Centre international du vitrail, Stained-glass art museum in Chartres, France
The Centre international du vitrail is a stained-glass art museum in Chartres, France, housed in a medieval Gothic building steps away from the cathedral. It holds a permanent collection of Renaissance stained-glass panels alongside temporary exhibitions of contemporary work, and runs workshops and guided tours throughout the year.
The Cellier de Loëns was built around 1200 and first served as a storehouse for the tithe, where local farmers brought wine and grain to the clergy. Over the following centuries it became a prison, a military food depot, and even a cinema before being restored in the 1980s to become the Centre international du vitrail.
The Centre international du vitrail occupies a building locally known as the Cellier de Loëns, whose carved stone columns and ribbed vaults are still visible today. The space has served so many different purposes over the centuries that its walls seem to hold several layers of everyday life.
The museum is on Rue du Cardinal Pie and easy to reach on foot from the cathedral, which is just around the corner. It is open year-round, and visiting on a weekday tends to be quieter than on weekends.
The building was briefly used as a cinema in 1895 to screen films by the Lumière brothers, shortly after their invention of the moving image. The same space that once stored grain for the clergy later hosted one of the first public film screenings in France.
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