Colin Ward, Chartres: The Making of a Miracle, The Folio Society, London, 1986.
“Once upon a time,” architect Colin Ward writes, “the world was full of miracles.” Chartres was of all places one of the most miraculous.” Ward observes that “unraveling the enormously complex geometry of a building like Chartres is the labour of a lifetime” and tells us that sculptor Auguste Rodin described Chartres as the “Acropolis of France.” According to Ward, “the Middle Ages never doubted that numbers are endowed with occult power.”
The “construction of the physical world” was, to the Platonists and Neo-Platonists, “based on eternal numbers.” Pythagoras and Euclid are both carved in statuettes above the south doorway of the Royal Portal. Over the central door, a seated Jesus may be holding a half-rough ashlar stone. In Freemasonry, the ashlar represents the foundation of the Temple as well as the gradual process of human perfection.
Ward notes that it is the stained glass of Chartres that make the deepest impression on visitors. He credits the intensity of the colors to the “thickness, texture, and quality of the original glass which holds the sunlight, as it were, within it, so that the whole becomes a mosaic of colored fire.” Even during the Middle Ages, according to Ward, the stained glass of Chartres had already become legendary. There were stories of “secret ingredients”, including pulverized gold and precious stones being incorporated into the glass.