The western porch is composed of three large bays, of which the middle one was, as always in Christian churches, known as the Porte Royale. This name was given it because in the tympanum Christ was always represented triumphant, the King of Kings. Nor, as you gaze at the wealth of statuary and ornamentation upon which, as upon the architecture, the artists have lavished all their resources and all their skill in their endeavour to illustrate the Story of the Triumph of Our Lord, will you grudge this entrance its other names of Porta Speciosa and Porta Triumphalis. The sculptured figures are of every size. Once the whole porch was a blaze of colour. Of this colour and gold you may still see a few traces left.
Begun about 1110, under S. Ives, this typical example of early Gothic work was not completed till nearly 1150, and among those who wrought the images which people it were, some think, the artists who had worked at the Porch of S. Sermin at Toulouse, and knew that of S. Trophimus at Arles.
They would thus connect it with the art of the South, and, through that, with Roman art. It appears to me rather to be directly under the influence and inspiration of Byzantine art. There is to one’s eye something Eastern in this work as surely as there is something Eastern also to one’s ear in the rhythms of a Gregorian chant. However that may be, nowhere, at any rate, has the story of Christ’s Triumph been told so fully and with such a wealth of detail in stone as at Chartres. We are shown here not only His triumph but the events which led up to it. The whole Gospel is revealed to the gaze of the Christian who is about to enter the house of the Lord. The story is taken from the apocryphal as well as the canonical Gospels. It begins with the scenes represented by the thirty-eight miniature groups of the capitals, the figures of which, in spite of their small size and occasional lack of proportion, are full of life and interest. The first series starts northwards from the central doorway, and here the chisel literally reproduces the legend of S. Joachim and S. Anne and the Birth of the Virgin: then follows the story of Joseph and Mary and the Nativity of Our Lord, up to the episode of the Massacre of the Innocents. This brings us to the Clocher Neuf. We must now return to the right hand portion of the central doorway, and take up the story again, moving in the direction of the Clocher Vieux. The events recorded, up to the last appearance of Jesus to His disciples on the Mount of Olives, it is hardly necessary to enumerate.