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.

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. Under Bishop Guillaume de Grez, an extra 4.9 m was added to the height to make it the highest-vaulted cathedral in Europe. The vaulting in the interior of the choir reached 47.5 m (156 ft) in height, far surpassing the concurrently constructed Amiens Cathedral, with its 42-metre (138 ft) nave, and making Beauvais Cathedral the tallest vault of all the Gothic cathedrals. Work was interrupted in 1284 by the collapse of some of the vaulting of the recently completed choir. This disastrous collapse marked the beginning of an age of smaller structures generally, contemporaneously associated with demographic decline and the Hundred Years' War. However, large-scale Gothic design continued, and the choir was rebuilt at the same height, albeit with more columns in the chevet and choir, converting the vaulting from quadripartite vaulting to sexpartite vaulting. On January 14, the Feast of Asses was celebrated in Beauvais Cathedral, in commemoration of the Flight into Egypt. Construction continued through the 16th century, with the transept finished in 1548, and the 153 m (502 feet) tower in 1569, making the church the tallest structure in the world at that time. In 1573 on Ascension day, the collapse of the tower and crossing vaults halted work again. Repairs to transept vaults were rapidly completed and plans were drawn to construct a significantly taller tower than the structure before the collapse, but few additions were made due to a halt in funding. During the early 16th century, there was a plan to restart construction of the cathedral in a flamboyant Gothic style, but these were quickly abandoned. In 1600, construction on the nave began after a short funding allocation, but only the first arch was built before construction was halted for the final time. The truncated opening at the end of the choir was closed off with a provisional west wall, while the remaining portion of the original Romanesque church was left in place. The cathedral suffered severe damage during the French Revolution, with the sans-culottes decapitatin

Church data from Wikidata (CC0). Summary from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA).