CHAPTER I

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How France Built Her Cathedrals

[Illustration]

[Illustration: _Soissons Cathedral. The Transept's Southern Arm_ (_c.

1180_)]

How France Built

Her Cathedrals

A Study in the Twelfth

and Thirteenth Centuries

_By_

ELIZABETH BOYLE O'REILLY

Honorary Member of the _Société Française d'Archéologie_

_Author of_ "Heroic Spain" Etc.

_Illustrated With Drawings By_

A. PAUL DE LESLIE

[Illustration: colophon]

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS

NEW YORK AND LONDON

HOW FRANCE BUILT HER CATHEDRALS

Copyright, 1921, by Harper & Brothers

Printed in the United States of America

A-W

Contents

CHAP. PAGE

INTRODUCTION 1

I. WHAT IS GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE? 16

Gothic architecture the logical fulfillment of Romanesque--Origin of

Romanesque architecture--Romanesque basilicas modified by the

liturgy--Horrors of the IX and X centuries in France--Rebirth of the

builders' energy after the year 1000--Cluny, the civilizing force of the

X and XI centuries--Various regional Romanesque schools of

France--Normandy, Burgundy, Auvergne, Poitou, Languedoc, Provence, and

the Franco-Picard school--Birth of Gothic art--An undecided question

where the first diagonal-crossing ribs were used--Germany's and Italy's

claims--Claim of England--The Ile-de-France Picard region, the classic

land of Gothic--Gothic architecture not a layman's revolt against

monkish Romanesque--The architects of the Gothic cathedrals--No

heretical tendencies in Gothic sculpture--Origin of the term

Gothic--XVII- and XVIII-century scorn for Gothic architecture--Modern

French school of mediæval archæology.

II. ABBOT SUGER AND ST. DENIS-EN-FRANCE 43

Evolution from Romanesque to Gothic--St. Denis' abbatial, the first

important Gothic monument--Some early-Gothic churches in the

Ile-de-France--Morienval, the first Gothic-vaulted ambulatory extant (c.

1122)--Church of St. Étienne, at Beauvais (c. 1120)--St. Germer-en-Flay

built from 1150 to 1175, yet less advanced than St. Denis--Poissy's

church of St. Louis (c. 1135)--How Abbot Suger built his abbey church at

St. Denis--St. Denis' school of glassmaking, the leader for fifty

years--Dedication of St. Denis on June 11, 1144, consecrated the

national art--Who Suger was and how St. Bernard converted him--What is

left of the abbey church which Suger built--Reconstruction of St. Denis

by St. Louis, 1231 to 1280--Pierre de Montereau, its architect--Tombs in

St. Denis' abbatial--Deviation of the axis not symbolic--Some happenings

in St. Denis during the XII and XIII centuries--Charles Péguy's verses,

linking St. Denis, St. Geneviève, and Jeanne d'Arc.

III. PRIMARY GOTHIC CATHEDRALS 74

Cathedral of Noyon, first built of Gothic cathedrals (c. 1150)--Noyon's

communal charter, the first of known date, 1109--Cathedral's nave, a

vessel of most perfect proportion--Exceptional among French cathedrals,

its transept's rounded ends--Noyon has retained its annexes--Its chapter

house, built about 1240--Noyon city destroyed, 1918--Cathedral still

stands.

Cathedral of Senlis, second of the Gothic cathedrals, begun about

1153--Sculpture at Senlis' west portal (c. 1180) marks a date in

imagery--Cathedral tower, the "pride of the Valois land"--Transept's

façades of the best Flamboyant Gothic art--What the World War did to

Senlis.

Cathedral of Sens, begun about 1160--Sens' ancient see, governed by

notable men in the XII and XIII centuries--How they found out who was

the architect of the cathedral--St. Thomas Becket in Sens, 1164, and

again from 1166 to 1170--St. Louis married in Sens Cathedral,

1234--Glory of Sens' stained glass.

Cathedral of Laon, begun about 1160--Fallacy of the "town-hall"

theory--Cathedral of springtime foliage--Oxen on Laon's towers--Origin

of the square east end of Laon Cathedral--Laon's communal

struggle--Famous XII-century school of Anselm de Laon--Laon city shelled

by the French, but its cathedral unhurt.

Cathedral of Soissons almost a ruin--Desolation of Soissons in World

War--Soissons' southern arm of transept ends in a hemicycle (c.

1180)--Is the most exquisite thing in France--The crusading

bishop-builder, Nivelon de Chérisy.

Some important Primary Gothic churches: Abbatial of St. Remi at Rheims

(c. 1170)--Its superb XII-century glass wrecked in the World

War--Abbatial of Notre Dame at Châlons-sur-Marne (c. 1160)--Pioneer in

fenestration--First to use pillars between chapels and

ambulatory--Church of St. Quiriace at Provins (c. 1160)--Provins,

residence of the counts of Champagne--Its international fairs frequented

by mediæval Europe--Collegiate of St. Yved, at Braine (c. 1200), between

Primary Gothic and the Era of Great Cathedrals--Individual plan of its

choir-chapels--St. Leu d'Esserent, on the Oise, the best type of the

small churches in the classic Ile-de-France--Its forechurch shows

transition work (c. 1150)--Primary Gothic work to be found at Étampes,

Vendôme, Fécamp, Rouen, Lisieux, Angers, Mantes, Paris.

IV. NOTRE DAME OF PARIS AND OTHER CHURCHES OF THE CAPITAL 126

Notre Dame, begun in 1163--Its exterior unsurpassed, the west façade a

classic--Scholastic training of its bishop-builders--_Summa_ of the

supreme scholastic, Aquinas, like a Gothic cathedral--Thirty thousand

students then in Paris University--Bishop Maurice de Sully (1160-96)

built Notre Dame--Bishop Eudes de Sully made the portals of the west

façade--Bishop Pierre de Nemours died a crusader, before Damietta,

1219--Bishop Guillaume d'Auvergne finished the north tower

(1228-49)--All the prelates building Paris Cathedral good and able

men--Their sincerity lives in its stones--First architect unknown--Jean

and Pierre de Chelles made the transept and apse chapels--Sculpture of

Notre Dame masterly--Sainte-Chapelle built by St. Louis, 1246 to

1248--St. Julien-le-Pauvre a contemporary of Notre Dame's choir (c.

1180)--Same noble sculptured capitals--Three Benedictine abbey churches

of Paris show early trials of Gothic vaulting--St. Germain-des-Prés, St.

Martin-des-Champs, St. Pierre-de-Montmartre--St. Louis and his friend,

Joinville--Louis IX illuminated his kingdom with fair churches--On his

first crusade spent five years in the East, 1248 to 1259--From 1254 to

1270 worked for his people--Death of St. Louis on the crusade of

1270--His characteristics: justice, pity, other-worldliness--Inimitable

charm of Joinville's _Histoire de St. Louis_--Describes his friendship

with the king in Palestine--Joinville's old age and death in 1319.

Mantes' collegiate of Notre Dame is Primary Gothic--A contemporary of

Paris Cathedral--Perhaps by the same architect--Its chapel of Navarre

one of the best works of Rayonnant Gothic.

Meaux Cathedral, a difficult architectural page to decipher, owing to

reconstruction--Begun in 1170, but rebuilt radically after

1270--Bossuet, its greatest bishop (1681 to 1704)--Meaux, the cathedral

for the _Te Deum_ of victory--Battle of the Marne, 1914, waged at the

city gates.

V. ERA OF THE GREAT CATHEDRALS: CHARTRES, RHEIMS, AMIENS 169

Cathedral of Chartres--Bishop Fulbert's Romanesque Notre Dame burned in

1194--His vast crypt, of 1020, still exists--Bishop Geoffrey de Lèves

built the tower of Chartres, called the most beautiful in the world

(1145)--Making of the three western portals (c. 1155)--Gothic cathedral

begun after the fire of 1194--Primary Gothic west façade escaped the

fire--Jehan de Beauce crowned the northwest tower, 1506 to

1513--Sculpture of the transept portals and porches, 1220 to

1260--Chartres excels all cathedrals in the wealth of its stained glass,

chiefly of the XII and XIII centuries.

Cathedral of Rheims, begun by the crusader, Bishop Albéric de Humbert,

1211--Its architects recorded in the pavement labyrinth--Its west façade

the culmination of Gothic art--Coronation of Charles VII in 1429, Jeanne

d'Arc present--Astounding sculptural wealth of this "Cathedral of the

Angels"--Martyrdom of Rheims in the World War.

Cathedral of Amiens, the Parthenon of Gothic art--Bishop Evrard de

Fouilloy began it, 1220--Designed by Robert de Lusarches--Its sculpture

the peer of Rheims and Chartres--Its portal of the _Vierge Dorée_ (c.

1280).

VI. SIX OF THE LESSER GREAT CATHEDRALS: BOURGES, BEAUVAIS, TROYES,

TOURS, LYONS, LE MANS 211

Cathedral of Bourges--Only XIII-century cathedral without a

transept--Inner aisle has its own triforium and clearstory--Chevet built

by St. Guillaume, 1200 to 1209--Over main portal is best Last Judgment

(c. 1275)--Bourges famous for its stained glass--Jean, duc de Berry, and

Jacques Coeur, the late-Gothic art patrons of Bourges--Their gifts to

the cathedral--Orléans Cathedral destroyed by Calvinists (note).

Cathedral of Beauvais--A mighty fragment: only a choir and

transept--Begun in 1247, derived directly from Amiens--Transept façades

masterpieces of late-Gothic--Is Flamboyant Gothic of English origin?--Le

Prince family of glassmakers.

Cathedral of Troyes--Its choir built by Bishop Hervé, 1206 to

1226--Martin Chambiges designed the Flamboyant west façade--Magnificent

XIII- and XIV-century windows of Troyes Cathedral--St. Urbain's church

begun by Pope Urban IV in 1262--Carried the Gothic principle of

equilibrium to its limit--Churches of Troyes treasure-houses of stained

glass and sculpture--Cultivated court of Champagne's rulers--To the

Gothic school of Champagne belongs the Cathedral of

Châlons-sur-Marne--Châlons another center for stained glass.

Cathedral of Tours--Choir begun about 1210--Has the classic note of the

Touraine landscape--Cathedral windows set up between 1260 and

1270--Venerable ecclesiastical souvenirs of Tours--Tours, the center for

the Region-of-the-Loire school of sculpture--Michel Colombe, last of the

great Gothic artists, worked here--Environs of the city rich in

Flamboyant Gothic.

Cathedral of Lyons--Lyons boasts an apostolic succession for its

bishops--Early Christian martyrs of Rome's chief city in Gaul--St.

Martin d'Ainay's abbatial dedicated in 1107--Cathedral choir late XII

century--With Vienne Cathedral (note) it alone in France used

incrustations--Nave of Lyons Cathedral building through the XIII

century--Stained glass of Lyons of exceptional quality--All Christendom

was represented at the Ecumenical Council held in Lyons Cathedral in

1274--Church of Brou built by Marguerite of Austria (note)--Moulins

Cathedral and Souvigny's abbatial and tombs (notes).

Cathedral of Le Mans--XII-century nave built by notable prelates--Bishop

Hildebert de Lavardin (1097 to 1125) a poet and scholar--Guillaume de

Passavent made the Angevin vaults (c. 1150)--Geoffrey the Handsome,

nicknamed Plantagenet, and his son, Henry II of England, born in Le

Mans--Trinité church at Vendôme (note)--Le Mans' Gothic choir built from

1218 to 1254 by Bishop Geoffrey de Loudon--Le Mans ranks next to

Chartres and Bourges for its wealth of stained

glass--Rayonnant-Flamboyant transept of the XIV and XV centuries--The

groups at Solesmes a final expression of Gothic sculpture (1495 to

1550)--Collegiate church at St. Quentin, in size a cathedral,

XIII-century choir--Villard de Honnecourt, probably the architect of St.

Quentin.

VII. PLANTAGENET GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE 285

Plantagenet Gothic fused the cupola of Aquitaine and the diagonals of

north--Lasted a hundred years, from 1150 to 1250--For clearness divided

into three periods: I. Heavy diagonals, II. Eight slight branches, III.

Multiple ribs--English fan tracery a derivation of Angevin Gothic.

Cupola churches of Aquitaine: St. Front at Périgieux, begun after a

fire, 1120, and finished by 1180--Cahors Cathedral has Romanesque portal

of beauty (note)--Cathedral of Angoulême, begun 1109--Its façade a

notable page of French decoration--Rich façades distinguish Poitou's

Romanesque school--Fontevrault abbey church, built in the first half of

the XII century--Plantagenet tombs at Fontevrault--Aliénor of Aquitaine

buried there in 1204 beside her husband, Henry II, and her son, Richard

Coeur-de-Lion--Aliénor's descendants notable builders of churches.

Cathedral of Angers--Its nave vaulted with First-Period diagonals, about

1150--Anjou rulers a remarkable race--Fulk Nerra, the great builder,

died 1040--Choir of Angers Cathedral extended after 1274--In the nave is

XII-century glass of St. Denis derivation--Cathedral's Apocalypse

tapestries--Fortress of Angers, built by St. Louis, 1228 to 1238--Church

of Toussaint had a ramified vault of the Third Period--St. Jean's

hospital hall, endowed by Henry II, a gem of Plantagenet art--Choir of

St. Serge, 1220 to 1225, a masterpiece of lightness.

Saumur--Another center for the study of Plantagenet Gothic--Historical

fête called the _Non-Pareille_ took place in its castle in 1241--St.

Pierre's church shows different kinds of Angevin vaults--Church of St.

Martin at Candes, a Plantagenet masterpiece--St. Florent-les-Saumur

shows one of the first eight-branch vaults--Puy-Notre-Dame and Asnières

beautiful examples of Plantagenet art (note)--Plantagenet vaults at Le

Mans, Vendôme, Chinon, and Tours.

Cathedral of Poitiers, begun by Henry Plantagenet and Aliénor of

Aquitaine, 1160--In adopting the gracious Plantagenet vaulting it

remained true to Poitou's Romanesque traditions--XII-century Crucifixion

window the most glorious in the world--Spirit of Poitiers' bishops, St.

Hilary and Fortunatus, inspired it--Church of Ste. Radégonde is

Plantagenet vaulted--St. Hilaire's abbatial has curious octagonal

cupolas--St. Jean's baptistry, the oldest building in France, dating

from the IV century--Clement V at Poitiers in 1307 carried on the

Templars' process--Hall of the count's palace rebuilt by Duke Jean de

Berry--Jeanne d'Arc examined there in 1429, found to be sent of God.

VIII. GOTHIC IN THE MIDI 329

Cathedral of Clermont-Ferrand, begun in 1248--Gothic of the north,

translated with a Midi accent--True character of Auvergne shown in its

Romanesque churches--Notre Dame-du-Port, the classic type of Auvergne's

Romanesque school--Abbey church of La Chaise Dieu, begun by Clement VI,

1344--Contains incomparable tapestries (note)--First Crusade proclaimed

at Clermont by Urban II, 1095--Riom's Sainte-Chapelle, of the XIV

century--Madonna of the Bird a masterpiece of late-Gothic

imagery--Romanesque Cathedral of Le Puy (XII century) one of the most

venerable shrines in France.

Cathedral of Bordeaux, like the city itself, is of the north and the

south--Nave is composite and difficult to read--Clement V (d. 1314)

built the Rayonnant Gothic choir--In the Romanesque church of Ste. Croix

appeared the first diagonals of the region--Charlemagne laid Roland's

olifant on the altar of St. Seurin--St. Bertrand-de-Comminges Cathedral

built by Clement V--Cathedral of Bayonne (note).

Cathedral of Toulouse consists of two inharmonious parts--Unaisled nave

with Angevin vaults building while Simon de Montfort besieged

city--Gothic choir begun in 1275--Chief monument of Toulouse is the

abbey church of St. Sernin (begun 1075)--Languedoc then excelled in

sculpture: Moissac's portal and cloister (note)--Toulouse a center for

brick architecture--Its Jacobins' church begun in 1229--St. Dominic's

mission in Languedoc--Albigensian Crusade.

Albi Cathedral, the incarnation of the Midi wars: meridional

Gothic--Aggressive Bernard de Castanets began it in 1282--Flamboyant and

Renaissance riches were added to St. Cecilia's cathedral--Frescoes of

its vault have never been surpassed (1509 to 1512)--Its choir screen

equally noted--Auch Cathedral has famous XVI-century windows

(note)--Cathedral of Rodez possesses a notable Flamboyant tower (1510 to

1526) (note)--Carcassonne Cité has been too much restored--Its ci-devant

cathedral of St. Nazaire the best of XIV-century Gothic--Like a

reliquary of colored glass--Carcassonne town has typical Midi Gothic

churches.

Narbonne Cathedral, consisting of a vast Gothic choir, begun in

1272--Its mechanical skill cold, but still Gothic of the grand

style--Lovely XIV-century glass--Sack of Béziers, 1209--Perpignan

Cathedral and Elne's cloister (note)--Abbey church of Fontfroide allied

with Poblet in Catalonia (note).

Montpellier Cathedral, formerly an abbey church, built by Urban V, XIV

century--Jaime el Conquistador, mighty builder of churches, born in

Montpellier, 1208--Mende Cathedral and St. Victor's abbatial at

Marseilles built by Urban V (note)--Maguelonne, former cathedral of

diocese, now the most aloof spot in Europe--Aigues-Mortes, begun by St.

Louis, completed by his son--Fortress unspoiled by restorations--Both

crusades of Louis IX sailed thence--St. Gilles' abbey church, partly a

ruin, interesting to archæologists; building from 1116--Noted portal of

St. Gilles inspired Trinity Church, Boston--Loyalty of Provence to its

Saintes-Maries traditions--Les Saintes-Maries church a pilgrim shrine

(note)--St. Martha's church at Tarascon (note).

St. Trophime Cathedral at Arles--Portal influenced by Gallo-Roman

sculpture--Its cloister the fairest Christian monument in the

city--Ruins of Montmajour near Arles--Frédéric Mistral should be one's

companion in Provence--Expresses the regional soul--St. Maximin church

the best Gothic monument in Provence--Begun by Charles II d'Anjou in

1295--Cathedral of St. Sauveur at Aix-en-Provence is composite--Its

south aisle originally a separate Romanesque church, XII century--Good

King René gave the triptych by a French _primitif_--Avignon's great day

was the XIV century under seven meridional popes, 1309 to 1377--Palace

of the Popes built from 1335 to 1358--Grandest fortress-palace in the

world.

IX. THE GOTHIC ART OF BURGUNDY 410

Burgundy excelled in monastic architecture--The cradle of three great

cloistral centers--Luxeuil, Cluny, Cîteaux--Luxeuil, founded by St.

Columbanus (610), reorganized the VII century--Cluny, Christendom's

supremest monastic congregation, founded 910--St. Hugues of Cluny (1049

to 1109) trained the leaders who remade Europe's civilization--Peter the

Venerable, abbot from 1120 to 1156, continued building Cluny's vast

church--Abélard died in a Cluny house, 1142--Revolution destroyed the

glorious abbatial church--Paray-le-Monial, the favorite priory of Abbot

Odilo (d. 1049) of Cluny, initiator of the Truce of God--Its Romanesque

church has fluted pilasters (XII century)--Autun Cathedral's Romanesque

portal the ancestor of the sculptured doors of Gothic cathedrals--Abbey

church at Saulieu (note)--Beaune's collegiate of Notre Dame has lovely

tapestries--Hôtel Dieu at Beaune (1444 to 1457), founded by Nicolas

Rolin, contains Roger van der Weyden's best work--Hospital hall at

Tonnerre (founded 1293) the prototype for Beaune's hospice--Fontenay,

the oldest Romanesque Cistercian church extant--Dedicated by Eugene III

in 1147--Avallon's church of St. Lazare blessed by Paschal II in

1107--Has a well-known Romanesque entranceway.

Some Primary Gothic churches in Burgundy--Montréal's collegiate can be

visited from Avallon--Built by a returned crusader late in the XII

century--Pontigny's abbatial the oldest Gothic in Burgundy--Its nave

(1160 to 1180), with _bombé_ vaults, was begun as Romanesque--Its choir

used structural features as decorations--Three archbishops of

Canterbury, St. Thomas Becket, Stephen Langton, and St. Edmund Rich,

found refuge at Pontigny--Vézelay's abbatial of the Madeleine the

stateliest church in Burgundy--Its Romanesque nave and Gothic choir

belong both to the XII century--Its imaged portico (c. 1132) a supreme

work of French sculpture--Second Crusade preached by St. Bernard at

Vézelay, 1146--Philippe-Auguste and Richard Coeur-de-Lion rallied here

for the Third Crusade, 1191.

Burgundy's best Gothic monuments--Collegiate of Notre Dame at Semur a

gem of the Burgundian school, begun about 1225--Its sculpture

exceptional--Auxerre Cathedral begun in 1215, the model of Gothic

churches in the province--Auxerre's sculpture and its opaline glass rank

with the first--Bishop Jacques Amyot (d. 1593) restored the cathedral

after the Calvinists sacked it--Cathedral of Nevers has an apse at both

west and east ends (note)--Dijon, the capital of Burgundy, led in art,

under its four great dukes, 1364 to 1477--Flemish-Burgundian school

began modern imagery--Dijon's cathedral of St. Bénigne, formerly an

abbatial, is mediocre late-XIII century--Crypt of St. Bénigne begun

1001--Oldest monument of the Romanesque renaissance--William of

Volpiano, abbot of St. Bénigne, initiated the revival of architecture

after the year 1000--Rebuilt Tournus abbey church (note)--Church of

Notre Dame, Dijon, is a gem of Burgundian Gothic (1220-1240)--Its

subtleties of construction have never been excelled.

St. Bernard, abbot of Clairvaux (d. 1153), born near Dijon, the greatest

son of Burgundy--His reform laid the spiritual foundations of Gothic

cathedrals--His puritanic taste in architecture made Cistercian churches

bare and simple--Cistercian Order, founded 1099, instrumental in

spreading Gothic over Europe--St. Stephen Harding, its practical

founder, welcomed St. Bernard at Citeaux in 1113--Five hundred

Cistercian monasteries founded in Europe before the middle of XIII

century--Spirit of St. Bernard, greatest of Cistercians, lives in the

_Imitation of Christ_.

X. GOTHIC ART IN NORMANDY 472

Monastic architecture best expression of Norman character--Normandy,

like Burgundy, was a land of monasteries--Bernay's abbey church an

ancestress of Norman Romanesque (note)--Bec Abbey, the Cluny of

Normandy--Lanfranc made the school of Bec world-noted--At Bec, St.

Anselm began the philosophical movement of the Middle Ages--William of

Volpiano pioneer in the rebirth of architecture in the duchy--Jumièges,

the first Norman church of architectural pretension, begun 1040--Only

vestiges remain of St. Wandrille abbey--Caen, the Mecca of Norman

Romanesque and the queen city for towers--Three good towers at St.

Pierre-sur-Dives--St. Georges de Boscherville the best type of Norman

Romanesque--Fécamp's Primary Gothic abbatial rose after the fire of

1169--Gothic abbatial at Eu built after the death of St. Laurence

O'Toole, 1180--Mont-Saint-Michel the greatest of Norman abbeys--Its

Merveille (Gothic halls), building from 1203 to 1228--Choir of

Mont-Saint-Michel, the best work of Flamboyant Gothic, begun 1450.

Rouen Cathedral, not local in character--Its tower of St. Romain begun

in 1145--Its transept façades and Lady chapel XIV-century Rayonnant

work--Abbatial of St. Ouen a gem of Rayonnant Gothic--No city richer

than Rouen in Flamboyant Gothic monuments--Trial of Jeanne d'Arc at

Rouen in 1431 and her Rehabilitation in 1456.

Lisieux Cathedral the earliest Gothic cathedral in Normandy--Begun after

1160 as Ile-de-France Gothic--Its Lady chapel built by Bishop Pierre

Cauchon, Jeanne d'Arc's venal judge.

Évreux Cathedral not homogeneous, but has much charm--Its choir

(1298-1310) a gem of Rayonnant Gothic--XIV century's best array of glass

in its choir.

Séez Cathedral modest in size--Norman in style--Its choir a forerunner

of Rayonnant Gothic--Has XIV-century windows.

Bayeux Cathedral the Gothic of the duchy at its best--Romanesque part of

its nave remarkable--Bishop Odo, brother of the Conqueror, built the

crypt, and of his time is the Bayeux Tapestry--Choir of Bayeux a

masterpiece of Normandy's elaborate Gothic.

Coutances Cathedral loveliest in Normandy, begun after the fire of

1218--Its three towers notable--Aisles of choir are of different height.

Gothic art of Brittany--Brittany more a land of shrines than

cathedrals--Her religious soul best expressed by her

Calvarys--XIII-century cathedral at Dol has fine eastern

window--Cathedral at Nantes possesses the last great work of Gothic

sculpture--Cathedral of Quimper very Breton in spirit--St. Pol-de-Léon

Cathedral entirely complete--The Kreisker is Brittany's grandest

tower--St. Yves of Brittany helped build Tréguier Cathedral.

Summing up--Gothic art gave way before the pagan Renaissance and the

contempt for legends roused by the Reformation. In the World War France

again displayed the spirit that had built cathedrals. Unquenchable

idealism of the French race.

INDEX 583

BIBLIOGRAPHY 605

Illustrations

SOISSONS CATHEDRAL. THE TRANSEPT'S SOUTHERN ARM (C. 1180) _Frontispiece_

POISSY. AN EARLY EXAMPLE OF GOTHIC VAULTING (C. 1135) _Facing p._ 54

ST. DENIS-EN-FRANCE AND ITS ROYAL MAUSOLEUMS " 68

NOYON'S CHAPTER HOUSE (1240-1250) _Page_ 83

SENLIS' TOWER (C. 1230-1250) _Facing p._ 90

THE INTERIOR OF LAON CATHEDRAL (XII CENTURY). VIEW

FROM THE TRIBUNE GALLERY " 98

THE OXEN ON LAON'S TOWERS " 106

NOTRE DAME OF PARIS. VIEW FROM THE SOUTH _Page_ 127

NOTRE DAME OF MANTES (1160-1200). THE CONTEMPORARY

OF PARIS CATHEDRAL _Facing p._ 162

THE CATHEDRAL OF MEAUX, VIEWED FROM THE NAVE'S AISLE " 168

THE CATHEDRAL OF CHARTRES (1194-1240). THE SOUTHERN

ASPECT _Page_ 178

THE ANGEL APSE OF RHEIMS (C. 1220) " 196

THE TRANSEPT OF AMIENS CATHEDRAL (1220-1280) _Facing p._ 204

THE APSE OF BOURGES (1200-1225) " 214

ST. URBAIN AT TROYES (1264-1276) " 236

LE MANS CHOIR (1217-1254). THE DOUBLE AISLES " 270

ANGOULÊME CATHEDRAL. A XII-CENTURY CUPOLA CHURCH

OF AQUITAINE WITH A TYPICAL FAÇADE OF POITOU'S

ROMANESQUE SCHOOL " 290

THE PLANTAGENET TOMBS AT FONTEVRAULT " 298

THE PLANTAGENET GOTHIC CHOIR OF ST. SERGE AT ANGERS

(1220-1225) " 312

NOTRE DAME DU PORT AT CLERMONT-FERRAND. TYPICAL

XII-CENTURY CHURCH OF AUVERGNE'S ROMANESQUE

SCHOOL " 338

LE PUY IN OLD AUVERGNE " 344

THE JACOBINS', OR DOMINICANS', CHURCH AT TOULOUSE (XIII

CENTURY) " 358

ALBI CATHEDRAL (1282-1399). A MIDI FORTRESS CHURCH " 370

THE MEDIÆVAL CLOISTER OF ARLES " 398

THE XI-CENTURY SANCTUARY OF CLUNY AS IT WAS UNTIL THE

REVOLUTION _Facing p._ 414

VEZELAY'S XII-CENTURY ABBEY CHURCH OF THE MADELEINE " 436

NOTRE DAME AT DIJON (1220-1245). BURGUNDIAN GOTHIC " 452

THE CRYPT OF THE ABBAYE-AUX-DAMES AT CAEN (1059-1066) " 484

BELFRY OF ST. PIERRE AT CAEN (1308-1317). PROTOTYPE FOR

THE GOTHIC TOWERS OF NORMANDY AND BRITTANY " 490

THE HALL OF THE KNIGHTS AT MONT-SAINT-MICHEL (1203-1228).

SECOND STORY OF THE MERVEILLE " 500

THE CHOIR OF BAYEAUX CATHEDRAL (1210-1260). TYPICAL

OF NORMANDY'S ELABORATE GOTHIC " 546

How France Built Her Cathedrals

[Illustration]

How France Built Her Cathedrals

INTRODUCTION

"We may live without architecture, and worship without her, but _we

cannot remember without her_. How cold is all history, how lifeless all

imagery, compared to that which the living nation writes and the

uncorrupted marble bears. There are but two strong conquerors of the

forgetfulness of men, Poetry and Architecture, and the latter in some

sort includes the former, and is mightier in its reality; it is well to

have, not only what men have thought and felt, but what their hands have

handled and their strength wrought and their eyes beheld, all the days

of their life."[1]

So wrote John Ruskin in one of his flashes of genius, and never was word

truer. Architecture is the living voice of the past. Architecture is

history. By architecture the forefathers from whom we come relate to us

their progress in knowledge, their prowess in handicrafts, their

economic conditions, their sorrows, their rejoicings, their aspirations.

They wrote it down, those men and women whose blood is our blood, on

great stone pages of perennial beauty for us to read--_if only we

would_. By architecture we are linked in a grand solidarity with all

that has gone before, with the proud periods of history that thrill us

as we read, and with the tragic outbreaks of the oppressed that sadden

our spirit.

Whenever men have set themselves to forget this solidarity, their first

act has been to fling themselves in frenzy on cathedral and city hall.

In 1914 they forgot it, and mighty Rheims fell. They forgot that Bamburg

had learned its imagery from Rheims, that German Norbert, revered of St.

Bernard, had helped France in the days when Gothic art was in formation,

that he died bishop of Magdeburg, and Magdeburg is a Primary Gothic

cathedral in the land which frankly called the new architecture _opus

francigenum_. Would the civic halls of Noyon, Arras, St. Quentin, and

Ypres lie in ruins if Frankfort and Lübeck had remembered?

In 1793, man again thought to set up a barrier between himself and his

past, and he shattered the art treasures of a thousand years and tore

down the cathedrals of Cambrai, Arras, and Avranches; he tore down

Cluny, the greatest Romanesque church in the world, Cluny the civilizer,

that had removed from agriculture its stigma as serfs' work. Man fancied

that to shatter and demolish was to build.

Again in 1562, a date most tragic in the annals of Gothic architecture,

men tried again to rear a wall of hate between themselves and the

generations gone before, and the cathedral of Orléans met the fate of

Cluny and Cambrai, and from end to end of France images were

decapitated, and ancestors' tombs wrecked impiously--even the tombs of

spiritual ancestors who with painful journeyings afoot had brought the

gospel light. Whether you go to chapel or to temple to-day, to

meetinghouse or to cathedral, whether you worship under the open sky, be

you a reader of Marx or of Aquinas, you were robbed most piteously of

your patrimony in 1562, in 1793, in 1914.

How is it to be prevented again? By trying to make the monuments of the

past loved, by relating the tale of their building, by telling the life

story of the builders. If we know them we must surely revere them, and

when we have learned to know and to love, we have learned to be liberal.

Archæology is _to teach us to remember_. Those who have gone before have

passed on to us cathedral and town hall; it is our obligation to

transmit them intact to those who come after. They are not ours to

destroy. Art is the high-water mark reached by civilization; art does

not speak in English, or in German, or in the Latin tongue, but in a

language understood of all peoples and all times. To destroy a great

monument of the past is to betray civilization. It was proved in 1914

that erudition is not safeguard enough, nor is enthusiasm, sighs 1793,

nor purpose to reform, admits 1562. We must comprehend intelligently our

own personal solidarity with the past. We must never look at a noble

building without proudly realizing that we had a hand in its making.

Battles then can rage around cathedrals without danger of their

destruction. As in golden amber, the past will preserve them, the past

which is yours and mine and everyone's heritage.

It is a right instinct which makes a man treasure the home he has had

transmitted to him through several generations. How much more--when

loyalty is roused by an XVIII-century or a XVII-century

habitation--should emotion be felt for what was reared from 1140 to 1270

by the very generations who began for us of to-day most of the big

things we value: our universities, our literature, our political

freedom, our prosperous trade.

Now in the making of these infinitely precious things, France played the

leading role. Put partisan feeling aside and acknowledge it honestly. "I

believe," said Ruskin, in a lecture at Edinburgh, in 1853, even before

the new science of mediæval archæology was formulated, "that the French

nation in the XII and XIII centuries was the greatest nation in the

world, and that the French not only invented Gothic architecture, but

carried it to its noblest developments."

French Gothic churches are a fountainhead, and should rank first.

Because of them we have Westminster, Ely, and Lincoln, we had Tintern,

Melrose, Mellifont, Holycross. They built the Burgos, Toledo, León,

Seville, and Belem, which have given wings to the soul of the Peninsula.

Because of the French cathedrals we have Cologne, Magdeburg, and

Halberstadt, Vienna, Prague, Upsala, Siena, Florence, and Milan.

By her lyrics, her epics, and her architecture, France was the

inspiration of Europe in the XII and XIII centuries. With his sword, the

crusader carried compass and rule. Those indefatigable wanderers, Cluny,

Cîteaux, and the men of Prémontré and Chartreuse carried with them the

chisel and the Book. Then as now the commercial traveler was a valiant

propagandist; in 1181 a cloth merchant of Assisi, returned from trading

in France, where he had seen the cathedral of Lyons rising, or perhaps

that of Paris, or that of Poitiers, and he had passed under wonderful

new-imaged portals in the Midi and in Burgundy; so, in memory of

beautiful things, he chose to call the son born to him, Francis, and the

boy grew up to love and to chant the lyrics of France and named himself

"God's little troubadour."

Backward and forward has moved the ebb and flow of races and their arts.

When Celts from conquered Britain passed over to Armorica they carried

with them the Arthurian cycle; Teutonic tribes, strong in bone and

tissue, poured into Gaul a very avalanche; masterful Norsemen populated

the seacoasts; and before the recording of time the Oriental and the

Latin had made their home in the land between the northern seas and the

big inland water of commerce. Does such history seem too remote to be of

emotional value? Are personalities lacking? Not so in the missionary

days of Columbanus and Benedict, first hewers of the cathedrals'

foundation blocks, for never came a great movement of building activity

that did not tread in the steps of spiritual regeneration. Your

forefathers and my forefathers came into France to help her, to bring

her art and letters in her dark hour. They came to teach and they came

to learn, to succor and to find refuge. They came in the persons of

Celtic Columbanus, Brieuc, Malo, Fiacre, Malachy, and holy Laurence

buried at Eu, as English Alcuin, Stephen Harding, John of Salisbury, and

Saint Edmund Rich buried at Pontigny. They came as German Radegund and

the saintly Bruno and Norbert, as Italian Benedict, Fortunatus,

Hildebrand, William of Volpiano, Lanfranc, Anselm, Aquinas, and

Bonaventure, as Spanish Dominic, and Portuguese Anthony. They came from

Egypt with Maurice and his Thebans, from the Levant with Irenæus and

Giles, from Hungary with Martin the soldier. And the story of each one

of them is recorded in the churches that stand in France to-day. Without

architecture we would have forgotten them.

With the ebbing and flowing of the tide in the affairs of men, a day

arrived when the big people and the little people of Normandy, Poitou,

Anjou, and Flanders passed in large numbers into Great Britain and

Ireland in the wake of the Conqueror and of Henry Plantagenet, so that

the very names we bear are those of the cathedral builders.

Who has not watched the widening ripples of water spread from a center?

Even so is each one of us a center whence in ever-widening circles

stretch out our progenitors, embracing more and more men, more and more

women, rippling over the pitiful barricades of 1793, sweeping over the

factions of 1562, till by the time the widening ripple has reached the

age of St. Louis, the age of Suger, it is scientifically impossible that

we, in our very own forefathers, were not building some of the eighty

cathedrals and three hundred great minsters with which France was then

clothing herself as with a white mantle of churches. We were chatelaine,

and burgher's wife, we were villein's daughter and knight's son, and

side by side we harnessed ourselves to carts and dragged in the blocks

for the tower at Chartres and the belfry at Rouen, and the canticles we

sang during our voluntary servitude passed into the stones and are still

chanting there--_if only we would listen_. No visionary notion this, but

science and history. By architecture we remember.

Of our kin was the bishop who sacrificed his revenue to rear God's

house. Of our kin were the architects, masters of the living stone, who

with inspiration conceived their shrines of Notre Dame and were trained

soundly enough in mason craft to achieve their dreams; of our kin were

the artisans who put up the serene images at cathedral doors for the

edification of the people, and chiseled with warm, loving touches the

running bramble of the roadside. Even botany is to be learned in

mediæval cathedrals. Not a leaf that grows in Champagne to-day but was

carved on the walls of Rheims seven hundred years ago. Against the big

capitals of Paris Cathedral they laid the broad plantain leaf of the

marshy Oise, then, seeing around them that indigenous acanthus, the

uncurling fern, they carved it, too, and as they grew adept with chisel

they wrought ivy and vine leaf, parsley and holly, and in time,

intoxicated with their skill, they undercut the rich foliage and

serrated the lobes and curled the leaf edges, till summer ran riot in

stone and the architectural line was well-nigh lost sight of in sheer

joy of nature's glad livery.

The cathedrals of France are an enduring appeal to man's high faculty of

imagination. In them we go crusading again. We scale the walls of

Constantinople with doughty Bishop Nivelon, builder of Soissons

Cathedral, we are ransomed from Saracen captivity with Bishop Albéric,

builder of Rheims. We repent of our black feudal deeds with Fulk Nerra,

and when we have finished our footsore penances in Holy Land, we punish

ourselves in our purses, raising costly abbeys in Anjou and Touraine. On

our Eastern pilgrimage we have seen visions of Oriental color, and,

remembering them, we lighten our sober churches of the north with

translucent mosaic tapestries. We dot our Western land with circular

Holy Sepulcher temples. It is said that Suger, builder of the first

great Gothic church in the world, maker of jeweled windows over which

science sighs in despair of emulation, used eagerly to inquire of

travelers returned from the East had they seen aught, even in St. Sophia

itself, to surpass his St. Denis'. We are rightly sure that our new art

surpasses all others. We may borrow, but our borrowings are creations.

By architecture in happy promiscuity we crowd to the international fairs

of Champagne. We elbow and we jostle to see what our diligent brothers,

the art-loving Flemish burghers, have brought for exchange, or what

things beautiful the merchants from south of the Alps have to barter.

To-day, at Troyes, we are astounded by the gathering of art treasures

in that lesser-known city, and we wonder at the mighty rampart walls at

Provins. _Then we remember._ It is architecture that will not let us

forget what efficient traders we were in the XIII century.

By architecture we are Benedictines at Cluny, white monks at Fontenay,

of Prémontré at Braine. Again we pace in meditative cloisters, we tuck

up our robes to delve in mother earth to make the desert bloom, we

illumine parchment pages, we teach the plain-chant to children, we cast

bells, each with its own entity, each a living voice for the people,

named with its own name.

By architecture we are one of the thousands athirst for knowledge, who

gather at the feet of abstruse debaters in the schools of Bec, Auxerre,

Rheims, Orléans, Laon, Chartres and Paris, king's son seated on the

rush-strewn pavements next to peasant's son, both equally convinced that

the most thrilling of all sciences are philosophy and theology. Books

are scarce; as yet no printing press; we must wander far to gather

crumbs of learning; our strong young brains are intact, prepared for

service by long ages of active bone and muscle; with avidity we seize on

problems so knotty that the learned ones of 1920 fear to touch them.

"The time of big theories is the time of big results." It is we, in the

person of the Scholastics who built Paris Cathedral, and Laon, the

intellectual,--churches disciplined, sober and strong. It is we the

multitudinous scholars of the Middle Ages who built Chartres, the wise

mystic, and opalescent Auxerre, and Châlons on the Marne of Victory. And

lest the hungry generations tread us down, we inscribed our loved

subtleties on their walls, and at their portals placed images of the

Liberal Arts.

By architecture we join one side or the other in the eternal struggle of

Might and Right. Sometimes in atonement we spend the revenues secured by

heedless Might on minster or cathedral. By pain and struggle we have won

our city charter, and we are proud to record in God's sight and man's

what thrifty burgesses we are, what trained journeymen. To work is to

pray, say the cathedral windows set up by furriers, butchers, vintagers,

and farm laborers. To work is as fine a thing as to fight at Roncevaux

and Mansurah, as did our next-door donor neighbor here. The little

people of the Lord are as grateful in his sight as the noble

_prud'hommes_. _Le bon Dieu_ likes to be shown how a tailor cuts his

cloth and a baker bakes his bread just as well as to be entertained with

pilgrimage adventures or the story of a canonized saint. Are we not

saints in the making if only we can get the better of that prowling

felon, the devil, whom we have set up over our church door with

pitchfork and caldron as a warning to the unwary?

"O men and women of to-day"--appeal the windows at Chartres and Bourges

and Tours--"you whose blood is our blood, who without our struggle would

have no ordered government, no self-ruling cities, no trade to bind land

with land in the sanity of peace, no arts and crafts, why not learn to

read our story? There are those unable to decipher a line of our

illumined pages who will assure you that we were sunk in gross

superstition, that our sole religion was the worship of bits of cloth

and bone. Yes, even from the halls founded by good Robert de Sorbon (in

order that youth with its lean purse might get a free education) the

erudites marshal against us every human frailty of our hardy,

enterprising times. And yet, in unparalleled marvels of stone and glass

we have recorded the deepest sentiments of mankind. But having eyes,

they see not. Come then, you, and interpret us. Come, and through us,

_remember_."

Each great cathedral is pleading to us by the alluring half-smile of its

angels, by the dignified images of reverent personages at its entrances,

by each gargoyle, each faithful guardian that has craned his neck for

ages to keep rain water from the precious walls. Cease to be so superior

to the legends and dreams we set forth, they seem to be saying. We know

just as well as you that the apostle St. Thomas did not have all the

adventures raising fairy palaces in India which we put to his credit in

our windows and tympanums, even though good Bishop James of Voragine, in

his cycle of church feasts, our iconographic chart--_Legenda

Aurea_--relates it. The holy Jerome, close to the desert and the origin

of things, real and apocryphal, warned us not to be too credulous. But

symbols and legends are the breath of art, as art alone realizes through

expression, the supersensual visions of mankind. Are there not millions

of good Christian folk in India to-day? Her first evangelist builded

better than ever we can relate by our imagery.

We are not at all dull, plead the waiting cathedrals. Encyclopædias they

call us. Yes, we had our little weakness for symmetry, for the mystic

beauty of numbers, for gathering into "Mirrors" all the knowledge of the

world. But how admirable is our Mirror of Morals, with virtues and vices

contrasted; how interesting our Mirrors of Nature and of History that

tell the story from Genesis to Revelations, and that set the marvels of

the skies and man's dumb fellow creatures, the beasts, side by side on

the walls of the house of worship, with David and Isaias, St. Peter and

St. Paul, Charlemagne and Louis. And our Mirror of Knowledge--how

profound it is: not as enemies but as allies would it show forth science

and religion. We are no more dull than the Bible is dull, than the

_Divina Commedia_ is dull. We satisfy the subtlest intellects; alike the

lettered and the unlettered enjoy us.

Each French cathedral and each minster makes its own special plea. Lyons

reminds us, in windows of apocalyptic radiance, that her first bishops

came from John the Apostle, that Christian blood flowed in her forum as

generously as in Rome's Coliseum. Of the very stones of the

Amphitheater, hallowed by her martyrs, is her cathedral built, and the

architectural methods of the north and the south are welded here in the

ancient central city of Gaul whence rayed out the linking highroads of

Rome.

At Tours, the charity of Martin to a beggar is recorded many a time, for

it civilized middle Europe. Slow, steady, and deep were the

accumulations of culture by the Loire of measured horizons and classic

restraint. A tower named of Charlemagne recalls that Saxon Alcuin filled

the schoolrooms of St. Martin's Abbey. A chiseled tomb reminds us that

here worked the last sculptor of the Middle Ages (loyal to its humble

and profound Christian traditions), as well as the first artists of the

imported pagan Renaissance.

At Le Mans and Angers, at Fontevrault, with its tomb of Henry

Plantagenet, who gave us our jury system, speak those fighting

progressives, the Angevin rulers; and all their love of the arts and of

adventure endures in the exotically beautiful development which we call

Plantagenet Gothic. An unlettered king is an uncrowned ass, said a

X-century count of Anjou.

At Poitiers, city of St. Hilaire who fought the Arians, is the most

glorious window in the world--Christ triumphant on the Cross, and again

we walk in procession to the strain of Bishop Fortunatus' hymn, and we

read the Church Fathers in Greek and Hebrew in Queen Radegund's

cloister. Aquitaine's line of troubadour dukes, passionate sinners, and

prodigious repenters lives in every church in the old hill city, from

the cathedral wherein Aliénor blended the indigenous art of her own

Poitou with the Plantagenet suppleness of her Angevin husband, to the

cupola-covered abbatial of St. Hilaire, where her son, Richard the

Lion-hearted, was installed as duke.

At Caen we live with the Conqueror and Matilda in their penitential

abbey-churches, full of thought and purpose, the architecture of

hieratic pre-eminence which Normandy passed on to England. At Coutances,

the cathedral walls record the Tancreds, so the people say; close by was

the eyrie of that eagle brood who set up kingdoms in Italy and the

Orient. At Rouen we mutter with the crowd in the market place that a

grievous shame it is to burn a saint as a witch, and in reaction, soon

we are to rear monuments whose every line is jubilant freedom. At Rheims

we are crowned kings in a cathedral so sumptuous that on coronation days

it needed no tapestries to adorn its walls. At Clermont and at Vézelay

we don the crusaders' insignia with cries of enthusiasm. The lavish art

of Bourges tells of Jacques Coeur's largess, the princely merchant who

financed the army that rid France of her invaders, just as clearly as

the ducal tombs and imagery at Dijon relate the pageantry of the

XV-century Burgundian life. The stones of Pontigny tell of Becket the

martyr, whose cause impassioned all Christendom, as many a sculptured

group and storied window in France relate, and of another great

Englishman, Stephen Langton, who passed from this cloistral

peace--dividing the Bible into chapters for us--to the Magna Charta

struggle in England. _By architecture we remember._

Until we have seen Albi's aggressive fortress-church what do we really

know of the Albigensian heresy, of the disease un-European,

antichristian, antisocial, that bred in the precocious civilization of

Languedoc? What do we know of that terrible struggle called a crusade,

when the greedy barons of the north descended on the Midi (ever brutal

and refined), thinking to cure its soul by the sword and with the same

blows to carve out for themselves rich principalities? Forever is the

story told in the Jacobins' church at Toulouse, in the red cathedral

fortress above the Tarn.

All the isolating pride of feudalism is resumed in the ramparts of

Carcassonne and Aigues-Mortes, all the frustrated destiny of Narbonne in

its vast fragment of a cathedral, all the unbroken links with the Latin

are in the sculpture at Arles and St. Gilles, all the immemorial story

of _la grande bleu_ in Maguelonne's solitary church. _By architecture we

remember._

The Celtic remnant, that in the volcanic-torn uplands of middle France

inflicted on Cæsar his sole defeat, lives always in the churches of

Auvergne, so stubbornly indigenous, planted so sturdily, contriving

decorative beauty from the regional varicolored lava stones. In the

granite churches of Brittany endures all the aloof individuality, the

sensitive independence, the tenacious traditionalism of the dwellers by

the sea in the far-north outpost of France. We have our souls to keep,

say the lowly Breton shrines, we have always been too busy doing that

to find time to erect great churches. But once our neighbors, the

Normans, taught us tower-building, our Celtic imagination leaped _au

delà_ by their spires, so we raised our royal Kreisker which far out to

sea welcomes home our Breton sailors.

Architecture is history. Architecture is what the old Greeks said of

history, "philosophy teaching by examples." The cathedrals of France

prove that there is no supreme architecture where there is not liberty

or the will to attain it. In 1109 the bishop-baron of Noyon granted his

city a charter, the first communal written laws on record. In 1145 Noyon

began to build the first Gothic cathedral of France. In the

Ile-de-France, where from the nation's birth were lived its intensest

hours, sprang up the churches which are the most national, the most

racially French in character, Noyon, Senlis, Soissons, Laon, Paris.

The history of architecture proves that without a right-minded national

pride, ready to make sacrifices in order that it may transmit its high

deeds to the future, no mighty monuments rise. In 1214 Bouvines' victory

was won and French unity demonstrated. In 1220, not far away, was laid

the foundation stone of Amiens Cathedral, the crowning achievement of

the national art. A hazard, such juxtaposition? Ah, no. Nothing happens

by chance in this science of the builder whose basic forces are long at

work in silence. Architecture is the truthteller of history.

The history of France, which in the XII and XIII centuries meant

universal history, is written on the walls of the cathedrals built under

Philippe-Auguste and his grandson St. Louis, during the full flowering

of the new national art. And in the days when France was neither happy

nor good nor great, when faith flagged, when a minority's blind greed of

gold ended the international fairs, drove out the Jews, overtaxed the

clerical church builders, when the crusading enthusiasm ended in a

Templars' process, then the structural logic of Gothic architecture

turned to pitiless geometry. So proclaim the cold, uninspired

XIV-century churches, and few of them ever were built. It seemed almost

as if the Gothic cycle had run its course. The XII century had seen its

rise; the XIII century its apotheosis; the XIV century its decline. Was

the last word said? Churches are not built by generations that live in

ceaseless war, in misrule, or under a foreign yoke.

There was to be another chapter for the Gothic tale. Aspiration was born

again, national pride lifted its head and art flowered. Not from beyond

the mountains or the sea came the needed missionary this time, nor from

a Carolingian palace, nor out of Norman and Burgundian cloister. No

saint-king was to lead now, but only a young girl from a peasant hamlet.

When Jeanne d'Arc broke the spell of foreign invasion, when she gave

France a new soul, then all over the land rose that pæan of rejoicing

which we call Flamboyant Gothic art, for verily it flamed up with joy.

Never will you see an arch of double curvature, accoladed, soaring to

its triumphal finial, never will you gaze at radiant belfries rising

richer and richer with each story, never will you pray beneath a

late-Gothic pageantry picture window with its mullions swaying in

exaltation, but the thought of the Maid of Orleans and her mission will

come to you. This Flamboyant art may run riot in details like any

modern, but it remains true in its essentials to the Middle Ages.

Forever will it tell of the freeing of France from foreign rule, even as

the academic Rayonnant phase sets forth the lowered ideals of Philippe

le Bel, or the ampleness of XIII-century Gothic, the creative age of

Louis IX and his augmenting grandfather. No regional schools were there

in the last manifestations of the national art; they built the same at

Albi as at Rouen, at Bordeaux as at Lyons, for an entire people shared

the same feeling of recovered self-respect.

You can learn to read it by yourself, learn to _remember_, if only you

are not repelled by that stiff word "archæology." Just what generation

made Dijon's crypt and Morienval's ambulatory, put the masonry roofs on

the Caen abbatials, chiseled the column statues at the doors of Angers,

Le Mans, and Chartres, made of Bourges' procession path a heavenly way

of ruby, sapphire, emerald, and topaz, raised the tower at Senlis, paid

tribute to St. Cecilia's gentleness in the white imagery of Albi's grim

fortress--that is archæology. Archæology tells how Cluny lifted up a

prostrate Christendom, how the Normans conquered England, how Abbot

Suger reformed himself, how Bernard of Clairvaux exhorted Europe, how

the Lion-hearted went crusading as had his fascinating mother before

him, how Simon de Montfort won the Midi, how the wily Philippe-Auguste

enlarged his domain, province by province--and all the while most of the

Gothic cathedrals of France laid their foundations--and how the

_bon-saint-homme-roy_, truest lover of the builders' art, sat under an

oak tree, dispensing justice at first hand, with his loyal Joinville

seated close beside him. That is archæology. It is written down clearly

on great stone pages of perennial beauty for us to read--_if only we

will_. A little knowledge of construction's laws is needed to show us

how to see. A little more of history to guide us when to feel. If to

love we must know, to know we must set ourselves to learn. Even in these

days of easy motor travel one cannot go about book-laden. But there are

open libraries in French cities where an inquirer is courteously lent

the monographs on the town's monuments, or the big folios that picture

the storied windows. It has, therefore, appeared advisable to give, with

each cathedral, a list of its biographies, for they may be of use some

rainy afternoon in France.

It seems almost unnecessary to remind ourselves that in the XII and XIII

centuries the Church of Europe--barring the Greek schism--was one and

united, save for the quarrels inseparable from all manifestations of

mankind's history, and that the Protestant of to-day descends from the

same mediæval forefathers as does the Catholic, from the same builders

of cathedrals, crusaders, feudal proprietors, and commune winners. To

refuse sympathy to the two best centuries of the Middle Ages because,

three hundred years later, occurred a break in western Christendom is as

illogical as the attitude of those historians who would liken the

religious movement of the XVI century to the antisocial outcrop of

Oriental dualism called the Albigensian heresy.

Let us then, with open minds, turn to this art of the builder, "the

strongest, proudest, most orderly, most enduring of the arts of men that

if once well done will stand more strongly than the unbalanced rocks,

more prevalently than the crumbling hills; the art which is associated

with all civic pride and sacred principle; with which men record their

power, satisfy their enthusiasm, make sure their defense, define and

make dear their habitation."[2]

CHAPTER I

What Is Gothic Architecture?[3]

_Le temps

Où tous nos monuments, et toutes nos croyances

Portaient le manteau blanc de leur virginité

Où sous la main de Christ, tout venait de renaître._

--ALFRED DE MUSSET.

About the year 1000 a new spirit animated the art of the builder in

France. That rebirth, to which has been given the name Romanesque, held

sway for a hundred and fifty years, and had reached its apogee when, in

mid-XII century, it was superseded by the architecture we call Gothic.

Gothic architecture did not spring up like a mushroom. Like all

manifestations of art, it was the logical fulfillment of its

predecessor. Romanesque and Gothic were phases of the same art. The

dethronement of Romanesque was a voluntary abdication in favor of

younger, more efficient leadership: "What is called the birth of Gothic

is but the coming of age of Romanesque."

The XI-century monks who built monastic churches cleared the path for

the laymen builders of the Gothic cathedrals. With persistency, with

courage, the monk architects went forward, seeking a way. And the way

sought, the problem on which they concentrated their energies, was how

to protect their churches by masonry vaulting without sacrificing

amplitude or lighting.[4]

Out of their trials to solve that problem there emerged a new principle

of construction, and Gothic architecture was then born. Thrust and

counterthrust was the law of its being. Instead of the Romanesque idea

of equilibrium by dead load, by sheer mass, which may be called a

continuous counterbutting of the vault's thrust, there now was

substituted equilibrium by intermittent abutment. By means of

diagonal-crossing ribs the vertical and lateral thrusts of the stone

roof were collected at fixed points, which points alone had to be

counterbutted. Thick walls were a necessity in a Romanesque edifice, if

it were to be stable, but in a Gothic building the walls could be made a

mere shell, since all the work was done by an active skeleton, a bone

structure of stone, consisting of piers, arches, and buttresses.

To define shortly, Gothic architecture is the art of erecting buildings

with vaults whose ribs intersect (concentration of load) and whose

thrusts are stopped by buttresses (the grounding of the thrusts). The

never-ceasing downward and outward thrust of the vaulting is met by an

equivalent resistance in pier and buttress and solid earth. Equilibrium

results from that well-adjusted opposition of forces.

Since the starting point in the development of Gothic was the vaulting,

and how to substitute a stone vault for a wooden roof was the germinal

idea of the Romanesque builder, it is no digression to turn to the

earlier school, the chrysalis of Gothic. The name "Romanesque" is an

affair of yesterday, employed by a French archæologist about 1825.

Various local designations had hitherto been used, such as Lombard, or

Norman, or Romano-Byzantine, but the term Romanesque for this

architecture is as suitable as the name Romance is for the popular

languages which, in that same period, were forming out of the corruption

of Latin. A definition given by M. Camille Enlart is excellent:

"Romanesque art was a product of Rome, animated by a new spirit, and

combined with a certain number of elements of barbarian or Oriental

origin."

Rome gave the basilica plan to western Europe, which for centuries

continued to build its churches as oblong halls with a small apse at one

end. The hall, or nave, consisted of a central vessel with side aisles

that were divided from it by piers. In the treatment of vaulting and the

method of stone laying Romanesque architecture also derived from Rome.

Byzantine influences certainly were important, but they affected the

decoration more than the plan or the structure; the use of the Byzantine

cupola was merely occasional. The Romanesque masters copied the ivories

and miniatures of the Eastern Greeks till, in time, they turned to

nature for their models, and then their work took on new life and

evolved into the glory which is Gothic sculpture.

While some have laid stress on the Oriental influences, rather than

those of Rome, in the formation of Romanesque art, others have

overemphasized the personality and fantasy introduced into French

architecture by the Barbarian invasions. No doubt the influx of new

blood added new elements, but since knowledge of the invaders' art is

fragmentary, there can be no scientific base for the theory. Composite,

certainly, were the causes for the new spirit which animated

architecture after the Carolingian day, but it is safe to say that the

influence of Rome predominated.

In the course of the centuries the Roman basilica was modified by the

Catholic liturgy. For catechumens, or penitents, was made the porch, or

narthex, before the western end. Tribunes were built over the side

aisles.[5] Increased church ceremonial brought about a development of

the choir. The custom of burying the dead in crypts under the main

altar originated the raised chancel. Between the choir and the nave the

builders began to insert a transverse nave called a transept.[6] Such an

enlargement enabled the congregation to approach closer to the altar

ceremonies; only the bigger churches built transepts in the XI century.

Then the liturgical writers saw in a transept the extended arms of the

Cross, and it was in that spirit the XIII-century transepts were

made--their symbolism was posterior. The first ambulatories were no

doubt built in churches which possessed some revered relic, to

facilitate the passage of the pilgrim crowd. (The term ambulatory will

be used to designate the continuation of the choir aisle round the

apse.) Before long that curving processional path, with radiating

apsidal chapels opening from it, was taken to represent the crown of

thorns about the Sacred Head. "All things as pertain to offices and

matters ecclesiastical be full of divine signification and mysteries,

and overflow with a celestial sweetness: if so be that a man be diligent

in his study of them, and know how to draw honey from the rock and oil

from the hardest stone." So wrote William Durandus, the XIII-century

French bishop whose _Rationale_, or treatise on church symbolism, was an

inspiration for centuries and, next to the Bible, the most frequently

printed book of the older times.[7]

Despite a host of additions to the basilica of Rome--transept,

ambulatory, a long choir, apse chapels, towers--despite the discarding

of the classic orders and of antiquity's use of a veneer of finer stone

(the Romanesque builder used the unadorned stone of his own region) the

church of western Europe remained, in general plan, a Roman basilica.

Like Rome, they covered their main vessel by a flat wooden roof,

although they knew how to build barrel and groin vaulting.[8]

Now a wooden roof is an easy prey for fire. Such roofs, a succession of

long-continued invasions, and the faulty construction of Merovingian and

Carolingian churches are accountable for the fact that in France to-day

is no church that predates the year 1000. Some portions of ancient wall

are embedded in later work, and some few early crypts are intact. But to

speak with certainty of Merovingian and Carolingian architecture is

impossible, though they formed the incubating phase of Romanesque art.

In France the IX and X centuries were periods of overwhelming disaster.

In the Midi were Saracen incursions. In northern and central France

Norman pirates wiped out Charlemagne's revival of art. As far as

Poitiers and Clermont the Northmen's path of destruction extended. "Look

where you will," wrote Flodoard, the chronicler, "the sky is red with

fires." To the litany was added a new invocation--_A furore Normannorum,

libera nos, Domine_.

The falling to pieces of Charlemagne's civilization and the general

return of social disorders have led to an overdramatic contrasting of

the year 1000, when mankind, in terror, anticipated the ending of the

world, with the rebirth of hope and of building energy, when the dread

day had passed. Whenever the gaunt horses--famine, pest, war, and

death--are afoot, humanity is prone to look for the fulfillment of the

apocalyptic prophecy. Previous to the X century the final day had been

awaited, and the same superstition was to seize on the world's

imagination in following centuries.

The X century was certainly a desperate age. Fifty years of it were

famine, and on the highroads people were killed for food. But the evils

did not cease precisely with the year 1000; also it should be noted that

a certain number of churches were begun before the XI century opened.

However, to mark the start of a new art life the year 1000 is a

convenient date if we bear in mind that it was not a sharp division

between Carolingian and Romanesque architecture, since a gradual

evolution took place. All through the XI century the vital renewal of

architecture went on, and churches were built which, to this day, are

unrivaled for their profound religious spirit. They exist to tell us

that in the harsh life whence they emerged there were enlightened cases.

They vindicate, by their grand simplicity and detachment of soul, the

men who built them. Never was an art less one of routine than this of

the so-called hidebound monks, an art of a people reborn, full of

youth's daring, an art that was never to have an old age, eager,

untiring, experimental, an art that fitly generated the most

scientifically sound of architectures--Gothic.

The heterogeneous races, Celtic and Gallo-Roman, Germanic, and Norse,

whose conflicts long had held France in anarchy, were at last welding

into one people. The advent of a vigorous third dynasty, under whose

leadership social conditions improved, was another cause of art's

rebirth. Not long after 1000 the bishops formulated the _Trève de Dieu_,

by which peace was enforced on the turbulent lords from Wednesday night

to Monday morning. With interval of peace came commerce and wealth and

the security necessary for works of the imagination. The rebuilding of

churches was inevitable.

Invasions and wholesale conflagrations had impressed on the mediæval

mind the necessity of a church roof more durable than wood, but a

masonry vault over a wide space was a constructive feat too difficult to

be achieved immediately. In fact, up to the very end of the XI century,

though the builders had succeeded in vaulting with stone the crypt, the

apse, and the side aisles, they continued generally to cover the wide

central vessel in wood. However, the fecund idea was at work. From the

time that it took possession of their imagination, to the day when

Gothic, its fulfillment, was clearly enunciated, there was over a

century of continuous effort--roughly speaking, from the year 1000 to

the memorable day in 1144 when was dedicated the first truly Gothic

monument of considerable size--the abbey church of St. Denis. Within

that energetic span of years is embraced the Romanesque architecture of

France.[9]

The monk, Raoul Glaber, wrote an account of the rebirth of architecture

after the year 1000. It has been quoted to weariness, but is none the

less a valuable contemporary record. The whole earth, he says, as of one

accord seemed to throw off its tatters of old age and to reclothe itself

in a white mantle of churches. The monastery in which lived monk Raoul,

St. Bénigne, at Dijon, was one of the first to inaugurate the new

century, and its present crypt dates from the year 1001. Soon after 1017

the monks of Mont-Saint-Michel, in the far corner of Normandy, began a

new church, to which belonged part of the present nave. At Chartres,

Bishop Fulbert undertook to rebuild his cathedral after the fire of

1020, and the vast crypt which to-day astonishes every beholder was his

work.

The chronicler, Raoul Glaber, lived under the rule of the most powerful

monastic brotherhood ever organized, Benedictine Cluny, embracing

several thousand houses scattered over Europe. Founded in 910, during

the darkest years of the Middle Ages, Cluny kept alive the light of

learning and art, "the solitary torchbearer that passed on the flame

from the spent glow of Charlemagne to the Gothic rekindling." Her monks

were the pioneers of civilization. Cluny beat back barbarism with a

pertinacity that should make hers an honored name in history. So

established was her reputation as a civilizer that William the Conqueror

wrote to the great Abbot Hugues, to beg from him Cluny monks for

England, saying that he would pay their weight in bullion.

Cluny formed the savants who made the XII century memorable. Her fertile

seed provided Europe with doctors, ambassadors, bishops, and popes.

Gregory VII had passed through her discipline, and in his giant task of

reform, it was from Abbot Hugues that he solicited monks of Cluny. Urban

II, who set in motion the First Crusade, had been a monk in the great

Burgundian house. It is interesting to note that a generation of

reforming pontiffs accompanied the expansion of the Romanesque movement.

This would seem to contradict the notion, which many hold, that the

clergy profits by keeping the people in superstitious ignorance. It is

when religion is purified of its dross that man's respiritualized faith

out-flows in generous donations to the Church.

St. Benedict had taught his sons that work as well as prayer was a part

of salvation. The monks of Cluny fostered agriculture, thus taking away

its stigma as serf's work. Thierry speaks of the mediæval monastery as a

model farm. In Cluny craftsmen of every kind were trained; its school of

music was noted, and along the roads, as they traveled, the monks from

Burgundy sang canticles. But the art of arts for Cluny was that of the

builder, the supreme art that takes into its service all the others, to

lead them to the glorification of God's house. When, in bands of twelve,

the monks of Cluny set out to colonize in Spain, in Germany, in Italy,

in Poland, everywhere they carried with them the tool as well as the

Book. As a rule they conformed in each province to the local building

traditions. There was never a distinct Cluny school of Romanesque

architecture.

By the end of the XI century the main provincial centers of France had

each evolved its own special building characteristics. French Romanesque

architecture has been divided into some six or seven regional

schools--those of Normandy, Burgundy, Auvergne, Poitou, Languedoc,

Provence, and a minor school, the Franco-Picard.[10]

In their efforts to protect their churches by masonry roofs, these

various regional schools made use of the barrel vault or the groin

vault. The latter was found too insecure to span a wide space. Now, the

thrust of a barrel vault was exerted along the whole length of the wall,

which necessitated a continuous abutment--in other words, an enormously

thick wall. Only small windows could be opened. Since the Romanesque

architect had the ambition to light his church well, and not to encumber

his floor surface by clumsy piers, a barrel vaulting could be but a

temporary solution of the main problem.

The struggle for a satisfactory stone roof was pursued tenaciously. Many

a clearstory wall was thrust apart by the vaulting's pressure. Thus the

abbey church of Bec, finished in the 'forties of the XI century, was

reconstructed in the 'fifties, and three times, again, had to be

rebuilt. No failure could daunt the courage of those old monastic

builders. Already inherent in the newly amalgamated race was the

creative genius of France. Perseverance and courage were to have their

reward.

The theory long taught in the École des Chartes was that in the first

part of the XI century, among a number of rural churches in the royal

domain, there gradually came into use the member which was to

revolutionize the science of building. The idea did not spring from one

brain; it was a collective, not an individual, triumph. When, under some

groin vault, no doubt at first to reinforce it, some obscure mason

constructed the earliest intersecting stone ribs, the first step in

Gothic architecture had been taken.[11]

From that essential organ, the other characteristics of Gothic art were

deduced: flying buttress, slender piers, expanse of windows. In a Gothic

vault the infilling, or web, rested elastically on the diagonal ribs. As

the load of the stone roof was thus concentrated at fixed junctures, it

was necessary to reinforce only those given points. Buttresses became

intermittent. All the disintegrating force of the heavy vaulting was

gathered on the diagonally crossing arches. An arch never sleeps, said

the old Arab proverb. Let us then, said the mediæval architect, set a

guard on it that also never sleeps; and from that idea he proceeded to

develop the greatest architecture of all times. The force of expansion

was counteracted by a proportionate force of compression. By means of a

framework made up of vault ribs, of piers, of buttresses, and flying

buttresses, the edifice became a living skeleton. The walls between the

active members, when relieved of their load, served merely as screen

inclosures and could be carved into fragile beauty and hung with

transparent tapestries of colored glass. Because the flying buttress

transmitted a large part of the vault's pressure to the exterior

buttress piles, the piers within the church could be lessened in

diameter, and greater capacity be given to the interior.

Each new trial was a lesson learned. It was only with time that they

adjusted precisely the sufficient counterpoise to the thrust of the

vaults; it was only by degrees that the pier's diameter was lessened,

only with practice that was learned the placing of flying buttresses

neither too high nor too low. At first many a flying buttress was made

needlessly heavy. The solid wall in between the buttresses was not

discarded all at once. In the first Gothic churches windows continued to

be single lights, then two or three lancets were placed side by side,

subsequently each light was subdivided by mullions, and gradually an

elaborate fenestration developed. For a time, too, the round arch

continued in use, and the earliest vault ribs were semicircular. With

the fusion of the equilateral arch and the counterbutted intersecting

ribs, the essence of Gothic architecture was achieved.

Lesser consequences of the new form of vaulting followed in logical

succession. Obeying the law that it is the thing borne which commands

the form of the thing that bears, the ribs may be said to have drawn out

of the sturdy pier of Romanesque art the clustered columns of Gothic

gracefulness.

Not a single beauty in a Gothic church but has a structural

explanation. The soaring pinnacles that crown the buttresses are

apparently mere ornaments, but in reality those gallant little bits of

decoration are of sound engineering usefulness. By weighting the

buttresses, they hasten to channel the transmitted lateral thrust of the

vaulting into a vertical pressure, and they increase, too, the

counterthrust of the flying buttress against the side walls.

A clear comprehension of Gothic is impossible unless the fact be grasped

that architecture is nothing if not structural, and that no decoration

can veil a faulty skeleton. Ornamentation is the spontaneous blossoming

of the structure, else it is meaningless--a principle many a modern

architect might well digest. Too long has the most scientifically exact

of architectures been judged by its embellishments, which often enough,

in the hands of the copyist, do become a florid veneer without reason.

The Gothic master-of-works was right when he said that nothing which was

inherently needed could be ugly. No longer were flying buttresses hidden

under the cover of wooden roofs. Proudly ranged about the church, those

essential practical members became one of the distinctive beauties of

the new science of building. Renan, with his treacherous half praise,

has called the flying buttress a crutch needed by an architecture which,

from its start, nourished the seeds of decay, since it was based on no

sound constructive formula. Its success was a prestidigitator's trick,

he said. Such criticism misunderstands the A B C of Gothic lore. Can a

living limb be called a crutch? it has been aptly asked. The Gothic

cathedral is not only the most complicated, but is also the most

complete, organism ever conceived by man.

Where the first diagonal-crossing ribs are to be found will probably

never be known. Various have been the claimants. The Rhenish claim is no

longer taken seriously. Gothic made its first appearance in Germany as a

fully developed French art, and its XIII-century name, there, was _opus

francigenum_. In his Gothic work the Teuton showed a fondness for the

_tour-de-force_ and his manual dexterity surprises more than it

satisfies. The best German works in architecture are the sober

Romanesque churches. Germany's school was developed a century before the

Romanesque of France; across the Rhine occurred no Norman invasion to

sever art traditions from Charlemagne's renaissance. The pre-Gothic art

suited her ethnical temperament, and was long adhered to. While France

was building Gothic, Germany was still erecting Romanesque cathedrals.

Not till the end of the XII century were churches along that "_rue des

moines_," the Rhine, vaulted in the new manner.

The claim of Italy to be the first to use the diagonal ribs is denied by

most French archæologists, but is put forward by the Italian scholar

Rivoira and by Mr. Arthur Kingsley Porter.[12] The latter cites the

church of Sannazzaro Sesia as showing proofs that its high nave was

Gothic vaulted by 1040. For a century, he says, the Lombard churches

used diagonals, especially in Milan, where wood was scarce and it was

easier to build permanent brick ribs under the groin vault than to mold

the groin on a temporary substructure. Diagonal ribs were invented, he

thinks, as a device to economize wood. That may be true of the Lombard

churches, of which he has made an elaborate study. And it may be true

that the use of such diagonals filtered into Provence and Languedoc,

where appeared some early Gothic vaults sporadically before 1150, at

Fréjus, Marseilles, Maguelonne, and Moissac, all with the rectangular

profile of the Lombard type. The theory he advocates does not prove why

the Ile-de-France masons could not themselves, without hint from

Lombardy, have stumbled on the new feature which was to revolutionize

the builder's art. Why should we prefer his explanation for the first

use of diagonals--the desire to economize wood--to that advanced by the

French scholars--the effort to brace a falling groin vault?

Mr. Porter acknowledges that not a single Lombard church was rib-vaulted

throughout, that the Lombard architects never counterbutted their

diagonals properly, that their vaults proved unsatisfactory, so that

after 1120 they returned to their groin and barrel vaulting, or used

timber roofs, in those regions where wood abounded. The destruction of

Milan through the German invasion, in 1162, was a fatal blow to Lombard

architecture. We can only conjecture how northern Italy might have

worked out the problem of stone roofs. The best definition of Gothic,

thinks Mr. Porter, is Professor Moore's, which concludes thus: "Wherever

is wanting a framework maintained on the principle of thrust and

counterthrust, there we have not Gothic." The Lombard churches never met

the vault thrust with counterthrust of buttress. Surely not in Lombardy

was conceived the new system of construction?

S. Ambrogio at Milan was cited as l'oeuvre initiale, till it was

proved that it was built not in the IX century, but after 1067; and as

later disasters necessitated reconstructions, none of the present

diagonals was extant before 1198. S. Abondio at Como, consecrated by

Urban II, in 1095, has some very early intersecting ribs, but they are

more a step toward the new system than a true Gothic vault, since the

ribs merely reinforce and do not carry the cells.

M. Camille Enlart contends that the systematic use of Gothic in Italy

was not earlier than the second quarter of the XIII century, and was

brought across the Alps by French Cistercian monks. Though for centuries

Italy used it, she apprehended its constructive principle imperfectly.

Because she possessed a Niccola Pisano, a Giotto, a family of Cosmati to

veil the poverty of her Gothic skeleton with details of consummate

beauty, criticism is silenced. Her best Gothic monument, the cathedral

of Siena, was insecure because of technical errors. Always was Italy

adverse to showing the mechanism by which an edifice stood; few flying

buttresses were ever built south of the Alps. She preferred the classic

wide spacing of piers, an unencumbered interior, and small windows

against her hot sun. Who remembers that he is in a Gothic church when in

the somber cathedral of Florence? Its long nave is divided into four

bays where a northern church would have used eight. For Italy the

Renaissance was a whole-hearted return to a national art which she could

fully understand.

No people outside of France better understood and developed Gothic art

than the English. Their claim to priority is based on the date of the

cathedral of Durham, whose choir-aisle diagonals Mr. John Bilson says

are as early as 1093. Since those diagonals show no hesitation, they

must have been preceded by others. Where in England are there to be

found the earlier trials? The English claim is practically a Norman one,

and Normandy's experimental work in Gothic vaultings remains to be

traced. Rivoira claims that Lombard influences predominated in the

formation of Normandy's Romanesque school. Can the Norman be said to

have discerned in diagonals their immense possibilities any clearer than

had the Lombard?

Those among the French archæologists who have disputed the Norman claim

to priority say that the principal span of Norman and English churches

was covered with timber roofs far into the XII century. We know that the

Gothic vaulting of the two abbey churches of Caen were XII-century

additions, and M. de Lasteyrie thought the same was true of Durham,

though Mr. Bilson has convinced MM. Enlart and Lefèvre-Pontalis that

Durham's choir-aisle vaults are an original part of the cathedral begun

in 1093. Not till 1174, when Guillaume de Sens began Canterbury

Cathedral, did French Gothic architecture, in its plenitude, appear in

England.

The question of priority remains an open one. It might almost be said

that vaulting with intersecting ribs began to appear here and there

simultaneously, that if it had not cropped out in the Ile-de-France, it

would have appeared in Normandy, or vice versa. And not long after them,

the builders in Burgundy and Anjou began to use it. Before 1150,

isolated samples of the Gothic rib vault appeared at Vézelay, Poitiers,

Bordeaux, Quimperlé, Moissac, St. Gilles, Marseilles. The hour was ripe

for the solution. Gothic architecture was the spontaneous invention of

French builders at the dawn of the XII century, at a time when the

poetry of France was imposing itself on the whole of Europe.

_L'oeuvre initiale_ will never be known. However, there was a region

where the early use of the ogival vault was not accidental, but

systematic, one spot in the heart of France where it immediately made a

school, since there it found no strong earlier traditions to overcome,

where it became a living organism and went through a succession of

logical developments until it had taken on the main characteristics of

the new art. There is one center from which Gothic architecture spread

out with slow, sure march into the neighboring regions. In the

Ile-de-France, all the trials were summed up and developed by Abbot

Suger at St. Denis. From 1140 to 1144 he wedded definitely the pointed

arch with the diagonal rib.

The French masters, who have contended that the Ile-de-France is the

cradle of Gothic architecture, have had lesser controversies among

themselves as to which special portion of the royal domain led in the

evolution. M. Woillez, a pioneer, considered the environs of Beauvais

the favored spot; M. Saint-Paul looked to the districts between Normandy

and Paris; M. Enlart sought the nucleus in Amiens diocese in Picardy;

and M. Lefèvre-Pontalis chose the classic diocese of Soissons. The two

latter masters have modified their views since studying Durham's vaults,

and they may modify them further in regard to Lombardy's early use of

diagonals. The controversy is not closed.

The France of that day was more a feudal confederation than a united

kingdom, and some of the king's vassals ruled territories larger than

his own. If the feeling of nationality is created as much by great

achievements in common, as by political boundaries and the ties of

blood, if, as all now agree, the enthusiasm of the Crusades, those holy

wars against a common foe, helped to weld the rival sections of France

into one nation, surely that other enthusiasm of the day, those other

_Gesta Dei_ per Francos, the building of the Gothic cathedrals, played

an important part in forming the national soul. From end to end of

France they were building when at the battle of Bouvines a French king

united with the jealous barons, with clergy and with burgess and with

villein in a common defense of their native land. King, clergy, lords,

and people fought at Bouvines, and king, clergy, lords, and people built

the big national churches. All the energies of the times went to their

making, all the primitive strong purposes, all the newly stirred

intellect of the schools. Science was as needed for them as inspiration,

for without the long manual training of the guilds, the mystic glow had

not sufficed.

There has crept into various architectural manuals, since first M.

Viollet-le-Duc voiced it, a theory which scarcely needs refuting, so

disproved is it by modern research.[13] Gothic art is considered as the

layman's expression of revolt against the Romanesque art of the monks,

an idea that denies the structural sequence of the two phases of the

same art, and would present Gothic as a reaction against its

predecessor, instead of its supreme development.

We read that a cathedral was built as a sort of assembly hall for the

rising communes, and not _pour loger le bon Dieu_. Now in every known

case it was the bishop who started the rebuilding of each cathedral, and

the works usually began with the choir, the part of a church suitable

only for the cult. Even when a bishop, in his character of proprietor of

a city (as in the case of Rheims and Laon), opposed the communal claims,

he and the people went on building their cathedral together. We have

precious documents to assure us in what spirit of piety the work was

done. All classes and all ages, women as well as men, gave their

voluntary labor to the new works, after having confessed and

communicated in pious confraternities; sometimes it was for an abbot

that they dragged in the stones from the quarry, as at St. Denis and St.

Pierre-sur-Dives; sometimes it was to aid a bishop, as at Chartres and

Rouen. To offset such irrefutable evidence there is not one contemporary

reference to a laic, or communal purpose.

Also, when it is asserted that the bishop helped the cathedrals because

they were jealous of the monastic orders, there is not one historical

record to confront a host of documents which disprove the idea. Large

numbers of the bishop-builders issued from monasteries, founded

monasteries, and returned to monasteries to die. While Maurice de Sully

was erecting Notre Dame, at Paris, he built four monasteries, in one of

which he requested to be buried. The bishop who began Auxerre Cathedral

chose Cistercian Pontigny for his tomb. The bishop-builders of Noyon,

Laon, Senlis, Soissons, Rheims, Bourges, and Rouen were buried among the

monks. That there should occasionally be friction between a bishop and

an abbot over legal privileges is only characteristic of human nature in

all times. As a class the bishops were not opposed to the monks, nor the

Orders to the secular clergy. The monks of St. Remi honored the

archbishop of Rheims in their choir windows.

The cloister welcomed the new architecture. Transition Gothic churches

were built by the monks of St. Germain-des-Prés and St.

Martin-des-Champs at Paris, and one could prolong the list into pages.

Where in Burgundy is found the earliest Gothic? In the Cistercian church

of Pontigny, and in Benedictine Vézelay. Where in Champagne?--the

abbatials of Notre Dame at Châlons-sur-Marne and St. Remi at Rheims. In

Normandy? In the Midi?--again the answer is, in abbey churches. Indeed,

monastic building energy seemed inexhaustible, for where the prime of

Gothic arrived, it was still the monks who produced that masterpiece of

the new art, the Merveille of Mont-Saint-Michel.

In the XII century the spread of monastic life took on a phenomenal

aspect. Benedictine houses and those of the newly founded Orders of

Cîteaux and Prémontré increased, not by hundreds, but by thousands. The

monks were in absolute accord with the spirit of their time. Sons of the

cloister had inspired the entire XI century: Gregory VII, Abbot William

of Dijon, St. Anselm, Lanfranc, St. Hugues of Cluny. A bevy of

remarkable men of the cloister led the XII century, the chief being

Suger of St. Denis, protector of the serfs, the man of genius who

stimulated the bishops of France to remake their cathedrals in emulation

of his Gothic abbey church, and St. Bernard of Clairvaux, on whose words

all Europe hung.

Architecture passed to laic control when the protection of monastic life

was no longer needed for artists, and when the science of building

required the specialist, the man occupied with it alone. The schools of

Cluny had trained the first guildsmen, and many of the names of Gothic

architects--Orbais, Honnecourt, Corbic--indicate that they were born in

places where monastic building industries flourished. It was in the

natural course of events that the art should pass out of the possession

of the few into the general national life.

Another natural happening has been distorted by partisans. The burning

of monastery archives during the XVI-century religious wars and by the

Revolution is accountable for the few names of architects that have come

down to us. The scarcity of such names has been cited as an instance of

the jealous suppression of the laymen by the clergy forced to employ

them. Now precisely the contrary is the truth. What modern architect was

ever accorded such prominence as was allowed by the bishops of Amiens

and Rheims to their masters-of-works when they inscribe those laymen

names in the labyrinth designs of the cathedral pavements? The monks of

Marmoutier and of St. Germain-des-Prés were proud to bury in their

abbey-churches their architects Étienne de Mortagne and Pierre de

Montereau. In Rheims, the architects Hugues Libergier and Robert de

Coucy were likewise honored.

By digging in old archives, the modern student is ever adding new names

to the nation's honor roll. Many a gap still remains, but the very

anonymousness of such masters of the living stone is stuff for the

imagination. One likes to picture the old-time craftsman-artist

rejoicing in his insignificance as he chiseled his leaf and vine just as

he saw them by the roadside. He served a Master who gave like wages to

all who worked in spirit and in truth, to him who, in the hidden corners

where no human eye could penetrate, carved his leaf and flower with the

same love as did the greater artist working on the stately imaged

portals.

The "heretical Gothic-sculpture bogey" has led certain imaginations

astray. There are those who find latent heresy in the old carvers' work;

they point, with suggestive smile, to the bishop and monk placed among

the damned in the Last Judgments at the cathedral doors. Let them turn

to the sermons of the day and they will find precisely the same

Christian doctrine of the equality of all men before sin and punishment,

preached from the pulpit within the church. Not in all the myriad scenes

from Old and New Testaments is a single doctrinal error to be found,

says M. Émile Mâle, who is master of the iconography of French churches.

The sculptor layman merely carried out the scheme of the trained

theologian.

Many a sharp word does M. Viollet-le-Duc give as critic to those who

enjoy in a cathedral the superficial beauties of decoration, but are

blind to the efficient structure, to the scientific upholding skeleton.

Surely it is a still more radical ignorance which perceives in a Gothic

church its mechanical perfection, but denies the aspiration to

immortality which was its inceptive spirit. To ascribe the origin of

cathedrals to the need by the nascent commune of a town hall is to make

of those soaring monuments veritable follies of human pride. Restore to

them their religious soul, have eyes to see what may be called their

spiritual framework, and as up-leaps toward the infinite they are

sublimities. Can churches be the creation of rebellion and hate when

into their very stones passed the clamorous vibrant faith of those

crusading generations? Like hovering prayers their vaults seem to shut

one in. The heart, weary of modern sophistry, draws strength from their

eternal affirmation. He must have little music in his soul who is deaf

to such a _Credo_. When men built Gothic cathedrals they knelt on both

knees to pray, and never have they soared more supremely above

themselves. "Deeds of God through the French" are these temples.

A word in regard to the term "Gothic." It is as unreasonable a misnomer

as could have been chosen, but since usage has sanctioned it, it must

pass. Primarily put into currency by the Italians of the Renaissance, in

the injurious sense of barbarous, the term was adopted by the French

neo-classics of the XVII century. Molière's scathing line on Gothic

sculpture is well known--"_Ces monstres odieux des siècles ignorants_."

He complained that Gothic art "_fit à la politesse une mortelle

guerre_." When Racine spoke of Chartres Cathedral he made use of the

term _barbare_; even to the churchman Fénelon the cathedrals of the

Middle Ages appeared unreasoned and faulty.

The opprobrious term was fixed by the Encyclopædists of the next

century, when prejudice against the Middle Ages became militant and

organized. With exclusive pedantism they dismissed the most national and

civilized of arts as worthy of those rough invaders, the Goths.

Voltaire, who, says Guizot, garnered only what was mean and criminal in

the Middle Ages, saw in the study of Gothic architecture "a coarse

curiosity, lacking good taste." As late as 1800, a project was abroad to

disencumber the soil of France of "these overcharged façades with their

multitude of indecent and ridiculous figures." And still later, the

students in the national school of architecture were taught to despise

the most reasoned, the most robust, the most logical of arts as a style

of confusion and caprice.

The rehabilitation of Gothic architecture in France, if tardy, has been

ample. No branch of modern science presents a more able corps of

workers. While true to the Latin genius, which unites clarity of style

with an exact erudition, they have obeyed a yet deeper race instinct

which knows that matter must be vivified by spirit, else learning sinks

to a dry-as-dust recording, incapable of its highest flight. The telling

of the monumental story of France has been touched by the sacred flame

of patriotism. Like paladins, these modern knights are abroad on all the

by-paths eager to rescue some hidden treasure of the national art.

Future scholarship will look back at the brilliant achievements of the

French archæologists of to-day with the same pride that is felt for the

Benedictine savants of the XVII century.

The aim of archæology is to date a monument correctly. How to do this by

scientific method has been taught the last two generations at the École

des Chartes, the national school par excellence, so M. de Vögué called

it. Archives are pored over to trace each link with history, and those

monuments which have no authenticated pedigree are compared with those

of certain date. Each manuscript date is verified by the analysis of the

edifice itself, whose successive campaigns of building are deciphered,

since few and far between are the homogeneous churches. Each restoration

also is verified. One of the solid bases for archæological exactness is

the knowledge of profiles, which are called by the English textbook rib

molds, arch molds, pier molds, or base molds. By a comparative analysis

of profiles, a monument can now be accurately dated. As keystones were

of different types in the various earlier decades of Gothic, they too

help to substantiate an edifice.[14]

Churches of one region are contrasted with those of another. The

material employed is considered, since the stone of a province causes

richness or poverty of sculpture: thus, Brittany's granite and

Auvergne's lava mean an undeveloped sculpture compared with the fine

white limestone districts of the Oise, or in Normandy and Poitou. When

practicable, excavations under an edifice can give data concerning

previous churches on the site.

M. Jules Quicherat was the first to teach that the history of the Middle

Ages architecture was the history of the architect's fight against the

weight and push of the vaulting.[15] Once the right path was blazed,

many an able pioneer helped clear the new road--such students as

Viollet-le-Duc, de Caumont, Woillez, Prosper Merimée, de Dion, Coutan,

de Beaurepaire, Grandmaison, Révoil, Rupricht-Robert, Félix de Verneilh,

Anthyme Saint-Paul, Louis Courajod, Buhot de Kersers. At the École des

Chartes, Robert de Lasteyrie occupied with distinction the chair held by

Quicherat for thirty years, and his pupils, Camille Enlart and Eugène

Lefèvre-Pontalis, in their turn, are passing on the high tradition to a

younger school. M. Enlart, the director of the museum of comparative

sculpture at the Trocadéro, is an authority on Romanesque architecture,

and has initiated the study of the spread of Gothic architecture in

mediæval Italy, Spain, the North, and the Levant.[16] M.

Lefèvre-Pontalis has written a host of erudite monographs; one learns to

accept his decisions as final, in so far as the ever-expanding realm of

knowledge can be final. He directs the invaluable publications called

the _Congrès Archéologique de France_ and the _Bulletin Monumental_, and

he edits those excellent short studies known as the _Petites

Monographies des grands édifices de la France_, which are convenient

pocket guides for the serious tourist.[17]

Each year is producing final monographs on the chief churches of France.

M. Georges Durand has rendered fitting tribute to Amiens. M. de Farcy

has identified himself with Angers, René Merlet with Chartres, Lucien

Broche with Laon, and Lucien Bégule with Lyons. MM. Brutails has

specialized on Gascony, the Thollier and H. du Ranquet on Auvergne,

Labande on Provence, Berthelé on Plantagenet Gothic, André Rhein on

Poitou and Anjou, Émile Bonnet on Hérault, Charles Porée on Burgundy,

and Louis Demaison on Champagne. Other able students are MM. Bouet,

Louis Serbat, Marcel Aubert, Ernest Rupin, Jules de Lahondès, René Fage,

Amédée Boinet, Jean Virey, Robert Triger, and Louis Régnier.

Precious texts have been unearthed from the archives by Victor Mortet,

Henri Stein, and Eugène Müntz. The sculpture of France has been studied

by MM. Robert de Lasteyrie, Émile Lambin, Léon Palustre, Eugène Müntz,

Gabriel Fleury, Raymond Koechlin, J. M. de Vasselot, Paul Vitry, Gaston

Brière, André Michel, Louis Gonse, and Émile Mâle. The latter three have

brought out monumental general works. _L'art gothique_ of Gonse gives

the most exact and extended account of the beginning of Gothic, says

Anthyme Saint-Paul, who is himself one of the most inspiring masters of

mediæval archæology. M. Michel, who is conservator of the national

museums, has edited the superb _Histoire de l'art_, to which leading

French scholars have contributed.[18] And the iconography of French

cathedrals has received no more magistral treatment than from M. Mâle,

to whom is due the credit of establishing the scholastic character of

Gothic imagery.[19] His path was cleared by pioneers such as Didron,

Crosnier, Martin, and Duchesne.

Happily for the local schools, a bevy of intelligent churchmen have

devoted themselves to their regional monuments. I hope I may be pardoned

if I do not name each with his ecclesiastical designation, but cite them

here simply as savants: the Abbés Eugène Müller (Senlis); Bourassé and

Bosseboeuf (Touraine); Ledru (Le Mans); Auber, De la Croix, and Mgr.

Barbier de Montault (Poitiers); Chomton (Dijon); Bulteau (Chartres);

Abgrall (Brittany); Maurin (Aix-en-Provence); Bouvier (Sens); Cerf

(Rheims); Bouxin (Laon); and for the Norman churches, the Abbés Fossey,

Porée, Loisel, and Pigéon.

The list might be greatly extended. One can cite only a few. From the

pages of such students have been written these chapters, by one who has

felt that there must be many travelers who love the old cathedrals of

Europe and have wandered among them puzzled by half-understood things,

longing to know with exactitude how and when they were built. So it has

not seemed a useless task to gather into these ten chapters what the

French scholars are relating of their churches. So swiftly do

archæological discoveries follow one another to-day, that statements

accepted now may be obsolete to-morrow. The makers of history and art

books can hope to serve only their hour.

The new school of Christian archæology is redeeming the misrepresented

centuries after the year 1000. It is undoing the systematic

falsification of history, and is teaching us to read the past other than

by the printed page. Not hate, but love, opens new windows in the soul.

The study of the churches of France adds flesh and blood to many a mere

name in history. One gains a very special liking for little Abbot Suger,

most dependable of men, whose life was a succession of big undertakings.

One feels reverent affection for that sentinel of the Church and its

guide, Bernard of Clairvaux, who said some harsh things of fine

churches, all the while that he was feeding the mystic life that made

them inevitable. And very real become the bishop builders when one knows

their cathedrals. One pores over the old volumes of the _Histoire

Littéraire de la France_, begun by XVII-century Benedictines, and still

being continued by the Institute of France, to gather details of good

Bishop Fulbert and doughty St. Ives, who built at Chartres; of that

distinguished literary man, Bishop Hildebert de Lavardin, who worked at

Le Mans; of the well-poised Bishop Maurice de Sully, who raised Notre

Dame at Paris; of crusading prelates such as Albéric de Humbert, who

began Rheims; and of Nivelon de Chérisy, who built Soissons, and who, on

the Fourth Crusade, played a foremost role. One grows to love, above

all, the saint-king, Louis, truest hero of _la douce France_, who

illuminated his kingdom with fair churches. And no one can admire St.

Louis and not keep a warm corner in his heart for Joinville, his

comrade-in-arms, the irresistible seneschal of Champagne.

Crusades and chivalry and all the multicolored aspects of the XII and

XIII centuries become clearer to the imagination as one traces the story

of the cathedrals of France; scholasticism and the early days of the

schools, when Abélard sparred with Guillaume de Champeaux. Very real

they all become: Peter the Venerable, good Stephen Harding, St. Thomas

Becket, John of Salisbury, St. Edmund Rich, Stephen Langton, St.

Dominic, St. Malachy O'Morgair, Innocent III, St. Bonaventure, and St.

Thomas Aquinas. France welcomed them all during the two vital centuries

when she imposed her literature as well as her architecture on western

Europe, when the Paris schools were the intellectual center of the

world.

To paint a rose-colored picture of the two best centuries of the Middle

Ages would be absurd. They were full of very evil things. There were

horrifying episodes in them. "Barbarism tempered by religion; religion

disfigured by barbarism," is the definition of Balmes, the theologian.

The inconsistencies were gigantic. The same men who sacked

Constantinople in 1204, dealing art a staggering blow, were the very men

who in western Europe were building cathedrals. Then, as now, there were

many for whom religion served as a convenient cloak for the lower

instincts; then, as now, there were many who never lost sight of the

higher ideals. Side by side with the evil and the self-seeking should be

set the sublime impulses which checked those untutored generations. Do

not hide the merciless laying waste of Languedoc by the north, but do

not forget that, in the same hour, men had reached an abnegation of self

that led them to the African coast as voluntary substitutes for their

brother Christians in bondage there.

In the midst of its human infirmities it was an age that aspired: its

poets sang of the Holy Grail, its kings and its serfs were saints, there

were saint scholars and barons and merchants, there was even a saint

lawyer.

It is precisely the restored balance between good and evil which the

study of Gothic art is bringing about. The partisan may go on compiling

a police gazette and call it history.[20] While the towers of Gothic

churches point upward, he is refuted. The modern mind has once for all

grasped that it is psychologically impossible for an age to have been

sunk in blind superstition when it could build, not merely one or two,

but hundreds of churches whose every line is an aspiration toward

sanctity. The cathedrals are the true apologetics of the Middle Ages.

Archæology is again proving its claim to be the soul of history.