Old Cambrai Cathedral

[3] By the end of the twelfth century, a chapel dedicated to Saint Gangulph was finished and a bronze angel crowned the octagonal stone spire.

[5] In 1428 Philippe de Luxembourg claimed that the cathedral was the finest in all of Christianity, for the fineness of its singing, its light, and the sweetness of its bells.

[2] The building is known only through a few surviving documents - two high-precision drawings by Louis XIV's military painter Van der Meulen, statements made on the feasibility of the Fénelon spire project, a watercolour painted by an English soldier on the fall of the First Empire, and two photographs of the royal engineers' 1695 'plan-relief' of the town (the plan-relief itself was taken by the Germans during the Second World War occupation and was destroyed in the Battle of Berlin in 1945).

It was installed with great ceremony in the Chapel of the Holy Trinity and became the object of fervent pilgrimage, reflecting a contemporary appetite for new types of devotional imagery.

In Cambrai, the work attracted thousands of pilgrims, including Philip the Good (1457), Charles the Bold (1460) and Louis XI of France.