Sainte-Chapelle

The Sainte-Chapelle is a jewel box of light standing in the courtyard of the old royal palace on the Île de la Cité, now surrounded by the Palais de Justice. King Louis IX built it to house the relics of Christ's Passion, among them the Crown of Thorns, which he had bought for 135,000 livres from the Latin emperor of Constantinople. Work began after 1238 and the chapel was consecrated on 26 April 1248. It is regarded as one of the highest achievements of Rayonnant Gothic, the phase in which builders reduced stone to a slender skeleton and filled the space between with glass.

The chapel has two storeys. The lower chapel, dedicated to the Virgin and used by the palace household, is low and dark, only 6.6 m high, its vaults painted with the golden fleur-de-lys of Louis IX and the castles of his mother, Blanche of Castile. Narrow stairs then lead up into the upper chapel, reserved for the king and his guests, and the change is overwhelming. The walls seem to be made entirely of stained glass: fifteen great windows, most of them put in place between 1242 and 1248, with some 670 square metres of glass. The builder hid the iron chains that brace the walls behind the glazing bars, and clustered each support from slender colonnettes so that the stone almost disappears.

The windows tell the Bible from Genesis through the Passion, with a strong emphasis on the kings and queens of the Old Testament, a clear message about royal authority; the last window brings the story up to Louis's own time and the coming of the relics. The glass is mostly deep blue and red and changes with the hour and the weather. At the west end is a later rose window of the late fifteenth century, nine metres across, in the flamelike Flamboyant style, with 89 panels of the Apocalypse. Damaged in the Revolution, the chapel was carefully restored in the nineteenth century by Félix Duban, Jean-Baptiste Lassus and Émile Boeswillwald, with the young Viollet-le-Duc; the cedar spire dates from 1852.

Getting there

The chapel is in the centre of Paris on the Île de la Cité, next to the Conciergerie, the other surviving part of the medieval palace, with which it is run as a monument. Cité station on Métro Line 4 is the nearest. The nearest airport is Paris-Orly (ORY), about 14 km away.