Loading your cart Your cart is empty Items in your cart 0. During the winter season, we try to use as many opportunities as we can to go learn new tours. This week, we had the pleasure of going to Chartres, a city located 56 miles southwest from Paris. It is famous worldwide for its cathedral. The cathedral of Chartres was built for the most part between and Compared to Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, whose construction started in , Chartes is a bit later. However, construction only lasted about 30 years β as opposed to the years it took to finish Notre-Dame Cathedral!
And just like Notre-Dame Cathedral , there was a fire⦠but back in ! And for the same reasons : there were renovations going on in the attic of the cathedral, meaning the space between the vault and the roof. Instead of wooden beams, the architect decided to built a new metal frame covered with copper, built in record time, from to Outside of the fire of , the cathedral of Chartres survived the wars between the Catholics and Protestants in the s, as well as the French Revolution.
Like any church built in France in the s, the architecture of the cathedral of Chartres relies on the principles of Gothic-style architecture. A network of rib vaults on the inside, which direct the weight of the vault to the corners where columns could support it, as well as flying buttresses on the outside of the building, support the walls. This allowed the walls to be higher and thinner. More importantly, it was now possible to insert larger stained-glass windows, filling the building with light.
The stained-glass window of the Chartres Cathedral has a surface area of around 27, square feet or 2, square meters , which is a record for a religious building in France. That makes it the only cathedral in the world to have preserved this much original stained glass. Because of the changes in the techniques used to make the stained-glass. In the s, glassmakers made blue stained-glass by using a mix of cobalt blue, marine plant ash, copper, iron and antimony an opacifier.
However, with the new Gothic-style architecture, stained-glass windows are now larger, making this technique too expensive. Instead, wood ash replaced marine plant ash, and manganese replaced cobalt ; this new composition made the blue color darker than before. It is visible in the paving. In total, its path is around 85 meters or feet long.
