Marc Chagall's stained glass windows for the Chapel of the Archbishop's Palace at Reims Cathedral, installed in 1974 when the artist was eighty-seven years old, represent a culminating moment in his lifelong engagement with the relationship between Jewish and Christian biblical traditions. Chagall, who was born into a Hasidic Jewish family in Vitebsk, Belarus, and spent his long career in dialogue with - and sometimes in tension with - both his Jewish heritage and the Christian cultural world that surrounded him in France, brought to these windows a depth of meditation on the two Testaments that few artists of any century could have equaled.
The two windows present the Abrahamic covenant from Genesis 15 and the Annunciation from Luke 1 in a continuous visual dialogue. The choice of subjects is itself theologically significant: Genesis 15:5 records God's promise to Abraham - 'Look up at the sky and count the stars - so shall your offspring be' - and Romans 4:18 describes Abraham as the one 'who against all hope, in hope believed.' Luke 1:38 records Mary's response to Gabriel's announcement: 'I am the Lord's servant. May your word to me be fulfilled.' These are parallel moments of faithfulness to an impossible promise: Abraham's trust that God will give him a child in old age and beyond, Mary's trust that God will accomplish what is biologically inconceivable.
Chagall's characteristic visual language in stained glass - floating figures in dreamlike spatial relationships, deep blues and reds that saturate the light, animals and symbols woven into the narrative action - was developed across four decades of glass commissions that included the windows for Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem (his twelve tribes series), the American windows for the Art Institute of Chicago, and windows for cathedrals and synagogues across Europe and America. By the time he came to Reims, he was working at the height of his powers with the medium he had made distinctively his own.
Reims Cathedral carries its own weight of history in the visual dialogue between the two Testaments. It was the cathedral of the French coronation, the place where Clovis was baptized and where France's kings received their anointing - a ceremony modeled on the anointing of Israel's kings in 1 Samuel and 1 Kings. The coronation rituals drew on biblical typology in which the French kings were figures of the anointed Davidic monarchy. To place windows depicting the Abrahamic covenant in this building was to participate in a conversation about election, covenant, and the providential history of nations that the building itself had been conducting for seven centuries.
For Chagall, a survivor of European antisemitism who had fled the Nazis and lost much of his community to the Holocaust, the dialogue between Jewish covenant and Christian faith was not merely aesthetic or historical. It was personal and urgent. His windows throughout his career reflected a desire to hold together what European history had so catastrophically torn apart - to affirm that Abraham was the common father, that the promise of Genesis 15 was the foundation on which both traditions stood, and that beauty made in honor of this shared inheritance was a form of healing as well as witness.
The windows at Reims are among the less frequently discussed of Chagall's commissions, overshadowed by the Jerusalem windows and the Hadassah series. But they are among his most theologically precise: two moments of faithful response to divine promise, held in the warm colored light of a medieval French cathedral, offered by a Jewish artist to a Christian institution as a gift of reconciliation and common rootedness.