Sources and Meaning of the Marian Hemicycle Windows at Évreux: Mosaics, Sculpture, and Royal Patronage in Fifteenth-Century France

Summary

Valois Patronage and the Lady Chapel at Évreux

At the Cathedral of Notre Dame, Évreux, the stained glass gracing the Lady Chapel represents the culmination of a century of Valois artistic patronage manifested at the ancient See of the Norman Eure. Erected and glazed with funds provided by King Louis XI (1423–83), the chapel and its decoration remain in the twenty-first century a unique religious and political ensemble of fifteenth-c. French art. What becomes notable is that the glazing campaign presents king, dynasty, Church, and piety in a visual expression of contemporary religious mentality within the emerging national monarchy of later medieval France (fig. 1). During the biennium of 1467–69, four ateliers of glaziers worked at Évreux under the direction of Jean Balue, the royal bishop, who had been appointed by the king through Gallican privilege, par droit régal. Stained-glass artists glazed the nine Gothic bays of the Lady Chapel in order to commemorate the Coronation of Louis XI held on Assumption Day, 15 August 1461, at Rheims. The event was symbolized in a dazzling fifteenth-c. scene of coronation, portraying king, peers, and heraldry within the fleur-de-lis tympana of the four sanctuary bays of the Chapel. Beneath this brilliant apparatus stand thirty-two devotional images representing the Public Life of Christ: King Louis XI had become Christ's earthly image in the Sacre, which concluded with the great acclamation of Laudes regiae.