help

Hello everyone

well, I need some help to correct a text I have written in English (I am French) for an exhibition (start soon), it is about the cathedral of Chartres, the architecture vocabulary is good, I just need an opinion about the mistakes.

Many Thanks

Set up along the Beauce, on a stretched cutwater limited by the steep sides of the Eure, the town of Chartres is famous for the cathedral towering it and extends over the surrounding country. Essentially rebuilt after the fire of 1194, the cathedral of Notre-Dame appears as an uncontested and universal model of the cathedral for the purity of its architecture, the exceptional evidence of the gothic, the beauty of its statuary and reliefs, the perfect translation of the thought of the contemporaneous theologists and the homogeneity of the ancient glass windows,

Although unrecognized and often ignored by the visitor, the choir screen in the cathedral of Chartres forms a carved monument, which is impressive and unique. Encircling entirely the sanctuary like a true wall, it constitutes a rich book of pictures and stories which develops in narrative pictures its religious scene in an elegant ornamental decoration.

Edified over a long period of two hundred years, principally because of the vicissitudes of time (bad weather, wars, famishes, epidemics). The choir screen saw the succession of stonecutters, painters of popular picture and sculptors who came Paris for most of them where they worked at court. The church-wardens of the cathedral chapter were the principal donors, and the canons did not hesitate to engage their personal goods to fund the construction works, all the Chartres inhabitants took part to this collective enthusiasm. The choir screen remains a precious testimony of the French sculpture of the beginning of the Renaissance at the end of the century of Louis. XIV.

The construction started in 1513, in the last years of the reign of Louis XII, under the direction of architect Jehan de Beauce, who just finished the construction of the north church tower. The choir screen was designed to be crossed by daylight at the level of the large scenes on one side of the ambulatory and the other. Chapels lit by a clerestory were made between the walls of the screen. In 1529, the choir was fully closed : a few years later, the execution of the ornamentation of the base and the clerestory were completed. Started around 1516, the placement of the forty large groups in the cornices topped by carved baldaquins, ended in 1716 at the same time as the whole monument. From 1763 to 1789, the new laying out of the choir provoked destruction and mutilation which deeply modifyed the structure and the aspect of the screen : closing at the back of the niches, openings in the clerestory and suppression of small statues placed towards the inside of the sanctuary. The choir screen went through the revolutionary period without important damage and is presented to us today is such as it were at the end of the eighteenth century.

The large groups realised by French renowned artists are dedicated to the story of the Virgin and that of Christ. The story, developing from the south to the north, starts with the Annunciation of the Birth of the Virgin and ends with the Crowning in Heaven. The diversity of the stylistic influences and sources of inspiration testify the origins and various formations of the sculptors : the most northern scenes still have a medieval spirit, German and Italian influences can be observed in a same scene, the late mannerism filled the carved figures at the beginning of the seventeenth century by Thomas Boudin.

The ecclesiastic statues and the figure statues, representing human society, punctuate the clerestory and seem to mix with the life of the Virgin and her Son.

The flamboyant gothic adopted in the first two bays, in the north like in the south, was soon replaced by the Renaissance style : the medallions of the base, the ornamentation of the clerestory and the carved baldaquins ideally express this dynamic and brilliant style.