the age of the gothic cathedrals. the churches builthen one has come to stand for the rest-- 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 of a great opeuare. 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 were founded and the old ones thrived as local and lo-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 eraordinary peoe 12th-century frce the man who coeived 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 s 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 139 feet.

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 d historal 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 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 tmingand 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

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