Saint Louis and the Relics of the Passion
In 1239 Louis IX received the Crown of Thorns from the Latin emperor of Constantinople, Baldwin II, who had pledged the relic against a loan. The king met it at Sens, processed it to Paris, and walked barefoot for the final stretch into the city. He soon added a fragment of the True Cross, a holy nail, and other relics traditionally venerated as connected with the Passion. To house them, he built Sainte-Chapelle inside the royal palace on the Île de la Cité. Construction proceeded with unusual speed, and the chapel was consecrated on 26 April 1248, weeks before Louis departed on the Seventh Crusade. The relics were enshrined in a great silver chasse above the apse and were shown by the king on the major feasts of the Passion. Sainte-Chapelle remained the home of the relics for more than five centuries. During the French Revolution the chapel was deconsecrated, the reliquaries melted down, and the relics dispersed. The Crown of Thorns and the surviving fragments passed into the care of the Archbishop of Paris and were transferred to Notre-Dame, where they are kept today. In the 19th century the chapel itself was restored under Lassus and Viollet-le-Duc, who reset much of the stained glass and rebuilt the spire.
The plan is a two-level palace chapel. The lower chapel, set at the level of the palace courtyard, is dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary; it was used by the household, the servants of the palace, and the public. The upper chapel, reached by stair, is the relic chamber: a single Rayonnant Gothic room ringed by fifteen tall lancet windows that rise from waist height to the vault. Slender stone shafts and metal tie-rods carry the weight that would normally fall on walls, so that the glass can become the surface of the room. The west rose window, set above the entrance to the upper chapel, was added at the end of the 15th century in the Flamboyant style; its scenes are taken from the Apocalypse.
What makes Sainte-Chapelle a Catholic place and not only a Gothic landmark is the way it reads Scripture and royal devotion together. The fifteen lancet windows narrate the Bible from Genesis and Exodus through the prophets, kings, and life of Christ, ending with the story of Saint Helena's finding of the True Cross. The relics of the Passion stood at the centre of that program: the chapel was meant to show pilgrims that the same God who had spoken in the law and the prophets had also suffered and died on the Cross, and that the relics of that Passion were now entrusted to the kingdom of France. Today the chapel is no longer used for the Mass and no longer holds the relics, but the program is still legible to a Catholic visitor who knows what it was built for.
