Of the French cultural treasures run by the Centre des Monuments Nationaux (CMN), Sainte-Chapelle, on the Île de la Cité in Paris, is the third most visited after the Arc de Triomphe and Mont Saint-Michel in Normandy. An annual 1.2 million individuals, of whom 80% hail from exterior of France, come to marvel at this diminutive chapel’s stained-glass splendour, in keeping with Le Monde.
From January, the 35% of these guests who’re from exterior the European Union will likely be charged €22, in comparison with the EU ticket which varies, relying on the day, between €13 and €19.
When the worth hike was introduced in December, the president of the CMN, Marie Lavandier, instructed Le Monde newspaper that it remained “modest”. Referring to the upper costs already charged in excessive vacationer season, she mentioned that individuals had been simply as happy with their visits and no complaints concerning the costs had been registered. That led her to conclude that worth hikes would solely be an issue if what individuals had been coming to see was ultimately lacklustre—and nobody may say that about Sainte-Chapelle.
For almost 800 years, artwork historians, theologians and vacationers alike have famous the resplendence with which Sainte-Chapelle overwhelms its guests. In 1323, the French thinker Jean de Jandun likened getting into it to being “rapt to heaven”.
“One rightly imagines,” he wrote in his Treatise on the Praises of Paris, “having entered one of the crucial lovely properties in paradise.”
What makes it so chic are the higher chapel’s 15 stained-glass home windows—“a nationwide treasure,” says Sylvain Michel, the chief architect and urbanist at CNM. Michel is presently overseeing an intensive, long-haul restoration venture on the chapel’s home windows and the stonework that helps and frames them. Due for completion in 2030, the marketing campaign will price a complete of €21.5m, Michel says.
Hovering weightlessness
This month the group embarks on the Jeremiah and Tobias bay, which sits between the apse and the southern façade, in addition to the Judith and Job bay, on the southern aspect of the nave. This follows the profitable reinstallation, in December, of the Ezekiel bay within the apse.
These home windows stand 13 metres tall across the apse and an much more spectacular 15 metres alongside each side of the nave. Collectively they depend 1,113 narrative panels, separated by bolstered stone pillars so slim that the good scenes they provide seem to drift in mid-air, lending the whole room a way of hovering weightlessness. Analysis on the distinctive Thirteenth-century structural innovation at work reveals the interior iron rods utilized in these pillars had been sourced from as distant as Belgium.
Over the previous 20 years, 5 of the seven apse home windows, the northern façade and the western portal rose have been restored, together with stonework and sculpted parts. As a result of two-thirds of those home windows are originals courting again to the Thirteenth century, the imaginative and prescient for the chapel’s restoration has lengthy been about greater than merely fixing them.
For the reason that Seventies, Michel says, conservators, first on the division for regional cultural affairs and, from 2007 onwards, on the CMN, have progressively eliminated the historic home windows to check and work on them in atelier circumstances, and put in clear-glass replicas within the authentic casings.
As soon as restored, the originals are then positioned a number of centimetres additional inside. “This ensures that the constructing is sealed off from the weather and the historic home windows are protected,” Michel says. As conservation protocols go, this has repeatedly confirmed an astute transfer. When hailstones the scale of ping-pong balls carpeted Paris in a thick layer of ice on 3 Could 2025, Michel says that the restored western rose, which bore the brunt of the storm, was unscathed. Fortunately, no hail hit the Ezekiel bay on which work was solely simply starting on the time.
Very similar to neighbouring Notre-Dame, Sainte-Chapelle was the topic of a “grande restoration” within the Nineteenth century. Between 1837 and 1863, a number of architects—Félix Duban, Jean-Baptiste Lassus, Émile Boeswillwald and his son Paul Louis Boeswillwald—undertook ground-breaking conservation work. When archaeologists examined the rose above the western portal and the home windows of the northern façade within the 2010s, they discovered that, by way of the stained glass, these Nineteenth-century interventions had been impressively light-handed. Of the 87 figurative panels in query, solely 9 had been recreated in full—all of the others had been the originals.
A prototype spire for Notre-Dame
It’s whereas heading up work on Sainte-Chapelle in 1841 that Lassus met Eugène Viollet-le-Duc. Two years later, they utilized collectively to take cost of the restoration of Notre-Dame. The spire Lassus et al rebuilt for Sainte-Chapelle would go on to be a prototype for Viollet-le-Duc’s fabled design for Notre-Dame.
Each the cathedral and the chapel served political, nation-building functions from the outset. However they did so in very alternative ways. When Louis IX returned to Paris in 1239 with 22 relics of the Ardour—Christ’s Crown of Thorns alone had price him over half of the French crown’s annual earnings—he selected to first present them to the general public in Notre-Dame. He then spent inordinate sums to construct the Sainte-Chapelle as a quasi-private reliquary to carry them.
Restoration work in progress © Benjamin Gavaudo/Centre des Monuments Nationaux
Historians and pundits sofa French president Emmanuel Macron’s insistence on rebuilding Notre-Dame as shortly as he did in modern political phrases. The president of a divided nation was restoring the individuals’s cathedral to the individuals, thereby hoping to unite them.
In contrast, Sainte-Chapelle’s plodding 50-year restoration programme speaks to altogether extra historical energy performs. It has not been used as a spot of worship because the late 18th century, and for lengthy durations in the course of the intervening centuries it was closed to the general public altogether. Preserving it alive, subsequently, is about preserving historical past.
The chapel, as Michel places it, was “wished by the king”. Whereas this was nicely earlier than the time of Louis XIV, the assertion of divine energy—the deification of the monarchy—by which the Solar King would later function is rooted in its stained-glass magnificence. “The whole thing of the nation’s historical past is distilled on this one monument,” Michel says.
