Bourges Cathedral
Cathédrale Saint-Étienne de Bourges
- UNESCO World Heritage
Interesting facts
- The timber roof frame, built between 1240 and 1255, consumed the wood of some nine hundred oak trees.
- Bourges has no transept at all, unusual for a High Gothic cathedral, and its stepped triangular cross-section was later copied at Toledo and Le Mans.
- The nave vault rises about 37 metres, roughly four metres higher than Notre-Dame de Paris, and the arcade piers alone are 21 metres tall.
- Sixty-four 13th-century reliefs on the west front draw on Talmudic commentaries, possibly devised with help from a member of the city's Jewish community.
- Eleanor of Aquitaine was crowned Queen of France in 1145 in the earlier cathedral that stood on this site.
- In 1562 a Protestant commander who seized the city planned to blow up the cathedral, but was persuaded to keep it as a Protestant church instead.
- During the Revolution ten of the cathedral's twelve bells were melted down for cannon, and the emptied south tower became known as 'the Deaf One'.
- The room atop the south tower's great buttress served as the builders' office, with plans of bays and a rose window scratched into its stone floor.
- In the 18th century the painter François Boucher used that same upper room of the south tower as a studio for a time.
- The finished north tower is crowned by a bronze pelican and holds the great bell Gros Guillaume, cast in 1841–42 and weighing about six tonnes.
Why it is worth it
Bourges Cathedral, dedicated to Saint Stephen, crowns the old town of Bourges in the Berry region of central France, and it is one of the purest statements of High Gothic ever built. Work began in 1195 under Archbishop Henri de Sully, on the line of the Gallo-Roman ramparts, and the main structure went up in about four decades, at the same time as Chartres. UNESCO listed it in 1992.
What makes Bourges different is its plan: five portals on the west front open onto a central vessel and four side aisles, and the interior runs as one vast, unified space to the apse. The aisles rise in steps: the outer ones are low, the inner pair much taller, and the central nave soars above both, so the building reads as a pyramid of light from inside and a cascade of flying buttresses from outside. The effect is of enormous width and unity, and much of the 13th-century stained glass survives, above all in the ambulatory chapels, where windows from around 1215 tell the stories of Joseph, the Apocalypse, the Last Judgement and the parables of Christ.
The towers of the west front tell a less orderly story. The north tower collapsed on the last day of 1506; it was rebuilt over the following years with money raised by granting dispensations to eat butter in Lent, and has been called the Butter Tower ever since. The south tower, never finished, is propped by a massive buttress that once held the chapter's small prison. In 1424 the cathedral acquired an astronomical clock, which still works after restoration in the 1990s.
Below the choir, a lower church built into the slope of the old ramparts is not really underground at all. It holds the tomb effigy of Duke Jean de Berry, the great patron of illuminated manuscripts, a Renaissance Entombment group and fragments of the 13th-century rood screen. The north tower can be climbed by 396 steps, with views over the city, the marshes and the plains of Berry.
Getting there
The cathedral is in the centre of Bourges. The nearest airports are Tours Val de Loire (TUF), about 132 km away, and Clermont-Ferrand Auvergne (CFE), about 156 km away; Paris-Orly (ORY), about 183 km away, has the widest choice of flights. The crypt and tower entrance is on Place Étienne Dolet beside the cathedral.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Bourges Cathedral or the Cathedral of Saint Stephen of Bourges is a Roman Catholic church located in Bourges, France. The cathedral is dedicated to Saint Stephen and is the seat of the Archbishop of Bourges. Built atop an earlier Romanesque church from 1195 until 1230, it is largely in the High Gothic or Classic Gothic architectural style and was constructed at about the same time as Chartres Cathedral. The cathedral is particularly known for the great size and unity of its interior, the sculptural decoration of its portals, and the large collection of 13th century stained glass windows. Owing to its quintessential Gothic architecture, the cathedral was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1992.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0
47.08222, 2.39917per Wikidata