The Cathedral of Amiens
The Cathedral of Amiens* by Esther Singleton is a detailed art-historical and architectural study of the Notre-Dame Cathedral of Amiens, one of the supreme achievements of French High Gothic architecture, presenting its physical structure, sculptural programs, and historical significance as an integrated whole. Singleton opens by situating Amiens Cathedral within the broader development of Gothic architecture in northern France, tracing the sequence of building campaigns that produced the structure visitors encounter today. She explains that construction began in 1220 under master builder Robert de Luzarches, following the destruction of an earlier Romanesque church by fire, and that the nave was essentially complete by 1236, with the choir finished by 1270 and the towers rising through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. She conveys the deliberate ambition behind the project: the citizens and clergy of Amiens intended to surpass all rival cathedrals in height, and they largely succeeded, the nave vault soaring to approximately 138 feet, making it the tallest complete Gothic nave in France. A substantial portion of the work is devoted to the exterior sculpture, for which Amiens is justly renowned. Singleton examines the three great portals of the west façade in sustained detail. The central portal is dedicated to Christ, its tympanum depicting the Last Judgment, its trumeau bearing the famous figure known as the Beau Dieu — the beautiful, serene Christ in majesty — which she regards as one of the defining achievements of thirteenth-century French sculpture. The left portal is consecrated to the Virgin, and Singleton traces the narrative scenes of the Annunciation, Visitation, Nativity, and Dormition arranged across its registers. The right portal honors Saint Firmin, the first bishop of Amiens and the city's patron martyr, whose legend is told in sculptural episodes of considerable narrative clarity. Singleton attends closely to the quatrefoil reliefs along the base of the façade, which depict the Vices and Virtues, the labors of the months, and the signs of the zodiac, reading these as a vernacular theological and cosmological encyclopedia addressed to lay worshippers. Singleton then conducts the reader through the interior, describing the nave's soaring verticality, the clear articulation of arcade, triforium, and clerestory, and the sense of rational order that distinguishes Amiens from the more exuberant experiments of some contemporary buildings. She discusses the choir screen, the elaborate wooden choir stalls of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries — numbering over a hundred and carved with scenes from the Old and New Testaments as well as from the legend of Saint Firmin — and the Renaissance-era choir enclosure with its gilded and polychromed reliefs. The stalls receive particular admiration as examples of late Gothic craftsmanship that survived the devastations of the Revolution largely intact. The chapels radiating from the choir and nave aisles are treated individually, with attention to their patron saints, funerary monuments, and surviving medieval glass as well as the nineteenth-century restorations overseen by Viollet-le-Duc, whose interventions Singleton notes without excessive criticism, acknowledging the genuine dilapidation the restorer found while recording where original fabric was altered. The treasury and its relics associated with the head of Saint John the Baptist — a relic brought from Constantinople and long the most prized possession of the cathedral — are described as central to the building's medieval identity and pilgrimage significance. Singleton concludes by assessing the cathedral's place in the history of art, arguing that Amiens represents the moment of perfect equilibrium in Gothic architecture — the point at which structural daring, sculptural richness, and spatial clarity achieved a balance that later buildings would push past into excess or complication. She draws comparisons with Chartres, Reims, and Beauvais to establish Amiens's specific character: less mystically colored than Chartres, more architecturally unified than Reims, and structurally stable in ways that the over-ambitious Beauvais choir was not. Throughout, her method combines archival and art-historical information with the responses of a close, sympathetic observer who moves through the building at ground level, reading its surfaces and spaces as expressions of a coherent medieval worldview.
By Esther Singleton · First published 1909 · Genre: Architectural Criticism, Art History, Religious/Theological Commentary