The World of Chartres

The World of Chartres PDF Author: Jean Favier
Publisher: Abrams
ISBN:
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
Details one of the greatest Gothic buildings in the world, the Cathedral of Notre Dame at Chartres, France, exploring its history, its structure, and its glass artistry.

The World of Chartres

The World of Chartres PDF Author: Jean Favier
Publisher: Abrams
ISBN:
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
Details one of the greatest Gothic buildings in the world, the Cathedral of Notre Dame at Chartres, France, exploring its history, its structure, and its glass artistry.

Saving the Light at Chartres

Saving the Light at Chartres PDF Author: Victor A. Pollak
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 081176897X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 441

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Book Description
Built around 1200 and now a UNESCO World Heritage Site that draws more than a million visitors and pilgrims each year, Chartres Cathedral is one of the jewels of Western Civilization. How Chartres Cathedral and its priceless stained glass (today the largest such collection in one location) survived World War II’s widespread destruction of cultural monuments is one of the great stories of recent history. Saving the Light at Chartres begins half a decade before World War II, when a young French architect developed a plan to save the cathedral’s precious stained glass. As war engulfed Europe in the fall of 1939, master glass artisans dismantled the hundreds of windows, and soldiers, tradesmen, and laborers with local volunteers crated thousands of glass panels, stowed them in the crypt, and months later—just before German invaders reached Chartres—hauled them across the country to an underground quarry. This effort to save the stained glass is but a prologue. By August 1944, the U.S. Army had broken out of Normandy and was racing across France toward Paris and the Seine. Chartres became a key battleground. Allied bombing blew out the cathedral’s temporary window coverings, and when the Americans—assisted by French Resistance fighters—entered the city in the face of unexpectedly heavy defiance and snipers in the cathedral, many soldiers believed German artillery spotters were occupying the cathedral’s spires. When Colonel Welborn Griffith Jr.—a senior operations officer of Twentieth Corps in Patton’s Third Army—arrived, some were pressing to countermand the army’s standing order to avoid the cathedral and threatened to destroy it to neutralize the German spotters. Griffith was skeptical. He inspected the cathedral himself, climbed its towers, but found no Germans, so he rang the bell, waved an American flag, and ordered that the cathedral be spared, saving it from destruction. Griffith would be killed later that day. Victor Pollak tells both stories—the rescue of the windows and Colonel Griffith’s fateful role—in a compelling narrative. Saving the Light at Chartres honors the government and local teams who saved the windows, the Resistance that performed a vital role in the liberation of Chartres, Welborn Griffith, and the enduring treasure that is Chartres Cathedral.

Universe of Stone

Universe of Stone PDF Author: Philip Ball
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061970077
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
“[A] lively biography of Chartres Cathedral . . . Ball’s account of its construction reveals fascinating details.” —The New Yorker Chartres Cathedral, south of Paris, is revered as one of the most beautiful and profound works of art in the Western canon. But what did it mean to those who constructed it in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries—and why was it built at such immense height and with such glorious play of light, in the soaring manner we now call Gothic? In this work, Aventis Prize winner and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Philip Ball makes sense of the visual and emotional power of Chartres and brilliantly explores how its construction—and the creation of other Gothic cathedrals—represented a profound and dramatic shift in the way medieval thinkers perceived their relationship with their world. Beautifully illustrated, filled with astonishing insight, Universe of Stone embeds the magnificent cathedral in the culture of the twelfth century—its schools of philosophy and science, its trades and technologies, its politics and religious debates—enabling us to view this ancient architectural marvel with fresh eyes. “A terrific book . . . a lucid, thoughtful tour de force.” —The Christian Science Monitor “Engrossing . . . a resplendent account of the mysteries of Chartres Cathedral.” —Sunday Times “There is no better introduction to the subject.” —The Wall Street Journal

Chartres Cathedral

Chartres Cathedral PDF Author: Etienne Houvet
Publisher:
ISBN: 9782909575230
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 94

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Book Description


Chartres Cathedral

Chartres Cathedral PDF Author: Robert Branner
Publisher: W. W. Norton
ISBN: 9780393314380
Category : Architecture, Gothic
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
"An introduction to Chartres Cathedral with an analytical and historical essay, documents and source materials, critical essays, and 125 illustrations"--

Cathedral of the Black Madonna

Cathedral of the Black Madonna PDF Author: Jean Markale
Publisher: Inner Traditions
ISBN: 9781594770203
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Explores the connection between ancient druidic worship of a virgin at Chartres and the veneration of the Black Madonna • Examines the Virgin Mary’s origins in the pagan worship of the Mother Goddess • Identifies Mary with the dominant solar goddess of matriarchal societies The great cathedral of Chartres is renowned the world over as a masterpiece of High Gothic architecture and for its remarkable stained glass, considered alchemical glass, and its mystical labyrinth. But the sacred foundations of this sanctuary go back to a time long before Christianity when this site was a clearing where druids worshiped a Virgo Paritura: a virgin about to give birth. This ancient meeting place, where all the druids in Gaul gathered once a year, now houses the magnificent Chartres cathedral dedicated both to the Virgin Mary, Mother of God, and to one of the most venerated Black Madonnas in Europe: Our Lady of the Pillar. Coincidence? Hardly, says Jean Markale, whose exhaustive examination of the site traces Chartres’ roots back to prehistoric times and the appeal of the Black Madonna back to the ancient widespread worship of Mother Goddesses such as Cybele and Isis. Markale contends that the mother and child depicted by the Black Madonna are descended from the image worshipped by the druids of the Virgin forever giving birth. This image is not merely a representation of maternal love--albeit of a spiritual nature. It is a theological notion of great refinement: the Virgin gives birth ceaselessly to a world, a God, and a humanity in perpetual becoming.

Chartres and the Birth of the Cathedral

Chartres and the Birth of the Cathedral PDF Author: Titus Burckhardt
Publisher: World Wisdom Books
ISBN:
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
This new and revised edition of Titus Burckhardt's masterpiece, Chartres and the Birth of the Cathedral, is a richly colored window onto the lofty intellectual and spiritual climate that conceived the marvel that is Gothic architecture. Featuring a new appendix with three sections, and a new Foreword by John James, a world authority on Chartres, as well as 25 new illustrations, it cannot fail to inspire the reader to become a pilgrim to Chartres.

Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres

Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres PDF Author: Henry Adams
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Le Mont-Saint-Michel (France)
Languages : en
Pages : 452

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Book Description


The Story of Chartres

The Story of Chartres PDF Author: Cecil Headlam
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Chartres (France)
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description


The Master Masons of Chartres

The Master Masons of Chartres PDF Author: John James
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 9780646008059
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
James' analysis of Chartres is likely to be the best and most detailed we shall have.' JOURNAL OF ARCHITECTURAL HISTORIANS The great cathedral of Chartres is the most impressive and exciting building surviving from the middle ages, andis preserved almost intact. Yet we know nothing of the men who created it. John James, in this masterpiece of detection, shows how he came to identify the master masons from the stones themselves. His meticulous `reading' of the cathedral has revealed much about those men: how they solved problems of engineering and design, how they raised two-ton stones forty metres into the air, and how one mason controlled over 300 men in this gigantic workshop. JOHN JAMES is an Australian architect. His first visit to Chartres, in 1969, led to a continuing passion for the early Gothic buildings of northern France, and he has been `reading their stones' ever since.