Beauvais Cathedral (Part One).

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Beauvais Cathedral from the South-East.

Photo: July 2005.

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/aengineer/40624675/in/set-892135/

Author:James Mitchell

Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.0

(Wikimedia Commons)

The Cathedral of Saint Peter of Beauvais (French: Cathédrale Saint-Pierre de Beauvais) is an incomplete Roman Catholic Cathedral located in Beauvais, Northern France. It is the seat of the Bishop of Beauvais, Noyon and Senlis. It is, in some respects, the most daring achievement of Gothic architecture and consists only of a Transept (16th-Century) and Choir, with Apse and seven polygonal Apsidal Chapels (13th-Century), which are reached by an Ambulatory.

The small Romanesque Church of the 10th-Century, known as the Basse Œuvre, much restored, still occupies the site destined for the Nave.

History

Work was begun in 1225, under Count-Bishop Miles de Nanteuil, immediately after the third in a series of fires in the old wooden-roofed Basilica, which had reconsecrated its Altar only three years before the fire; the Choir was completed in 1272, in two campaigns, with an interval (1232–38) owing to a funding crisis provoked by a struggle with Louis IX. The two campaigns are distinguishable by a slight shift in the axis of the work and by what Stephen Murray characterises as "changes in stylistic handwriting." 

Under Bishop Guillaume de Grez, an extra 4.9 m was added to the height, to make it the highest-vaulted Cathedral in Europe. The vaulting, in the interior of the Choir, reaches 48 m in height, far surpassing the concurrently-constructed Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Amiens, with its 42 m (138 ft) Nave.

The work was interrupted in 1284 by the collapse of some of the vaulting of the recently-completed Choir. This collapse is often seen as a disaster that produced a failure of nerve among the French masons working in Gothic style; modern historians have reservations about this deterministic view. Stephen Murray notes that the collapse also "ushers in the age of smaller structures associated with demographic decline, the Hundred Years War, and of the 13th-Century."

English: Cathedral of Saint Peter of Beauvais, France.

Français : Cathédrale Saint-Pierre de Beauvais, Oise, Picardie, France.

Photo: September 2008.

Source: Own work.

Author: Tango7174

(Wikimedia Commons)

However, large-scale Gothic design continued, and the Choir was rebuilt at the same height, albeit with more Columns in the Chevet and Choir, converting the vaulting from quadripartite vaulting to sexpartite vaulting. The Transept was built from 1500 to 1548. In 1573, the fall of a too-ambitious 153-m (502 feet) Central Tower stopped work again. The Tower would have made the Church the second-highest-structure in the world at the time (after St. Olaf's Church, Tallinn). Afterwards, little structural addition was made.

The Choir has always been wholeheartedly admired: Eugène Viollet-le-Duc called the Beauvais Choir "the Parthenon of French Gothic."

Beauvais Cathedral, France.

This building is classé au titre des Monuments Historiques. 

It is indexed in the Base Mérimée, a database of architectural heritage maintained by the French Ministry of Culture, under the reference PA00114502.

Photo: September 2011.

Source: Own work.

Author: PMRMaeyaert

(Wikimedia Commons)

Its façades, especially that on the South, exhibit all the richness of the Late-Gothic style. The carved wooden doors of both the North and South Portals are masterpieces, respectively, of Gothic and Renaissance workmanship. The Church possesses an elaborate astronomical clock in Neo-Gothic taste (1866) and tapestries of the 15th- and 17th-Centuries, but its chief artistic treasures are stained-glass windows of the 13th-, 14th-, and 16th-Centuries, the most beautiful of them from the hand of Renaissance artist, Engrand Le Prince, a native of Beauvais. To him, also, is due some of the stained-glass in St-Etienne, the second Church of the town, and an interesting example of the transition stage between the Gothic and the Renaissance styles.

During the Middle Ages, on 14 January, the Feast of Asses was annually celebrated in Beauvais Cathedral, in commemoration of the Flight into Egypt.


PART TWO FOLLOWS.