Background

This website contains a complete set of photographs of every panel in the 22 early 13th century stained glass windows from the ambulatory of Bourges Cathedral (480 separate panels in total).

At the time of writing, this is still very much work in progress. My aim has been to get all of the images on-line as soon as possible so that other researchers would have access to them. I will go back and add detailed descriptions, notes on exegetical and narratological aspects, references, etc, when time, and the demands of my PhD supervisor, allow.

Navigation

At the top level there are two index options - the annotated floor-plan and a summary list of windows with small preview images. Either of these index pages will allow access to keys for the inividual windows. From there on, to make life easier for users, I have adopted the same basic navigational paradigm as Alison Stones' authoritative website on Chartres Cathedral. 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.

The general principle throughout the website is that clicking an underlined text link will navigate the current browser window to the new page, whereas clicking a hotspot on one of the images will open it in a new browser window, leaving the current page undisturbed.

The only exceptions to the one-panel/one-page model are the Magdalen (bay 17) and St Nicholas (bay 19) windows, where the complex interrelationships between frames make it necessary to treat each row in-toto. In each of these two cases, clicking a panel on the detail-view page will load a larger jpeg into a new window (though you may need to switch off the auto-resize option in your browser to see the full size images.)

If at any point you get lost, clicking the "Bourges Cathedral the ambulatory glass" logo in the top-right of each page will bring you back here.

The site is designed for use on high-resolution monitors (ideally 1280x1024) and high-speed broadband connections - users with more limited equipment will just have to be patient. I would recommend maximising all the windows.

Technical Details

The images on this website were all photographed using a Nikon D1X camera and a Nikkor 80-200mm f2.8 IDEF lens. I then used various scaling and skewing corrections in Photoshop to compensate for the foreshortening, keystoning and trapezoidal distortions that result when photographing from ground level. This is particularly necessary when photographing the windows in the radiating chapels, where it is physically impossible to get square-on to the glass (all of the "whole-window" photos in these cases are montages.)

The pictures were all taken over the course of six exhausting days in early September when I was lucky enough to have a week of the kind of miserable rainy weather that is absolutely essential for good stained-glass photography! On the same trip, I also photographed the windows at Poitiers and Angers cathedrals - these ones are not as good since they are much higher and were mainly outside the range of my lens - but I do have them in case anyone needs images. Generally the Poitiers images are better than the only other alternative in the public domain, which are the Metcalf archive photos at Princeton.

All images are copyright Stuart Whatling, 2006. If anyone needs higher-resolution images for accademic purposes, feel free to contact me at the following address: . Originals are mainly 2500 - 3000 pixels wide after corrections.

If any publishers happen to stumble across this website and are interested in producing either a coffee-table book or a field guide to the windows then naturally I should be delighted to hear from them!

Change log

01/12/06 - Final bays (22-24) uploaded

27/11/06 - Bay 21 (St Mary of Egypt) added

23/11/06 - Bays 19 (St Nicholas) and 20 (John the Baptist) added

21/11/06 - Initial upload of bays 3-18