La Cathédrale Reading Order

What is the symbolism of Chartres Cathedral in Huysmans?

For Huysmans in La Cathédrale (1898), Chartres Cathedral is the supreme embodiment of the Catholic aesthetic imagination — the place where architecture, sculpture, stained glass, and iconographic symbolism combine to produce a total work of spiritual art that surpasses anything that modern art can achieve. Huysmans's analysis of Chartres draws on the tradition of medieval symbolism (the interpretation of all natural things as signs of spiritual realities), which he finds fully embodied in the cathedral's iconographic program: the stained glass windows with their symbolic use of color (white for purity, red for charity, blue for contemplation, etc.); the sculptural programs on the portals; the structural symbolism of the Gothic vault as an image of the heavenly Jerusalem; and the Marian symbolism that pervades the cathedral and makes it a monument to the Virgin above all. Huysmans also uses Chartres to argue against modern art: the medieval craftsmen who built the cathedral worked within a tradition, for a community, in the service of a spiritual vision — they did not work for themselves or for aesthetic effect — and the result is a form of beauty that modern individualist aestheticism, for all its refinement, cannot approach. This argument — that the highest art is made in the service of a shared spiritual tradition rather than individual genius — is the conclusion that the entire spiritual journey from À Rebours through La Cathédrale has been approaching.