How France Built Her Cathedrals Part 24

There have been various divisions of this school, and it is always well to bear in mind that such cut-and-dried cla.s.sifications are arbitrary and made use of merely for the greater ease of the student. By dividing Plantagenet work into three periods--preceded by a brief incubation hour, the twenty years before 1150--it is easier to follow the evolving steps of this brilliant phase of the builder's art.

During the short introductory stage before 1150 the cupola had the upper hand and imposed its construction on the intersecting ribs just imported from the north. The earliest _bombe_ vaults with ribs are really cupolas still, since the stones of their infilling were laid in concentric rings round and round. Only a small number of these ribbed cupolas were built.

Then in the first phase of Plantagenet Gothic appeared the ascendency of ribbed vault over cupola. The dome was lowered and the stones of the infilling were laid like those of a true Gothic vault, not horizontally, round and round, but vertically, with the courses running parallel with the ridges of the triangular compartments traced by the diagonals. Each of the four triangular cells was concave in both directions, with a groin defining its axial line. Hence eight panels, not four, composed the _bombe_ vault, groin ridges alternating with ribs.

Such groin lines called for strengthening ribs beneath them, since a curving surface has more need of a bone skeleton to stiffen it. Given the _bombe_ shape, it was inevitable for the architect to arrive soon at the use of ridge ribs between the diagonals. The Plantagenet vault _par excellence_ is made up of eight ribs that branch from a central keystone, those ribs being of the same slight graceful profile as the arches framing each vault section.

For a time the rib molds of the First Period were enormously heavy and wide, like the diagonals of the nave of Angers Cathedral--the oldest Angevin Gothic work extant (c. 1150). Their profile shows two large round molds with a flat s.p.a.ce between. Before long the level s.p.a.ce tended to swell into a roll molding, which in time predominated over the lateral ones; such are the diagonals of the Trinite church at Angers (c. 1170). Finally, the side rolls died out altogether, leaving one slender uniform torus, a characteristic of the Second Period of Plantagenet art.

When the lateral and transverse arches adopted the same delicate profile as that of the eight branching ribs, there was achieved the slender elegance and rare distinction typical of the best Plantagenet interiors.

Keystones were richly carved, and pretty figures and heads were added where the vault ribs met the framing arches. During the last quarter of the XII century the Plantagenet school was building vaults of this type, and they remained in vogue till the cuplike shape died out altogether.

In Plantagenet art the ramification and intercrossing of ribs had a structural reason, since they were the logical result of the concave outline of the vault and not, like the supplementary ribs of Flamboyant Gothic, mere ornamentations.

In the third and final period of Plantagenet Gothic, the ribs ramified more and more. They had first been increased about the windows of apses, because an eight-branch vault was better suited to a square than to a curve. During the years preceding 1250, the ramification of the ribs grew very complicated. All divisions between the vault sections were eliminated, and the masonry roof appeared to be continuous, one bay melting subtly into the next--in reality a cradle vault, _a penetrations_, carried on intercrossing, branching Gothic ribs. The construction of such stone roofs was no easy matter and comparatively few of them were built.

It is interesting to note that a germ of the Angevin school when carried to England, then under the same Plantagenet rule, developed into what is a unique architectural glory, English fan tracery vaulting.

Most of the monuments of Angevin art fall under the three main divisions here given. Like a beautiful hybrid, the Plantagenet stone roof pa.s.sed through a continuous series of transformations, while in northern France, once a satisfactory masonry vault had been achieved, it was adhered to faithfully as a cla.s.sic type until the Flamboyant, or final, phase.

Frequently a Plantagenet church is extremely plain outside, in striking contrast with the aerial grace of its interior. The cause is a structural one, hence satisfactory. The thrust of a _bombe_ vault is not altogether concentrated on branching ribs, piers, and b.u.t.tresses, but in part is borne by the inclosure walls. Hence these latter were made thick and pierced merely by lancet windows; with such walls there was no need of flying b.u.t.tresses. When the piers were somewhat relieved of the roof load by the thick walls, they could be made exceedingly slender. There is an effect of gracious winsomeness in certain Plantagenet churches, to be described only by such words as "fairylike" and "Saracenic." The transient perfect moment of the art of northern France was seized and rendered by the curving transept at Soissons, an ideal vision of the Beyond. In southwestern France the first, fine, careless rapture nothing can recapture is to be found in St. Serge at Angers, of lesser genius than Soissons, but, like it, possessed of an enthrallment that is enduring.

THE CATHEDRAL OF ANGERS.[184]

A mon avis, ceux qui n'ont pas au moins le tourment religieux ignorent la moitie de la vie, et la plus belle, la moitie de la pitie. Un esprit est bien incomplet s'il ne s'eleve pas jusqu'a sa destinee, et un coeur est bien faible s'il n'a que des motifs humains d'agir, de se contraindre, et de se donner ou de pardonner.--RENe BAZIN (born in Angers, 1850).

No city in southwestern France is a more satisfactory center for a comparative study of Plantagenet Gothic than Angers--the old Black Angers of history, which owed its importance not to any pre-eminence of site, but to the powerful line whose cradle land it was.

Each phase of the regional school of Gothic can be found in Angers. In the tower of St. Aubin, a vestige of an ancient abbey named after a VI-century bishop of the city, is a ribbed cupola, typical of the incubating period of the school.[185] It is more a cupola than a Gothic vault. The stones are laid horizontally in concentric rings, and the ribs are more decorative than structural, being in part embedded in the infilling. The abbot who erected it ruled from 1127 to 1154.

The First Period of the Gothic of Anjou is represented at Angers by a masterpiece of elemental force--the nave of the cathedral. Three huge so-called domical vaults, truly Gothic in construction, span the sixty-foot unaisled nave of St. Maurice. The stones are laid parallel with the groin line of each triangular panel between the intersecting ribs. Those diagonals are needlessly heavy, for the builders were still experimenting. The crown of each vault section is ten feet higher than the framing arches--wall arch and transverse arch. The exceptional span of Angers' three ma.s.sive vaults is due to a reconstruction of the nave undertaken in the XII century, at which time the side aisles of the Romanesque cathedral were eliminated and the entire width of the edifice thrown into an un.o.bstructed hall.

Mr. John Bilson, the eminent English archaeologist, belittles the influence of the cupola church in Angevin Gothic, the shape of whose vaults he attributes to a structural cause. He thinks that the extreme width of Angers' nave made it essential to raise the keystone above the crowns of transverse and wall arches in order to prevent its settling.

The diagonals were made more obtuse than the equilateral framing arches lest they might tower too high. Given the form adopted for the arches, the _bombe_ vault web resulted inevitably. Arch curves determine the forms of a vault. None the less is M. Berthele's account of the Plantagenet school sound both ethnically and aesthetically. The Angevin architect chose to persist in the use of _bombe_ vaults over narrow spans where there was no structural need to raise the keystone.

A succession of cathedrals had stood on the site of Angers' actual church. To that of the IV century, St. Martin, Gaul's apostle, presented relics of St. Maurice and his legion of Theban soldiers. A Merovingian cathedral mentioned by Gregory of Tours was succeeded by a Carolingian basilica, and after the year 1000 the chief church of Angers was rebuilt several times as Romanesque. A dedication occurred in 1030. In 1032 the cathedral was wiped out by a fire caused by that remarkable personage, Fulk Nerra, the Black Falcon, who raised Anjou from an insignificant under-fief to be one of the chief powers in France.[186] To atone for his feudal excesses, Fulk built many shrines and made many pilgrimages; in Palestine, with the same melodramatic instinct for the picturesque which his descendant, Coeur-de-Lion, was to display, he walked barefooted in the streets of Jerusalem, flagellated by his own servitors, as he lamented, "Lord be merciful to a perjured, unfaithful Christian wandering far from his native land."

All over Anjou, and in Touraine, Fulk III put up abbey churches and castles; "the great builder," he was called. One day, from his castle on the rock of Angers, his falcon eyes saw a dove fluttering over a certain spot beyond the river, and there he founded the abbey of St. Nicholas in 1020, and his wife at that period (he had a succession of wives, one of whom he is said to have killed) founded a nunnery close by to which was once attached the church of the Trinite. In the XVI century St. Nicholas was called Ronceray, because a bramble-rose insisted on pus.h.i.+ng its way up through the choir's pavement.[187] A superman was Fulk the Black, highly dowered intellectually, with enormous capacity for organization, but of shameless wickedness, calculating, subtle, unscrupulous as to the means by which he pursued his designs, and of demoniac temper--marked traits in his race from generation to generation.

Vestiges of the cathedral of Angers which rose after the fire of 1032, and in which Urban II preached the First Crusade, are in the actual nave, built by Bishop Ulger[188] (1125-49). He taught in the cathedral school, which school was the nucleus of the present University of Angers. His successor, Bishop Normand de Doue (1149-53), at his own expense, subst.i.tuted for the timber roof of the new nave its ma.s.sive Angevin vaults. When we recall that only fifteen years earlier Abbot Suger, who started Gothic architecture on its triumphal career, was building the heavy diagonals to be seen in the antechurch at St. Denis, we can understand what pioneers were the builders of southwest France in the use of the cardinal organ of the new system.

Angers Cathedral continued building during the final years of the XII century, under Bishop Raoul de Beaumont (1177-97), who erected the southern arm of the transept and added a short choir; the city walls at that period prevented the farther extension of the apse. Along the west facade, the same prelate built a s.p.a.cious porch, twenty-five feet deep, which stood till 1806, when, in spite of episcopal protest, the civic authorities tore it down rather than trouble to repair it. Sorely does the western entrance need that softening portico. Angers' portal images are of the same archaic column-statue type as those at Chartres' western doors, and here, too, in the tympanum is a Byzantine Christ in an elliptical aureole, surrounded by the symbols of the evangelists. Bishop Raoul de Beaumont came of one of the ill.u.s.trious races of crusaders, statesmen, and prelates, the _ancienne chevalerie_ in which France was so prolific for centuries. A XIII-century Beaumont, marshal of France, stood by Joinville in voting against the knight's return to Europe until they had redeemed their servitors from captivity; a XIV-century Beaumont was instrumental in giving Dauphiny to France; a Beaumont in the XVIII century was the archbishop of Paris, who warned the nation that if it de-Christianized itself it would be denationalized. Bishop Raoul's nephew, Guillaume de Beaumont, became bishop of Angers, and in 1236 donated land from his garden for the erection of the northern arm of the transept. Eight-branch Plantagenet vault sections cover transept and choir.

The choir of Angers Cathedral was extended after 1274, when permission was obtained from St. Louis' brother, Charles d'Anjou, to demolish part of the city ramparts. Heavy b.u.t.tresses mark the junction of the old part and the new. By the extension of the eastern limb the church became a bold Latin cross. Secluded nooks in dim religious corners are not to be found in these unaisled churches of southwestern France. In them is no curving procession path, no picturesque perspective effects. Though they possess their own quiet n.o.bility, seldom does their grave reverence rise to sublimity. The exterior of Angers Cathedral was made equally simple, without radiating apse chapels or flying b.u.t.tresses.

The cathedral's nave boasts some windows which were donated before 1180 by a generous canon. Borders of the St. Denis gla.s.s were repeated in them. The third window (north), which has an inimitable deep blue background and a wide border, relates St. Catherine's life; the fourth portrays, the Burial of the Virgin; and the fifth is devoted to St.

Vincent. Probably local workers allied with the St. Denis school made these lights. In the nave's southern wall is a good Renaissance lancet, transferred here from a ruined chateau. When the choir was completed, its windows were filled with gla.s.s of the Paris school a century later than the nave's windows. The transept roses are Flamboyant Gothic.

Angers Cathedral tops a high hill, so that its towers are landmarks, visible for thirty miles around. Its west facade has been so reconstructed that it now presents the ungainly proportions of the church fronts in Hanover and Brunswick. After a fire, in 1516, when the towers were renewed, stone spires were added by the well-known Flamboyant Gothic master, Rouland Le Roux, who elaborated the frontispiece of Rouen Cathedral. Then, in 1533, a third tower was built between the original two. One of its walls rested on the west facade, but the other three have mere arches for foundations, so that the tower hangs in s.p.a.ce, as it were, the kind of feat applauded by the tourist guide, but which the true lover of structural sincerity can dispense with. Jean de l'Espine, a local master of whom Angers is proud, designed the curious central tower, and two sculptors who had worked on groups at Solesmes made the facades eight warrior images which have been restored.

Scarcely was Angers Cathedral newly dressed when came the tragic year 1562, to wreck the gathered treasures of generations. The Huguenots broke into the transept from the bishop's garden--and ever since that door has been walled up in disgrace. For a fortnight they intrenched themselves in the church, looting its treasures, destroying tombs and images. More than a hundred splendid tombs lined the walls of the church. The neo-cla.s.sic canons of the XVII and XVIII centuries lost so entirely the comprehension of the national art that they sent priceless bronze tombs to the smelting pot, even that of Bishop Raoul de Beaumont, the builder. A silver-gilt altar given by Bishop Normand de Doue who spanned the nave with its vaults of magnificent proportions, was sold, as was another altar, the gift of Bishop Guillaume de Beaumont, and with the proceeds was erected the pseudo-cla.s.sic baldaquin over the high altar. They did away with the lower panels of the precious XII-century windows in order that a new metal bal.u.s.trade might show to better effect. In a final attack of _bon got_, those worthy canons proceeded to whitewash the entire inside of the cathedral, including the tombs and statues. The Revolution broke up the elaborate funereal monument of good King Rene, on which several generations had worked; Jacques Morel, who sculptured the Souvigny sarcophagus, was putting final touches to it when he died in Angers in 1453. For years after 1793 its chiseled stones were used by the city's masons to adorn chimney pieces in civilians'

houses.

Anjou, after returning to the French crown in the XIV century, was again given as an appanage to a king's son, to Louis,[189] son of Jean le Bon, and brother of those art-loving Valois princes, Charles V and the Dukes of Berry and Burgundy. Louis I d'Anjou had made for his palace chapel at Angers, in 1378, some tapestries telling the Apocalypse wonders. His grandson, good King Rene, presented them to the cathedral, where first they were hung for a visit of Louis XI. In the days when the cathedral walls were being whitewashed those one hundred and fifty yards of textile art, made by Parisian weavers after Flemish models--and the oldest-dated tapestries extant--were put up for sale, but, not finding a purchaser, were used to cover greenhouses and to line stables. When in 1843 the bishop of Angers was able to rescue a hundred yards of the Apocalypse, he was mocked for his taste for rubbish. Three hundred francs was all he paid for over sixty sections of the embroidery, and when one section was recently loaned to the exhibition at Ghent it was insured for forty thousand dollars.

Louis II d'Anjou married Yolande of Aragon, a statesman-like woman of sound character and good taste, and together they built the pavilion that stands within the fortress inclosure, and the chapel adjoining it (finished in 1411), whose _bombe_ vaults are carried on ribs of prismatic profile. Yolande's two sons, Charles and Rene, ruled Anjou.

The claims of Louis XI to the duchy caused his uncle, King Rene, to spend his latter years in Provence, but never did he forget his birthplace, and to Angers Cathedral he sent the green marble Roman bath mounted on lions, now used as a holy-water font. Rene wrote poems and plays, composed church music, painted and illuminated, and throughout a long life of misfortunes proved himself a loyal knight and Christian philosopher. Shortly after his death Anjou returned to the French crown.

The ramparts within whose somber walls was the palace[190] of the counts and dukes of Anjou's three lines of rulers, was constructed by St.

Louis, from 1228 to 1238, though begun by his grandfather, Philippe-Auguste. For the precincts of his huge fortress St. Louis was compelled to take lands from the congregation of Toussaint. With the compensation money the religious rebuilt their church and roofed it with a Plantagenet Gothic vault of the elaborate final phase of the regional school. The interlocking ribs had three lines of keystones, like the vault of Airvault (Deux-Sevres).

Toussaint had been founded in the XI century by a pious canon, as a refuge for the poor and stricken, and the duty of its clergy was to visit the sick and bury the dead. That every forlorn soul might feel under the protection of his own chosen patron saint, the name All Saints was chosen. The Revolution suppressed the asylum of charity and in 1815 Prussian cavalry were stabled in the neglected church. The roofless nave now serves as an archaeological museum. The vaults of the choir were made early in the XVIII century on the same model as the nave's XIII-century Plantagenet roof.

The fortress built by St. Louis on the Toussaint property was saved from demolition by the seneschal of Anjou, who, when Henry III's orders came to destroy the ramparts, had the tact to proceed in so leisurely a fas.h.i.+on that after seven years, when he was able to get the order revoked, little more was destroyed than the upper stories of the towers.

A kneeling image of that truly patriotic seneschal, Donadieu de Puycharic, is now in the museum installed in the XII-century hospital of St. Jean.

That hospital of St. Jean was begun by another enlightened seneschal of Anjou, but before long (c. 1180) Henry Plantagenet undertook to finish and endow it, some say to expiate the a.s.sa.s.sination of St. Thomas Becket. The oldest parts of St. John's establishment are the granary and the north and east corridors of the cloister; the latter's south gallery was built (1538) by Angers' local architect, Jean de l'Espine. The hospital hall was undertaken between 1174 and 1188, and at first was roofed in wood.

Shortly after 1200 the Knights of St. John Hospitalier of Jerusalem were put in charge of Angers hospital, and governed it till 1232. During their occupancy the hall was covered by its twenty-four small cuplike sections, each of which is carried on four slender ribs. The effect of the three aisles of little _bombe_ vaults is alluring. The slender torus usually distinguished the eight-branch Plantagenet type, and its use here for simple diagonals is an exception. The chapel attached to the hospital was also built in two campaigns; over part of it was employed the eight-rib vault, while portions were roofed in the more complicated Plantagenet way.

The singular grace of St. Jean's hospital hall, with its slender columns and multiple little _coupoliformes_ vaults, inspired the small choir of St. Serge, which many hold to be the most exquisite example of Plantagenet Gothic. The church[191] once formed part of an ancient Benedictine monastery named for the pope, who had inst.i.tuted the triple chanting of the _Agnus Dei_ in the Ma.s.s. Hitherto the Angevin masonry roof had been applied to churches without side aisles. The ground plan of the cupola church had been adhered to. The Plantagenet architects now began to copy another regional model, Poitou's Romanesque church, whose side aisles were almost as high as the princ.i.p.al span they b.u.t.tressed; hence the light came entirely from the lateral corridors. One roof covered all.

Poitiers Cathedral was among the first to use Poitou's pre-Gothic plan in Plantagenet architecture. The choir of St. Serge developed the same idea in its own small, gracious way. No doubt the harmonious effect obtained in St. John's hospital by the three aisles of _bombe_ vaults inspired the architect of St. Serge, who built his choir, from 1220 to 1225. Six fragile-looking columns, thirty feet in height, support with ease the twelve little Plantagenet vaults, which are of the eight-branch type, with elaborate keystones, and minute figures at the intersection of the ribs and the framing arches. At the choir's square eastern end the ribs ramify considerably around the windows. It is impossible to say wherein lies the witchery of this small monument--all elegance and lightness. Some call it Saracenic because of its exotic loveliness. Its science of construction is perfect. Certainly some individual genius designed it.

SAUMUR[192]

L'ancienne Grand' Rue de Saumur ... la rue montueuse qui mene au chateau, obscure en quelques endroits, remarquable par la sonorite de son pet.i.t pave caillouteux, toujours propre et sec ... la paix de ses maisons impenetrables, noirs, et silencieuses--l'histoire de France est la, tout entiere.--BALZAC, _Eugenie Grandet_ (whose scene is Saumur).

Close by Angers lies Saumur on the Loire, "well-loved, well-set city."

It comprises, with its environs, another center for the study of Plantagenet Gothic. The town is topped by its castle, now in main part of the XIV century. In its former great hall, built by Henry Plantagenet, took place, in 1241, that celebrated fete called the _Non-Pareille_ which Joinville has described. His memory of it was so fresh, after sixty years, that he could tell the color of Louis IX's robe and surcoat; perhaps it was the first time that Joinville saw the saint-king who was to become his closest friend. He was not yet twenty when he accompanied his suzerain of Champagne, Thibaut IV, the maker of songs, to the feast held in Saumur chateau for the knighting of Alphonse of Poitiers, the king's brother.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _The Plantagenet Gothic Choir of St. Serge at Angers (1220-1225)_]

The bodyguard of St. Louis were a Bourbon, a Coucy, and a Beaujeu, behind whom stood ranged a host of barons and knights in silk and cloth of gold. The future king of Portugal and a prince from Thuringia, the son of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, waited on the table of the queen-mother, Blanche of Castile, who, when she heard the name of the princeling from beyond the Rhine, called him to her side and placed a kiss upon his brow, since there, she said, his saintly mother must often have blessed him. Jealous pa.s.sions, too, burned behind the glitter and show. Isabelle of Angouleme, the widow of John Lackland, married now to a Lusignan who had to render homage to his new suzerain, cried out, imperiously, "Am I a waiting woman that I should stand while they sit at ease?" and she proceeded to stir up war.

Below the castle of Saumur lies the XII-century unaisled church of St.

Pierre, whose masonry roof belongs to different phases of Angevin Gothic. Over the transept-crossing is a ribbed cupola without distinct pedestal, inspired evidently by the small unribbed cupola of Fontevrault's crossing. The stones are laid in horizontal concentric courses like a true dome. Though archaic in structure, St. Pierre's _croisee_ is of skilled execution. It belongs to the last third of the XII century.

Over the choir and transept are the heavy diagonals of the First Period of the Plantagenet development, and the nave's vault sections are carried on the eight branches of the Second Period. Powerful transverse arches separate the wide, square bays, and against the inclosure walls are other strong arches beneath the windows. The walls of St. Pierre's choir are not parallel, but draw closer together at the eastern end, for undoubtedly there was much intentional asymmetry in mediaeval monuments.

The Flamboyant day gave to St. Pierre its well-carved choir stalls and some exquisitely toned Flemish tapestries executed by local weavers.

Other superb tapestries adorn Notre Dame-de-Nantilly, a church patronized by Louis XI, who added to it the south aisle and a Flamboyant oratory. The body of the edifice belongs to the first half of the XII century; its barrel vault is braced by slightly pointed transverse arches. At the transept-crossing is a ribbed cupola, without distinct pedestal, like that of St. Pierre. Against the fourth pier, to the south, is the epitaph which good King Rene himself composed and set up because of his affection for his old nurse, Dame Tiphaine, for whose soul he begs a paternoster of all who pa.s.s by. Against the fifth pier is the Limousin enamel crozier of the archbishop of Tyr, keeper of the seal for St. Louis, who was buried here in his native city in 1266.

Behind the Gothic Town Hall is the now unused chapel of St. Jean, a small example of the Third Period of Angevin architecture, when ribs branched considerably; in the square chevet they ramify to the number of twenty.

A mile down the river lies what is left of St. Florent-les-Saumur[193]

re-established by Fulk Nerra when he conquered Saumur in 1026. Its narthex, now the chapel of a nuns' community, shows one of the earliest uses of the Plantagenet vault of eight branches (1170-1200). At St.

Florent was living the daughter of the exiled poet-duke of Orleans, with her young husband, the Duke of Alencon, when one day in 1429 word came that at Chinon, near by, where Charles VII was staying, had arrived an inspired maid, and young d'Alencon, soon to be Jeanne d'Arc's lieutenant--her _gentil duc_--galloped along the banks of the Loire to see the wonder. So delighted was he with Jeanne's management of spear and horse that he presented her with a palfrey, and she came to St.