Yes, it's pretty crazy. The cathedral-building impulse was a kind of mania in a sense and indeed involved generations.
From Henry Adams in 1904:
“The measure of this devotion, which proves to any religious American mind, beyond possible cavil, its serious and practical reality, is the money it cost. According to statistics, in the single century between 1170 and 1270, the French built eighty cathedrals and nearly five hundred churches of the cathedral class, which would have cost, according to an estimate made in 1840, more than five thousand millions to replace. Five thousand million francs is a thousand million dollars, and this covered only the great churches of a single century.”
I keep wondering how many artisan sculptors worked on these cathedrals over the decades it took to create what we see. It boggles my mind.
Yes, it's pretty crazy. The cathedral-building impulse was a kind of mania in a sense and indeed involved generations.
From Henry Adams in 1904:
“The measure of this devotion, which proves to any religious American mind, beyond possible cavil, its serious and practical reality, is the money it cost. According to statistics, in the single century between 1170 and 1270, the French built eighty cathedrals and nearly five hundred churches of the cathedral class, which would have cost, according to an estimate made in 1840, more than five thousand millions to replace. Five thousand million francs is a thousand million dollars, and this covered only the great churches of a single century.”
― Henry Adams, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres
Ha, I just bought that book 2 weeks ago. The random music of the spheres is still at work.