About Sainte-Chapelle
King Louis IX commissioned the construction of the Sainte-Chapelle in 1242! It took about 7 years to completely finish the chapel, but it was already in use in 1248. And back in 13th century, the Royal Courtyard was located at the Île de la Cité, which was later moved to the Louvre and Versailles.
The chapel was intended to house the 22 religious relics that King Louis IX started to collect in 1239. One of the most ancient relics was the Crown of Christ "Crown of Thorns". Due to all these relics, Paris became the head of Western Christianity.
There are 15 windows with a height of 15 meters. There are more than 1000 scenes depicted on these stained glass panes (1,113). These scenes are from the Old and the New Testaments that would recount the history of the world before the relics arrived.
The cost of building Sainte-Chapelle was about 40,000 Livres while collecting all of the relics was around 235,000 Livres(!). Even the silver chest where the relics were stored until the chapel was completed, cost 100,000 Livres.
Sainte-Chapelle consists of two chapels, one for the common people, which you could visit below, and one for royalty and relics which was the upper section of the chapel. Still, both chapels are very well designed.
The photographs that you're about to see are from a building nearly 800 years old. Let that sink in.
Summary
So, after we visited the Panthéon, we decided it was time to go to Sainte-Chapelle. We took the subway and finally arrived there. The line for this landmark was pretty long, so I proposed to buy tickets online. Since @lackofcolor kept the tickets on her phone, she was like... why do all the tickets look the same? So, we opened the ticket to the Panthéon on our phone... At this moment, I realized... and lackofcolor as well. I bought tickets for Sainte-Chapelle, and not for Panthéon. We burst into laughter because we tried to scan the tickets 4 times back at the Panthéon and no one said a word. LOL. WELL... I guess we can just skip the line on this one as well then.
We passed all the people waiting with big smiles on our faces. Had to keep my cool though, because I felt a bit like a cheater. Oh well, we showed our tickets, and -bleep- they turned green. What a surprise. Haha. Sainte-Chapelle was heavily guarded by police with automatic rifles. Which was a bit intimidating, but it kind of gave us the feeling we were entering something special.
The church from the outside was looking pretty cool, and you could see a glimpse of the aubergine purple-colored stained glass. The glass panes looked kind of thiccccc and looked probably nearly black/brown if you didn't take a closer look. The entrance was nice. The ground level was turned into a souvenir shop, almost. @Lackofcolor was like; "wow, this looks nice, but I thought it was bigger!". I looked at her and smiled; "this isn't the thing you know, this is just the entrance", so we moved up to the grand room. And holy... this looked surreal. Due to all the purple glass panes, the entire room was filled with pink/purple/magenta-colored light. How did people even -think- of making something like this?
Despite the size of the room, it was stunning to see with our own eyes. High-decorated ceilings, and glass everywhere, with a lot of decoration on the walls. You could see how old the building was just by looking at the damaged walls. We spend about 30-40 minutes in there and we were just amazed, like everyone else who was paying a visit to Sainte-Chapelle. We felt extra good because we got a free ticket to the Panthéon, I hope they got a better checking system. But yeah, we truly enjoyed staying there.
The above photographs are from the first floor. Once we got to the "main part" of Sainte-Chapelle, it was a totally different world. The number of people that were visiting this landmark was a lot. It was packed! It was quite challenging to make any good photographs, but the hardest part for me was to get these images to resemble the building as it was. The magenta-cast type color may look unreal, but I'm quite happy with how close I managed to get these photographs to the real thing. It might have been a bit more magenta than is shown in the photographs.
But if I take a look at some photographs that are shown on the official website, it got me second-guessing! Were we so lucky with the Sunlight? There are a few professional photographs that I came across on the interwebz that showed similar lighting.
Cheers
Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed these photographs and a little story about Sainte-Chapelle. We surely had a good laugh after realizing we showed the wrong tickets at the Panthéon, and still managed to see it. Sainte-Chapelle is a must-see, besides all of the other (more) popular landmarks in Paris. One of the best tips that I can give you, is to book your tickets online beforehand, at least a few hours before going due to possible delays in ticket processing.
Cheers,
Ruben
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