La Sainte-Chapelle (Holy Chapel)

Restored by Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc

1841-67

4 Boulevard du Palais, Paris

Other Views

Exterior, Sainte-Chapelle

[See commentary below]

Photograph and text Jacqueline Banerjee 2008.

[You may use this image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the photographer and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]

This church, originally built to house important religious relics, inspired and influenced Sir George Gilbert Scott and other major Victorian architects. Viollet-le-Duc, under whose direction it was restored in the mid-Victorian period, was as influential in France as Pugin and Ruskin were in England, and his work on the church attracted a good deal of attention from outside France. Of particular interest is the French architect's view that the Gothic style was "defined by its structural innovations," which he saw as coming from "the perfect equipoise of its skeletal components." This, he believed, "was produced by the precisely executed interdependence of all parts." The ribs or vaults were of prime importance to him, along with the "piers and buttresses supported by the foundations"; on the other hand, the "walls and webbing were infilling, to keep bad weather out and warmth or coolness in," and not essential to the skeleton itself. According to Violett-le-Duc, perfect "equilibration" was what made the building dynamic and gave it the feel of "a living organism" (Reynolds 39-40).

These experiments had a great deal of impact on his contemporaries too, including Scott, who (for example) used iron instead of stone pillars in the new King's College Chapel, London. Scott was also inspired by the general outline of the Sainte-Chapelle, as can be seen from the apsidal structure of St John's College Chapel, Cambridge.

References

Reynolds, Donald Martin. Nineteenth-Century Architecture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

---

Victorian
Web

Visual
Arts

Archi-
tecture

The
Gothic

Next

Last modified 13 August 2008