Notre-Dame de Chartres
— — a blue that has held since the twelfth century.
Not only on a wall.
“Two unmatched spires above a small grey-stone city on the wheat plain of the Beauce, an hour by train from Paris. Inside, 167 medieval stained-glass windows turn the nave the deep cobalt that bears the cathedral's name. On the floor of the nave a thirteenth-century labyrinth runs in concentric circles, walked slowly by pilgrims when the chairs are cleared on Fridays in Lent.
Notre-Dame de Chartres, 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.
The place, in three passes.
The Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Chartres rises above the small city of Chartres, the préfecture of Eure-et-Loir, about 90 km southwest of Paris on the flat wheat plain of the Beauce. The present building, in High Gothic, was raised between 1194 and 1220 on the surviving Romanesque crypt of an earlier church burnt in the 1194 fire. The two spires were never matched: the south, finished about 1160, is Romanesque and reaches 105 metres; the north, the Clocher Neuf, was crowned in flamboyant Gothic by Jean de Beauce around 1513 and rises to 113 metres. The whole was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1979.
Chartres holds the largest surviving collection of medieval stained glass in the world: 167 windows, most of them set between 1205 and 1240, covering roughly 2,600 square metres. The cobalt of the twelfth-century windows in the west front, including the famous Notre-Dame de la Belle Verrière, is the colour known as bleu de Chartres, a deep blue whose exact composition has never been fully reproduced. The light moves across the nave through the day: the south aisle carries the morning, the apse the noon hour, the west rose the late afternoon as the sun drops over the Beauce.
Chartres is reached in about one hour by TER train from Paris-Montparnasse; the cathedral stands a ten-minute walk uphill from the station. Entry to the nave is free. The crypt is shown by guided tour only, and the north tower can be climbed for a small fee in the warmer months. The labyrinth on the floor of the nave, about 12.9 metres across and laid around 1205, is walkable on Fridays in Lent when the chairs are cleared, and on a small number of feast days through the year. The cathedral keeps the Sancta Camisa, a relic held to be the tunic of the Virgin, since the gift of Charles the Bald in 876.