St. Eustace and St. George: Crusading Saints in the Sculpture and Stained Glass of Chartres Cathedral

Abstract

The writer discusses two 13th-century statues of military saints at the Martyrs Portal at Chartres Cathedral in Chartres, France. He suggests that the figures of St George and St Eustace (the latter long misidentified as St Theodore) represent the imposition of interests related to private devotion, and shows that the figures of the Crusading saints appropriate iconographic attributes of Byzantine military saints. He builds his iconographic argument by considering the sculpture and stained glass at the cathedral together. He concludes that the images of the military saints not only evince new social attitudes toward Crusading, toward knightly identity, and toward private devotion, but also provide evidence that the cathedral was ready to accommodate these new attitudes.