31/08/2026
Sainte-Chapelle was completed in 1248, built by King Louis IX to house relics he acquired from Constantinople, including what was believed to be Christ's Crown of Thorns. Its stained glass, spread across fifteen windows, contains 1,113 individual scenes drawn from the Old and New Testaments, one of the most complete surviving examples of 13th-century glasswork anywhere in the world.
The chapel came close to losing all of it. During the French Revolution, the building was stripped of its relics, used first as a grain warehouse and later as a legal archive, and its spire was torn down. Filing cabinets stacked against the windows to store legal documents ended up protecting much of the original glass from damage during this period, an accidental preservation historians now credit as one reason so much survived.
Roughly one-third of the glass still had to be replaced, mainly during a major 19th-century restoration led by architects including Félix Duban and Jean-Baptiste Lassus, and later Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, who worked from surviving drawings and a 13th-century psalter to match the original colors and style as closely as possible.
A new restoration campaign, ongoing since the 1970s and still active today, continues to clean and stabilize the surviving medieval panels, working bay by bay to preserve the glass without altering its original character.
