Religious art inside Amiens cathedral

I decided to post these eight photos as a slide show. I don't have a lot to say about any of them, and my quick and dirty research hasn't turned up much. Still, they are worth looking at. The sidshow runs for about two minutes. You'll notice a gory image of the beheading of John the Baptist in mid-show.

In the first photo in the show, I think the bishop (I assume he is one — maybe he's Saint-Honoré, who was the bishop of Amiens some 1,500 years ago) looks an awful lot like the late socialist president of the French Republic, François Mitterrand. Is that Jack Lang (Quel bel homme !) he's talking to? I wonder if the piece was restored in the 1990s, when they were in power. And could that be, Donald Trump in the next-to-last picture, disguised as a priest?

I'm not sure where I took the photo of the painting of an Amiens scene featuring the cathedral. It must have been inside the church. By the way, the current president of France, Emmanuel Macron, was himself  born in Amiens, in 1977.

Haut-relief polychrome sculptures in the Amiens cathedral*

La cathédrale d'Amiens abrite deux magnifiques suites sculptées en haut-relief 

dans chacun des bras du transept. Ce sont des monuments funéraires.

Le premier haut-relief, «Le Temple de Jérusalem», est une suite de quatre niches illustrant
une action qui prend place dans une partie du temple.
Dans les deux premières niches, Jésus chasse les marchandsdu temple.

Dans la troisième niche, la table des pains évoque l'eucharistie.

Dans la dernière niche, le grand prêtre encense le tabernacle.

Le deuxième haut-relief, qui relate la légende de saint Jacques le Majeur et du magicien Hermogène,

est un don du chanoine Guillaume aux Cousteaux, mort en 1511.

Just above is a view of part of the second haut-relief in a slightly different light.

*The text in French in this post is my adaptation of text I found on a French web site

that includes many beautiful close-ups of these hauts-reliefs.
The three images in this post are from photos that I took on July 21, 2010.

La façade sud de la cathédrale Notre-Dame d'Amiens

On the south-facing façade of the transept of the cathédrale Notre-Dame d'Amiens there's a portail, a portal, that seems to go by two names. It's called either the portail Saint-Honoré or the portail de la Vierge dorée ("the golden Virgin").
Here are three views of it, going from farther out to closer in.

The figures above the Virgin Mary are the twelve Apostles.
Saint Honoré, who died in about the year 400, was the seventh bishop of the city of Amiens.
He is also the patron saint of bread bakers (boulangers).

This statue of the Virgin and Child is actually a copy of the 13th-century original (photos here),
which was moved to the interior of the church in 1980.

It's this kind of statuary that was saved by sand-bagging the façades of the cathedral during the bombardments of the 1914-1918 war. These are 10-year-old photos that I took with a Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS1 digital camera.

Inside the cathedral at Amiens

Here are three large images showing part of the interior of the cathedral in Amiens. The height of the ceiling is 42.3 meters (nearly 140 feet), which is much higher than the ceiling at Notre-Dame de Paris (33.5 meters = 110 feet). The area covered by the building measures more 7,700 sq. ft. — 1.9 acres, which is more than 80,000 sq. ft.

Notre-Dame d'Amiens suffered significant damage during the First World War. The German army bombarded the town and the cathedral with mortar shells. The people of Amiens sandbagged the front of the church to try to prevent damage to all the sculpture. After the war, the stained-glass windows were dismantled and taken to Paris for restoration work. Unfortunately, an accidental fire in the Paris facility where the work was under way destroyed most of them. The cathedral made it through the Second World War unscathed.

I wish my photos gave a better idea of and feeling for how enormous the Amiens cathedral really is. In fact, it's almost twice as big as Notre-Dame de Paris. I remember the feelings I had when CHM and I were inside the cathedral ten years ago today — dizziness and exhilaration. Over the next few days, I'll be posting some more detailed photos I took there.