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Stories of faith put Sainte Chapelle's visitors in state of grace
Sunday, August 06, 2000 By Linda Underhill
It is impossible to count all of the angels at the Sainte Chapelle. They perch on the tops of steeples, unfurl their wings over pulpits and sound the trumpets of the apocalypse in the rose window, stars falling from heaven around them. But there must be even more angels unseen, protecting this radiant jewel of Gothic architecture from fire and the fury of revolution for over 700 years. Or perhaps it is watched over by St. Louis himself, the king of France who built the chapel in Paris in 1248.
I had always heard that the Sainte Chapelle was the inspiration for the Heinz Chapel in Pittsburgh, so when I arrived in Paris it was the first church I went to see. As an undergraduate at Pitt, I used to go to the Heinz Chapel for my own private stress management workshops during exam week. As an alumna, I was lucky to be permitted, through a rather lengthy application process, to be married in the chapel. It was always nothing less than magical to me.
It makes sense that the Sainte Chapelle inspired our own Heinz Chapel, because it too is a place of magic.
Like the chapel that came to Pittsburgh 700 years later and a world away, the Sainte Chapelle is an intimately serene space. Although no services are held there now, unlike at Heinz Chapel where people of different faiths still come to worship, there can be no doubt from the expressions on the faces of tourists from all over the world that they worship, each in their own way. Some worship with cameras, flashbulbs and guidebooks. But others sit quietly, gazing raptly at the light. For when the sun is shining through the 15 windows of blue and red and yellow stained glass, one cannot help but be in a state of grace. And as the sun moves slowly across the sky or clouds pass in front of it, the windows keep changing. The halo of a saint or the wings of an angel suddenly burn gold where there was only yellow a moment ago. The walls of the building disappear; there is only light.
The 1,134 scenes depicted in the stained glass at the Sainte Chapelle are sometimes referred to as a "Bible of the poor," for windows like these told sacred stories in pictures, which could be "read" by those without the education to decipher Latin texts in the Middle Ages. Yet it would take a more educated and practiced eye than mine, even with the help of the cards provided in a number of modern languages, to tell one panel from another. It is rather the entirety of the 50-foot high curtains of light that open a gate to heaven.
I like the Heinz Chapel's windows because they chronicle not just the story of Christianity, but no less than humankind's search for truth and beauty, and because they represent both sexes equally. The Sainte Chapelle's windows come from a more patriarchal tradition, but in their 6,458 square feet of colored light, they also illuminate a fascinating diversity of life. They depict the travails and the terrors that always precede the glory in medieval art, with their scenes of saints and sinners, angels and demons, horses, grapevines, shooting stars and fleurs de lis.
Perhaps it is also the miracle of salvation that lends the Sainte Chapelle some of its luster. Fire destroyed everything around it twice. Mobs threatened to tear it down stone by stone when France overthrew the monarchy and everything that symbolized it -- like the Sainte Chapelle, built by a king, with his castle all around it.
Today the Sainte Chapelle is surrounded by the modern Palace of Justice. But if you walk through the halls of justice on your way to an evening concert at the chapel, you can still enter it much as the king himself would have done, from a porch on the upper level, through an enormous red door, much like the one at Heinz Chapel. At night, when the windows no longer blaze with their stories of faith, the walls take solid form around you, and you can study the statues of the apostles adorning each of the 12 pillars. They are not the originals. Those have survived only in fragments displayed at the Cluny Museum of Medieval Art on the left bank. (There you can also see -- conveniently at eye level -- a few of the Sainte Chapelle's original windows, for a third of these have also been replaced with faithful restorations over the years.) Much of the colorful decoration of the paneling and the vaults of both upper and lower chapels here is also relatively modern. So originally, the Sainte Chapelle would have looked even more like our own Heinz Chapel with its beautifully austere limestone vaults and richly carved woodwork.
Both chapels have the same narrow, winding staircases and the same stones worn smooth by many feet, the same delicate spires, the same radiant walls of glass. Like the Sainte Chapelle in Paris, the Heinz Chapel rises near a river, its steeple piercing the sky over a busy city. I am one of the lucky ones. I have seen them both.
The Sainte Chapelle in Paris, at 4 Boulevard du Palais on the Ile de la Cite, is open daily April through September from 9:30 a.m.-6:30 p.m., and October through March from 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Admission is 32 francs, about $5. The price is reduced for ages 12-25, and children are admitted free. Admission is free to all if you are lucky enough to be in Paris on the first Sunday of the month. The stained glass windows are best viewed when the sun is shining.
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