On the north face of the pier, S. Ambrose converting S. Augustine; S. Martin healing a deaf mute at Chartres; S. Marcel of Paris leading a dragon in his stole; S. Giles casting out a devil from a man at Athens; S. Jerome translating the Holy Scriptures; S. Martinien, the hermit of Cæsarea, with the penitent courtesan Zoe.
Above the porch, in the Gallery of the Kings of Judah, are eighteen life-size statues arrayed in the royal vestments of the time of S. Louis. They are the ancestors of Christ, and that was the only merit of some of them, as their history is given us in the Books of Chronicles and Kings. Varied in age and pose but similar in costume, they are, where they stand, sufficiently decorative, but they cannot compare with the kings and queens of the western porch.
Regarded merely as works of art, a large proportion of the two thousand odd statues in the porches of Chartres deserve almost as much praise as they excite interest. But when we consider the intentions of the artists who made them, and remember the conditions under which they were wrought, as they have been suggested in the previous chapters, we shall be able to appreciate them with a more perfect sympathy and to judge them with a broader understanding. The sculptors of the thirteenth century did not aim exclusively at sensuous beauty or at anatomical perfection, and they did not attain it. They were concerned with psychology as well as and even more than anatomy, and they strove to give by their art not only pleasure but instruction also. The perfection of the human body was not so obvious to them as the imperfection of the human soul. For them the flesh was only desirable when it exhaled the odour of virtue, when it was inspired by the sympathetic sadness which springs from the consciousness of frailty and resignation to the burdens of this life, combined with a burning desire for the eternal life to come, or when it was rendered sweet by the holy joyousness of spirit which springs from peace, pity and love. They added, then, to the science of art, the science of ideas. And if, therefore, mediæval sculpture never rose to the height of artistic perfection achieved by a Phidias or Praxiteles, yet their work remains fulfilled with a quality not possessed by any Apollo, the charm of a spiritual intelligence.