E-Text 6

Portals

We must now return to our point of entry, the western portals, and consider the extensive sculptural program: let us begin with an assessment what we can see....  Four great flat-faced buttresses divide three cavernous portals, each capped with a tympanum framed by voussoirs and crowned by a gable.  From a distance the sculptured elements of the tympana and voussoirs are barely legible but we may quickly recognize the organizing force of the continuous line of super-life-sized statues standing upon the front surfaces of the buttresses and in the sides (embrasures) of the portals: there are 52 of them, plus the three statues, trumeaux, in the center of the portals.  The verticality of each figure is enhanced by the fact that it has a slender column attached to the back: the figures appear to hold up the edifice (compare the Caryatids of the Erechtheum).  Each figure is crowned by a canopy and stands atop a little crouching figure, conveying the theme of triumph (compare the triumphalism of the Parthenon sculptural program).  The visitor hardly needs to be told that these are the prophets, Apostles and saints who appear to bear up the physical structure of this particular church just as they also bear up the historical structure of the Church Universal.  In approaching and entering the space of the portals the visitor joins the company of the elect.  Jaded by the image glut of our own age the modern visitor should take account of the extraordinary impact these life-like figures, once brightly painted, might have had upon medieval pilgrims reminded of the solemn processions of the clergy on days of special celebration or liturgical dramas that reenacted the events of the principal feast days of the year in sacred space. 

The 12 figures upon the front surfaces of the buttresses represent the minor prophets: each holds a scroll and some of them gesture toward the now-effaced words once painted there.  They clearly want to speak to us: these are the preachers or interlocutors of the Church.  Our website will allow you to identify each of them and recount the prophesy depicted in the low-relief quatrefoil below.  Their organizing presence may be derived from the Ordo Prophetarum, a liturgical drama designed to animate prophecies of the Incarnation of Christ: it was performed in sacred space in the season of Advent. 

Following the sequence of the Biblical books the order of the minor prophets at Amiens runs from the extreme right hand buttress with Hosea, Joel and Amos to end on the extreme left with Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi: it thus reveals the starting point in our attempt to comprehend the portal program: the right (south) portal of the Virgin Mary, Mother of God (Mère Dieu, derived from Greek Theotokos).