Friday, May 28, 2021

Une Gentile Vitrine!!

 I go into a lot of cathedrals and churches when I am in Paris or other parts of France.

The windows are the obvious reason.

We once attended the story teller's tour of  Cathédrale de Notre-Dame de Chartres.

The guide and story teller for the tour was Malcomb B. Miller an expatriot Brit and holder of the Legion d'Honneur due to his lifetime commitment to and attendant expertise in the the windows of Chartres.

So from that point forward I could see that "looking at church windows" was a pretty big deal, tantamount to an industry, in France.

(The windows of Chartres are a recurring and pivotal theme in the autobiography - really an almost mystical contemplation of the past - complete with a never ending attempt to calibrate its force and an aggressive attempt at seeing into the future and calibrating it against the calibration of the past, rather than an autobiography - of John Adams' great grandson, The Education of Henry Adams.)

So I started doing the easiest thing possible: taking pictures of the windows every time I go into a cathedral or church.

It's easy in the sense of clicking a shutter.

It's almost impossible - for me - to get anything that adequately tells the tale of those amazing stories and explosions of color.

In any event I have compounded my problem by not making any attempt to document where any image might have come from.

So when Screen Saver serves up the occasional image of a window that has any merit I have no idea where it came from.

So it is with this one: it's verging on OK, but I don't know where it came from.

My favorite subject cathedral is St. Severin in Paris, but I'm pretty sure it's not from there.



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