Download or read book The Master Masons of Chartres written by John James and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 1990 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: James' analysis of Chartres is likely to be the best and most detailed we shall have.' JOURNAL OF ARCHITECTURAL HISTORIANS The great cathedral of Chartres is the most impressive and exciting building surviving from the middle ages, andis preserved almost intact. Yet we know nothing of the men who created it. John James, in this masterpiece of detection, shows how he came to identify the master masons from the stones themselves. His meticulous `reading' of the cathedral has revealed much about those men: how they solved problems of engineering and design, how they raised two-ton stones forty metres into the air, and how one mason controlled over 300 men in this gigantic workshop. JOHN JAMES is an Australian architect. His first visit to Chartres, in 1969, led to a continuing passion for the early Gothic buildings of northern France, and he has been `reading their stones' ever since.