How France Built Her Cathedrals Part 23

CHAPTER VII

Plantagenet Gothic Architecture[174]

Il n'y a pas seulement deux principes opposes dans l'homme. Il y en a trois. Car il y a trois vies et trois ordres de facultes. Il y a trois especes de dispositions l'ame bien differentes: la premiere, celle de presque tous les hommes, consiste a vivre exclusivement dans le monde des phenomenes qu'on prend pour des realites. La deuxieme est celle des esprits les plus reflechis qui cherchent longtemps la verite en eux-memes ou dans la nature.... La troisieme enfin est celle des ames eclairees des lumieres de la religion, les seules vrai et immuables. Ceux-la seuls ont trouve un point d'appui fixe.--MAINE DE BIRAN (1766-1825; born in Perigord).

The Gothic of the southwest grew out of the meeting of the cupola church of Aquitaine with the intersecting ribbed vault of northern France. It rose and spread in a region then under Plantagenet rule, Anjou, Poitou, Maine, and Touraine. As the first known vault of the Angevin type was dated approximately 1150, and as the system died out about the middle of the XIII century, Plantagenet Gothic was but an incident of a hundred years in French architecture. However, it was a phase which produced monuments of such remarkable individuality and grace that the school deserves more notice than has. .h.i.therto been given it.

The dominant feature in Plantagenet Gothic is its cup-shaped vaulting.

The French term "_bombe_" is more exact than such expressions as "domical" and "domed." The panels of an Angevin vault do not form parts of a spherical dome. The keystone of each section is raised higher than the four arches framing the section. Similar vaults were built during the first trials of diagonals by other Gothic schools, in districts where there were no cupola churches to serve as models. They were the result of inexperience in constructing ribbed-groined vaults, and their _bombe_ shape disappeared as soon as architects learned to raise their transverse and wall arches, by stilting and pointing them, to the level of the keystone. While the so-called domical vault in other schools had been a transitional step, in Plantagenet Gothic it was intentionally persisted in and became the most distinguis.h.i.+ng characteristic of the school.

In principle and in construction, the Plantagenet school is truly Gothic. The cells are carried on the backs of diagonal ribs. The Angevin builders recognized at once the advantage of concentrating the thrust of the stone roof at fixed points and counterb.u.t.ting and grounding the load at those points only, so they followed close on the northern architects in adopting the new system. At the same time they felt that the cupola tradition in their region was not to be wholly set aside. M. Anthyme Saint-Paul well expressed it when he said that southwestern France "_s'est conduit en nation tributaire et non soumise_."

There can be little doubt that the presence in the Plantagenet territories of churches covered by a number of small cupolas encouraged a decided curve in the newly imported diagonals. It was not for nothing that near Angers and Saumur, the two cities where Angevin vaults were first constructed, lay the famous abbatial of Fontevrault, a masterpiece of the cupola school. Had not the arrival, midway in the XII century, of the northern French type of masonry roof checked the construction of such churches, it is probable that they would have extended farther north. From the meeting of the two schools developed the Plantagenet phase of Gothic.

Before proceeding to a description of the successive steps taken by Plantagenet architecture in its best-known examples at Angers, Saumur, and Poitiers, it is well to touch on the cupola churches of southwestern France, building for a century before the beginning of the regional Gothic school. M. de Lasteyrie has divided Romanesque architecture into some half dozen schools--those of Normandy, Burgundy, Auvergne, Poitou, the Midi, Champagne, and the scarcely enunciated Picardy Ile-de-France school. To these he added two isolated developments of short duration, one typified at Tournus, in Burgundy, where half barrels are placed transversely across a nave; and the other consisting of cupola-covered edifices which were building from Saintes to Fontevrault in the same hour as the Poitou-Romanesque churches surrounding them. For three generations the cupola haunted the imagination of southwestern France. The majority of them came into existence by hazard, as it were. They were not in the first plan of the church, but were built to replace other roofs, and in France they have been set on every kind of pedestal.[175] They were a variant of the barrel vault of the region preferred because less material was required.

How the cupola arrived in Aquitaine is still an open question. M. de Lasteyrie has belittled the explanation of an Oriental source, since the mode of construction in France differed from that of cupolas in the East. His idea is that the use of the cupola never died out from the earlier days in Gaul, and that the domed churches of France may be considered to be fairly indigenous. M. Enlart has contended that no matter how or when the use of the cupola got into France, its origin was undeniably Byzantine, since Rome took the feature from Byzantium. He has dwelt on the fact that it was while such churches were building in France, the men of western Europe were going on pilgrimages, on crusades, and on trading ventures into countries where the cupola was a common feature.

ST. FRONT AT PeRIGUEUX.[176]

Is it not better to dwell a little sadly far from the world, under the hand of G.o.d? The world gives but vain pleasures. You will be like others beguiled by it and hardened. You will hear many evil conversations, you will see many contemptible pus.h.i.+ng people with distinguished names, you will feel malignant envy, many will be the faults with which you will reproach yourself.... Nothing is good apart from Peace. Peace is the mark of G.o.d's finger. All that is not Peace is but illusion, and disturbing self-love.... Be simple and insignificant, and Peace will be your reward. It is only you yourself who can trouble your own Peace. It is in forgetting self that Peace comes.--FeNELON (1651-1715; born near Perigueux).

The most discussed of the cupola churches is St. Front at Perigueux. For a while it was considered a mother church of the school, but such well-constructed domes are a culmination, not a beginning. One of the oldest cupolas extant is that of St. Astier, near Perigueux, finished in 1018; there are two large domes over Cahors Cathedral, in which church Pope Calixtus II blessed an altar in 1119.[177] The two cupolas over Cahors' unaisled nave appear in the exterior view, but were not well enough constructed for their inner surfaces to be left uncovered by coats of plaster, whereas the interior masonry of St. Front is beautifully finished, proving that in point of time it was separated from St. Astier.

Long and heated have been the controversies over the date of the cathedral of Perigueux. As much s.p.a.ce has been devoted to the discussion as to the little Morienval in the Ile-de-France. At first it was taken to be the church begun before 1000 and dedicated in 1047. To-day no one dreams of saying it predates the fire of 1120. A few of the bays of the ancient church, burned in 1120 with much loss of life, were retained as parish rooms and now stand to the south of the present cathedral's facade. It is very evident that they never were intended to be incorporated in the new church.

Once it was thought that the actual St. Front, which is in the shape of a Greek cross, with a dome over each of its arms, copied St. Mark's at Venice. St. Mark's was modeled on the church of the Apostles at Constantinople, destroyed by Mohammed II in 1464. However, its domes were added only when the basilica was rebuilt, in 1063. And furthermore, there are indications at St. Front to show that the original design was to lengthen its nave by another bay, which would have changed the plan from a Greek cross to the universally used Latin cross.

The present St. Front was begun after 1120 and probably was completed by 1180, in which year a record says that Bishop Pierre de Mimet (1169-80) moved the ancient tombs into the basilica. During some modern repairs parchments were discovered in a scaffold hole thirty feet from the ground and closed only by a loose stone. The MSS. were in the Romance dialect of the XII century, and were abusive of Henry II of England, who besieged Perigueux in Bishop de Mimet's time. Such a hiding place for compromising papers might well have been thought of during the last stage of a building while yet the scaffolding stood in place.

St. Front's interior possesses a fine, plain solidity of its own, but its garish white walls cry out for mosaics or fresco. The cupolas rise above the big arcades without any vertical foundation members. Each is divided into a hemispherical dome and a drum having the shape of spherical triangles. So ma.s.sive are the square piers supporting the cupolas that narrow corridors have been threaded through them. Those dense piles of masonry saved St. Front when the Huguenots lighted bonfires at the base of the piers. St. etienne, formerly the cathedral of Perigueux, was devastated then, so that only two of its cupolas remain; the westernmost one is rougher, earlier work.

The restorer, Abadie, took deplorable liberties with St. Front, but it is an exaggeration to call it a modern church studied from a Romanesque original. Abadie from 1865 to 1875 reconstructed the great broad arches. .h.i.therto slightly pointed, and the actual sanctuary is entirely his work. Oriental and un-French as is the exterior of Perigueux Cathedral with its white domes, its neo-minarets, its immense tower each of whose stories is lesser in size than the one below it, and whose summit is a pavilion covered with the inverted tiles called pineapple scales, one has to accept the disconcerting fact that it was building in the same year with the cathedrals at Paris and Laon. Well has St. Front been called an archaeological monster defying the laws of that science.

THE CATHEDRAL OF ANGOULeME.[178]

If we wish to know all that is worthy of being imitated, we must make of legends a part of our studies and observations. The marvel of the lives of the saints is not their miracles, but their conduct.--JOUBERT, _Pensees_ (1754-1824; born in Perigord).

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Angouleme Cathedral. A XII-century Cupola Church of Aquitaine with a Typical Facade of Poitou's Romanesque School_]

The cathedral of Angouleme shares with St. Front and Fontevrault the distinction of being the finest cupola church in France. It is unsurpa.s.sed in the setting on the edge of the city's steep hill above the Charente valley. In ancient Angoumois, now the department of the Charente, are over five hundred XII-century Romanesque churches.[179]

Angouleme Cathedral was begun in 1109 by Bishop Gerard (1101-36), who had taught at Perigueux in the cathedral school and no doubt learned there to admire cupolas. His first dome at Angouleme--the easternmost one--is slightly later than the older cupola of St. etienne at Perigueux. Bishop Gerard had the moral courage to rebuke the sinful union of the troubadour-duke, Guillaume IX, and the fair Vicomtesse Malbergeon, whose portrait he wore on his s.h.i.+eld when he marched into battle. Guillaume informed Gerard that only when hair grew on his bald, prelate pate would he give up the lady of his affections. Gerard was papal legate in Gaul for Pascal II, Calixtus II, and the second Honorius, and was the prelate chosen, because of his eloquence, to be spokesman for the bishops who opposed Paschal II's compromise with the German emperor on the question of invest.i.tures. And yet this able man, because Innocent II had not renewed his dignities, joined the anti-pope faction and took with him Guillaume X of Aquitaine. Only the pa.s.sionate genius of St. Bernard was able to end the scandal.

The cathedral built at Angouleme by Bishop Gerard, like most of the churches of the southwest, lacks the charm of perspective, since it has neither curving processional path nor side aisle. A note of force is given to the interior by the strong projection of the b.u.t.tress piers, more salient within the church than without. Farther to the south, when the Gothic day had dawned, b.u.t.tresses were to be disguised as walls between the side chapels. The three cupolas that roof the nave--each covering a large square bay--are among the largest in France. The side walls are divided at mid-height: below is a huge blind arch, while above are two round-headed windows. Angouleme's hemispherical domes on pendentives were sufficiently well constructed to dispense with plaster coatings, an advance over Cahors Cathedral and St. etienne at Perigueux.

At the transept-crossing is an immense dome forming within the church a lantern lighted by a series of round-headed windows that open in its pedestal. The arrangement derives directly from the Orient and is rare in France. A very fine tower, whose stories lessen as they rise, covers the northern arm of the transept, and till the cathedral was sacked, during the XVI-century wars, a similar tower spanned the transept's southern limb.

Angouleme's elaborate XII-century facade is one of the noted pages of monumental decoration in France, a frontal more of ornate beauty than of power, in which M. Andre Michel finds the influence of old ivories. Tier on tier rise its carven scenes, with a Christ in Majesty crowning the whole. The XIX-century restorer, M. Paul Abadie, who worked such havoc at Perigueux, took equal liberties here. He made the upper story with its turrets topped by conical spires, and over-restored the princ.i.p.al sculptural groups. These pre-Gothic churches of southwest France obsessed his imagination, for when he came to design a church of his own he put up on the Mount of Martyrs in Paris a neo-Byzantine, neo-Gothic basilica most strangely reminiscent of Aquitaine as it stands in exotic isolation under the cold, northern sky.

Angouleme's west facade had not long been completed when under its portal pa.s.sed John Lackland to be married to the fourteen-year-old daughter of the Count of Angouleme, Isabella, already affianced to a Lusignan. Henry III of England, the builder of Westminster Abbey, was the fruit of that union. Twenty years later Isabella married the son of her discarded fiance, and her jealousy filled France with war. Jezebel, the people called her. She rests in effigy at Fontevrault, beside the tomb of her great father-in-law, Henry II, the first Plantagenet.

FONTEVRAULT ABBEY CHURCH.[181]

A trait peculiar to this epoch is the close resemblance between the manners of men and women.... Men had the right to dissolve in tears, and women that of talking without prudery. The women appear distinctly superior. They were more serious, more subtle. Richard Coeur-de-Lion, the crowned poet-artist, a king whose n.o.ble manners and refined mind, in spite of his cruelty, exercised so strong an impression on his age, was formed by the brilliant Alienor of Aquitaine. St. Louis was brought up exclusively by Blanche of Castile, and Joinville was the pupil of a widowed and regent mother.--GAREAU, _Social State of France During the Crusades_.

The art of the cupola church may be said to have culminated in the abbatial at Fontevrault on the confines of Anjou, Poitou, and Touraine, and practically the northernmost point to which attained the cupola development of Aquitaine. Undoubtedly it would have spread farther afield had it not been checked--even while Fontevrault was building--by the advent of ogival ribs which initiated a new manner of masonry roofing. In Fontevrault's bourg is a village church covered gracefully in the Plantagenet Gothic manner.

The untenable theory was advanced by a French architect that the cupola church was the egg out of which hatched the radical organ of Gothic architecture, that the first ribs were employed to stiffen a dome.[182]

No one to-day concedes this. Yet, though cupola monuments may not have affected French Gothic in general, they certainly exerted a local influence on the Gothic of the West. The hemispherical domes at Fontevrault were directly under the eye of the first architects of Plantagenet Gothic.

An abbess ruled over men at Fontevrault. Its founder, the Blessed Robert d'Arbrissel, had been impressed by the Saviour giving St. John into the spiritual guidance of the Virgin. So he organized a new Order comprised of four communities ruled by a woman: a main house for nuns and another for men; a hospital dedicated to St. Lazarus, and a house for repentant Magdalenes. Robert d'Arbrissel was a Breton, schooled in Paris, and noted for his eloquence, which so impressed Urban II, who heard him preach at the dedication of Angers' church of St. Nicolas, that he named him an apostolic missionary to spread the First Crusade.

Feeling need of spiritual renewal, Robert had retired for meditative peace to these forests when one day he was attacked by bandits. He yielded all he possessed on condition that they give him their souls to guide, and, having converted them, the name of their chief, Evrault, was given, it is said, to the congregation that gathered in cells about the holy man. Pious folk came and sinners, the rich and the poor, the halt and the hale, and the impetuous Robert called them one and all "the poor of Christ." "I never read of a hermit," said honest old Samuel Johnson, "but in imagination I kiss his feet; never of a monastery but I fall on my knees and kiss the pavement."

In 1106, Paschal II approved the Order and in Blessed Robert's lifetime some five thousand gathered at Fontevrault. Abbot Suger, who was a young student at that time near the new abbey, testified to the edification it gave. A sermon by the Blessed Robert converted the fair Bertrada de Montfort, who had quitted her ign.o.ble husband, Fulk IV of Anjou, to marry Philip I, king of France, which illegal union kept churchmen busy during sixteen years; she callously brought her second master to visit her first. The fight which Rome waged to preserve monogamy in western Christendom deserves the highest praise. Bertrada died the second abbess of Fontevrault. The historic names of France compose the list of abbesses. The young widow of the only son of Henry I of England retired here, after the loss of the White s.h.i.+p, and her father, Fulk V of Anjou, came to visit her as he quitted his career in Europe to take up his new role as king of Jerusalem. Margaret of Burgundy, the builder of Tonnerre's hospital hall, and second wife of Charles d'Anjou, St. Louis'

brother, was educated at Fontevrault by her aunt the abbess. About 1500 Abbess Renee de Bourbon built the Renaissance cloister. To-day the famous house serves as a state prison.

Fontevrault church played a part in the Gothic story. Its earliest cupola, over the transept-crossing, differs from those over the nave in that its base is not distinct from its dome. Angers copied it in its churches of St. Nicholas and St. Martin, and so did Saumur in St.

Pierre. When in 1119 Calixtus II dedicated Fontevrault, the church consisted of the present choir and the transept. During the first quarter of the XII century the aisleless nave was spanned by four cupolas on clearly defined pedestals. Perhaps from Angouleme Cathedral came the fas.h.i.+on of domes on pendentives, after some Fontevrault monks had gone on legal business, in 1117, to the capital of Angoumois.

The _abbaye-double_ was favored both by the Angevin rulers and their Poitevin neighbors, the dukes of Aquitaine. Henry II's father and mother, Geoffrey the Handsome of Anjou and the ex-empress Matilda of England, gave generously toward the building of the new church, and so did Alienor of Aquitaine's forbears of the ill.u.s.trious house of Poitiers; hence it was fitting they both, Henry and Alienor, should lie in burial there. When Henry Plantagenet died in 1189 in his castle at Chinon, which the old chronicler tells us rises steeply from the Vienne "straight up to heaven"--the Chinon whither Jeanne d'Arc was to come to give France a new soul--the dead monarch was carried to Fontevrault church near by, instead of to the Grammont he favored, the mother-house of a new Order founded by Stephen de Tierney in 1176. The archbishop of Tours came to Fontevrault to conduct the funeral, and Henry's rebellious son, Richard Coeur-de-Lion, stood by while they lowered into the tomb the great administrator who gave us the germs of our jury system, the man of the same unbridled pa.s.sions, the same strong leaders.h.i.+p in arms and statecraft, as his ancestor, Fulk Nerra, who had won this strip of middle France by sheer ability. And well Richard might feel serious, for the nine generations of increasing prosperity, promised to Fulk I of Anjou, ended with him.

In 1199 the Lion-hearted himself was brought to Fontevrault for burial; he had begged to be laid in penitence at the feet of the father he had defied, like the true Angevin he was. As his elder brother had said: "It has ever been the way with Plantagenets for brother to hate brother, and for son to turn against father." The ceremony for Richard in Fontevrault abbey church was conducted by St. Hugh from Lincoln, where he was raising a splendid Early-English cathedral. He had come to France to protest to Richard against further spoliation of his see. At this 'shrouding of a second Angevin among the shrouden women,' Alienor stood beside the nuns, and, the ceremony over, St. Hugh, so wise and holy amid such seething pa.s.sions, proceeded to comfort the widowed Berengaria.

Richard, like his father, was a cosmopolite. "_Miey hom e miey baron_, _Angles_, _Norman_, _Peytavin et Gascon_," he sang in his prison lay, and indeed one would be puzzled to know which of them were the countrymen of him whom Guizot called "the bravest, most inconsiderate, most pa.s.sionate, most ruffianly, most heroic adventurer of the Middle Ages."

In 1204 his equally turbulent, able, and seductive mother, Alienor, was buried at Fontevrault beside the husband against whom she had stirred up undutiful sons, and who in his last years had kept her shut away from further mischief. From 1122 to 1204 stretched her full life; queen of France for fifteen years, queen of England for fifty, a pernicious influence upon them both, but always a most sensible ruler for her own Aquitaine. She pa.s.sed her final years in peaceful Fontevrault, but her stormy destiny was to be troubled to the end. In 1204 her grandson, Arthur of Brittany, besieged her in a Midi castle where she was visiting, and when John Lackland heard of his mother's plight he came by forced marches to her relief and captured Arthur, who soon after was foully murdered. Alienor had seen the rise of Gothic at St. Denis, whose corner stone her French husband laid, and she lived to found churches of the gracious Plantagenet phase of the new art. But true daughter of the Midi that she was, an Aquitaine cupola church is her rightful funeral monument. In her, as in her own Midi of that age, culture and corruption were precocious.

The fourth of the famous Plantagenet tombs at Fontevrault which England has tried to get for Westminster Abbey, is that of Isabelle of Angouleme (d. 1247), the wife of John Lackland. And there once were two others, the tomb of Richard Coeur-de-Lion's favorite sister, Jeanne (d. 1199), who became the fourth wife of Raymond VI of Toulouse, and that of her son, Count Raymond VII (d. 1249), of the Albigensian wars--tombs swept away either by the Huguenots or during the Revolution. As the XIX century opened, the Plantagenet tombs lay forgotten in a cellar. When England became aware of their value they were s.h.i.+pped to Paris in 1846, to be taken across the Channel. Luckily, however, an Angevin, M. de Falloux, became minister on the declaration of the Second Republic, and the four precious mausoleums were returned to Fontevrault church.

Alienor was ninth in descent from that Duke of Aquitaine who had founded great Cluny itself. Her grandfather, Guillaume IX, the troubadour duke, was a benefactor of the newly established Fontevrault. When her father resigned his dominion in penitence, his will was that Alienor, his heiress, should wed the son of the king of France. So in Bordeaux Cathedral, in 1137, Alienor married the future Louis VII. No temperaments could have been more opposite. In 1249 she took the Crusader's cross from St. Bernard, at Vezelay--where the monks were building their glorious basilica. At Constantinople her troublous beauty roused admiration, and scandal at Antioch, where the ruler was her own handsome young uncle, Raymond of Poitiers.[183] Her union with Louis became an irksome bond and she clamored for its dissolution on the ground of consanguinity. The flouted French king was only too happy to be rid of her, but Abbot Suger, foreseeing all too clearly the national calamity that would be precipitated should Alienor's great domains pa.s.s to a rival of France, held together the mismatched pair. When he died, in 1152, headstrong Alienor broke loose, and as she rode away from the court of France the great lords came out to woo her--one of them even tried to kidnap her. Because she craved a strong arm to revenge herself on her first husband, she chose as consort young Henry Plantagenet, Count of Anjou and Maine, and Duke of Normandy; she was thirty, Henry not yet twenty. Thus began the long Capet-Angevin duel, not to be fought out to a finish until 1452, when all that Henry II had possessed on the Continent and all of Alienor's wide domain were in the hands of the king of France. It needed a St. Jeanne to atone for the very unsaintly Alienor.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _The Plantagenet Tombs at Fontevrault_]

From this unscrupulous, mischief-making, virile, and capable queen of the XII century sprang a vigorous brood of men and women, pa.s.sionate in both good and evil, and most of them enlightened art patrons, builders of churches, and writers of verses. Coeur-de-Lion was a troubadour.

John Lackland's son built Westminster Abbey. Alienor's daughter, the queen of Castile, had an Angevin architect help in the building of Las Huelgas, by Burgos. Her daughter of Champagne set the trouveres singing of Lancelot, Tristan, and Iseult. Another Eleanor of her lineage had her funeral journey marked by sculptured crosses from Lincolns.h.i.+re to Charing Cross. It was given Alienor to make some atonement for the evil she brought on France in her youth; at eighty years of age she went into Spain to bring back her granddaughter, Blanche of Castile, as bride for the grandson of the discarded Louis VII, and Blanche gave France the saint-king who illuminated his realm with fair churches. Another of Alienor's great-grandsons was a saint-king, Ferdinand, the conqueror of Seville, who founded many a church. Even as the cruelty and craft of John Lackland cropped out in Charles d'Anjou, whom the Sicilian Vespers punished, so the culture and inconsistency of Coeur-de-Lion appeared again in his nephew of Champagne, Thibaut IV, the maker of songs. From Alienor descended Bishop Eudes de Sully, who built the western portals of Notre Dame at Paris, and Henry de Sully, who had the plans drawn for Bourges Cathedral. Herself an outstanding figure in the early day of Gothic art, and ancestress of enlightened builders, much can be forgiven Alienor. All of which brings us back to the starting point of our chapter, the formation of the Plantagenet Gothic school of architecture.

PLANTAGENET GOTHIC

The XII and XIII centuries were a period when men were at their strongest; never before or since have they shown equal energy in such varied directions or such intelligence in the direction of their energy; yet these marvels of history--these Plantagenets; these scholastic philosophers; these architects of Rheims and Amiens; these Innocents and Robin Hoods and Marco Polos; these crusaders who planted their enormous fortresses all over the Levant; these monks who made the wastes and barrens yield harvests--all, without apparent exception, bowed down before the woman. The woman might be the good or the evil spirit, but she was always the stronger force.--HENRY ADAMS.