The Beauvais Cathedral

St Pierre Cathedral in Beauvais, is a rare example of a Carolingian Cathedral, with surprising and original proportions.

The 13th century Gothic chancel, like a glass cage standing proudly 48.5m high, is a sublime example of Gothic style.

Various disasters which happened during construction, including the collapse of the 153 m high spire in the 16th century, have left the Beauvais Cathedral without a nave.

A rare example of a Carolingian Cathedral. By Diliff – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=40041978

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.The transept was built from 1500 to 1548. In 1573, the fall of a too-ambitious 153-m (502 feet) central tower stopped work again. The tower would have made the church the tallest structure in the world at the time. Afterwards little structural addition was made. See other Catholic sites in France.

The Choir

The choir has always been wholeheartedly admired: Eugène Viollet-le-Duc called the Beauvais choir “the Parthenon of French Gothic.”


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The Façades

Its façades, especially that on the south, exhibit all the richness of the late Gothic style. The carved wooden doors of both the north and the south portals are masterpieces, respectively, of Gothic and Renaissance workmanship.

The church possesses an elaborate astronomical clock in neo-Gothic taste (1866) and tapestries of the 15th and 17th centuries, but its chief artistic treasures are stained glass windows of the 13th, 14th, and 16th centuries, the most beautiful of them from the hand of Renaissance artist Engrand Le Prince, a native of Beauvais. To him also is due some of the stained glass in St-Etienne, the second church of the town, and an interesting example of the transition stage between the Gothic and the Renaissance styles.

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The Chapels and the Medieval clock

Probably the oldest fully preserved and functioning mechanical clock in Europe.

Several of the chapels contain medieval stained glass windows made during the 13th through 15th centuries.

In a chapel close to the northern entrance, there is a medieval clock (14th – 15th century), probably the oldest fully preserved and functioning mechanical clock in Europe. In its vicinity, a highly complicated Beauvais Astronomical clock with moving figures was installed in 1866.