From medieval sacred place to modern secular space

Changing perspectives on the cathedral and town of Chartres

Laura H. Hollengreen

The French Gothic cathedral of Notre-Dame at Chartres is, without doubt, one of the most familiar monuments in all of medieval art and architecture (Figure 4.1). One reason for the thirteenth-century building’s justifiable familiarity is that it has the enviable reputation of having come down to us relatively unscathed. With the exception of the north bell-tower, it was not significantly rebuilt in later centuries nor did it lose more than fragments of its impressive decorative ensembles of sculpture and stained glass. In this essay I propose to examine the built fabric of the urban precinct around the cathedral in order to differentiate actors and audiences within the medieval town of Chartres, to specify more precisely than has yet been done who saw what when and, thus, which themes were deemed appropriate for target audiences on different sides of the cathedral. By examining this famous church in terms of

its built environment, I hope to enable the reader to see it quite literally from new directions – and to glimpse how the programmes and placement of the cathedral’s decoration responded to urban patterns of land ownership, legal jurisdiction, demographic distribution, and circulation.

The only important instance of concentrated damage to the cathedral occurred at the time of the French Revolution when the building was secularized into a ‘Temple of Reason’. Having reconstructed as precisely as possible the medieval uses of the cathedral’s different fagades, I shall show that it was not until the late eighteenth century that significant change began to take place; when it did, it gave rise to a new perspective which still dominates today and which has obscured the functions of the cathedral for its varied medieval users. The story I wish to tell, therefore, does not end with the Middle Ages but continues with an account of the specific governmental and popular actions which de-sacralized the building in the 1790s, how those actions both reflected and redirected habits of spatial practice from the preceding periods, and how they anticipated later changes in circulation patterns within the city of Chartres, feeding into a revision of perceptions of the huge cathedral.

In the wake of work by the French historian Andre Chedeville, published in the 1970s, the cathedral’s urban context has drawn an increasing amount of attention. Among the many topics Chedeville investigated was the local economy which he argued was much more restricted than previously thought.1 Even that restricted economy went into decline in the thirteenth century after construction of the Gothic cathedral, with the result that there was little geographical spread of the urban area of Chartres during the subse­quent five centuries. Although Chartres was recognized as the primary seat of the Virgin Mary in France – this was formally conceded by twenty-two other French dioceses in the fourteenth century2 – most of the audience most of the time was local.3 My search, then, is not for the pilgrim come from afar, but for the habitual users and viewers of the cathedral: residents of the cloister, residents of the town, residents of the diocese. They, and only they, had the opportunity for the repeated viewing necessary to reap the full thematic complexity of the cathedral’s decoration.

The fact that different cathedral portals served different functions and different audiences (local or otherwise) is widely acknowledged – it has been recognized, for example, by scholars such as Dieter Kimpel and Robert Suckale for Amiens, and Barbara Abou-el-Haj for Reims4 – so a similar finding at Chartres would not be surprising. Drawing on a variety of sources,

I challenge the notion that the west fagade Royal Portal was necessarily the ‘main’ entrance to the cathedral in the Middle Ages (Figure 4.2). I argue that while the west was the primary fagade in liturgical use, the south fagade constituted the major point of public access to the cathedral, while the north, although visible to lay traffic, functioned most of the time as a more private clerical entrance.