MedievalArt.org.uk - Photographs by Stuart Whatling

Le Mans Cathedral - the Medieval Stained Glass

Background

This area of the website contains detailed photographs of (most of) the mid-13th century stained glass in the Cathedral of St Julien in Le Mans. So far, I've photographed all of the triforium windows (all except for the right hand lancet of bay 100) and about two thirds of the clerestory windows. (N.B. the terms 'triforium' and 'clerestory' are slightly misleading at Le Mans because it has a Bourges-style cross section - strictly speaking they're upper and lower clerestories but for the sake of convenience I'll refer to the latter as the triforium.)

Navigation

As with the Bourges pages, at the top level there are two index options - the annotated floor-plan and a summary list of windows with small preview images. The former is most useful if you are interested in a particular window whilst the latter gives a better idea of how each window relates to its neighbours.

Either of the two top-level index pages will allow the user to access details of the individual windows; each window has it's own index page, containing a photograph of the whole window, a line-drawing of the armature design with each panel numbered, and a numbered list of captions corresponding to each of those panels. Clicking either on the caption or on the relevant panel within either the photograph or line-drawing will switch to a detailed view of just that panel. All of the panel-detail pages is fixed to 800-pixels in height - clicking the photo will normally launch a new window containing a slightly larger jpeg file (1200 pixels high) which can easily be resized or downloaded if required.