the story of the cult of carts takes us to the heart of one of the most remarkable periods in the art of the west-- the age of the gothic cathedrals. of the churches builthen, one has come to stand for the rest--cathedrals. chartres. the church at chartres was burned down several times between the 8th century and the 12th. each time, the people of chartres willed its rebuilding. the craftsmen, sculptors, glaziers, masons, and construction workers flooded in from far and wide. but the people of chartres themselves provided the basis, in the money raised by selling the produce of their labors. they also provided the emotional commitment, and sometimes that could reach fever pitch, as in 1145.

in 1194, the church was again burned down, leaving only the great west gate, the western towers, and the ancient crypt. miraculously, their most sacred relic, the tunic of the virgin mary, survived intact in the crypt, to the joy of the people. even more miraculously, the entire church was rebuilt in 27 years. that is the church that we can still see today. what the cathedral meant to the people who lived in these streets in the 13th century is very different from what it means today. then the cathedral was the center of spiritual life and the focus of civic pride. daily life literally revolved around it. as in many medieval towns, the western gates of the cathedral formed one sid a great opesquare.

in the middle ages, this was the place where the townspeople could meet the farmers and produce of the countryside could be bought and sold. here, too, they could mingle with tinkers and peddlers, salt sellers, dealers in relics, and the whole gallery of nefarious characters who thronged the roads of christendom at that time. the important rituals of people's lives centered in the church. in the church, the infant was baptized, the young were married... and prayers were offered for the souls of the dead.

the tremendous outpouring of skill, labor, and faith represented in the age of gothic cathedrals needs to be understood in light of the great changes happening in western europe between 1100 and 1300. the most important of these was a dramatic population boom. as europe grew more stable and more prosperous, men and women seem to have married younger and had bigger families. the population of the west increased threefold in those two centuries, and in the richest parts, up to tenfold. hundreds of new towns and the old ones thrived as local and long-distance ade flourished. at the same time, there were new intellectual impulses, evidenced best of all in the founding of the great universities-- paris, oxford, and cambridge. inside the church, great scholars, such as peter abelard, attempted to wrestle afresh with those eternal problems

of the relationship between the rational and logic and faith. so everywhere there was a sense of change. nowhere is this sense of change revealed more dramatically than in architecture. in a drab suburb of paris, at the church of saint-denis, once the glorious burial place of the kings of france, we can pinpoint the moment of transition to the new, visionary gothic style. it's rare in the history of western architecture when we can see a new style born in a new place in one monument at a very specific moment in time. such is the case here where, for the first time, the gothic style was created.

william clark is an art historian who has made new contributions to our knowledge of saint-denis and chartres. the new style of architecture is characterized by these tall, thin columns, their foliage capitals that lift up the ceiling height, a network of pointed arches and rib vau@ts. these things had been used before. what's new at saint-denis is the sense of the organization of the space. the divisions are played down in favor of a unified space that flows from one side of the building to the other. the differences from romanesque architecture are clear. romanesquerchitecture had massive, heavy, thick walls and divided spaces. here at saint-denis, the divisions between units, like the walls between the radiating chapels, have simply disappeared in favor of this vast expanse of space

that seems to float around us, and it's filled with light. the wall as a surface has disappeared and has been replaced by translucent screens of glass. all this was due to the influence of one of the st eordinary peoe 12th-century frce, the man who conceived the w building, abbot sur of saint-denis. suger believed the light flooding the choir through the stned-gls windows becomes divine light, a revelation of the spirit of god. thus it was possible, he said, to create in a church a strange region of the universe suspended between earth and heaven.

suger also placed gold and jeweled objects everywhere in his church, for these, too, were felt to reflect the divine light. in june 1144, suger consecrated the new choir at saint-denis in the presence of the king of france, his nobles, and the chief archbishops and bishops. dazzled by what they saw, they returned home inspired to equal

or even outdo suger's creation. reims, sens, senlis, soissons, beauvais, canterbury, and chartres would soon show the influence of the new saint-denis. the medieval cathedral was the focus of popular pride and intense rivalry, for the prestige and importance of a town was determined largely by the size, height, and beauty of its cathedral. this rivalry pushed church spires to unprecedeed heights. the spire of chartres would extend beyond the top of a 30-story skyscraper. a 40-floor skyscraper would be needed to surpass the spire at strasbourg. the dimensions of the cathedral at amiens made it possible for the entire city, 10,000 people, to attend one ceremony. but it was in the height of the vaulting that the most intense competition reigned.

when the vaulting of notre dame in paris achieved a height of 108 feet, chartres rose 121 feet above the ground. reims then surpass this with 125 feet. next, amiens rose 139eet. finally beauvais cathedral, which would have beaten them with a vault of 158 feet, went beyond the limits of safety and medieval engineering skill, and the walls of the choir collapsed. despite isolated disasters like beauvais, gothic triumphed over much of europe within a few generations. at canterbury, when the choir was destroyed in the great fire of 1174, it was rebuilt in the new gothic style. england was the first to adopt the gothic, not surprising in a country with close dynastic and historic lks with france. but english architects always tended to go their own way,

favoring length over height, evolving their own forms, often by deliberately misinterpreting their french models. by the early 14th century, at wells cathedral, the deep-rooted english tendency toward architectural fantasy broke free, producing daring innovation. most striking and eccentric are the massive strainer arches added to reinforce the supports of the crossing tower... and that most notable of english contributions to gothic, the elaborately patterned vault, with its delicate tracery of stone. during the heyday of gothic, hundreds of cathedrals d thousands of churches

were built across europe in that time, it has been estited that more stone was quarried in france alone than in the entire history of ancnt egypt. at the heart of gothic was a combination of all the arts, transformed by religious faith into a mystical vision. and it is at chartres that these elements are felt to have achieved their greatest hmony. the west front of chartres, the so-called royal portal, is the only group to survive the calamitous fire of 1194. the faithful were greeted by rows of old testament kings and queens, recalling the biblical ancestry claimed by the 12th-century french kings.

these old testament prophets and kings and queens give us a very clear sense of the new relationship between sculpture and architecture. they stand away from their architectural background. they float serenely in space, touching neither the bottom nor the top. their lines are dictated by those of the architecture behind them, thus their tall, slim, and vertical proportions, but they are, at the same time, remarkably free from their architectural constraints. at once majestic, dignified, but no longer remote. they're very human and approachable in their facial expressions and their emotions.

up above in the tympanum, we have christ in majesty with the four evangelist symbols... with the elders of the apocalypse d angels, a majestic vision symbolizing, in fact, the promise of salvation. unlike the tming and crowded tympanum of saint-lazare at autun, whose subject was the last judgment in all its terrifying detail,

here, we have the promise of salvation and a serenity and a majesty and above all, an approachable humanity that anites thsculpture here. we see in them the very embodiment of the mid-12th century humanism that is so prevalent in the school of chartres at this very time. one exciting thing at chartres is you can move from the west front to the north transept and change completely the sense of style in the sculpture. there's a change in the attitude towards the human body. these figures are now freer and seem to move. they have animated facial expressions. the drapery falls around the bodies and reveals it in its contours.

we've got old testament kings and prophets. all of these emphasize salvation through sacrifice. abraham, for instance, is preparing to sacrifice his son isaac, as god commanded him. he looks up at the angel, who orders him to substitute the ram. both the north and south transept portals belong to the new cathedral, built after the 1194 fire. the south side followed shortly after the north, so the samchanges we saw there are now even more advanced. here, for instance, is the warrior saint theodore. with a weight borne on one foot like the classical contrapposto pose, he's liberated from the architectural framework. in contrast to the other biblical figures, for the first time, he is dressed and armed

as a contemporary 13th-century crusader. the human form and its natural depiction, now sanctioned by the church, released the creative energies of the gothic sculptor. soon a variety of individualized figures blossomed on cathedrals not only in france, but all over europe. the great age of gothic cathedrals was an unparalleled time of expansiveness in european society, but in saying that, we mustn't forget that during those years, the mass of society was still dependent peasantry, unfree, laboring under extraordinarily r soci ste

it was perhaps because their lives were so harsh that the cathedral meant so much to them. there could hardly be a greater contrast between the squalid conditions of their lives and the splendor of the cathedral to which the quite literally looked up.

here at chartres, we see the culmination of 50 years of architectural experimentation and development all brought together by a master builder to create a completely new sense of gothic space. we start at the floor with those tall, lean pillars that rise majestically from the floor uninterrupted towards their capitals and their arcades

and on the front side, directly towards the vaults. the second level is a horizontal wall passage that provides relief from the vertical and that prepares us for the most spectacular achievement at chartres, those enormous clerestory windows-- windows that are as tall as the arches below, windows taking up the full expanse of the wall-- that marks it as the beginning of the classic age of french gothic cathedrals, the period that we call the high gothic. chtr h more of its original glass than any oth dieval cathedral. what makes possible the size of thoswindows and the openness of that wall is, in fact, the last jor structal advance

in gothic architecture, the external flying buttresses, that take all the weight and the pressures from the vaults, from the timber roof, and transfer it away from the wall directly into the ground. romanesque architecture doesn't have this advantage. there we have short, heavy piers, thick walls with small windows, round arches, and groin vaults, creating solid but not very tall buildings. in the gothic church, the walls don't carry the structure's whole weight. the inner piers are slim and narrow. the rib vaults are thin under a tall timber roof. massive windows dominate the wall. this openness was possible because the structural support has been moved outside. massive upright piers surround the building. giant arches spring from them to resist the pressures of weight and wind.

what i like particularly in chartr i think it is unique-- its ensemble of stained glass. it gives an atmosphere. it gives really what people of the time want it to be. it is a church. it is a church in which people pray, so the stained glass is to give a light which isn't nature or life, which is another light. anne prache is an eminent french medievalist who has devoted much of her professional life

to the study of the cathedral of chartres and its stained-glass windows. the moment you get inside this church, the light changes, so you are really in another world, in a sacred world. it must have been a very great enterprise to decorate such a church. it is supposed to cover about 7 acres of windows, which is something terrific when you think of the means the people had at the time. the church is dedicated to the virgin, and you find her everywhere. she is the center of all the decoration of the church.

if you look at the central window on the west facade, which is the largest window ever made in the 12th centur- 11 meters, something like 30 feet high-- you have a great composition, a kind of coration just as you could see on mals or on tapestries or on grt mosas.

yo justshe is enthronede that between anls, so she is really the queen of heaven. for the stained-glass makers, they had no large pieces of glass. they had only small pieces because they blew the glass. they could not produce it as it is produced today, so they could produce only little bits of glass. each time they wanted to change the color, they had to change the piece of glass, and to put all the pieces of glass together, they had to have lead going all around. it's like a mosaic. if you start studying these windows, you can learn a lot about the life of the middle ages. we have the furriers, we have even the sculptors, and probably, it's one of the best representations

of the 13th century. it's really a great documentation for us, so i think the stained glass of chartres is really telling about the way people lived, the way they thought, the way they prayed, all their ideas and beliefs. the cathedrals of the gothic age, like chartres, were indeed, as abbot suger had said, "new works suffused by new light." in their combination of soaring stonework, scpture, and painted glass, they created an art to set beside and even surpass the works of classical antiquity. theirsas a living art which had taken centuries to come to fruition, and it still has the power to astonish us by the sheer quantity and quality

of the great churches, the vast areas they covered, the huge spaces they enveloped, and their ethere beauty. their art originated slowly and painfully, but those who came after them, the artists whom we now call those of the early renaissance, would truly be standing on the shoulders of giants. captioning performed by the national captioning institute, inc. captions copyright 1989 educational broadcasting corporation

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