Amiens was capital of the old province of Picardy and is now the capital of the département of Somme. It is a busy industrial and textile town, population
140 000, situated on the River Somme midway between Paris and Calais.
It is surrounded by prosperous farming country, and is famous for its macaroons, its duck-pastries (pâtés de canard en croûte), and for the quality of its vegetables, grown locally in market gardens serviced by canals from the River Somme. The old city dates back to the time of the Romans, but much of it was destroyed during the World Wars; it was the Battle of Amiens in 1918 which finally convinced the German government of the impossibility of a German victory. With post-war reconstruction, only a small proportion of its older buildings survive.

Most visitors bypass Amiens en route to or from Paris. However, there is one major attraction: the Cathédrale de Notre-Dame.
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The cathedral

Celebrated as possibly the finest example of High Gothic architecture in France, Amiens cathedral is the largest by area in the country and has the most stunning nave, which soars to a height of 42 metres. It was built originally to a design of the architect Robert du Luzarches between 1220 and 1236. Later the nave (the ‘body’ of the church) was augmented by the addition of the choir (completed in 1269), a spire, two towers and a number of chapels, while parts were remodelled during the nineteenth century. Fortunately it received little damage during the World Wars, despite the extensive damage to the town. The cathedral was one of the earliest to exhibit the flamboyant style in its decoration, and its sculpture was among the first to depict life-like figures rather than the stylized forms found in earlier cathedrals. Amiens cathedral is a magnificent edifice, well worth a journey!  




















The cathedral and human proportion

The overall floor plan was based on the Greek cross in proportions matching that of the ideal human body (left), expressing the spiritual truth of the church as ‘the body of the Lord’.

Investigate Use your library to investigate the proportions of the human body and how it is applied to cathedral design. What is the ‘golden ratio’, and how does it occur?






















The octagram or star octagon

Medieval architects and masons had none of the modern mathematical tools to assist them in the design and construction of their buildings. They relied largely on the traditional Euclidean tools of straightedge and compass. These were used in a tradition traceable back through the Arabic, Roman, Greek and Egyptian cultures. The dimensional proportions of the floor plan of Amiens were based on the octagram, generated by two squares, which are easily constructed using Euclidean tools. Designs based on the octagram used the so-called 2 system of proportioning. This is because the diagonal of a unit square is 2 units in length.

Investigate  With the help of the diagram, construct a square of given edge length using only straightedge and compass.

Investigate With the help of this diagram, construct an octagram of given edge length using only straightedge and compass.

Investigate The octagram construction can be continued indefinitely inwards If the outside square has unit side length, find the areas of the first three octagrams in this sequence. Show that each octagram has an area which is half the area of the previously drawn octagram.




















Symbols in design

The layout of the cathedral’s floor plan is based on a treble octagram, that is, three interlocking octagonal stars. In fact, these were overlaid by a set of 7 smaller interconnecting octagonal stars related to the larger ones. The design is both aesthetic and symbolic.

Thus the 3 parts of the ‘Trinity’ diagram above stood for the 3 persons of the Godhead, each represented in a feature of the cathedral. The 12 external points of the stars represented the 12 Apostles. The octagram is found elsewhere in the cathedral, for example in the design of the Rose Window in the South Transept (left). The use of the number 7 also occurs elsewhere, for example in the number of chapels radiating around the east end of the choir and the number of bays in the nave. The number 7 had all sorts of mystical and symbolic significance: 7 days of creation, 7 graces, 7 virtues, 7 deadly sins, 7 tones of the Gregorian (musical) scale and so on. In similar ways, other significant numbers were incorporated into the design of the cathedral.

 
















Use of the cube

It has been observed that the nave of Amiens cathedral is contained within a cube consisting of 6 6 6 = 216 smaller cubes, each having edges of length 23 feet 6 inches (7.16 metres). This unit of length, known as the French perch royal, was commonly used by stone masons in France from the tenth to the fifteenth centuries. These smaller cubes define the internal proportions of the nave and also the ratio of space (or ‘void’) to walls and buttresses. In the Gothic cathedral, this ratio was maximized to create a feeling of lightness and space, enhanced by the use of stained glass.

 Project  If you have a cathedral or old church in your town, measure the dimensions, and try to determine if there is an underlying structural design. It might be possible to obtain a plan of the church, or some historical account of its design and construction. Can you find the numbers 3, 7 or 12 in the design?

 Link  http://www.learn.columbia.edu/Amiens.html