Universe of Stone: A Biography of Chartres Cathedral by Philip Ball

The Barnes & Noble Review

Grand, sometimes extravagant claims have been made for Chartres Cathedral over the past nine centuries. In 1214-16, some ten years before work on the building was even finished, the royal poet and chronicler William the Breton was already trumpeting its glories, claiming that "none can be found in the whole world that would equal its structure, its size and décor." More modern visitors have been almost as lavish in their praise. Its soaring aisles and spectacular glass windows have been hailed as the ultimate expression of the 12th-century European Renaissance, as the embodiment of the High Gothic style, and as the physical incarnation of the teachings of the celebrated School of Chartres. Complex and often tortuous theories have been posited to explain its supposed geometric precision, and its apparent adherence to the punishing strictures of the Golden Mean. Writers claim to have detected the lost secrets of the Druids and the Knights Templar sealed within its walls; some have even found the mythical codes of the Freemasons surreptitiously chiseled, Dan Brown–like, into its stonework.

Why has Chartres exerted such an extraordinary pull on the imagination? And why has it attracted such a welter of ambitious and sometimes madcap theories?

Partly, Philip Ball explains in this clear and level-headed study, because of the sheer beauty of the building (the French sculptor Rodin proclaimed himself "completely dazzled" by it). Partly, too, because of the building’s seemingly miraculous state of preservation -- it is, according to Bell, a "nearly pristine document."

The chief reason for Chartres’s iconic status, though, undoubtedly has to do with the revolutionary nature of its overall design. Its thin, almost diaphanous walls, large, pointed windows, vast, rib-vaulted ceiling, and extravagant flying buttresses, when taken together, offer such a departure from the thick-stoned, narrow-windowed, round-arched and inward-looking Romanesque model of previous centuries that they seem to betoken nothing less than a total revolution in both style and sensibility. "There are few buildings in the world," Ball states, "that exude such a sense of meaning, intention, signification -- that tell so clearly and so forcefully that these stones were put in place according to a philosophy of awesome proportions, appropriate to the lithic immensity of the church itself." Explaining what that awesome philosophy was, and what those meanings, intentions and significations are, is the chief purpose of this highly accomplished work.

A consultant editor for the British science journal Nature and the winner of the 2006 Aventis Prize for Science Books, Philip Ball has already shown, in The Devil’s Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science, that he is comfortable negotiating the space between science, history, and cultural theory. In Universe of Stone, he aims to embed Chartres Cathedral (and the sudden efflorescence of Gothic architecture that accompanied it) firmly within the medieval culture of the time, arguing that such a building could only have been built on the back of the new-found philosophical confidence of the 12th-century Renaissance -- a confidence that flowed directly from the rediscovery of the classical texts of Euclid, Aristotle, Archimedes, and Ptolemy. Where earlier generations had sought merely to accept God’s mysterious purpose, 12th-century Western thinkers could suddenly envisage the universe as a logical system of eternal order. Chartres, its geometry, its clarity, its light and the "vertical ecstasy" of its design are, Ball argues, breathtaking physical incarnations of this newfound belief.

Ball is not the first writer to expound this theory, and he is happy to admit the debt he owes to the work of the German art historian Erwin Panofsky. He is particularly quick to defer to Panofsky when it comes to recognizing the importance of the famous Chartres School, whose discipline of rationalist, neo-Platonic, proto-scientific inquiry he sees encoded in every corner of the cathedral’s structure.

He does, though, express some doubts about the reductiveness of Panofsky’s vision, pointing out, for instance, that many of the builders who worked on the cathedral would have been at best semi-literate. How, then, to explain the direct transfer of knowledge from school to builders that is implicit in Panofsky’s critique? (It’s one of Chartres’s many mysteries that no individual "architect" has ever been credited with the design; indeed, as Ball points out, the concept of "architect" is not one that medieval minds would necessarily have recognized.)

Such a determinedly practical and grounded point of view serves Bell well when it comes to demolishing some of the more free-floating theories that cluster around Chartres. The Brown-like Masonic codes are swiftly dealt with, and Ball dispels the idea that they were ciphers hiding long-forgotten mystical knowledge; rather, they were either stonecutters’ signatures to help their employers tally payment or a type of "medieval barcode" added at the quarry to identify each stone’s intended destination. Similarly, the notion that the proportions of the cathedral conform to some "sacred geometry" encapsulated in the Golden Mean seems less attractive when you consider that "there are in fact rather few numbers between 1 and 2 for which a close correspondence with some ‘meaningful’ ratio cannot be found."

Ball is just as good at puncturing romantic medieval notions about Gothic cathedrals’ construction (there were frequent strikes, and tensions, too, between clerics and townspeople) and at highlighting the cynical way in which miracles and relics were used to attract well-heeled religious visitors. He shows us how medieval builders would have built an arch, and reveals the superior strength of pointed windows (one of several innovations imported from the Arab world) over rounded ones.

In all of this, Ball is an eminently sensible and grounded authority. Gothic architecture, he admits in his introduction, remains a battlefield of competing theories, one that has "spurred some bloody conflicts." "There are few points of view that have not suffered the withering dismissals of eminent and formidable critics," he warns. This engrossing book is an enviably clear-sighted guide to both the critical complexities and the physical glories that await the curious reader. --Andrew Holgate

Andrew Holgate is Deputy Literary Editor for The Sunday Times (London).

From the Publisher

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, during this time, did Europeans begin to build churches in a new style, at such immense height and with such glorious play of light, in the soaring manner we now call Gothic?

Universe of Stone shows that the Gothic cathedrals encode a far-reaching shift in the way medieval thinkers perceived their relationship with their world. For the first time, they began to believe in an orderly, rational world that could be investigated and understood. This change marked the beginning of Western science and also the start of a long and, indeed, unfinished struggle to reconcile faith and reason.

By embedding the cathedral in the culture of the twelfth century—its schools of philosophy and science, its trades and technologies, its politics and religious debates—Philip Ball makes sense of the visual and emotional power of Chartres. Beautifully illustrated and written, filled with astonishing insight, Universe of Stone argues that Chartres is a sublime expression of the originality and vitality of a true "first renaissance," one that occurred long before the birth of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, or Francis Bacon.

Publishers Weekly

Anyone who has been thrilled by the great Gothic cathedrals will revel in this study of both the spiritual and architectural qualities of those medieval wonders. For Ball (Critical Mass), a consultant for Nature magazine, the Chartres cathedral is the apotheosis of the Gothic style, and in his hands it becomes a kind of time capsule bearing the message of the High Middle Ages, when reason was emerging into a world previously governed by faith and fear. Ball is a sure-footed guide through the thickets of medieval philosophical debate about reason and religion, while also presenting the strong personalities of the time, such as the ascetic Bernard of Clairveaux and his nemesis, the fractious Peter Abelard. Then Ball focuses on the physical aspects of the cathedral: the role of the geometry in Gothic design, the fine points of rib vaults and pointed arches, and the role structural necessity played in creating the Gothic aesthetic. But for Ball the central question is the possible link between the the realms of the spiritual and physical: did the "hard-shell-studded limestone" Chartres cathedral embody the worldview of the new scholasticism taught at Chartres's prestigious school, which rejected the notion that God's ways are unknowable in favor of viewing nature as governed by orderly, intelligible laws? Ball's passion, sharp critical mind and fluid prose open a window onto the remote, alien world we call the Middle Ages. 16 pages of color illus., 100 b&w illus. (July 1)

Kirkus Reviews

The intellectual revolution in medieval France, as embodied in the architecture of a great cathedral. Nature consulting editor Ball (The Devil's Doctor: Paracelcus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science, 2006, etc.) leaves no stone unturned as he explores the shifting social and political atmosphere of 12th-century France during the rise of one of history's greatest testaments to God and Gothic architecture: the cathedral at Chartres. Conceived in homage to the Virgin Mary, the church was constructed during a period of rapid progress in thinking and execution. Great Gothic structures were sprouting all over France, and along with them, advances in technology and technique that greatly benefited the cathedral's mysterious builders. Neo-Platonic physics, experiments with light and form, changing ideas about reason and logic and a radical shift to metaphysical inquiry all played a role at Chartres. Europe, emerging from centuries of strife and barbarism, now devoted itself to promoting the opposite. Scholars suggest that by the end of the 13th century, Chartres had become a major center of learning as well as the most accomplished example of Gothic architecture in France. Two of its defining characteristics, the illusion of weightlessness and the infusion of light, were enabled by mathematics. Flying buttresses and vaulted arches allowed for the immense height and infrastructure supporting luminous panes of colored glass. The great rose window, a masterpiece of form and function, fuses in classic high-medieval style the tangible and spiritual, the mundane and transcendental, the public and personal. The fact that this magnificent house of worship was also used as a town hall andmarketplace encapsulates the delicate transition taking place in public intellectual life, as theology made room for philosophy and science, while the cathedral's soaring nave and windows remind us that divine worship has always been at the root of this spectacular structure. A revelatory look at a seminal period in art history. Agent: Russell Galen/Scovil Chichak Galen Literary Agency

Product Details

• ISBN: 0061154296
  
• ISBN-13: 9780061154294
• Format: Hardcover, 336pp
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Pub. Date: July 2008
• Sales Rank: 14,857

• Table of Contents
• Read an Excerpt

Table of Contents

Read an Excerpt

In 1204 some of the finest churches in Christendom were ransacked and the precious icons and relics were divided up among the plunderers. They snatched reliquaries from altars, forced open chests filled with holy treasures, stripped gold and silver metalwork from church fixtures. In their haste they spilled the sacramental wine over the marble floor, where it might mingle with the blood of any priest who stood in their way.

But these marauders were not infidels. They were Christian knights of the West, the flower of Europe's chivalry, bearing the sign of the cross that identified them as Crusaders. For this expedition, the Fourth Crusade, went not to the Holy Land and Jerusalem but to Constantinople, the capital of the eastern Holy Roman Empire, where the schismatic Greek rulers refused to recognize the authority of Pope Innocent III.

This was not the only crusade underway at that time. There was another afoot in Europe itself, and it was concerned not with sacking churches but with building them. Just as the knights of France, England and Germany were despoiling the gilded splendour of the Hagia Sophia, builders in their homelands were inventing a new architectural style that would rival the glories of Byzantium. Over some three hundred years, the Europeans engaged on a 'cathedrals crusade', building churches on a scale never again equalled either in size or in quantity. In France alone, eighty cathedrals, five hundred large churches and several thousand small churches were constructed between 1050 and 1350. At the end of this period there was, on average, a church forevery two hundred inhabitants of France and England. And these were not squat and gloomy edifices in the style we now know as Romanesque, but towering monuments of stone and glass, filled with light and seeming to ascend weightlessly towards heaven. They were the Gothic cathedrals. Now considered the finest works of medieval art, these churches are even more than that. They represent a shift in the way the western world thought about God, the universe and humankind's place within it.

Our contemporary view of that transformation is obscured by a lot of rubble. Much of it was deposited in the nineteenth century, whose historians, artists and architects, in the course of rescuing the Gothic style from ill repute, laid down a mythology about what it represents. When we think of a cathedral today, it is a Gothic building that comes to mind, not the heavy Romanesque precursors. And for many of us this vision is embodied in a specific edifice, standing in what has been rightly called 'splendid isolation' on the Île-de-la-Cité: Notre-Dame de Paris, immortalized by Victor Hugo in his eponymous novel of 1831. Hugo's book wasn't simply a work of fictionit was a meditation on architecture in general, and on the architecture of the Gothic age in particular, and it defined a vision of these things in the same way that Dickens described a version of London that has now become inseparable from that city's stones. For Hugo, the Gothic cathedral was a social construction, a temple made for and by the people rather than decreed by an ecclesiastical elite. That image chimed very much with the tenor of post-Revolutionary France, and it gave rise to a myth of the cathedral that is still pervasive today. 'The greatest works of architecture', said Hugo,

are not so much individual as social creations; they are better seen as the giving birth of peoples in labour than as the gushing stream of genius. Such works should be regarded as the deposit left by a nation, as the accumulations of the centuries, as the residue of successive evaporations of human society, briefly, as a kind of geological formation.

It's not just Hugo's exquisite prose that makes the idea seductive. We can feel a little less overwhelmed by the stupendous scale and structure of the cathedrals of Notre-Dame de Paris, Strasbourg and Chartres, if we can indeed regard these buildings as something geological, created by the immensity of time and the energy of countless generations, rather than as objects that were conceived in the minds of a handful of men and constructed by labourers stone by stone. And we need not feel oppressed by their colossal size if, like Hugo, we believe that in the Gothic era 'the book of architecture no longer belonged to the priesthood, to religion or to Rome, but to the imagination, to poetry and to the people'.

Hugo was not the first to voice these views, but no one had previously found words so compelling, and he made them so familiar that a whole generation of French intellectuals, historians and artists fell under their spell. For Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, the great nineteenthcentury restorer of French Gothic buildings, Hugo's reading of the Gothic cathedrals meant that they became national monuments and 'a symbol of French unity'. If this belief helped Viollet-le-Duc return some of France's great churches to a state approaching their former glory, we have reason to be grateful for it. But that does not make it any less a facet of the romantic myth of the cathedral.

It is hardly surprising that historians of 150 years ago needed to have some story to weave around the Gothic cathedrals. These monuments seem to sit in defiance of the traditional narrative we have spun about western history, in which the Middle Ages separate the wonders of Greece and Rome from the genius of the Renaissance with an era of muddle-headed buffoonery. We are even now apt to forget that it was the Renaissance historians themselves who constructed this framework. Today, however, there is no shortage of alternative stories to replace that created by Hugo and his contemporariesand each tells us something about our own times, regardless of how much light they shed on the High Middle Ages. And so the cathedrals become cryptograms of ancient, sacred knowledge; or they are symbols of church oppression; or they are testaments to the skills of the medieval engineers. Many of these stories have some truth in them; none gives us the full picture. That, after all, is what all great works of art are like: they are never unlocked by a secret code, but they may be enriched by repeated viewing, first from this angle, then from that. Knowing 'how' and 'why' they were created does not allow us to understand them fully, but it may inspire us to love them more ardently.