105. The story of S. Martin (by Clement, the glass painter of Chartres, whose name is recorded in a similar thirteenth-century window in Rouen Cathedral?). Given by the Shoemakers.
106, 107. White eighteenth-century glass.
108. Fourteenth-century grisailles. The Annunciation. Two coats of arms.
109. Signs of the Zodiac and Months of the year. The life of the Virgin. Rose, Christ crucified. Given by Thibaut VI., Count of Chartres, for Thomas, Count of Perche, killed in the Battle of Lincoln, 1217.
110. Notre-dame de la Belle Verrière (_see_ p. 161). Above, the Virgin (whose mouth has been skilfully restored), enthroned and crowned, with Christ between her knees, surrounded by angels bearing candlesticks and censers. Below, the Marriage at Cana, and the Temptation of our Saviour in the Wilderness, on the Temple and the Mountain.
111. Scenes from the lives of S. Antony and S. Paul, the first hermit. Given by the Basketmakers.
‘Monument unique, et qu’il faudrait comparer aux gigantesques constructions de l’Egypte, aux monstrueuses pagodes de l’Inde pour lui trouver des analogues.’--DIDRON.
‘Notre-Dame de Chartres! It is a world to explore, as if one explored the entire Middle Ages.’--PATER.
The Cathedral of Chartres is gifted to a peculiar degree with the quality of impressiveness. This quality it owes to the living unity, the animated harmony of its members, and also to the sensation of space, not emptiness, to the impression of massiveness which is yet not heavy, suggested by the whole, whether viewed from near or afar, and equally by the parts, such as the west front or the nave.
‘Dependent,’ says Pater, ‘on its structural completeness, or its wealth of well-preserved ornament, or its unity in variety, perhaps on some undefinable operation of genius, beyond, but concurrently with, all these, the Church of Chartres has still the gift of a unique power of impressing. In comparison, the other famous Churches of France, at Amiens for instance, at Reims or Beauvais, may seem but formal, and to a large extent reproducible, effects of mere architectural rule on a gigantic scale.’
The main body of the Cathedral was completed by 1210, for it is written in the Latin version (1210) of the _Poem of Miracles_ that one day there came a shining light which dimmed the candles that were lit, and a noise as of thunder that drowned the voices of the many faithful praying in the church, and that a belief sprang up that the Virgin herself had appeared to honour with her presence the Cathedral built to her praise.[74]