Bleuet and Anthoine Colas, Master Masons of Troyes Cathedral. Artistic Personality in Late Gothic Design

Students of medieval architecture have attempted to derive their conclusions concerning the artistic personality of "the medieval master mason" from an analysis of the building itself. Such attempts can be frustrated by the fact that we can rarely know with any certainty where one mason laid off and the next began. Such knowledge can sometimes be derived from the written sources which the process of cathedral construction has left behind. The 15th-century fabric accounts of Troyes Cathedral allow us to identify the successive master masons by name and to understand the nature of each individual's contribution. The discovery of new fabric account material reveals the name of a hitherto unknown mason, master Bleuet of Reims Cathedral. The written evidence, correlated with an analysis of the building, allows us to test the assumption that the personality of a particular master mason will necessarily be expressed in a single unified style.