About the Sainte-Chapelle

The Sainte-Chapelle was built in the heart of the Capetian palace on the Île de la Cité and consecrated in 1248. It originally housed the Passion Relics, above all the Crown of Thorns, acquired by Louis IX from the Latin Emperor of Constantinople in 1239 at a price exceeding the cost of the building itself. The chapel was conceived as a monumental reliquary in Rayonnant Gothic style. The Grande Châsse, a grand reliquary raised on its architectural surround in the apse, stood at the center of a continuous program of light and imagery.

The walls of the Upper Chapel are dominated by over 1000 stained glass windows with scenes from the Bible, and the discovery of the Passion Relics and their transport to Paris.  The image program presented Paris as a New Jerusalem and the French crown as the divinely sanctioned custodian of Christ's own relics. Blanche of Castile's involvement is legible in the building's fabric and documentation. The heraldic castles of Castile pattern the painted columns and stained glass alongside the Capetian fleur-de-lys; windows depicting Esther and Judith, biblical queens who delivered their people, stand near the alcove associated with her use. The paired royal alcoves of the Upper Chapel echo the typological pairing of queen and king, Virgin and Christ, that recurs across her manuscript commissions.

Gautier Cornut's eyewitness account of the Crown of Thorns' translation and the surviving foundation charter situate the project within the court Blanche dominated during and after her regency. The chapel thus stands as the culminating monument of a programme in which her patronage, piety, and power were bound together: a building whose purpose was the veneration of the relics and whose visual language proclaimed the sacral rulership of the dynasty she secured.

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