriel and Mary; the visitation – Mary and Elizabeth; and the presentation of Christ in the temple with the Virgin and Simeon - three episodes all involving the Virgin, so we see her three times. While earlier statues are self-sufficient, standing alone, these figures have become involved in a drama – they have started to relate to each other. (And this prefigures the treatment at Reims, where we see again those three great scenes of the annunciation, visitation and presentation. The masons didn't just take their style with them – they also took the subjects, the iconography, the meaning of the work.)

      And now, let's go into the cathedral and take a good look at the interior space as a whole.

      What you see here is one huge space, all visible from the west end. It's the largest of the French Gothic cathedrals, and the second highest – only Beauvais is taller, and Beauvais was never completed. Let me give you some ideas of its ranking. Laon, one of the earliest of the French Gothic cathedrals, was only just over half as high, at 24 metres, and Paris and Chartres were about 33 metres high; but this is 42.4 metres high from floor to vault, an immense space. And it's three times higher than it is wide – very tall, very narrow, very impressive, yet not claustrophobic at all despite its narrowness.

      The whole nave was built in about 15 years, from 1220 to 1235. That's a whole quarter of a century after Chartres cathedral was begun – a new generation, as far removed from the world of Chartres as we are from the 1970s. A bishop of 1235 probably looked at Chartres cathedral the way we look at space hoppers, punk rock, kipper ties and flared trousers.

      The main arcade is very tall, half the total height of the nave, giving an effect of openness as you can see through into the aisles past the very slender piers that support the arches. And the standard High Gothic three-story elevation has been altered to increase that sense of openness. The clerestory at the top has been expanded to create huge window openings, and the triforium in the middle has been squeezed down into a shallow blind gallery. Look how much light comes through into the body of the church, both from the aisle windows, and through that great clerestory. The whole structure has been lightened, as if the density of matter has been reduced, and the wall is very thin. It's very flat, very linear in style, and highly transparent. Engineering knowledge had really progressed since the early days of the Gothic style and this allowed the wall surface to be opened up - buttresses and arches take the strain.

      Look up to the clerestory windows and you'll see how they have adopted what's called rayonnant style tracery, based on radiating patterns – that's what 'rayonnant' means – and on circles; imagine, if you like, that you have a pair of compasses and nothing else, and you could still design these patterns. The tracery is simple and geometrical, but very slender – there's a lot of glass and relatively little stone. And this is an architecture which resonates with logic and sureness of taste – mathematical proportion and geometry can be seen to be the keys to its construction. Scholars of the time saw God as a master architect, creating a universe to which mathematics was the key; this architecture evokes the same equations.

      It's a cobweb texture, tightly pulled in; the tracery and the piers of the nave create a gridlike pattern. It's no longer vigorous and plastic like earlier Gothic work, but rather brittle and lacelike, and flat. It's delicate rather than strong; you might even say it's rather feminine compared to Chartres or Paris. But what mastery is employed here to make it all feel just right – and to keep this web of stone standing. You have to admire the engineering behind it all – an illusion of weightlessness.

      And it was all made with just two types of stone block – the standardisation of patterns enabled building to be carried out on a much greater scale. The medieval cathedral workshop was the nearest thing the medieval world had to a factory, and by now, mass production had been brought in.

      Now when you look through to the choir, it has a pierced triforium – contrasting with the blind triforium in the nave - so it is full of light. The east wall is incredibly light and transparent, creating a wonderful airy, luminous space around the high altar. The great architect and medievalist Viollet-le-Duc called this cathedral a reservoir of air and light and I have to say he was right about that.

      Now let's just get a feel for the history of the building. Robert de Luzarches created the overall plan in 1220, and he built the aisles up as far as the level of the vaulting, and the west porches. Now what's important about his plan is that by reducing the thickness of the towers, putting them on top of the porches instead of over the first bay of the nave, he got rid of the narthex – the two heavy bays that characterise earlier cathedrals – and so he could create a single, unbroken space, all the way from here to the eastern end of the church.

      The next mason, Thomas de Cormont, finished the first two storeys of the choir, and the ambulatory and its chapels. He also vaulted the nave. His son Renaud built the higher parts of the choir and apse in the 1260s, and vaulted the crossing and the choir in a slightly different style. You'd expect it to be a bit different – this is forty years after the cathedral was begun; the amazing thing is that it fits so well into the original work, suggesting that the original plans might well have still been in existence, and Renaud was still following them.

      The only thing that wasn't in the original plans was the range of side chapels. These were added by guilds, and sometimes by individuals, and they represent a sort of privatisation of religion – each guild, each family, wanted their own space, separate from the overall cathedral. They were

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