Art and Politics in the Sainte-Chapelle of Paris

IN HIS LETTER TO ARTISTS , Pope John Paul II has reminded us that "Society needs artists . . . who ensure the growth of the person and the development of the community."¹ We know this all too well, for our society is afflicted by cultural ills that our public art does nothing to cure. We need the art of which the Holy Father speaks because to live the virtues in community and to crown them with worship is distasteful to us until we have come to love the good as we should. Art can and should draw us forward in our love of the good by delighting us with the good. Public art does this for the whole society and thus is, properly speaking, political. We can learn about the political role of art by considering the Sainte-Chapelle of Paris, commissioned by St. Louis IX to hold the Crown of Thorns. Far from the work of royal propaganda that recent commentators have deemed it,² the Sainte-Chapelle is the consummate work of Christian political art: by exalting the kingship of Jesus Christ it teaches earthly kings humility and a spirit of service.

The Sainte Chapelle

The visitor to Paris today finds the Sainte-Chapelle in the heart of the city, sharing the Ile-de-la-Cité with the cathedral of Notre-Dame and the nineteenth-century Palais de Justice, in whose ample courtyard the chapel is located. From the outside, the chapel is impressive, rising over forty meters above the pavement, the straight lines of its buttresses leading the eye to a handsome balustrade, a steep roof, and a soaring wooden spire ornamented with gargoyles in the best nineteenth-century style.³ The entry is through the west portal at ground level, into the lower chapel, originally dedicated to the Blessed Virgin and used for daily mass by the royal household. Today, a large souvenir stand dominates the lower level, and visitors walk haphazardly over the tombstones of canons who served the chapel from the time of St. Louis to its secularization during the Revolution. The lower chapel is spacious,⁴ divided into three aisles by two rows of slender columns, and covered by elegant vaults painted blue and red and decorated with fleurs-de-lys. The windows are raised above eye level and curiously wedged into curved triangular lozenges, giving the room the feel of a crypt, and making the visitor desire all the more to ascend the spiral staircase at the rear and gain the celebrated upper chapel.

The first impression of the upper chapel comes from its color: multicolored glass panels surround the room, divided from one another by golden piers rising to deep blue vaults studded with gold stars. The upper chapel has the same dimensions as the lower, but it is undivided and very tall, its vaults rising a full twenty meters above the floor. It is a great hall, composed of four rectangular bays, with a seven-sided apse at the east end, in which stands the reliquary tribune mounted upon a stone arcade of gold pointed arches. Today, it is difficult to view the colors of the chapel well, for the great doors at the west are usually open, flooding the room with daylight, and during visiting hours the sun streams through the windows of the south wall, making them too brilliant to read. The chapel would be seen better under candlelight and toward the end of day, at compline in the summer, or vespers in winter. To see the setting sun shining through the great west rose window, shaped like a flaming orb, would repay a trip across the ocean.

The Patron

Any account of the inspiration and meaning of the Sainte-Chapelle must begin with its patron, St. Louis IX. Born in 1214, only months before his grandfather Philip Augustus's victory at...