Ch. 10 - The Court of the Queen of Heaven

All artists love the sanctuary of the Christian Church, and all
tourists love the rest. The reason becomes clear as one leaves the
choir, and goes back to the broad, open hall of the nave. The choir
was made not for the pilgrim but for the deity, and is as old as
Adam, or perhaps older; at all events old enough to have existed in
complete artistic and theological form, with the whole mystery of
the Trinity, the Mother and Child, and even the Cross, thousands of
years before Christ was born; but the Christian Church not only took
the sanctuary in hand, and gave it a new form, more beautiful and
much more refined than the Romans or Greeks or Egyptians had ever
imagined, but it also added the idea of the nave and transepts, and
developed it into imperial splendour. The pilgrim-tourist feels at
home in the nave because it was built for him; the artist loves the
sanctuary because he built it for God.

Chartres was intended to hold ten thousand people easily, or fifteen
thousand when crowded, and the decoration of this great space,
though not a wholly new problem, had to be treated in a new way.
Sancta Sofia was built by the Emperor Justinian, with all the
resources of the Empire, in a single violent effort, in six years,
and was decorated throughout with mosaics on a general scheme, with
the unity that Empire and Church could give, when they acted
together. The Norman Kings of Sicily, the richest princes of the
twelfth century, were able to carry out a complete work of the most
costly kind, in a single sustained effort from beginning to end,
according to a given plan. Chartres was a local shrine, in an
agricultural province, not even a part of the royal domain, and its
cathedral was the work of society, without much more tie than the
Virgin gave it. Socially Chartres, as far as its stone-work goes,
seems to have been mostly rural; its decoration, in the porches and
transepts, is royal and feudal; in the nave and choir it is chiefly
bourgeois. The want of unity is much less surprising than the unity,
but it is still evident, especially in the glass. The mosaics of
Monreale begin and end; they are a series; their connection is
artistic and theological at once; they have unity. The windows of
Chartres have no sequence, and their charm is in variety, in
individuality, and sometimes even in downright hostility to each
other, reflecting the picturesque society that gave them. They have,
too, the charm that the world has made no attempt to popularize them
for its modern uses, so that, except for the useful little guide-
book of the Abbe Clerval, one can see no clue to the legendary
chaos; one has it to one's self, without much fear of being trampled
upon by critics or Jew dealers in works of art; any Chartres