Amiens Cathedral is the largest Gothic cathedral in France by interior volume and one of the most ambitious of all medieval building projects. Work began in 1220 and the main structure was complete within a remarkably short fifty years — a speed of construction that gives the building an architectural unity rare in great Gothic churches. The result is High Gothic at its purest: soaring nave, the most intricate of flying buttresses, west facade dense with sculpture, and an interior of extraordinary vertical drama.
The nave rises to 42.3 metres — higher than Notre-Dame in Paris, higher than Chartres. Stand at the west end and look east: the effect is that the building appears to be still rising even as it stands. The choir screen is decorated with sixteenth-century reliefs that are among the finest examples of late Gothic sculpture in France, and the floor labyrinth (rarely seen in Gothic churches) is embedded in the marble paving. The treasury holds a claimed relic of the head of St John the Baptist, brought from Constantinople in 1206 and still the object of considerable local veneration.