Max Ingrand's stained-glass windows

Detail of a stained glass window in the library

The cloister Bookshop presents an exceptional collection of stained glass windows by master glass artist Max Ingrand. Discover the liberal arts in a modernized version revisited by the artist.

Contemporary stained glass

In the library

The stained glass windows in the library, a beautiful vaulted room on the monument's second floor, date from the 1960's.

Their creator, master glassworker Max Ingrand (1908-1969), chose to illustrate the theme of the liberal arts in a revisited, modernized vision associated with the fine arts and science and technology.

The former bookshop — The bookshop
Baptiste Bruzel

The liberal arts

Do you know what the liberal arts are? They are the disciplines taught in medieval schools.

There are seven of them, inherited from Antiquity, divided into two cycles:

the trivium which covers the sciences of language: grammar, rhetoric and dialectic.
the quadrivium grouping the scientific disciplines of arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy.

The liberal arts were a theme regularly represented by artists in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. They can be found in painting, sculpture, illuminations, manuscripts and stained glass.

Max Ingrand's choice to depict the liberal arts in the stained glass windows of the bookshop in the Psalette cloister is also a reminder of the original function of this place.

In medieval times, every religious establishment had a place dedicated to study and culture. A music school, also known as a psaletta, was housed here. Young choirboys were trained here. They received a high-level musical and religious education and sang at services in the adjoining cathedral.