that, looking at it, one forgets that it is the natural inclination of stones to make low mounds of rubble. Here the stones have been persuaded to leap into the air, and (even more remarkably) to stay there. The point to be made here is that at Bourges we have a completely unremarkable site, on fairly flat ground, that has been turned into something special mainly by building. And this cathedral stands in a tradition of making light-filled spaces that began two generations earlier at Saint-Denis. The abbey church there is a fine and spectacular building, but it is not large compared with the cathedrals at Paris (Notre Dame), Chartres, and Bourges that were built later, so if we study the buildings carefully, paying attention to the order in which things happened, we can see how the ideas developed and were used with increasing confidence and daring. It would not have been possible for an ancient Greek mason to have decided to build something like Bourges. It would have been, in the first instance, absolutely inconceivable, because the ideas would not have been available to him. It depended on various imaginative leaps, each one of which was in its time as great as that involved in inventing the first spire. And then beyond that, even if he could have had the idea, he would not have been able to imagine how on earth it would be possible to build it. Even if he could have done that, he would not have been able to persuade his contemporaries to believe in him and to finance his efforts, which would most likely have led to huge sums of money just ending up as collapsed rubble. Something like the cathedral at Bourges cannot happen overnight as the whim of an individual, but depends on a cultural and technical background that makes it possible to imagine and realize such things. Another point to notice is that the Gothic style was never adopted with great enthusiasm in the south. There is a fine Gothic cathedral at Milan in the north of Italy, but it is isolated, and the churches with pointed arches and vaults in the south of France and Italy tend not to take on the idea of large windows, but retained the flat walls of the earlier Romanesque style, often using these flat wall surfaces for paintings. One reason for this could be that the spaces enclosed by so much glass would overheat uncomfortably in the summer. Bourges is the most southerly of the really glassy cathedrals.
The pilgrimage chapel, the Wieskirche, in Bavaria is from a later date, from the 18th century (Figure 11). It belongs to a different architectural culture, but a similar religious culture to that which produced Chartres. Here, though, the religious community was not composed of highly educated monks, with a concern to embody arcane numerical symbolism in the fabric of the building, but a much more popular band. The church was founded following a miracle witnessed by a peasant. He joined together various bits and pieces from broken carved statues, using leather to make the flexible joints, so the finished figure of Christ is rather puppet-like. It is not a fine work of art, but was effective as a focus for pious devotions, and it was enshrined above the altar of a spectacular Baroque church. It does many of the same things as the Gothic churches did, but by different means. From the outside the building looks quite plain and simple. It is hardly decorated, except around the entrance, and the windows look like straightforward openings in the walls. It is evident from the outside that it is not quite an ordinary building, because it is the largest building around, set among fields, with little else in sight. One might expect that inside it would be more or less a large well-appointed barn. Certainly nothing would prepare the pilgrim for the drama within, modelled on the lavish architecture of palaces of the day. There is gold and profuse ornament, swirling clouds, and draperies that seem to have been caught up in an upward rush of air. Everything is designed as a piece, and expresses movement and fluidity, whilst remaining quite solid and still in fact. Much