I would be remiss if I didn't post a picture of Ste-Chappelle's famous stained glass. Standing in the Upper Chapel, where this photo was taken, I wondered why I wasn't impressed and awed by the brilliance, history, and quantity of the glass art surrounding me. After all, my guidebook and many others predicted I would be. I wished instead to be back at Sainte Chappelle at Le Château de Vincennes.
It was a partly cloudy day yesterday (unlike a completely gray today), maybe the room would've been more brilliant had it been perfectly sunny outside, but I don't think so. Although the dark blue ceiling was quite high above my head (20 or 30 feet?), I was never unaware of its presence. The brochure I picked up at the chapel's entrance states, "The ceiling seems to float above the stained-glass windows." Indeed. Its presence made me feel claustrophobic. The mostly dark red and blue stained glass was very stingy with the light. The room felt dark and small, although it was actually very large.
At the chapel in Vincennes the ceiling is neutral stone, and the glass color is much lighter. The chapel's interior glowed warmly and hospitably. I caught a glimmer of what a quark's life must be like inside of a photon.
I liked the stone work on the exterior though (above) and the decoration of the interior columns of the Sainte Chapelle of Cité:
The Sainte-Chapelle is on the Seine island of Cité and was built in a short 6 years (1242-1248) under Louis IX. In contrast, the construction of the chapel at Vincennes started in 1379 towards the latter part of the Middle Ages under Charles V, the Wise, and wasn't completed until Henri II's reign in 1552. Blame the English. I always do.
Wait a second... am I critiquing historic architecture?!?! I must be grumpy. I blame the awful weather. And the English.
I'm willing to bet that if you live in an American suburb, you know of at least one house in your town that is painted an awful color. Pink, smurf blue, purple, lime green, turquoise... you know the house I'm talking about. My childhood neighborhood had two such houses. There was a horrid almost-fluorescent avocado green house 5 houses down and on the same side of the street as mine and a pink house just around the block. Something about the center building in the below photo brought me back home:
I'm looking forward to Saturday: Tori Amos and Shakespeare. What a lovely combination.
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