Chartres:Through a Glass Darkly

Fifty-four miles outside Paris, Notre Dame de Chartres stands as the epitome of the medieval church builders' faith and skill. The most awesome of their triumphs are the stained-glass windows that tower like blue jeweled cliffs in the dark nave: 2,500 square meters of glass, 5% of the entire surviving legacy of medieval glassworkers.

Avalanche of Protest. The cathedral's sacramental gloom, however, comes in part from a buildup of dirt, pollutants, fungi and algae on the windows over years of exposure. At the end of 1976, the French government's Department of Historic Monuments finished a three-year restoration program on three of Chartres's most famous 12th century windows, all on the west wall above the main entrance of the cathedral: The Tree of Jesse, The Childhood of Christ and The Passion. The windows were taken down, disassembled piece by piece and sent to a government laboratory outside Paris for testing, then to a Paris atelier for cleaning. The grime was removed with cotton swabs wet with an aqueous solution called E.D.T.A. On went a coat of Viacryl, a synthetic polyurethane resin meant to protect the pocked and flawed surface of the 800-year-old glass. The windows were put back together, re-leaded, and replaced in the wall. And down came an avalanche of protest. The restoration, it was said, had destroyed the optical effect in three of the world's most famous stained-glass windows --and forever.

The first stirrings came from leading French artists--among them, Painters Alfred Manessier and Jean Bazaine, who had in the past drawn much of their visual language from Chartres's windows and had worked in stained glass themselves. The Viacryl coating, they charged, had ruined the transmission of light through the windows, shifted the color balance and, with its plastic gloss, canceled the irregular luminosity of the hand-cast glass. "I know what I see," says Bazaine. "Those windows, they were living. I have been looking at them for the past 50 years. Now they have no heart. Once they had depth and modulation; now they are flat, and the light does not change. Before the light would play on them, but now they look like a bad copy of 19th century vi-traux." Moreover, the critics asserted, the plastic film ruined a centuries-old patina that lay under the dirt. "It transforms the stained glass into sample colored glass," snapped Bazaine. "Clarity is substituted for light." '

Others -- including some art historians, scientists and restorers--agreed. They formed a society named A.D.V.F., for L'Association pour la Defense des Vitraux de France (Association for the Defense of France's Stained-Glass Windows), which now boasts a membership of 360, including 100 artists. Among its supporters is a leading glass expert, J.C. Ferrazzini of the Swiss Institute of Crystallography and Petrography. Physicist Ferrazzini claims that the solvent used on the Chartres windows reduces the content of metal ions on the glass surface, rendering it "about twice as susceptible to renewed corrosion." Moreover, he says, tests in his laboratory suggest that although the Viacryl resin may be impossible to remove with any known solvent, it is not impermeable --molecules of water and sulfur dioxide (a prime pollutant) can penetrate its skin and corrode the glass below. A.D.V.F.'s view is that to use the Viacryl treatment on Chartres's remaining windows, or on those of other endangered cathedrals like Bourges or St.-Denis, would be to court disaster. "It is a question of the life or death of some of the most beautiful stained glass in France!" exclaimed Manessier.

Light Is God. Nonsense, retorted the official restorers: Viacryl was perfectly safe and a solvent named Cital 12-12 would remove it. Besides, the need for repair was urgent. Jean-Marie Bettembourg, 33, head scientist on the glass project, points out that by 1974 the windows were ready to fall from their warped frames in the cathedral wall; the leadwork that held the pattern of glass together was giving way, and the warm colors were going black because of the glass's high content of potassium, which reacts with water to form darkening sulfates. Only the blue glass, low in potassium and high in sodium, had been spared, and so the predominantly blue light of Chartres's windows, traditionally beloved by artist and tourist alike, was a historical fiction. Restoration has tipped the windows more toward red and yellow. "Some like the mystery of the glass," says University of Paris Art Historian Louis Grodecki. "But I believe that we understand nothing, we see nothing." Explains Inspector General of Monuments Jean Taralon: "In the 12th century the windows were bright, because of Neoplatonic philosophy. In me dieval theology, light is God. Chartres was built with only one desire--a lot of light. We want to restore the primary function of the windows."

The opposing faction maintains that other solutions should be tried--perhaps covering each piece of stained glass with an equivalent leaf of very thin clear glass, held in place with waterproof putty to prevent moisture from reaching the surface. One flaw in that plan is that no such putty has yet been invented. Meanwhile, the Ministry of Culture has stopped the use of Viacryl for the time being until other methods--including those proposed by A.D.V.F.--have been tested. But Restorer Bettem-bourg is sticking to his plans. Says he: "In this whole story, scientific problems have been mixed with aesthetic ones. Aesthetics is always subjective, and personal feelings enter in." Adds Grodecki: "Manessier's vision of the dark somber windows is corroded by the restoration. He was inspired by Chartres and now his model has disappeared. Many people are disappointed."

One of the experts, Dr. Eva Frodl-Kraft of Austria, argues that the restoration basically requires a change of viewpoint. Says she: "It is necessary now to renounce a very dear legend about the windows of Chartres, a legend that I have helped to propagate. I have spoken of the incomparable blue rays of Chartres, heavenly blue, in vading all the other colors, the blue with which one identifies the supernatural impression of the west fagade. The restoration has not revealed another blue, but it has revealed for the first time the beauty of the other colors, which were hidden by the thick layers of corrosion."

And so, by one system or another, the restoration--or alteration--or damaging--of France's great cathedral windows will continue.

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