Welcome back to the Age of Cathedrals. In our last time together, we spoke of Louis the ninth, or Saint Louis purchase of relics, especially the crown of thorns, and of the ways in which relics work to abolish time, to make the Old and New Testament past alive and vivid to present day 13th century France, and thus to associate King Louis with the kings of the Bible. Relics may abolish time, but they only do so for an instant. And the greater ambition where the relic effect is concerned was the transformation of time into space, which is just what the space of the cathedral is designed to do. The Paris of the High Middle Ages having become a new Holy Land. Louis realized that his private royal chapel of San Nicholas was not grand enough for the relics he had amassed. And in May 1243, Pope Innocent the fourth granted privileges for a new chapel to be built. In January 1246, Louis founded a College of Canons, whose role it was to keep the relics of the Sainte-Chapelle. The Sainte-Chapelle was built, and it was consecrated on April 26, 1248, two months before Louis's departure for the Middle East and the seventh crusade. The building cost 40,000 pounds, and the reliquary cost a 100,000 pounds. Louis the ninth, was a great builder, not only of churches, but of military forts, like the one at Aigues-Mortes, from which he left for the Crusade and a fort at Jaffa, in present day Israel. He built the Royal Chateau de Tours. He built the Hospice of the 80 for the blind in Paris. The Hôtel Dieu at Pontoise and at Compiègne. He built a student residence near the Palais des Thermes in the fifth arrondissement Paris. He built the Abbeys of Maubuisson and Royaumont. He built the Priory of Nogent. And again in Paris, he built a Chartreuse for the Chartreuse Monks at Vauvert and a Beguinage for the Beguine nuns. The Sainte-Chapelle was not a public cathedral intended for the masses of faithful, thus its modest size. This is a church that speculates on the elegance of scale and not on the immensity of size. It is not a pilgrimage church to serve the needs of both a permanent congregation and passing pilgrims, thus its lack of ambulatory aisles and radiating chapels. It is not one of the great Gothic structures with wide flying buttresses, but a slim High Church built within the confines of the space of a city, appearing from the outside even to be somewhat cramped. The question of the lateral thrust of the high vault was in fact dealt with at the Sainte-Chapelle by a system of internal iron braces passing through the mullions of the windows and peers, and coinciding in part with the framework of the windows. The slimness of the structure which must have made it appear even taller than it was, contributed to the illusion of height. Which was evident even in the 15th century in this image of the Sainte-chapelle contained in the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry. The view is from afar, what is now on the outskirts of Paris not far from Saint-Denis which the Sainte-Chapelle was intended to displace as a Palatine chapel devoted to the cult of Saint Louis and the site of dynastic ceremonies. The Sainte-Chapelle is a private palace chapel, designed to serve the needs of the king and his household. It is a double structure, consisting of the light upper house of glass and a downstairs chapel for Louis's household retinue which was not inconsiderable. Louis had 50 to 60 servants at all times, five stable squires, two smiths, three stable boys, cooks in the kitchen, a sauce cook and someone to blow the bellows, a pantler who provided bread and two others in charge of table linen, a carter, ushers, clerks, the chancellery wax-warmer, pages, runners and many others, all of whom prayed downstairs. The upper chapel is a jewel of a structure, in which the principle of light and lightness of the walls is carried to an extreme. The masonry serving more as a frame for the windows than a structural support. The Sainte-Chapelle was designed as a giant reliquary box to house the relics that Louis had amassed, and they were formidable as we can see from this drawing from the 17th century. Where we see the Crown of Thorns, a piece of wood of the lance, a piece of the blade of the lance of Longinus, a purple mantel, a reed, the sponge, handcuffs, the Cross of Victory, the Blood of Christ, some blood that emanated from an image of Christ struck by a nonbeliever, Christ's childhood clothes, the cloth that Christ used to wash the feet of the Apostles, some milk of the Virgin, some hair of the Virgin, her veil, the top of John the Baptist's head, the holy shroud, a holy face, a piece of the stone of the sepulcher. We see as well Moses' staff, not to mention, Saint Louis's own head. Louis was canonized in 1297. His head was brought to the Sainte-Chapelle in 1298, as we see in this manuscript illumination from a 15th century missal of the actual ceremony of translation or transfer. In 1306, Louis's head minus the lower jaw was placed in a goal reliquary along with one rib, which went to Notre-Dame, thus consolidating saintliness and monarchy. So, if we follow the logic of relics and reliquaries contained in this 15th century manuscript of The Chronicles of Saint Denis, Louis, here seen holding a model of the Sainte-Chapelle, would also be holding the reliquary which held his own head. He was another Saint-Denis. Churches are always to some extent reliquaries. Since the possession of relics was as we saw with Saint-Denis and especially with Chateau, the substance of their glory, honor, riches and prestige. And the reliquary is almost always designed as a miniature church. You will remember the reliquary of Saint Louis. Here are a couple of examples: The first of an Eastern Reliquary meant to reproduce the shape of the Eastern domed churches. Here we see a reliquary from Italy, designed to hold the head of Saint Galgano. And here, a reliquary from the second half of the 13th century. Once in the treasury of the Sainte-Chapelle, meant to hold the remains of three beheaded Saints: Maximus, Lucius and Julius. This reliquary can be found today in the museum of the Middle Ages or the Cluny Museum. And this is the reliquary, the creation of Viollet-le-Duc in the 19th century which currently houses the Crown of Thorns. Note the detail which makes the analogy between the Crown of Thorns, the humiliated kingship of Christ and the crown of France with its fleur-de-lis, which Louis holds in his hands. The crown of thorns thus becomes a royal insignia, the galleria Cristi, the helmet of Christ which crowns the realm. We thus see what you might think of as a great microcosmic embrocation, a housing of smaller things within similar larger ones. A reliquary box shaped like a church inside of the church which was a giant reliquary, which in the case of the Sainte-Chapelle had yet another layer in the reliquary platform which stands at the far eastern end of the upper chapel in the curve of the apse. This is an enlarged ciborium or baldachin, a canopy or covering supported by columns freestanding in the sanctuary. It is carried on eight pillars and vaulted in three rectangular bays. Again, like a little chapel within a chapel, the whole of which is joined to the chapel walls on either side by elegant openwork arches. A wooden spiral staircase on either side leads to the platform above. The principle here of smaller forms within larger ones, within larger ones still, the reliquary box within the reliquary stage within the larger architectural structure is an embodiment of what you might think of as one of the fundamental mental structures of the Age of Cathedrals. The microcosmic model of the universe. Man is the microcosm of nature which is the microcosm of the wider cosmos. It also works as a structural principle to abolish time or to transform time into space. If smaller things which have the same form as larger things can be contained within them in some version of an infinite formal regress then the smaller historical moment of the present might be contained within the larger drama of Christian history, that is the Passion and Louis, by analogy, might participate in the aura of Christ. This is a fundamental principle of Gothic architecture in which smaller forms are contained within larger ones as pinnacles, gables, canopies, pointed arches are diminutives of the whole, and it is one of the ways that Gothic architecture is involved in making the history of France part of sacred history.
