The message of a great European cathedral

On 12 May I sat down at a café on the square, ordered coffee and Perrier, and began to sketch the west front of Strasbourg Cathedral. This was presumptuous: the complexity of the facade would have baffled the skill even of Muirhead Bone, who taught my father to draw, and who was the greatest architectural draftsman since Piranesi. Strasbourg is over 2,000 years old. There was a cathedral on the site as early as ad 550, and the present one, of red sandstone from the Vosges, was more than three centuries a-building (1200–1521). The plans for the west front survive, and are in the marvellous cathedral museum, showing that a dozen different architects, over 200 years, had a hand in the project. Much of it is in the Diaphanous Style, in which vertical stone veils and traceries form a grille of sculptured arches, gables and spirals masking the wall behind and dazzling the eyes with their convolutions.