Who Goes there? Communication Through Textiles and Dress in Chartres.

Our lecturer Janet Snyder, Ph.D, will examine how between the 1130s and the 1170s, narrative scenes in painted stained glass windows and over life size high-relief stone images of men and women dressed as courtiers revolutionized great church decoration in northern France. When the west façade of the Cathedral of Chartres was constructed, the clothes and fabrics depicted were very specific. The represented clothing of column-figures and of personages in stories depicted in the painted stained glass scenes clearly disclosed important information.

This talk will outline the language of textiles and dress that would have been legible to twelfth-century northern Europeans who could recognize the prestige and social standing of the represented individuals, and what the represented bodies and clothing may reveal to twenty-first century visitors about the society that produced them. It will address recognizable characteristics of textiles employed in painting and sculpture; the significance of represented ensembles of clothing and the appropriation of depicted textiles; some possible motivations of the patrons sponsoring portal programs with column-figures; and the use of a fine limestone, liais de Paris, for sculpture and its transportation from Parisian quarries.

Images were used to influence current political reality, at once reshaping and expressing what was to be remembered. Arranged as if for a ceremony of reception, the sculptural program articulated the peers in relation to their king as his magnates; they appear, not as rivals for royal power, but each in their proper place.

Host or Publisher American Friends of Chartres