Cathedrals are bursting with colour again

A £12 million initiative allows us to experience what these medieval temples should look like

Chartres Cathedral, France

As cathedrals swell with once-a-year congregations for carols and midnight Mass tonight, many on the pews – even regulars – will not fully appreciate the real story of the buildings in which they sit.

To have an opinion on medieval interior decoration you should first recall the English priest Robert Grosseteste. One of his many ideas was an early “big bang” creation theory based on expanding light (“God said, let there be light”), colour, and luminescence. It is for good reason that he is ranked among the fathers of science, and he should be compulsory reading for all who visit Chartres cathedral today.

Take the American architect, Martin Filler, who recently dropped into Chartres to enjoy its sepulchral gloom. He left swiftly, outraged by what he decried as “scandalous”, “a desecration”, akin to “adding arms to the Venus de Milo”. Unknown to him, exciting restoration work had been afoot since 2009. So instead of the familiar vanishing penumbra of soaring oil-and-soot-blackened walls pierced by jewels of stained glass, he found the sanctuary washed in light ochre, and adorned with intricately delineated gold, red, green, and black bosses on the ceiling’s now bone-white ribs. It was all too much for him.

I, on the other hand, can hardly keep still with the excitement. Medieval buildings were carnivals of colour and light. Wonderfully, the French government and the European Union have allocated £12 million to allow us once more to experience what a medieval cathedral offered the first people who entered it. But those like Mr Filler who like their cathedrals served up with a Protestant austerity are outraged. Colour? In a cathedral?

Actually: yes, please. This is a truly visionary initiative.

Our medieval cathedrals are astounding buildings, built by hand with no electricity or combustion engines, yet they huddle in city centres as museums for tourists. They no longer serve at the vibrant heart of the country’s religious life. So why not try something different and educational?

Chartres is engaged in a game-changing makeover. It is not putting in smoothie-bars, bouncy castles or mediocre modern art. Instead, it is honouring Grosseteste with its own big bang, giving us a visceral sense of what the cathedral looked like on the day of its consecration.

The medieval world adored light and colour. It had no bright plastics, cheery clothes or colour printing. But the one place a person could go for a visual punch in the solar plexus was the local cathedral, which was painted, inside and often out: walls, ceilings, statues, and especially the serried ranks of figures on the great west fronts. Once inside, the stories they told in their frescoes and windows were the biblia idiotarum (the books of the unlettered), where the illiterate majority could see stories etched pictorially into the building’s fabric. They were a cross between libraries and cinemas.

The team working on Chartres is not a group of eccentric hobbyists or a bunch of minority academics who have hit the funding jackpot. The French (post-revolution, bien sûr) take their unparalleled architectural heritage seriously. Twenty years ago, they found the 15th-century paint, and beneath that the original 13th‑century paint, proving that the entire cathedral had been brightly coloured, a temple of light, filled with dancing tunnels of rainbows from the colossal stained-glass windows. Its builders had wanted to bring a slice of heaven down to a squalid earth, and there was no more inspiring way to do it than with vivid colour. Let’s not forget that blue, made up of ground lapis lazuli, only came from Afghanistan, and was more valuable than gold.

They had classical precedents to lean on. We may be used to the Parthenon in Athens as a sand-coloured monument. But to the Greeks of the 5th century BC, it was a riot of colour, vividly painted with pigments that have faded only with time. Mr Filler should bear that in mind and head up to Paris and join the queues for the Saint-Chapelle. Do the unending lines of visitors there want to see another grey gothic church? No. They are waiting to experience the explosion of midnight blue and gold built by Saint Louis to house his crusade treasures. It is a soul-stealing jewel box of 13th-century Limoges enamel in stone and glass.

For Mr Filler, the crepuscular gloom of a gothic building is a matter of aesthetics. But to a medieval person, vision was more complex. What was seen by the eye entered the body and (on the basis of Aristotelian and Galenic theory) was absorbed into the animal spirits in the brain. Benefits or damage to health were only a glance away. Gazing at flowers strengthened the body. Bright colours and gemstones energised and healed. Lewd images corrupted, turning the mind into a sewer of filth. So the very lightness, airiness and colour of Chartres was as much about physical health as spiritual inspiration.

When Mr Filler thunders that it is “foolhardy” to try to recreate the medieval world because we now have electric lights, he is missing the fact the restored Chartres is giving us back medieval philosophy and spirituality, awe and inspiration, a world long mislabelled as the “dark ages”, but which lies at the heart of our modern identity. And to appreciate this intimate cultural reconnection with our past, it really does not matter whether you leave the lights on or off.