How France Built Her Cathedrals Part 20

In his short pontificate, 1262-64, Urban IV, besides creating this enduring memorial, inst.i.tuted the feast of Corpus Christi. He requested a liturgy for his new feast from St. Thomas Aquinas, who composed the _Pange lingua gloriosi_, the last stanzas of which are sung daily throughout the Christian world, the familiar _Tantum ergo_. To Aquinas is ascribed the _Verb.u.m supernum prodiens_ hymn whose ending is the lovely _O Salutaris Hostia_. Doubt and heresy have always been instrumental in clarifying doctrine and in enriching the liturgy and art. So in a later day was made, in reaction against the XVI-century desecration of the Eucharist, such windows as the Wine Press of Troyes and that of Conches.

In 1906, soon after St. Urbain's church had celebrated the completion of its western portal, it became the scene of a conscientious objection on the part of its paris.h.i.+oners, who protested against the taking of an inventory, they deeming it an unlawful interference with their private affairs. They sat in their church till the police broke in the doors; even then they continued to sing canticles, and were expelled only by having a hose turned on them. Six centuries earlier, St. Urbain's had been the scene, on the completion of its choir, of a suffragette-like demonstration by a community of nuns, who claimed part of the land on which the church stood. They smashed various things on the premises, and, it is whispered, even slapped a high dignitary's face. Apparently St. Urbain's is destined to pa.s.s into history under various aspects.

For four hundred years the ancient capital of Champagne was an active center of the stained-gla.s.s industry. Overpowering is the wealth of storied windows to be found in its churches, the majority being of the Flamboyant-Renaissance day. In the suburbs, and farther afield in the hamlets of Champagne, there is the same prodigal display of colored windows and interesting statues.[148] From father to son, from generation to generation, was pa.s.sed on the art skill of this ancient city on the highway of international trade.

In Troyes there were so many churches that the old saying ran: "You arrived from Troyes? And what are they doing there?" "_On y sonne._"

Next to St. Urbain's, for its wealth of art treasures, comes the Madeleine church built about 1175, and reconstructed during the Flamboyant enthusiasm when this city readorned almost every shrine it possessed. Contemporary with its noted _jube_, or rood screen (1508-17), is the statue of St. Martha, one of the gems of French sculpture, entirely of the national school, unaffected work as ample and robust as the best period of the XIII century. St. Martha is represented, in this church of Troyes dedicated to her sister, with the holy water by which she exorcised the legendary Tarasque of Tarascon. She was the patroness of housekeepers, and it is said that the servant maids of Troyes presented to their church this memorial of the plastic genius of Champagne.[149]

Champagne's special apt.i.tude for sculpture appeared in the XIII-century gargoyles of St. Urbain's church, each of which was almost a complete figure. Later her imagery grew mannered for a few generations, with the Madonna's face of a formal type, and an exaggerated throwing out of the hip. The advent of Flemish realism, through the Franco-Flamand school at Dijon, renewed the vigor of French idealism, and before the XV century closed a truly French Renaissance had set in, retaining the equipoise of the old school and quite free of Italian cla.s.sicism.

Eventually the imported standards checked that renewed national movement. It was not the big men of Italy's revival who came to Champagne, but secondary artists whose work was often pretentious or coldly abstract. From 1540, under the leaders.h.i.+p of the Italian, Domenico Rinnuccini, called Florentino, the foreign Renaissance prevailed at Troyes. In the church of the Madeleine, besides its _jube_ and St. Martha statue, is some of the best XVI-century gla.s.s. A window of 1506 tells the life of St. Eloi, the goldsmith-bishop of Noyon; a window dated 1517 is devoted to St. Louis; Jean Macadre I made a Jesse tree; and there is the celebrated Creation in which G.o.d the Father wears the papal tiara, significant of the reaction that followed Luther's attacks on Rome. There are, also, two good XV-century windows, the Lord's Pa.s.sion and the Magdalene's story.

So vast is the acc.u.mulation of treasures in the sanctuaries of Troyes that one can indicate merely a few of them. In St. Jean's church--Flamboyant Gothic mainly, with a XII-century tower and a XIV-century nave--is a Visitation (1520) by Nicolas Haslin, a meeting of two pleasant dames of Troyes, wearing robes of Burgundian fullness, a group in which there appears a first evidence of transalpine influence.

The reredos, from the Juliot studio, that led in the transition from French Gothic art to the neo-cla.s.sic standards, has conventional images somewhat overgestured. In the flat eastern wall of St. Jean is a _maitresse vitre_ (1630) by the Gontier brothers, delicate in hue, yet radiant, with half tones such as mauve, salmon pink, soft grays, pomegranate, celadine green. Eagerly the Renaissance masters seized on the new invention of _verre double_, which allowed them a fuller palate. Their over-use of opaque enamel-painting on gla.s.s led to the deterioration of the vitrine art, for the picture-painter soon swamped the glazier and draftsman who had worked in subordination to the architect.

In the church of St. Pantaleon, where Lyenin II worked, the windows are in one or two tones, gray-brown with silver-stain yellow and flesh color, a style better suited to domestic interiors or to civic halls than to churches. The church boasts a statue of St. James and a Charite by Domenico Florentino, and a St. Crespin group by a son of Troyes, Francois Gentil, influenced by the Italian. To Gentil is attributed the Christ at the column and the Christ bearing the Cross in the church of St. Nicolas, where are also images of St. Anne and St. Joachim from the Juliot studio, a St. Bonaventure from the same source whence emanated the adorable statue of St. Martha, and more of the grisaille picture-gla.s.s. In St. Martin-es-Vignes the window of St. Anne (1623) is attributed to Linard Gontier; in Ste. Sabine are some painted wood panels, and a carved keystone of great beauty; in the hall of the library of Troyes are thirty panels by Linard Gontier, made in commemoration of Henry IV's visit in 1598.

CHaLONS CATHEDRAL[150]

It so happens that in most of our communes the church remains the only witness of the olden times and of departed generations. It thus becomes a symbol, legible for the humblest, of the duration of our race, of the persistence, through the dead, of a special group of French families on a special corner of French soil. The village church gives the lesson of lineage, of the solidarity of efforts, of the communion of men.--EDMOND BLANQUERON, Inspecteur de l'Academie de la Haute-Marne, in the crusade to save the churches of Champagne, notably Vignory, one of the oldest in France (c. 1050).

The cathedral of Troyes and the church of St. Urbain belong to the Champagne school of Gothic, to which we have devoted no separate chapter because some of its monuments, such as St. Remi at Rheims and Notre Dame at Chalons, we grouped with the Primary Gothic churches, and the cathedral of Rheims with the Great Cathedrals, cla.s.sifications used solely for greater clarity.

From its inception, the Gothic of Champagne kept pace with the Ile-de-France Picard school, and in certain characteristics even took the lead of its neighbor. Gerson, Racine, La Fontaine, Gaston Paris, are among the sons of this province whose Gothic art, formulated centuries before them, displays qualities which embody aspiration, sublimity, sanity always and just measure, a singular ease and grace, patience, and science.

From Champagne came the gracious arrangement of planting slender columns and stilted arches at the entrance to radiating chapels. Champagne was the first to use the pier composed of twin columns, first to employ a pa.s.sageway round the church at the level of the aisle windows, and to place lancets side by side in each bay for the better lighting of the edifice. The region was conservative in clinging to certain Romanesque traits, such as apsidal chapels projecting from the eastern wall of the transept. It employed, as did Normandy and Burgundy, a circulation pa.s.sage under the clearstory windows. Champagne's influence spread far afield to Sens, Auxerre, St. Quentin, St. Denis, Metz, Toul, Ipres, Tournai, Avila, Leon, and York.[151]

Lest these pages should become overloaded, we can merely touch on the beautiful Champagne cathedral of Chalons-sur-Marne, an old city which is another treasure house of colored gla.s.s. The most interesting windows are in the small church of St. Alpin, whose apse celebrates the Eucharist, the souls in Purgatory, the Corpus Christi procession, lately mocked by the Calvinists. Its Manna in the Desert window is a symbol of the Eucharist. In St. Alpin are the most successful examples of that distinguished phase of vitrine art called _camaeu_--of cameo or chiaroscuro effect, using brown-gray hues, the yellow of silver-stain, a pale blue for the sky, and an occasional single touch of superb ruby red. One of the windows of Raphaelesque design represents St. Alpin, bishop of Chalons, meeting Attila the Hun; another, dated 1539, is a rendering of the Vision of Augustus, a theme most popular then.

Peter the Venerable called Chalons "great and ill.u.s.trious." Guillaume de Champeaux, one of the most learned men of the age, whose schoolroom was really the beginning of the University of Paris, was bishop of Chalons in 1115 when a young Burgundian named Bernard came to be consecrated abbot of Clairvaux. In the monk of twenty-five, unknown yet to fame, the great teacher was swift to recognize a supreme spiritual genius. In 1147 St. Bernard preached at the dedication of the Romanesque cathedral of Chalons before Pope Eugene III, who had been one of his own Cistercian monks at Clairvaux. The present tower to the north of the choir belonged to the church that Bernard knew. The south tower, its mate, is of the XIII century. The placing of belfries on either side of the choir was a Rhenish trait.

In 1230 Chalons Cathedral was wrecked by lightning. Its reconstruction began with the choir, under Bishop Pierre de Nemours, whose brothers were building-prelates at Noyon, Paris, and Meaux. In 1250 work on the nave was going on, and at the end of the century was built the transept's excellent north facade. The XVII century erected the unsuitable neo-cla.s.sic west frontispiece, yet at the same time, curiously enough, the two westernmost bays were constructed in perfect imitation of Apogec Gothic. It remains an open question whether the same Renaissance century made the apse chapels after a fire in 1668.

Some say they are of the XIV century, that the choir, as first built, had no ambulatory, but that one was added soon after, with radial chapels.

There is a n.o.ble purity in Chalons Cathedral, due in large part to its soaring monolithic piers. No church is richer in tombstones, and its stained gla.s.s is plenteous. In the eastern clearstory are three lovely silver and blue XIII-century windows; the north rose of the transept is early XIV century and the first window in the nave's south aisle is another good example of that period. The same aisle shows a brilliant XV-century light, ruby red in effect, and a window of 1509, wherein the Blessed Virgin's life is explained by quaint inscriptions. Some XII-century gla.s.s from Chalons Cathedral is in the Trocadero Museum at Paris.

Just as Champagne had proved herself a pioneer in the first days of the national art, so she distinguished herself in later times when Rayonnant Gothic turned to Flamboyant art. Among the few churches built during the transition between those two phases is the cathedral-like Notre-Dame-de-l'epine, in the fields a few miles from Chalons-sur-Marne, a link connecting St. Urbain at Troyes with the goodly array of Flamboyant buildings that sprang up in the ancient capital of Champagne.

The interior proportions of Notre-Dame-de-l'epine resemble those of Rheims Cathedral, and its rood screen recalls the _jube_ of the Madeleine church at Troyes.

But _revenons a nostro matiere_, as dear Joinville, seneschal of Champagne, would say. The reason for the wealth of architecture and its allied arts and crafts in the region of which Troyes is the center was because the ancient city, so unnoted in to-day's activities, lay on the mediaeval highway of commerce, and under its enterprising rulers became the scene bi-yearly of a fair to which all Europe flocked. To this day we use Troy weight. The counts of Champagne safeguarded the visiting merchants and fostered commerce by wise laws. Their money pa.s.sed in Rome and Venice as freely as in Provins and Troyes. Lavish and art-loving were the Champagne rulers; one of them founded Clairvaux in lower Champagne; another rebuilt the Cistercian church of Pontigny, just over the border in Burgundy. They were indefatigable crusaders, some of them winning thrones in the East. And their alliances constantly enriched their stock with new qualities, as when Count Henry the Magnificent wedded, in 1164, the daughter of Louis VII by Alienor of Aquitaine. That Countess Marie--the _suer comtessa_ to whom her half brother, Richard Coeur-de-Lion, addressed his famous prison song--made of her court of Champagne a school of good manners with all the ceremonial of the Midi's _cour d'amour_. What M. Gaston Paris calls poet-laureates' work, _poesie courtoise_, became the vogue, and the Countess Marie herself wrote in the troubadour manner. She encouraged the best of the XII-century poets, Crestien de Troyes (d. 1175), suggesting to him the romances of the Breton cycle, Lancelot, Tristan, and Percival.[152] Through Crestien the story of the Holy Grail spread over Europe. In him the trouveres new ideals of chivalry met the Midi's refined gallantry, and the Celtic themes which he versified brought what was needed of pa.s.sion and profundity.

All Europe then drew its poetic inspirations from the _matiere de France_, as France in her turn was enriching herself from the inexhaustible _matiere de Bretagne_. The XII-century French trouveres were imitated by the German Minnesingers, by the early songsters of England, Spain, and Portugal, and in Italy the precursors of Dante preferred the use of the Romance tongues of France. In the fecund hour wherein our modern civilization was conceived, France gave to the Western World her architecture, her sculpture, and her poetry. At the cathedral doors of Verona, Roland and Oliver were sculpted.

The international city of Troyes saw the creation of the Templars Order at her Council of 1128, whither had come Hugues de Payns, a knight related to the reigning counts. Taking part in the First Crusade, he proved himself a true _prud'homme_ in Palestine by forming a band of volunteer knights to escort unprotected pilgrims. At the Council of Troyes he won recognition for his monk-knights. St. Bernard championed them, drew up their rule, and gave them their white robe and red cross.

With the birth of the national art rose this great military Order and with its decline it was stricken down. When the l.u.s.t of gain replaced aspiration, men no longer went crusading or built cathedrals.

The ancient city of Troyes is not only a.s.sociated with epic poetry--"history before there are historians"--but is linked with the earliest two historians who wrote in the vernacular, Villehardouin and Joinville. "_Mes lengages est buens car en France fui nez_," boasted the Champagne poet, who tells us that G.o.d listened by preference to his speech, since he had made it lighter and better than any other, of more brevity, of n.o.bler amplitude. Villehardouin's record of the Fourth Crusade, the _Conquete de Constantinople_, possesses the same powerful simplicity as the greatest of all chansons-de-geste, _Roland_. He was born near Troyes, in whose convents lived two of his daughters and his two sisters, and to whose churches he left property.

Our good friend Joinville grew up in the cultivated court of the Countess Marie's grandson, Thibaut IV _le Chansonnier_, born in Troyes.

Thibaut's songs blended the courteous poetry of the troubadour tradition with the attic salt of his own most civilized Champagne. In his gallant company Joinville acquired his good manners and inimitable mode of expression.

The last countess of this land of gay singers and soldier-historians was Thibaut's granddaughter, Jeanne, who inspired Joinville to write his memoirs, helped to build Meaux Cathedral, and founded the College of Navarre where Gerson and Bossuet were to be trained. But, alas! the liberal young heiress of Champagne married the legist king of France, Phillipe le Bel, the executioner of the Templars. When he struck a blow at the international fairs of Champagne by persecuting Lombards and Jews, the great day for Troyes was over. When Jeanne d'Arc--born on the confines of Champagne--revived the nation's pride, the art traditions latent in the citizens of Troyes flowered once more with magnificence.

Only the slow acc.u.mulation of centuries could have produced the unemphatic beauty of the gracious St. Martha in Troyes' Flamboyant Gothic church of the Madeleine.

THE CATHEDRAL OF TOURS.[153]

A religion is the heart of a race; it expresses the emotions of a people and elevates them by giving them an aim: but, unless a G.o.d be visibly honored, religion does not exist, and human laws are powerless.... Thought, the fountain of all good and evil, cannot be trained, mastered, and directed except by religion, and the only possible religion is Christianity, which created the modern world and will preserve it.... France is being saved and lost perpetually. If she wants to be saved, indeed, let her go back to the laws of G.o.d.--HONORe DE BALZAC (1799-1850; born in Tours).

The cathedral of Tours does not startle. One is not carried away by it, at first. Its charm is that of the tranquil horizons of the Loire, _fleuve de lumiere, de vie doucement heureuse, partout de plein effets de lenteur, d'ordre_, so Rodin saw it. The beauty of Touraine increases with familiarity because it is touched with that measure, that justness of soul inherited from the cla.s.sic spirit, that has ever tempered, in the art manifestations of this nation, the sublime overimpa.s.sioned consistencies of the Celt and the lofty overexaggerated dreams of the Teuton.

The cathedral of Tours does not aspire to the impossible. It is a rather cold, high-bred church at one with its environment, the gracious garden of Touraine, a satisfying, discreet church and most intensely French.

While one rejoices that a Robert de Lusarches aspired to the Infinite at Amiens, one approves the architect of Tours who worked within human possibilities. The choir of the cathedral possesses both delicacy and force. Toward its erection Louis IX granted a quarry and some forest lands near Chinon. The choir must have been nearing its completion when in 1255 the king visited Tours, whose archbishop, Geoffrey de Martel, had lately died a crusader in Palestine.

During the fifty years prior to 1270 the cathedral was building. In 1269 the relics of St. Maurice and his companions from Thebes, who were martyred in Gaul under Diocletian, were transferred to the sanctuary.

Those early Christians were the tutelary saints of Tours Cathedral up to the XIV century. Then St. Gatien, the first to preach Christianity in this region, was chosen as patron. _La Gatienne_ the people call their chief church. The cult of the early missionary had been a favorite devotion of St. Martin, third and greatest bishop of Tours, who died as the IV century drew to a close.

Like Lyons, Tours has eminent ecclesiastical memories. The shrine of St.

Martin, the most popular saint of Gaul, made the city a frequented pilgrimage for Europe. Gregory of Tours, who ruled this see from 573 to 595, has described the richness of the Byzantine church that stood over the tomb of the great thaumaturge. Like most of the prelates who saved Latin civilization from the Barbarian's submersion, Bishop Gregory was of Gallo-Roman stock, of a senatorial family of Auvergne who boasted descent from an early Christian martyr of Gaul. In the present southwest tower of la Gatienne are traces of the VI-century cathedral built by this bishop-historian of Gaul, whose pages are a chief source for Merovingian times.[154]

The city of Tours always had two great monuments--the cathedral within the ramparts, the basilica of St. Martin outside the walls. St. Martin's abbey was the nation's intellectual leader when the Saxon scholar Alcuin became its abbot (796-804). He made of Tours a Christian Athens. They buried him in his abbatial, where four years earlier Charlemagne's wife, Luitgarde, had been laid. To-day only two towers stand of St. Martin's basilica--the Tour Charlemagne, begun by the Blessed Herve, abbot in 997, hence one of the oldest memorials of the rebirth of architecture a.s.sociated with the year 1000, and a former facade tower mainly of the XII century. One of the busiest streets of Tours runs up what once was the nave of the abbatial, but, not discouraged, the people of Touraine have erected a new Byzantinesque basilica of St. Martin on the site of the transept's southern arm. Those two tragic frenzies of forgetfulness, 1562, that scattered St. Martin's ashes--for which St. Eloi, bishop-goldsmith of Noyon, had made a priceless reliquary--and 1793, that laid in ruins his church in Tours and Marmoutier's Apogee Gothic abbatial that marked the rock-hewn cells where he had lived a hermit across the Loire, those two blind hours when men thought to erect barriers between themselves and their past, destroyed monuments which, did they exist still, would rank Tours, architecturally, among the first cities of Europe. St. Martin's church, built by Herve, became a _monument-type_,[155] copied by Ste. Foi, Congnes, St. Martial, Limoges, St. Sernin, Toulouse, and the cathedral at Santiago.

It is said that twenty centuries of human effort are represented by the stones of Tours Cathedral.[156] In the base of its facade towers are remains of the city's III-century walls, which had been constructed in their turn with the big stones stolen from the local Roman temples of 50 B.C. For sixteen centuries Ma.s.s has been said on this site. In the southwest tower are vestiges of Gregory of Tours' VI-century church, and in the northwest tower traces of the Romanesque cathedral on which worked the philosopher and theologian, Hildebert de Lavardin, the most popular poet of his age and one of the builders of Le Mans Cathedral before promoted to be Tours' sixty-fourth archbishop (1125-34). In refuting Berengar, a canon of Tours, who taught a confused doctrine concerning the Eucharist, Bishop Hildebert was the first to use the term "transubstantiation" in its theological sense. It is said that the custom of elevating the Host in the Ma.s.s resulted from the eucharistic controversies started by Berengar.

In 1167 a fire, caused by a quarrel over crusaders' treasure, between Louis VII and Henry II Plantagenet, destroyed the Romanesque cathedral of Tours. Bishop Joscion, who died in 1173, planned to construct a Plantagenet Gothic church, since Touraine was in large part under Angevin control, and to the church he began belongs the graceful _bombe_ vault borne on eight slender branches beneath the northwest tower. In 1191 Richard Coeur-de-Lion came to his city of Tours to receive the crusaders' insignia before his venture to the East. His ransom drained the land of building funds. For that cause or another, the projected work at Tours languished. The actual choir was begun only about 1210, when the city had become a part of the royal domain, and its new master Philippe-Auguste wrote that he held the church of Tours to be one of the chief jewels of his crown, and that whosoever molested it touched his (the king's) person.

We do not know who was the original architect of _la Gatienne_. etienne de Mortagne, who designed the Benedictine church at Marmoutier, is mentioned, in 1269, as master-of-works at the cathedral, but by that time its choir was completed. That choir, while making no pretense of being sublime, is a monument of n.o.ble robustness, displaying within and without the veriest genius of good taste. The vista closing the eastern end of the church is one of the most satisfactory in France, owing to its right proportion. In this, Tours derives directly from Amiens. Its pier arcade comprises one-third of the interior wall elevation; and the triforium and clearstory make up the other two-thirds--clearstory being double the height of triforium. At Tours the relation of span and height is admirable, and both are well correlated with length. Seen in perspective down the nave, the three stories of colored gla.s.s around the sanctuary are the supreme impression of this church interior, and seldom does one pa.s.s from its west portal without turning back for a lingering look at that harmonious chevet of consecrated light. Through the pier arches can be seen symmetrically the windows of the apse chapels. The design of the glazed triforium is excelled by no other in France; though serving as a kind of pedestal for the upper lights, it retains its own ent.i.ty.

When the choir of Tours was completed, the builders proceeded at once to erect the transept which, the stones themselves say, must have been finished as the XIII century closed. The nave's easternmost bays touching it belong to the first years of the next century, as do the two rose windows of the transept. The northern rose is irreproachable in design and of the same scintillating jewel tradition as XIII-century gla.s.s.

The Hundred Years' War, here as elsewhere, checked building activities.

When they were resumed at Tours, happily the first plans were adhered to, so that choir and nave are h.o.m.ogeneous. As the church advanced toward the west, the window tracery changed from Rayonnant to Flamboyant, the profiles grew prismatic, and the sculpture of the capitals became naturalistic rather than an architectural interpretation of foliage. The nave was made narrower than the choir, probably with the intention of joining it to the XII-century facade. Of the four triumphal piers at the transept-crossing, the two westernmost ones stand closer together than those flanking the choir, whose s.p.a.cious procession path causes the side aisles of the nave to appear meager.

What might seem an overreasonableness in the architecture of Tours metropolitan church is offset by the glory of its jeweled windows.

Between 1260 and 1270 the choir's upper lights were placed, and considering their date, they are exceptional in still being of the legend-medallions type rather than large single figures. Blue is set in greenish white with good effect, contrasting happily with certain contemporary windows at Paris, where the juxtaposition of blue and red produced melancholy purple. The joyous sparkling tone of Tours' lights proves a skillful use of pot-metal yellow. More care was taken to tell the legends plainly than to put borders round each medallion.

The gla.s.s of Tours belongs to the Paris school, though made, doubtless, by local workers. Were a floor laid below the triforium of the choir, its fifteen upper windows, composing a veritable pavilion of gla.s.s, would be almost a replica of the Sainte-Chapelle, and one recalls that it was Archbishop Odo of Tours who on April 25, 1248, dedicated for St.

Louis his new shrine at Paris. The donors of Tours' great windows were churchmen and laymen, the lowly and the mighty. Bishop Geoffrey de Loudon, builder of Le Mans' glorious choir, presented a light, as did Tours' own prelate and a group of parish priests. Small craftsmen were donors, drapers, and day laborers, and of course Queen Blanche's donjons of Castile are to be seen. Her window, devoted to St. James, the patron of Spain, is splendid in hue.

The fourth clearstory window on the north excels in color harmony. They call it the Adam window, after the first tiller of the soil. It was presented by plowmen, and relates their field labors as well as the story of Genesis. On one side of the central light of the clearstory is a dazzling Tree of Jesse, the gift of a furrier and his wife. Next to it is a window devoted to St. Martin, whose story is told again, in the late XIII-century gla.s.s of an apse chapel. More French churches have been dedicated to St. Martin than to any other patron save Notre Dame.

The windows of the sanctuary north of the axis chapel, though mixed in design, excel all others in exquisite color, being composed of fragments from St. Martin's abbatial reset here. The New Alliance window in the Lady chapel has medallions of Christ bearing His Cross and the Crucifixion accompanied by such symbols and prefigurings as Elisha resuscitating the child, Jonah issuing from the whale's jaws, the brazen serpent, and Moses striking the rock.

All the world was a symbol to the men of those Ages of Faith. The interlinked petals of the transept's northern rose meet in a symbol of the Divinity--a knot without beginning or end--the _forma universal_ visioned by Dante. There are Frenchmen who think that the splendid rose windows in their Gothic cathedrals suggested to the exile of Florence his conception of the empyrean. Heaven as Dante visioned it had neither roof of gold nor pillars of jasper, but was an expanded, supernal, white rose.

Once the nave of Tours Cathedral was filled with late-Gothic windows, but storms wrecked many of them. Some of its gla.s.s has been set in a line of lights beneath the transept's north rose, XV-century panels representing members of the Bourbon Vendome family, that was to mount the French throne with Henry IV. Jean Fouquet might have drawn them.

Under the XVI-century rose in the west facade is another row of windows containing good portraits of art patrons as munificent as the Bourbons--the Laval-Montmorency family. All over France we find them as donors of beautiful things.

The hour when Tours was an individual leader in art came during the late-Gothic development.[157] Then was finished the cathedral's nave, chapter house, library, cloister, and the psaltery with its pretty Renaissance stair. The cathedral canons, _Messires de la Gatienne_, sacrificed a forest for the nave's overroof. The elaborate Flamboyant facade was set up. Jean Papin was its architect, and Jean de Dammartin, fresh from Le Mans' transept, worked on it. It was begun under Archbishop Philippe de Coetquis (1427-41), one of the learned men whom Charles VII summoned to interrogate Jeanne d'Arc. He p.r.o.nounced her entirely sincere.