Strasbourg Cathedral

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Strasbourg Cathedral — the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Strasbourg — is the Gothic cathedral of the Alsatian city on the Rhine, raised in the pink-red sandstone of the nearby Vosges that gives the building its distinctive flushed colour. A Romanesque church stood on the site from the early eleventh century, begun under Bishop Werner of Habsburg; the Gothic rebuilding that produced the present structure ran across the later twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, its façade and tower drawn out over generations of masons. When the north tower and its openwork spire were finished in 1439, the cathedral reached roughly 142 metres, and it remained the tallest building in the world until the nineteenth century — a height never matched on the south side, so that the west front carries a single spire rather than the symmetrical pair its designers had planned.

The fabric is celebrated for two things in particular. The first is the sculptural programme of the façade and portals, among the richest of the high-Gothic age, and the great rose window above the main door. The second is the astronomical clock that stands in the south transept: a sixteenth-century mechanism, rebuilt in the nineteenth, that tracks the hour against the longer calendars of the planets, the moon, and the feast days. Its figures move on those rhythms. At noon the apostles file before Christ; through the day the ages of life pass, one after another, before Death. The clock made the cathedral a destination for those interested in the meeting of devotion and mechanism, and it accumulated a folklore of its own.

Around the building gathered the kind of legends that medieval cathedrals tend to attract. One names Erwin von Steinbach as master of the façade — a real thirteenth-century builder whose role later tradition magnified into sole author of the whole design. Another holds that the clockmaker was blinded so that he could never build a rival elsewhere; such stories are told of more than one medieval marvel and belong to legend rather than record. The cathedral also drew the attention of Goethe, who as a student at Strasbourg in the 1770s wrote an essay praising its Gothic as a native and organic art, a piece that helped turn educated European taste back toward the medieval.

The cathedral has remained in continuous Christian use through the Reformation — when the city went Protestant and the building served Lutheran worship for over a century before returning to Catholic hands — and through the shifts of French and German rule that mark Alsace’s history. It still functions as the seat of the Archbishop of Strasbourg. What began as a bishop’s church on a contested frontier became, over centuries of building, one of the defining monuments of European Gothic.

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