Amiens Cathedral Nave
— a forest of stone, lit from above.
Not only on a wall.
“The tallest finished Gothic cathedral in France. The nave climbs forty-two metres above the floor, and the light comes down from the clerestory in long pale columns. Robert de Luzarches drew the plan in 1220; the nave was largely up in sixteen years, fast for the thirteenth century. The labyrinth set into the floor still traces the path pilgrims walked on their knees. People walk in, look up, and stop talking.
Amiens Cathedral Nave, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
Amiens Cathedral sits in the centre of Amiens, the prefecture of the Somme department in the Hauts-de-France region of northern France, about 120 kilometres north of Paris. Construction began in 1220 under Bishop Évrard de Fouilloy, on the foundations of an earlier cathedral that had burned in 1218. The interior runs roughly 145 metres in length, and the vaults of the nave reach 42.3 metres, the tallest of any completed Gothic cathedral in France. UNESCO inscribed the building on the World Heritage list in 1981, calling it one of the most coherent realisations of the High Gothic style. The Somme runs past the city to the north, and the Hortillonnages, a floating market garden first cultivated in the medieval period, lie just east of the cathedral close.
The cathedral is built almost entirely of limestone, much of it quarried locally in Picardy and brought up the Somme by barge. Robert de Luzarches set the unified plan around 1220; he was followed by Thomas de Cormont and his son Renaud, who carried the work up into the clerestory and the vaults. The nave's piers are unusually slender for their height, which is part of why the interior reads as so weightless; the master masons had pushed the rib-vault and flying-buttress system close to its structural limit. The west front, finished about 1240, carries hundreds of carved figures and was once polychromed. The original pigments have been studied in detail and are projected back onto the stone during the Chroma light show each summer.
The interior is famously bright by Gothic standards. The clerestory windows, the upper tier just below the vault, are tall and slender; the walls of the upper storeys were thinned almost to a screen of glass, supported on the outside by a double row of flying buttresses. That structural choice lets daylight reach the nave floor with surprising directness, sliding slowly across the white limestone as the sun moves. Most of the medieval glass was lost over the centuries, and the windows in place today are predominantly nineteenth- and twentieth-century replacements, with a few medieval fragments preserved in the apse. The building was designed for that downward, travelling light; the architecture only finishes the sentence the sun starts.