Beauvais Cathedral

Beauvais Cathedral, otherwise known as the Cathedral of Saint Peter of Beauvais (French: Cathédrale Saint-Pierre de Beauvais; Picard: Cathédrale Saint-Pire ed Bieuvé), is a Catholic cathedral in the northern town of Beauvais, Oise, France. It is the seat of the Bishop of Beauvais, Noyon and Senlis and has been listed as a national monument since 1840.

The cathedral consists of a 13th-century choir, with an apse and seven polygonal apsidal chapels reached by an ambulatory, joined to a 16th-century transept. It has the highest Gothic choir in the world: 48.5 metres (159 ft) under vault. From 1569 to 1573 the cathedral of Beauvais was, with its tower of 153 m (502 ft), the highest human construction of the world. Its designers had the ambition to make it the largest Gothic cathedral in France, ahead of Amiens and Notre-Dame de Paris. A victim of two collapses, one in the 13th century, the other in the 16th century, it remains unfinished today; only the choir and the transept were built, and the planned nave was never constructed. The remnant of the previous 10th-century Romanesque cathedral, known as the Basse Œuvre ("Lower Work"), still occupies the intended site of the nave.

History

Construction on the cathedral began in 1225 under count-bishop Milo of Nanteuil, with funding from his family, immediately after the third in a series of fires in the 10th century Romanesque basilica, which had reconsecrated its altar only three years before the blaze. The cathedral choir was completed in 1272, in two campaigns, with an interval (1232–38) owing to a funding crisis provoked by a struggle with Louis IX. The two campaigns are distinguishable by a slight shift in the axis of the work and by changes in stylistic architectural design.