Strasbourg Cathedral - the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Strasbourg, known in Alsatian as the Münster - is among the greatest achievements of Gothic architecture and one of the most important repositories of medieval stained glass in the world. Its south transept rose window, completed around 1340 in the Rayonnant Gothic style, is the building's most celebrated single glazing achievement, a circular composition approximately fifteen meters in diameter in which intricate flamboyant tracery organizes dozens of individual scenes and figures into a radiating theological program centered on Christ in Majesty.
The theological program of Revelation 4:2-3 - 'And there before me was a throne in heaven with someone sitting on it. And the one who sat there had the appearance of jasper and ruby. A rainbow that shone like an emerald encircled the throne' - provides the visual archetype for all Gothic rose windows. The circular form and the radial organization from a central divine figure are direct translations of the heavenly vision: the rose window is a window onto the heavenly court, and the viewer standing below in the nave looks up into the light of divine presence. Isaiah 6:1 - 'I saw the Lord, high and exalted, seated on a throne; and the train of his robe filled the temple' - is the Old Testament vision that the Gothic rose window also encodes.
Strasbourg Cathedral's window program is more extensive than the south rose alone. The nave and aisles contain cycles from the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries that constitute one of the most comprehensive surviving programs of Gothic narrative glazing in France. The Solomon cycle - scenes from the life of Solomon, particularly the building and dedication of the Temple in 1 Kings 6-8 - runs through several windows and provided medieval viewers with the Old Testament type of which the Gothic cathedral was the New Testament fulfillment: Solomon's Temple of cedar and gold was the prefiguration of the cathedral of stone and glass, and the divine presence that filled the Temple at its dedication (1 Kings 8:10-11: 'the cloud filled the temple of the Lord. And the priests could not perform their service because of the cloud, for the glory of the Lord filled his temple') was understood to fill the Gothic cathedral with light in an analogous way.
The Prophet windows, depicting Old Testament figures in their hierarchical relationship to the New Testament figures they prefigure, follow the typological program standard in Gothic glazing: Isaiah with his prophecy of the virgin birth appears near the Annunciation; Daniel with his vision of the Son of Man appears near the Last Judgment cycle; Moses with the tablets of the Law appears near Christ as the new lawgiver. The medieval theological method of typological reading - finding in every Old Testament episode a prefiguration of a New Testament fulfillment - is the governing logic of the entire glazing program.
Goethe's famous essay 'Von Deutscher Baukunst' (On German Architecture), written in 1772 after his first encounter with Strasbourg Cathedral, is one of the founding documents of the German Romantic movement and the primary text through which the Gothic cathedral was reinterpreted as a form of organic, national, spiritual art. Goethe described the experience of the cathedral - particularly the sense of the exterior's soaring stonework and the interior's colored light - as an encounter with a kind of genius that transcended both Greek classical principles and French Gothic rationalism. His essay transformed the cultural reception of Gothic architecture in Germany and, through its influence on Herder and the Sturm und Drang movement, in European Romanticism generally.
The cathedral's central spire, completed in 1439, was the tallest building in the world from 1647 to 1874. The red sandstone of the Vosges mountains from which it is built gives the exterior a warm pink-orange color that changes dramatically with the angle and quality of light - an effect that reinforces the building's quality as a form of visible theology, a structure whose appearance changes as the day and season change around it.
Strasbourg Cathedral is open to visitors as an active Roman Catholic parish church and diocesan cathedral. The rose windows are best viewed from the interior in morning or midday light, when the south window is most fully illuminated. The cathedral's astronomical clock, completed in 1574, strikes the hour with a mechanical procession of the twelve apostles past Christ.
For further reading: Roland Recht, La cathédrale de Strasbourg (1971); Wolfgang Kemp, The Narratives of Gothic Stained Glass (1997); Painton Cowen, The Rose Window (2005); Willibald Sauerländer, Gothic Sculpture in France 1140-1270 (1972); Dieter Kimpel and Robert Suckale, Die gotische Architektur in Frankreich 1130-1270 (1985).