Since the central apside chapel is the most important, we can begin with the windows there, bearing in mind that the subject of the central window was the Life of Christ, dictated by rule or custom.  On Christ’s left hand is the window of Saint Peter; next him is Saint Paul.  All are much restored; thirty-three of the medallions are wholly new.  Opposite Saint Peter, at Christ’s right hand, is the window of Saint Simon and Saint Jude; and next is the grisaille with the arms of Castile.  If these windows were ordered between 1205 and 1210, Blanche, who was born in 1187, and married in 1200, would have been a young princess of twenty or twenty-five when she gave this window in grisaille to regulate and harmonize and soften the lighting of the Virgin’s boudoir.  The central chapel must be taken to be the most serious, the most studied, and the oldest of the chapels in the church, above the crypt.  The windows here should rank in importance next to the lancets of the west front which are only about sixty years earlier.  They show fully that difference.

Here one must see for one’s self.  Few artists know much about it, and still fewer care for an art which has been quite dead these four hundred years.  The ruins of Nippur would hardly be more intelligible to the ordinary architect of English tradition than these twelfth-century efforts of the builders of Chartres.  Even the learning of Viollet-le-Duc was at fault in dealing with a building so personal as this, the history of which is almost wholly lost.  This central chapel must have been meant to give tone to the apse, and it shows with the colour-decoration of a queen’s salon, a subject-decoration too serious for the amusement of heretics.  One sees at a glance that the subject-decoration was inspired by church-custom, while colour was an experiment and the decorators of this enormous window space were at liberty as colourists to please the Countess of Chartres and the Princess Blanche and the Duchess of Brittany, without much regarding the opinions of the late Bernard of Clairvaux or even Augustine of Hippo, since the great ladies of the Court knew better than the Saints what would suit the Virgin.

The subject of the central window was prescribed by tradition.  Christ is the Church, and in this church he and his Mother are one; therefore the life of Christ is the subject of the central window, but the treatment is the Virgin’s, as the colours show, and as the absence of every influence but hers, including the Crucifixion, proves officially.  Saint Peter and Saint Paul are in their proper place as the two great ministers of the throne who represent the two great parties in western religion, the Jewish and the Gentile.  Opposite them, balancing by their family influence the weight of delegated power, are two of Mary’s nephews, Simon and Jude; but this subject branches off again into matters so personal to Mary that Simon and Jude require closer acquaintance.  One must study a new guidebook—­the “Golden