What’s in a Rose? Glazing the Rose Windows of Chartres Cathedral

Chartres’s three rose windows offer a cohesive and complementary program of themes consisting of the Last Judgment in the western rose, the Glorification of Christ in the southern rose, and the Typological Life of the Virgin in the northern rose.  The position of these rose windows in the western, southern, and northern arms of the building, respectively, reinforces the cruciform shape of the cathedral and recalls the centrality of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross in Christian devotions.  The window apertures range from 10 to 12 meters in diameter, and hover approximately 22 meters above the pavement of the building. The roses differ in date, from c. 1205 for the western rose, c.1230 for the southern rose, and c. 1235 for the northern rose. But in form and content they are complementary to one another. Chartres is an especially engaging case study because work on the monument continues into the present, with the modern cleaning of its stained glass and interior walls yielding new evidence about the materials used in creating the building and the interior environment in which its rose windows participated. 

The cathedral’s rose windows had to be carefully planned in advance within the courses of masonry that make up the walls, they spanned different campaigns of building, they were made through the collaborative work of masons, glaziers, and metalsmiths, and they participated in the design and proportions of other elements on site, including the cathedral’s buttresses, clerestory rosettes, and pavement labyrinth.  Chartres Cathedral’s rose windows are part of the overall architectural design as well as offering pictorial embellishment and liturgical enhancement; they cannot be treated as mere elements of building design as though they were without pictorial imagery, and they cannot be isolated from their setting as if they were framed paintings on a neutral wall.  Rose windows are both architectural and pictorial elements of a church, carefully crafted to enhance its devotional setting.