The Gothic Art of Burgundy[267]
_Be strong in humility and humble in authority:
Be austere in tenderness and tender in austerity:
Be amiable in sorrow and grave in prosperity._
--ST. COLUMBANUS' Antitheses.
Burgundy, "a country placed on Europe's highways," was a land of
monasteries. They dotted the fertile province. There were "prodigious
Cluny," and Vézelay "the superb," scenes of historic gatherings; at
Auxerre was St. Germain's monastery; at Dijon, the abbey of St. Bénigne,
pioneer in the Romanesque renaissance of the region. There were Cîteaux,
the mother house of missions over the entire Christian world, Pontigny,
that harbored three archbishops of Canterbury, Fontenay with its
industrial forge, Tournus, Saulieu, Paray-le-Monial, and Flavigny, that
reminded Chateaubriand of Jerusalem set on its hill. Up and down the
land the _laus perennis_ never ceased.
On the confines of the old kingdom of Burgundy, as the VI century
closed, St. Columbanus founded at Luxeuil, between the sources of the
Moselle and the Saône, an abbey which was to mold the religious life of
the VII century, most fertile of epochs in the number and fervor of its
religious institutions. Luxeuil became the popular school of Gaul, the
mother house of hundreds of monasteries. Her monks filled the sees of
France. The Celtic Rule was harsh, a compound of the Orient, of Lerens,
and of Bangor in Ireland; even on feast days fish was a luxury. It was
only the personal genius of the impetuous Irish missionary that caused
it to be accepted for a few generations; then as the VII century closed,
the Benedictine Rule which conformed better to human limitations
superseded the Columban. "Where Columbanus sowed, Benedict reaped."[268]
Three hundred years later there rose in Burgundy the most splendid
monastic institution that Christendom has ever known, Benedictine Cluny,
that stood shoulder to shoulder with the reforming popes in their fight
for the purification of the Church.[269] Cluny initiated the Truce of
God, the peace movement of the XI century that permitted the art
renaissance which was to culminate in the Gothic cathedrals. Peace
meant an unmolested commerce, peace meant city charters and stable laws.
A reformed clergy meant the renewal of the people's love of the altar,
and their generous contributions toward the erection of churches. With
Cluny as leader there was then formulated the architecture which was a
stepping stone to a greater system.
Two hundred years after Cluny's foundation, Burgundy again gave birth to
a monastic movement which was to carry to the ends of Europe the Gothic
system of building. Cîteaux, in the extent of its conquests and its
centralized administration, has been compared with the Roman Empire.
Cistercian monks carried Burgundian Gothic to Spain, to Italy, to
Greece, to England, Germany, and Scandinavia. Owing to the conditions of
society and of the episcopacy, the cloister then was chief patron of
art. Simony infected the bishoprics and it is not under unworthy
prelates that churches are reared. Gregory VII, Cluny, that supplied him
with his army of reformers, and St. Bernard, with his white-cowled
brethren, warred unceasingly on simony, concubinage, and investiture
(the tormenting question of layman control of churchmen). And since it
was monasteries that fought that battle of regeneration, monastic
churches and not cathedrals were the first tangible proof of the ethical
rebirth of Europe. _À la peine ... à l'honneur._ When the reform
achieved by Cluny and Cîteaux had filled the sees with worthy bishops,
then were built the great cathedrals.
We have seen how the problem of roofing churches in stone caused the
evolution from Romanesque to Gothic art. Burgundy's struggle to achieve
a permanent stone roof was bolder than that of other regional schools in
France, and perhaps it was overhardy, since her abbatials, in Gothic
times, had to be buttressed to keep them standing. Though the Burgundian
discarded too early the Romanesque principle of equilibrium by dead
load, his temerity was a step forward in the march toward new principles
of construction. These monks on Europe's highway made churches of ample
width and height, and, rather than sacrifice their proper lighting,
opened windows in the upper walls of the central vessel. However, they
must have felt that their clearstory windows were an experiment, for
they essayed, occasionally, an embryo flying buttress, keeping it hidden
under the lean-to roof of the aisles.
The militant Romanesque school of Burgundy was too well developed for it
to bow instantly before the new art. Not here did the generating member
of Gothic architecture first come into common usage, but in that region
of northern France whose pre-Gothic school was of less importance. The
Burgundian clung stubbornly to his early ways of building, and even
after other provinces had accepted the ogival style he erected
thoroughly Romanesque churches; St. Philibert at Dijon is the
contemporary of the cathedrals at Chartres and Paris. Flying buttresses
at no time found favor in Burgundy. Groin vaults were persisted in
simultaneously with diagonals, and the sexpartite vault used long after
the north had dropped it. Firm plain profiles for archivolts and window
molds were preferred.
Once the Burgundian frankly accepted the new system, his bold genius led
him to push its principles to their limit. Within the confines of the
duchy were the quarries of hard Tonnerre stone that permitted audacious
experiments in building. He dared traverse his exterior buttresses by
circulation passages, he dared catch his heavily weighted diagonals on
corbels (carved with original heads), and to poise a mass of material on
the slenderest of colonnettes. Often he surmounted his triforium by a
passage that passed directly through the active wall shafts, as in
cathedrals of Auxerre, Nevers, and Semur. By the middle of the XIII
century Dijon achieved a marvel of Gothic technique in its church of
Notre Dame. Despite much notable Gothic work one is inclined, none the
less, to maintain that Burgundy found her fullest expression in her
earlier monastic churches. Alas, that the greatest of them, Cluny,
should to-day be but the phantom of its once colossal self!
CLUNY[270]
Time will be ending soon, heaven will be rending soon, fast we and
pray we: Comes the most merciful; comes the most terrible; watch we
while may we.
--BERNARD DE MORLAIX, "Jerusalem the Golden"[271] (c. 1140).
The "mother abbey of Europe" lies in a fertile valley some fifteen miles
off the express route that passes through Mâcon. The property was given
to the monks by a duke of Aquitaine, who thus anathematized future
despoilers: "I conjure you O holy Apostles Peter and Paul, to cut off
from life eternal all robbers, invaders, or sellers of that which I
herewith donate with full satisfaction and entire free will."
When Cluny was founded in 910, the victory of Christianity over the
Barbarians still hung in the balance. It was Cluny that weighed down the
scale for justice and progress, Cluny that gave to Rome the needed
reforming popes. Hers should be a name as honored in humanity's history
as Athens: "We leave college," wrote Montalembert, "able to cite the
list of Jupiter's mistresses, but ignorant, even to their names, of the
founders of the religious Orders that civilized Europe." And the
testimony of the Protestant Leibnitz is: "Without monks we should
have no erudition, for it is certain that we owe to monasteries the
preservation of letters and books." Four of the best among the popes
came out of Cluny's cloister: Gregory VII, Urban II, Paschal II, and
Urban V.
[Illustration: _The XI-century Sanctuary of Cluny as It Was until the
Revolution_]
The modern French school of mediæval archæology, delving into the past,
has drawn Cluny from its long oblivion. In 1910 was celebrated with
national honors the millennium of the Burgundian "abbey of abbeys," and
to the festival the French Academy sent M. René Bazin as its
representative to voice the gratitude of French letters to the "great
Order of Cluny which in the France of the Middle Ages exercised in its
plenitude the mission of civilizer, apostle of the Gospel, apostle of
peace, guardian of the whole field of knowledge, founder then, of all
works of charity, initiator of both literary and agricultural progress,
creator of an art which she spread over Europe."
During the Middle Ages the silent Burgundian valley was a busy hive of
arts and crafts[272] with goldsmiths' work, illuminating, carving in
ivory and in stone, foundering of bells, and the making of stained
glass. All that went toward the adornment of God's house was fostered in
Cluniac schools, but above all was the master art of the builder
honored. In bands of twelve the monks carried not only the Gospel, but
the arts to every part of Europe, and even farther afield, for there
were houses of the Order on Mount Tabor, in Nazareth, and in Bethany. No
uniform Cluniac building lore was followed; it was the usual custom for
the monks to conform to the local traditions in each different
country.[273]
It was natural that the big abbey church at Cluny proper should have
been Burgundian Romanesque. Hazelon, a monk of Cluny, was the
master-of-works, a learned man who had once occupied a high position in
the world; he is said to have himself worked here with trowel and
mortar. The tunnel vaulting was braced by transverse ribs that were
slightly pointed; clearstory windows were opened in the upper walls. The
channeled pilasters were a heritage from the classic traditions of the
region; near by, in Rome's former capital of Autun, were many monuments
of antiquity.
Cluny's abbey church of St. Peter was the largest in the world, and
covered an area about equal to that of the present St. Peter's at Rome.
It was over five hundred and fifty feet long; the cathedral at Paris is
not four hundred feet in length. There were double aisles and double
transepts. St. Hugues of Cluny, the sixth abbot, "a man of God greatest
among the great," "the pupil of the papacy's eye," ruled the Burgundian
mother house during the sixty years that Cluny guided Christendom (1049
to 1109). No flattery, no subtlety could turn him from pure justice.
Under him were trained Hildebrand, the future Gregory VII, who led the
forces of church reform. "The giving up of justice is the shipwreck of
the soul," said Gregory VII. Abbot Hugues trained also Urban II, who
preached the First Crusade. Among the houses he founded were St.
Martin-des-Champs at Paris, and St. Pancras at Lewes; in England there
were thirty-five Cluniac establishments in the time of Henry VIII.
Twice St. Hugues went into Spain, where his niece was the Queen of
Castile, engaged in substituting the liturgy of the Church universal for
the Mozarabic rite. To the town of Cluny he granted a commune, and he
built two of its parish churches, Notre Dame and St. Marcel.[274] When
he felt death approaching, he had himself carried before the altar of
St. Marcel, there to breathe his last on a bed of ashes, and a few days
earlier than the Easter Tuesday of 1109 on which he passed away, his
dear friend and frequent visitor at Cluny, St. Anselm of Canterbury,
died, being privileged, he said, to go to meet his Saviour in time for
the blessed Easter feast. Those two great men of the cloister by their
ethical and intellectual leadership laid the basis for the Gothic
cathedrals.
The choir of St. Peter's, at Cluny, was blessed by Urban II, in 1095,
when he came into France to preach the First Crusade. He passed a week
in his old home, after which he and his beloved master, St. Hugues,
proceeded to the historic gathering at Clermont. The nave of St. Peter's
was carried forward by succeeding abbots of Cluny, and many a pope was
to watch the edifice rising. Paschal II passed the winter of 1106-07 in
Cluny, and his successor, Gelasius II, died there in 1119; he had
recently consecrated the new Romanesque cathedral of Pisa.[275] On the
site of the wing of the cloister where he lodged now stands a
XIV-century building called by his name. On his death the cardinals at
Cluny held conclave, electing as pope a member of the ducal house of
Burgundy, the bishop of Vienne, who took the name Calixtus II; in Cluny
church he canonized the great Abbot Hugues.
St. Hugues' successor, Pons de Melgueil, after an estimable career, was
led by pride to a downfall. On his resignation, Pierre de Montboissier,
an Auvergne noble, known in history as Peter the Venerable, became the
ninth abbot (1122-56). At that time he was but thirty years of age. Pons
returned, seized Cluny abbey, and in the ensuing disorders the vaulting
of the new nave collapsed. Abbot Peter restored the stone roof, and
Innocent II dedicated the completed church in 1131.
The capitals then carved are to be seen in the town's Museum. Some of
them personified the eight tones of liturgical music, for Cluny excelled
in song, and every twenty-four hours her vast basilica echoed to the
chanting of the entire book of Psalms; never, says the old chronicle,
was there pause in the _saintes clameurs_, the _laus perennis_ started
by Irish Columbanus in the valleys of Burgundy. Some of the capitals
from the abbatial are contemporaries of the statuary at Vézelay, where
Peter the Venerable had been prior, and where his brother, Pons de
Montboissier, was abbot. Vézelay was a pilgrimage church, so that its
imagery was made of more popular character than that of Cluny, where
worshiped an intellectual élite.
Cluny began the carving of the Bible for the Poor. The Burgundians were
the first to develop the imaged portal which the Gothic cathedrals were
to elaborate into their sumptuous triple entrances. While Cluny was
building, a monk in the monastery composed a poem of some thousand
lines, opening with a vision of the heavenly Jerusalem. Bernard of
Morlaix must have found inspiration in his own Burgundian basilica,
which we know to have contained over three hundred windows of
translucent mosaic. He dedicated his poem to his beloved abbot, Pierre
de Montboissier.
Peter the Venerable was no Puritan in art, as was his friend St.
Bernard, with whom he had many a skirmish, owing to their temperamental
differences and the rivalship of their respective Orders. The abbot of
Cluny never wavered in his reverence for the "fellow citizen of angels,"
as he called the abbot of Clairvaux, and Bernard saw in Peter, man of
the world though he was, "a vessel of election full of truth and grace."
Like Abbot Suger, Pierre de Montboissier was the type of the liberal
culture of the Benedictine, and he was to live again in the XVII-century
scholars of the St. Maur reform, even as Bernard's uncompromising spirit
reappeared then in De Rancy and his Trappists, a reform of Cîteaux. Like
Suger, Peter the Venerable was a quoter of the classics, and a literary
man. "To write was for an abbot of Cluny a hereditary tradition," said a
XII-century historian. He had Arabic taught at Cluny for mission
purposes. Journeying in Spain, he was the first to have the Koran
translated for Europe; he held it to be Islam's best refutation. Very
modern appears this old-time abbot in the zest with which he set out to
travel, to inspect the houses of his Order. When he died in 1156, he was
ruling over two thousand establishments, in every part of Christendom.
In person Peter was distinguished, and in character most generous,
humane, and free from narrowness. He was wisely moderate always, and
simple and direct. The letters of his which still exist make him a
living personality. Though as keen a theologian as his friend Bernard,
Abbot Peter kept the defeated Abélard with him at Cluny until his
irritated spirit was soothed, and when the great schoolman died in 1142,
Abbot Peter wrote to Héloïse, in her nunnery of the Paraclete, in Troyes
diocese, to arrange that Abélard's body be brought there for burial, and
he himself went to preach the funeral sermon.[276] In his letter to
Héloïse he said that never had he seen truer humility and retirement
than Maître Pierre's; "after which," as M. René Bazin remarks, "none of
us need despair."
Cluny's abbatial of St. Peter was enlarged in the XIII century by a
forechurch of several bays, with double aisles. An antechurch or narthex
was a frequent addition to the Burgundian basilica; sometimes it was
open as at Autun and Beaune, sometimes wholly inclosed as at Vézelay.
Although Cluny's narthex was built as late as 1220, groin vaulting was
used for the aisles.
In 1245 Innocent IV paused for a month at Cluny, having in his train a
dozen cardinals and their suites, and Louis IX came for a fortnight's
conference with the pope, accompanied by the queen mother, his brothers,
and courtiers. The emperor of Constantinople and the heirs both of
Castile and Aragon were guests at that same time, and yet so immense was
the establishment, that all were accommodated without the monks quitting
their usual quarters. In 1248 St. Louis paused again in Cluny before his
first crusade.
With material success came spiritual decline. The tale runs the same in
most of man's organizations. As a reformer Cluny was succeeded first by
the Cistercians, whose fervor lasted for a century, when were needed the
two mendicant Orders of Francis and Dominic. The system that allowed the
king to appoint abbots, initiated by the Concordat of 1516, proved
fatal, and there is truth in the saying that the court prelates paved
the way for the religious wars. Three times in those bitter years of
strife was Cluny sacked, its famous library ravaged, and its art
treasures burned.
The Revolution completed the ruin. The first mob that marched out from
Mâcon to wreck the abbey was dispersed with firearms by the townspeople.
The municipality of Cluny wrote to the National Assembly to tell of the
constant benefits it had derived from the monks--so the rationalist
Taine relates in his _Ancien Régime_--but the impious wrecking of the
great monastery went on. Day after day cartloads of rare books were
brought to feed the bonfires in the square. All through 1793 bands of
looters came out from Mâcon to break windows and destroy images. The
indignant townspeople looked on impotently at the vandalism that spelled
their own material decline. At Napoleon's advent they sent petition
after petition to try to save the big church, but the Mâcon merchant who
had purchased it proceeded to open a road right up its nave and sold the
stones as building materials. First the narthex was blown up with
gunpowder; then a transept arm. When the huge central tower fell with
stupefying noise the people shivered with a nameless fear. The history
of France was being obliterated before their eyes.
To save what remained the town offered in exchange its communal lands
and market halls. In vain; the grandest monastic church in the world was
demolished piecemeal after the nineteenth century opened. Some seven or
eight towers had crowned St. Peter's. In 1811 the one over the choir was
destroyed. Gunpowder blew up the stately pillars of Pentelic marble and
Italian cipolin set around his sanctuary by St. Hugues seven hundred
years before. They destroyed the frescoes of the apse, which were so
fresh that one who then sketched them said that they seemed to have come
straight from the artist's brush.
To-day little of the abbey church is standing. There are vestiges of the
choir, a small tower, and the south arm of the main transept with a big
tower over it. There also remains the Flamboyant Gothic chapel built by
Abbot Jean de Bourbon (1456-81), out of the smaller transept. In the
town street are evidences of where the western doors of the abbatial
once stood. The entrance arches to the abbey grounds are intact, and
some few of the towers of the inclosure walls. The museum is now housed
in the monastery's guest quarters built by Jean de Bourbon. His
successor, Abbot Jacques d'Amboise (1481-1514), erected the pavilion
which now serves as Town Hall. Both of those art-loving prelates
constructed at Paris the Hôtel Cluny as town residence for the abbot of
the Burgundian mother house.
THE ROMANESQUE ABBATIAL OF PARAY-LE-MONIAL[277]
The world is very evil,
The times are waxing late,
Be sober and keep vigil,
The Judge is at the gate!
The Judge that comes in mercy,
The Judge that comes with might,
To terminate the evil
To diadem the right.
--BERNARD DE MORLAIX, "Jerusalem the Golden."[278]
Not far from Cluny lies Paray-le-Monial, "a town very dear to heaven,"
said Leo XIII's brief of 1896. The monastery was founded by the second
abbot of Cluny, St. Majolus, who was instrumental in bringing to France
William of Volpiano, the leading spirit in the renaissance of
architecture after the year 1000. The present abbatial resembles on a
very small scale that of Cluny. Its barrel vaulting is braced by pointed
arches and there are the channeled pilasters of Rome's tradition in the
region. The exterior of the apse and the carven doorway are gems of
pre-Gothic art. Towers and porch date from the end of the XI century,
and the remainder about 1130. At present the monastery church (which is
abominably marred with whitewash) is dedicated to the Sacré Coeur, a
devotion that was initiated by the Blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque, who
died in the Visitation convent of this town in 1690. Paray-le-Monial has
become one of the pilgrimages of modern France.
St. Odilo, who governed Cluny for the half century preceding the
sixty-year rule of Abbot Hugues, loved especially the priory of
Paray-le-Monial. He inspired and organized the Truce of God, the _Treuga
Dei_, by which war was prohibited on certain days and in certain holy
seasons. The monk, Raoul Glaber, to whom Odilo was patron, has described
in a chronicle covering the period from 900 to 1047 (an invaluable
document for the sources of the Capetian line) how the war-wrecked
populace flocked to the church councils that were their only hope, their
hands uplifted, with the beseeching cry, "Peace! Peace! Peace!" In the
rebirth of hope and energy that succeeded to the terrors of the year
1000, Glaber has told us how the earth reclothed herself in a white
mantle of churches. He had been spurred on to write his history by the
chief builder of the age, William of Volpiano. The great monastic
churchmen of Burgundy were leaders in the movement that was to
culminate, within four generations, in Gothic cathedrals. To Abbot Odilo
is attributed, also, the founding of the feast of All Souls, which he
set on the day following All Saints, as if to place the suffering ones
in the care of the elect. From the observance of this feast in Cluny
houses it spread to the entire Church.
THE ROMANESQUE CATHEDRAL OF AUTUN[279]
Et c'est ainsi que Dieu travaille quand il veut nous châtier sans
nous perdre, quand il ne veut pas que la guerre finisse, par le
feu, le sang, la désolation générale, la ruine entière et le
changement d'un État. _Il sépare les gens de bien_: il faut que les
uns se mettent avec choix au parti qu'ils estiment le plus juste,
et que les autres se trouvent dans le parti qu'ils approuvent
quelquefois le moins.--LE PRÉSIDENT JEANNIN (1540-1622; born in
Autun).
Autun's chief church, one of the few cathedrals in France which is
Romanesque, was begun in 1120 and consecrated in 1132 by Innocent II. In
that same year he blessed Cluny's nave and Vézelay's narthex. A friend
of St. Bernard, Bishop Étienne de Baugé (1112-36), was its chief
benefactor, as he was, also, of the Burgundian abbey of Saulieu.[280]
The Last Judgment over Autun's west door, signed by one Gislebertus,
dates from that period. Its strange, elongated figures are not the
culmination of an old art, but a first effort in a development that was
to produce the imaged portals of Gothic cathedrals. Autun's curious
tympanum was saved from the iconoclasts of the Revolution because the
_gens de goût_ of the XVIII century had covered it over with the
neo-classic plaster ornamentation they preferred. The graceful trumeau
images of Lazarus, Martha, and Mary are restorations. Before the western
door an open narthex for the use of lepers was added about 1178.
In the first part of the XII century, the cathedral school was directed,
during thirty years, by Honoré d'Autun, whose popular book, _The Mirror
of the Church_, introduced the use of animal symbolism into the
iconography of cathedrals. M. Mâle discovered that the New Alliance
window in Lyons Cathedral copied his book verbatim. In the learned
Honoré's day Autun Cathedral had not yet laid claim to the relics of the
risen Lazarus. Originally the church was consecrated to St. Nazaire,
which name was changed to Lazare after the Burgundian abbey of Vézelay
had spread the story that Mary Magdalene had died in Provence. No one
knew how Autun obtained the relics said to be those of Lazarus of
Bethany. They were first exposed for veneration in the cathedral in
1147. Monseigneur Duchesne has thought that the legend grew by
unconscious fabrications. It certainly did the Burgundian towns little
harm to honor those whom the Lord had cherished. Through long centuries
Burgundy delighted to call her sons Lazare.
The cathedral of Autun has a barrel vault undergirded by pointed arches.
Channeled pilasters,[281] great and small, abound; they are on all four
sides of the piers. In Autun stand gateways of Rome's empire to serve as
classic models. The acanthus leaves of the cathedral's triforium can
compare with those of the Porte d'Arroux. Autun was a Roman capital in
Gaul, founded by Augustus. It covered then twice its present area.
Agrippa, son-in-law of Augustus, built the great military road that ran
from Lyons to Autun, Autun to Auxerre, Auxerre to Troyes, Troyes to
Châlons-sur-Marne, Châlons to Rheims, Rheims to Soissons, Soissons to
Senlis, Senlis to Beauvais, Beauvais to Amiens, and thence to
Boulogne-sur-Mer.
The graceful central tower of the cathedral was added in the Flamboyant
Gothic day by Cardinal Rolin (d. 1483), son of the builder of Beaune
Hospital, Nicolas Rolin (a native of Autun), the self-seeking but able
chancellor of Duke Philippe le Bon. Another son of Autun was Pierre
Jeannin, president of the parliament of Burgundy and minister of Henry
IV. His father, a tanner, was a man of civic importance in the town.
President Jeannin's kneeling statue and that of his wife, Anne Gueniot,
are now in the cathedral choir, being all that remained, after the
Revolution, of his tomb made by Nicolas Guillan of Paris. No man ever
had a truer passion for the public weal than this Burgundian magistrate
who saved Burgundy from the stain of blood on St. Bartholomew's day in
1572. Word came from the king to kill, but the Catholic Jeannin on the
governor's council at Dijon urged delay, saying that when a king's
orders were given in anger, the wisest course was procrastination. He
was to live long enough to aid Henry IV in drawing up the Edict of
Nantes in 1598.
Jeannin's attitude in 1572 was all the more meritorious because Burgundy
had suffered acutely from the Calvinists, who invited their
co-religionists from Germany to fight their fellow citizens. In 1569 a
band of the invaders left behind them a trail of four hundred burned
villages. Cluny was attacked, and Cîteaux was sacked from top to bottom;
to-day some XIV-century debris is all that marks the mother house of the
Cistercian Order. The destruction of Cîteaux was irreparable for art,
since during centuries its abbatial was the St. Denis of the first
Capetian dukes who ruled Burgundy. The leading families of the province
felt it an honor to be buried at Cîteaux. In its church was once the
splendid tomb (now in the Louvre) of the seneschal of Burgundy, Philippe
Pot (d. 1494). The effigy of the baron in armor is carried on the
shoulders of eight black, cowled figures--a further development of the
_pleurant_ type of tomb.
In a chapel of Autun Cathedral is a beautiful modern statue of Pope
Gregory the Great, presented to Cardinal Perraud (1882-1906) of the
French Academy, as bishop of this ancient city whose prelate in the VI
century had entertained Augustine and his monks on their way to
missionize England. Cardinal Vaughan of Westminster was the donor of
this grateful souvenir.
THE HOSPITAL AND ROMANESQUE COLLEGIATE AT BEAUNE[282]
L'art du Moyen Âge--aussi ennemi de l'art académique figé dans ses
moules conventionnels que du désordre matérialiste--est une
esthétique très simple, très certaine, très puissante et très
libre. Cette esthétique n'invoque pas un idéal abstrait; elle
impose le culte de la réalité, de la plus humble comme de la plus
éclatante; elle pourrait s'appeler un réalisme trancendant,
respectant la forme telle que Dieu l'a faite, et en même temps la
transfigurant par la grand frisson de l'au-delà.--ROBERT
VALLERY-RADOT.[283]
The Hospital of the Holy Ghost, built by Chancellor Nicolas Rolin from
1444 to 1457, is a gem of the province, reminding us of the close union
of Burgundy and the Netherlands under the four great dukes of the West.
The third of those rulers, Philippe le Bon, patronized Jean Van Eyck, as
did the enterprising man who was the duke's chancellor during forty
years. For a church at Autun, Rolin ordered of Van Eyck, in 1425, the
magnificent Madonna now in the Louvre in which he kneels as donor--a
shrewd, hard-featured, capable man.
For his new hospital at Beaune he commissioned Roger Van der Weyden to
paint, in many panels, the Last Judgment now in the little museum of the
establishment, but originally installed in the large raftered hall.
After the Van Eyck's Adoration of the Lamb it was the most important
work of Flemish art undertaken. Philippe le Bon is portrayed in it
twice, and so is the donor. The outside of the panels is painted in
monochrome--what the French call _camaïeu_ from its cameo effect, and
the Italians call chiaroscuro. When this superb painting hung at the end
of the hospital hall that ended in a chapel like the XIII-century
hospice at Tonnerre, the patients could see it from their beds. The
Hôtel Dieu at Tonnerre had been founded by Marguerite of Burgundy, in
1293. After the death of her husband, Charles d'Anjou, whose cruelty
roused the Sicilian Vespers, she retired to the city of which she was
hereditary countess, and with two other dethroned ladies, the Empress of
Constantinople and the Countess of Tripoli, gave herself up to good
works. _La bonne Reyne_, the people called this princess who passed her
days serving the sick poor in a hospital where the spirit of the
Beatitudes ruled. None was dismissed from its door without new cloak and
shoes. To-day the great rafter-covered hall at Tonnerre lies empty; the
raising of its pavement has somewhat impaired its proportion.
Beaune's hospital hall, that indubitably copied Tonnerre's, serves still
the charitable purpose for which it was founded. Its quiet courtyard is
a vision of Flanders. In the kitchen the ancient iron crane of the
fireplace is ornamented with I.H.S.; the Middle Ages made even work
artistic. On feast days, such as Corpus Christi, the quaint half-timber
hospice is hung with beautiful XV-century tapestry. It is deemed an
honor for the leading families of the region to count one of its members
among the nuns whose service is for a few years, after which they may
return to their own people.
The collegiate church of Notre Dame at Beaune is a typical Burgundian
Romanesque edifice of the XII century, to which the following century
added a graceful open narthex of two bays. It possesses seventeen
embroidered panels relating Our Lady's life, presented in 1500 by the
Chanoine Hugues le Coq, and held to be among the most lovely tapestries
in France, evoking memories of Memling and the Flemish primitives.
AVALLON, MONTRÉAL, FLAVIGNY, AND FONTENAY[284]
L'esprit humain, poussé par une force invincible, ne cessera jamais
de se demander: qu'y a-til au delà? Il ne sert à rien de répondre:
au delà sont des espaces, des temps, ou des grandeurs sans limites.
Nul ne comprend ces paroles. Celui qui proclame l'existence de
l'infini accumule dans cette affirmation plus de surnaturel qu'il
n'y en a dans tous les miracles de toutes les religions. La notion
de l'infini dans le monde j'en vois partout l'inévitable
expression. Par elle, le surnaturel est au fond de tous les
coeurs. L'idée de Dieu est une forme de l'idée de l'infini. Tant
que le mystère de l'infini pesera sur la pensée humaine, des
temples seront élevés au culte de l'infini. Et sur la dalle de ces
temples, vous verrez des hommes agenouillés, prosternés, abimés
dans la pensée de l'infini. Où sont les vraies sources de la
dignité humaine, de la liberté, et de la démocratie moderne, sinon
dans la notion de l'infini devant laquelle tous les hommes sont
égaux?--LOUIS PASTEUR (1822-95; born in Burgundy).[285]
The hill town of Avallon, above the gorge of the Cousin, with a square
that would do honor to any capital, makes a convenient center from which
to explore various Burgundian churches. Its own church of St. Lazare
still possesses the apse and absidioles of the edifice blessed by
Paschal II in 1107. The remainder of the church was built in mid-XII
century, and the portal (in five orders richly carved, with channeled
and twisted columns) belongs to the end of the century. A copy of
Avallon's door is in the Trocadéro Museum at Paris where it can be
compared at close range with the two other notable Romanesque portals of
the province--those of Autun and Vézelay. The interior of St. Lazare is
excessively plain, having a high expanse of unbroken wall over the pier
arches, with the clearstory opened merely by little circular windows.
Twenty miles from Avallon is the church of Montréal, like a feudal fort
guarding one of the main passageways from Champagne. The lord of
Montréal was among the few hundred barons who returned from the dire
experience of famine, treason, and death which was the Second Crusade,
on which had set forth a hopeful hundred thousand knights and pilgrims.
In the latter part of the XII century he built Montreal's collegiate
church, one of the earliest Gothic ventures in the province, showing a
simultaneous use of Romanesque and Gothic vaulting. Its two westernmost
bays were added early in the XIII century. The beautiful alabaster
reredos of the XV century, and the carved choir stalls, are well worth
studying. Beyond Montréal, to the north of Avallon, lies Tonnerre's
hospital hall and to the south can be visited the abbatial at Saulieu
and the XIII-century castle of Chastellux, a son of which ancient house
fought in America with Rochambeau and was the good friend of George
Washington.[286]
To the east, at Flavigny, set picturesquely on a hill near the last
stronghold held by the Gauls against the Romans, stood one of the most
interesting of abbey churches, of which portions of the XIII-century
sanctuary remain, a few arches of the nave, and a Carolingian crypt
built by the abbot who ruled here from 755 to 768, hence that
subterranean chamber can claim to be the oldest dated monument extant in
France. Over the choir of Flavigny was a cupola, and the Lady chapel was
an XI-century octagon like that which William of Volpiano constructed
for his abbey at Dijon. This precious Benedictine abbatial was destroyed
in the XIX century. At Flavigny are two ancient parish churches. What is
now the Pension Lacordaire was the Dominican convent opened in 1849 by
that brilliant son of Burgundy, with funds donated by his admirers of
Dijon.
To the northeast of Avallon, at Fontenay, near Montbard, is the oldest
extant Romanesque church of the Cistercian Order, built from 1139 to
1147, on land given by the lord of Montbard, the maternal uncle of St.
Bernard; on his mother's side St. Bernard was of the blood of Burgundy's
first line of Capetian dukes. The great abbot of Clairvaux himself
conducted hither the twelve monks who were to found the new house and
reclaim the marshy region; and for his brethren of Fontenay he wrote his
treatise on Pride and Humility.
The first small sanctuary at Fontenay was soon replaced by the actual
one, built on the same lines as the church at Clairvaux, which no longer
stands. Both followed the Cistercian plan; no tower; no triforium nor
clearstory; uncut capitals; the east end rectangular; square chapels
opening on the eastern wall of the transept. Funds for the new
constructions at Fontenay were provided by a wealthy English prelate who
had retired here, Evrard de Montgomery, of the Arundel family, who,
while bishop of Norwich, completed the long Norman nave of that
cathedral. In 1147 the church was consecrated by Pope Eugene III, St.
Bernard being present. As it was frequent in Cistercian monasteries to
make a specialty of some branch of manual work, Fontenay conducted a
forge, and the massive XII-century building which housed it still
stands. The forge, the abbey church, and the refectory to-day comprise
part of a paper factory whose proprietor has taken a patriotic pride in
restoring these precious monuments of ancient Burgundy.
THE PRIMARY GOTHIC ABBATIAL AT PONTIGNY[287]
Whatever draws us from the power of our senses, whatever makes the
past, the distant, or the future predominate over the present,
advances us in the dignity of thinking beings. Far from me and
from my friends be the frigid philosophy as may conduct us
indifferent and unmoved over any ground which has been dignified by
wisdom, bravery, or virtue.... That man is little to be envied
whose patriotism does not gain force on the plain of Marathon, or
whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona.--DR.
SAMUEL JOHNSON.
The oldest Gothic church in Burgundy is the Cistercian abbatial at
Pontigny. "Cradle of bishops and asylum of great men," Pontigny is
_parfumée de souvenirs_, to use a charming stilted French phrase. It was
the first daughter of Cîteaux, founded in 1114. When a pious canon of
Auxerre proposed to endow a house of the new Order, the abbot of
Cîteaux, St. Stephen Harding, came to overlook the site on the confines
of Champagne, and then sent twelve monks to found the house, under the
leadership of Hugues de Mâcon, kinsman and childhood friend of St.
Bernard.
The Cistercians had not the Benedictines' weakness for a noble site, but
if they planted their monasteries in a marsh--as at Fontenay and
Pontigny--their agricultural industry soon made the desert bloom. The
earlier Cistercian churches obeyed St. Bernard's ascetic admonitions for
architecture, a Puritanism that became monotonous in the Italian
churches of the Order. In France the Cistercians ceased to adhere to
church simplicity, raising sanctuaries such as Ourscamp, Longpont, and
St. Julien-le-Pauvre at Paris.
No towers adorned Pontigny, and stained glass was eschewed, but the
leaded design of the grisaille windows is so lovely that, as M. André
Michel has said, "one could not be poor with more nobility." The
architect of Pontigny made skillful use of certain essential
constructive features to obtain his decorative effects. Thus, though
monastic sobriety was followed by omitting the triforium, the bare wall
between pier arches and clearstory was relieved (at the sanctuary curve)
by carrying down the moldings from the upper windows; and in the
procession path a fifth rib was introduced into each vault section,
which rib fell on a corbel set above the entrance to each of the
radiating chapels--a constructive subtlety by which was produced a
graceful wall arcade.
The present abbatial was begun a generation after the foundation of
Pontigny, with funds contributed by Thibaut the Great, Count of
Champagne. The transept, which is Romanesque, rose from 1150 to 1160.
While the walls of the nave were mounting, the master-of-works began to
prepare for a Gothic vault over the principal span. The lower windows
were round-headed; the upper ones used the pointed arch. As the keystone
of the diagonals was raised far above the arches framing each section, a
pronounced _bombé_ shape resulted. From 1160 to 1180 this transitional
nave of Pontigny was building, and the most famous of the English
exiles, who sought the hospitality of Pontigny, must have watched the
works. The choir, as first erected, had a rectangular eastern wall after
the usual manner of Cîteaux's churches. Then, from 1170 to 1200, the
present choir was erected with Gothic ambulatory and radiating
chapels.[288] Alix of Champagne, daughter of the abbey's generous
patron, and mother of the French king, Philippe-Auguste, was buried in
the new choir, in 1208. From 1207 to 1213 Pontigny harbored a second
archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton, of Magna Charta fame. During
the studious years he passed here he divided the Bible into chapters for
the first time, and even the Greeks accepted his rulings. In later life
Archbishop Langton often looked back to this byway of Burgundy; "his
garden, his solace, his abode of peace," he called it.
His predecessor at Pontigny was St. Thomas Becket, one of the
outstanding figures of the XII century, whose story is told in many a
French window and sculptured group. If ever an Englishman was all of a
piece it was that son of a Rouen merchant settled in London. During his
life as a courtier Becket was so lavish in grandeur that when he passed
through France as Henry II's ambassador, the countryside turned out to
see him, since few were the king's retinues that could equal his. When
Henry raised him to the highest post in the English Church he instantly
dropped luxury. He stood firm as a rock in defense of ecclesiastical
rights against the king's attempt at Church supremacy. Tennyson's
"Becket" says, "I served King Henry well as Chancellor; I am his no
more, and I must serve the Church."
To the end of time such a character will be discussed; some for, some
against, him; admired he certainly was by that sincerest and cleverest
of men, John of Salisbury, who lived in his intimacy.[289] Both in
England and France the populace felt that Becket was the champion of
their civic rights by his defense of church independence--then the only
supreme court against lay tyranny. Undeviatingly and enthusiastically
they supported him all through his seven years' exile. One of the
articles of the Clarendon Constitutions which Henry Plantagenet tried to
impose on English ecclesiastics was that no peasant could become a
priest without his lord's permission. The poet voiced the indignant
outcry: "Hath not God called us all, bond or free, to his service?"
When Henry II, with his usual Angevin bad faith, duped his new
archbishop into a promise to maintain the customs of the kingdom, and
thereupon proceeded to revive obsolete customs, Becket, repenting the
concessions he had made, fled, in 1164, to Sens, to lay the case before
Alexander III. The pope decided that certain of the Clarendon
propositions were impossible for any churchman to accede to. The abbot
of Pontigny offered hospitality to the persecuted primate and Becket
stayed with him till 1168, conforming to the severe Cistercian Rule. He
quitted the Burgundian monastery when Henry, in a burst of vindictive
anger, threatened to shut up every house of the white monks in England
as well as in his continental possessions if they harbored the
rebellious churchman. Soon after Becket's arrival at Pontigny, the irate
king sent thither the primate's relatives and friends, turned out to
beggary, in order that their plight might oppress the archbishop's
spirit.
The third exile from Canterbury, and the saint who has given his name to
Pontigny's abbatial, was a gentler spirit. St. Edmund Rich knew France
as well as his native region of Oxford, having studied in Paris
University and taught there for years. It is told how his mother, Mabel,
sent him to the foreign schools with a hair shirt and a cord whip in his
gripsack in order that he might learn to chastise and thus curb himself.
She was a merchant's wife, and alone reared her family, to enable her
husband to follow the call he felt for the cloister; two of her
daughters died the saintly abbesses of Catesby. At the knee of that
XIII-century mother the little Edmund, as a child, recited every Sunday
the entire book of Psalms. While lecturing at Oxford he initiated the
study of Aristotle. In Paris, St. Edmund watched the cathedral of Notre
Dame perfecting itself, and at Salisbury, while treasurer, he assisted
at the laying of the corner stone of the Gothic cathedral in 1220.
Worsted in the struggle to right crying abuses in English church affairs
where the king kept bishoprics vacant for his financial profit, and the
queen filled the sees with her own unpopular foreign relatives, the
archbishop, accompanied by his chancellor, St. Richard, was on his way
to Rome to remonstrate. He thought it wrong to condone further by his
presence evils he was powerless to correct. He paused in Burgundy, and
there death came to him in 1243. To-day his tomb stands over the high
altar of the abbey church named St. Edmé, in his memory. Puritan Bernard
most certainly would not approve the gymnastic-limbed angels that
decorate the present Renaissance tomb of St. Edmund, but one fears that
he would give his sanction to the whitewash that disfigures the interior
of the interesting Primary Gothic church.
To the canonization ceremonies at Pontigny in honor of St. Edmund of
Abingdon came St. Louis (who had known him well in Paris) and Blanche of
Castile, and notables such as the archbishop-builder of Bourges
Cathedral, and St. Richard, now become bishop at Chichester, in which
cathedral his tomb was destroyed, in 1538, by order of Henry VIII. Few
spots in France are more entirely apart from the come-and-go of modern
life than is forgotten Pontigny, _parfumée de souvenirs_.
THE ABBATIAL OF VÉZELAY[290]
Il y a des lieux qui tirent l'âme de sa léthargie, des lieux
enveloppés, baignés de mystère, élus de toute éternité pour être le
siège de l'émotion religieuse ... l'héroique Vézelay, le mont
Saint-Michel, qui surgit comme un miracle des sables mouvants ...
lieux qui nous commandaient de faire taire nos pensées et d'écouter
plus profond que notre coeur. Silence! les dieux sont ici! Il y a
des lieux où souffle l'Esprit.--MAURICE BARRÉS, _La colline
inspirée_.[291]
The supreme excursion from Avallon is that to Vézelay, ten miles away.
One can drive to it or walk to it, since no railway touches the valley
which once was the beaten thoroughfare for Christendom marching to
crusades. A good way to approach it in the proper spirit of pilgrimage
is to walk from the station at Sermizelle with the church of St.
Magdalene as the lodestar to guide one's steps. Vézelay has the aspect
of a hill city of Umbria. The abbey church, Gothic in its choir,
Romanesque in its nave, transition in its forechurch, and practically
all of it of the XII century, crowns the hill like a cathedral.
"_Le grand nom de Vézelay sonne aux oreilles avec une sauvage poésie. La
majesté du site est digne de la splendeur du monument._"[292] Always
afterward will you remember this abode of reverie with that uplift of
the heart which high art and high thoughts arouse. Like loved sites in
Umbria, this, too, is "one of the earth's oases of spiritual rest and
refreshment."
The abbey was founded in the IX century by Girard de Roussillon[293] of
_chanson de geste_ fame, but its position as a leading pilgrim shrine
was not established till Abbot Geoffrey was installed in 1037. Only then
did the relics of the Magdalene appear here, given, it was claimed, by
Charles Martel as reward for Burgundian aid during Saracen inroads in
the Midi. Monseigneur Duchesne thinks that from Vézelay started the
legends so loved in Provence, that the privileged family of Bethany,
with others who had known the Lord, fled from persecution in Syria to
the mouth of the Rhone about A.D. 40. Up to the XI century the Christian
world had accepted Ephesus as the burial place of the Magdalene, and the
tomb of Lazarus was claimed by Cyprus. In 899 the Emperor Leo VI had
removed both bodies to Constantinople, where he built a church for them.
Not a trace of the tradition concerning the Bethany sisters and brother
is to be found in France before Vézelay monastery claimed the possession
of the relics of the Magdalene and dedicated its church to her.
[Illustration: _Vézelay's XII-century Abbey Church of the Madeleine_]
The founder of Vézelay freed its abbot of the control of local bishop or
baron by establishing him as feudal proprietor of the town. The result
was that the history of the abbey was a stormy one. The neighboring
proprietors, resenting the abbot's independence, excited against him the
townspeople who had grown rich from the fairs held during the
pilgrimages. The burghers chafed at their serfdom to the monastery, and
in 1106, during riots, they murdered Abbot Artaud. He probably was the
builder of the Romanesque choir to which was originally attached the
actual nave, since there is record of a dedication ceremony at Vézelay
in 1104. As the archives were burned by the Calvinists in 1560, no
precise dates exist for the church, but M. Lefèvre-Pontalis thinks that
the crypt under the choir is of Abbot Artaud's time.
A fire in which hundreds perished occurred in 1120. The present nave
could not have been in use before then. When it was completed the
builders proceeded to erect a forechurch of three bays, and between it
and the nave was opened the famous portico which has been called worthy
of Paradise. Innocent II, in 1132, blessed the new parts of the
abbatial. He had lately consecrated the cathedral of Piacenza, and at
Pavia in that same year was blessed San Pietro-in-Ciel-d'Ore. North and
south of the Alps the same energies were astir, but no sculpture of that
period in Italy equals that of Vézelay. The date of the imaged portal of
Ferrara Cathedral is 1135, and that of St. Zeno at Verona, 1183.
The nave at Vézelay had no triforium, nor was there a tribune over the
aisles. However, in the narthex they built upper galleries, under whose
lean-to roof was concealed a quarter-circle wall that did the work of a
continuous flying buttress. The principal span was still further
counterbutted by the side aisles themselves. Over the easternmost bay of
the narthex appeared a vault section with Gothic ribs, but the diagonals
were more decorative than functional; the vault web of rubble in a bed
of mortar was molded on a temporary frame like a groin vault. Pointed
arches were employed in the main arcade of the forechurch.
Vézelay's capitals rivet attention, so dramatic are the Bible stories
related--the suicide of Judas, David and Goliath, Absalom, Moses, some
symbolized vices and virtues, too, and a few _genre_ studies. The
capital of the fifth pier on the north side of the nave shows field
laborers who carry cones which some say were used for scattering grain,
and others think were for the vintage, or for honey-gathering; the same
agricultural scene was represented at Cluny. Vézelay even ornamented
with sculpture some of the bases of its piers.
The triple doors between narthex and nave are a supreme work. At the
middle trumeau stands John the Baptist, he who was sent before to
prepare the way, the announcer as well as the witness. On the disk which
he holds was once carved the Lamb of God who taketh away the sins of the
world. Observe that the trumeau was made narrow at its base, in order to
let pass the pilgrim throngs. At each side of the door stand a few
apostles, and among them M. Viollet-le-Duc cited St. Peter as one of the
earliest attempts to escape the stereotyped Byzantine models by
portraying individual expression in imagery.
In the tympanum is the Pentecost, or perhaps it may be called more
exactly the Messiah's mandate to the apostles: Go, teach all nations.
Christ is surrounded by a gloria, and the Greek cross of his nimbus
symbolizes divinity. From his outstretched hands spread rays which touch
the head of each apostle. The explanations of the lintel stone have been
various. It would seem to represent the strange peoples of the world to
be won by Gospel preaching. Around the tympanum are eight medallions,
thought to interpret John the Evangelist and the seven churches of Asia
he exhorted.
In 1136 an Auvergne noble, Pons de Montboissier, became abbot of Vézelay
(d. 1161), when the forechurch was practically finished, but without
doubt while its statuary was in progress, for certain uncut sides of the
capitals prove that the stones were set up in the rough and carved _in
situ_. Under Abbot Pons, Vézelay emancipated itself from Cluniac rule.
He was the brother of Peter the Venerable of Cluny, who had become prior
of Vézelay at twenty years of age. In vain the amenable Peter counseled
Pons to show a more conciliatory spirit toward the restless townsmen,
but Pons was as stubbornly convinced of the righteousness of his
monastery's privileges as is many a modern landlord who holds vast areas
among the unlanded millions. He held a stiff head against popular
demands, the trouble grew aggravated, and the embittered burghers passed
beyond their first fair demands and compromised their cause. Abbot Pons
was driven out, but returned a victor after Louis VII had investigated
the case and imposed a heavy fine on the citizens. Some have thought
that the penalty money was expended on the elaborate sculptures of the
abbey church. The people might oppose their feudal master, but they were
aware that their material prosperity came from the pilgrimage church of
the monastery, and each Burgundian was proud to show the visiting
strangers the region's exceptional ability in stonecutting.
In Vézelay occurred two notable gatherings of mediæval history. Here, on
March 31, 1146, St. Bernard preached the Second Crusade, on the hillside
without the northern gate. Abbot Pons built on the site the chapel of
the Holy Cross, wherein was preserved the tribune on which the saint had
stood. The leaders of France flocked into this valley of Burgundy, Louis
VII and his brilliant queen, Aliénor of Aquitaine.[294]
St. Bernard had been commissioned by the pope to set the new venture in
motion, and he threw his whole passionate heart into the enterprise.
Standing above the vast gathering, he read the papal letter that told of
Odessa's fall, two years earlier, and the horrifying massacre of eastern
Christians. It was sound statesmanship that discerned the menace of the
Eastern Question; the advance of the Seljukian Turk was indeed a knotty
problem for the XII century, when XX-century Europe, after oceans of
blood, has not settled the trouble. We may be sure that Bernard of
Clairvaux used no flatteries in addressing the throng at Vézelay, if his
public word was as uncompromising as his private letters: "Up! soldier
of Christ! Go, expiate your sins! The breath of corruption is on every
side. The license of manners is unchecked. Brigandage goes unpunished.
_Debout, soldats du Christ!_" We know that his words of flame swept the
crowd, and that, as at Clermont, fifty years earlier, again rose the
cry: "God wills it! The Cross! The Cross!" The seductive queen, whose
equivocal conduct on this very crusade was to start centuries of
calamity for France, threw herself at Bernard's feet, to receive from
his hand the Cross. The lowly people jostled with the lords to take the
vow, "_les menues gens et les gens de grand air_," for crusades were
democratic things that did more than aught else to break up feudal
autocracy.
The eager men and women of 1146 knelt in the actual nave and narthex of
Vézelay's abbatial. The choir which we have to-day was not yet built. In
1165 a fire damaged the choir of the Madeleine. A year later the exiled
archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, excommunicated his enemies in
England from Vézelay's pulpit. The new choir was built mainly under
Abbot Girard d'Arcy (1171-96), and is Burgundy's Primary Gothic, though
a generation behind the work of that phase in the Ile-de-France.
Unpracticed hands made its vaulting, whose web is not built elastically
as in the true Gothic fashion; the stones were welded in a compact mass
by a bath of mortar. Viollet-le-Duc suggested that Abbot Hugues, deposed
by the pope in 1206 for indebtedness, may have expended more than he
should on the church.
The choir was well advanced when, in July of 1191, the second great
gathering at Vézelay occurred. Here Philippe-Auguste and Richard
Coeur-de-Lion met, swore eternal friendship, and then marched south
together for the Third Crusade. Before ever they reached Palestine their
pact of good will was broken, as was only to be expected with the virus
of the Capet-Angevin duel in their veins. Richard's mother, Aliénor, had
flouted Philippe's father, her first husband, on the former great
enterprise for the East which had been initiated at Vézelay. The
Madeleine church reconstructed its west frontispiece in the XIII
century in order to light better its narthex; the pignon is overheavy
and rather odd.
Three times St. Louis came to pray in the famous Burgundian pilgrim
church, his last visit being a few months before his death while
crusading in Africa. Then, in Provence in 1279, was discovered what was
claimed to be the real body of the Magdalene. Before the XIII century
was ended the prestige of Vézelay's pilgrimages was a thing of the past.
The monastery's ruin was consummated during the religious wars.[295]
Such was the decrepitude into which the splendid church fell, that only
a complete restoration by Viollet-le-Duc, from 1840 to 1858, saved the
edifice from collapse.
Because Vézelay's nave belongs to Burgundy's school of Romanesque it is
spacious and amply lighted; no gloom, no cramping here. Such a nave
could lead up to a Gothic choir, without sharp contrast. The choir,
taken by itself, may be a cold work, but the sublimity of its setting
places it beyond criticism. There is no more romantically ideal a vista
in architecture than the white choir of Vézelay, as it appears from the
narthex through the imaged portico. Seen thus down the prospect of the
sober nave four hundred feet away, it rises like the crusaders' dream of
the Heavenly Jerusalem.
The dominant note of Vézelay's interior is serenity. Pace up and down
its deserted aisles as a warm June day fades. The rose glow of sunset
transmutes the coarse, porous stones to glory and the church seems
voicing, _securo e gaudioso_, the grand old plain-chant psalmody which
through long centuries echoed here. With you, like a tangible presence,
is Faith's certitude, the certitude of John the Baptist who witnessed,
the vision of John the Evangelist who loved, the impassioned
tranquillity of Mary of Magdala. Here reigns the benignant gladness,
_benigna letizia_, that Dante attributes to St. Bernard in Paradise. The
luminous stillness of Vézelay testifies that he that cometh to God must
believe that He is. Here Faith is an overwhelming acquiescence of the
conscience as entire as was the belief of the men and women of the XII
century who, when they heard the preacher's word, responded with the
cry: "The Cross! The Cross!" In the solitary abbatial of to-day, half
forgotten on a bypath of the world, breathes the living quietude, the
active repose, the voluntary discipline of its old Benedictine builders.
"Faith is the substance of things to be hoped for, the evidence of
things that appear not. Without faith, it is impossible to please God."
Like the Tag, in India, there is here a supersensual art beauty that
renews the jaded spirit. Both have been embalmed for eternity in a
vivifying peace. "Without holiness no man shall see God," thought the
faulty, vehement, crusading generations who prayed in Vezelay's church,
and holiness, then, meant primarily the humble repentance of sins.
Whoever it was built the tomb of the Indian princess at Agra, whoever it
was built the church in Burgundy called after Mary of Magdala, he worked
in something more than stones and mortar. At Agra you end by thinking
that the secret of the enthralling magic lies in the marvel of
atmosphere, the deep soft shadows which break the dazzling sun expanses.
At Vézelay, in the groping effort to put its spell into words, you end
by saying that the beauty lies in the space which the inclosing walls
have so holily shut in. But what analysis or what detailed description
can convey how the spirit is impressed by this shrine, named for the
Sinner who poured out the precious ointment with a Faith and Love so
complete that it washed her clean!
In such a church come flashes of insight, momentary liftings of the
veil, periods of mental fecundity that make clear why the true mystic
passes without loss from his isolated reverie of Divine Love to an
intensely practical activity, and when you begin to understand that you
are on the way to a comprehensive sympathy with that pillar of French
Christianity, that apostle sent of God as surely as was Paul to the
Gentiles--Bernard the Burgundian, who prayed and preached in this abbey
church.
THE GOTHIC COLLEGIATE AT SEMUR-EN-AUXOIS[296]
Les Français, fils ainés de l'antiquité, Romain par le génie, sont
Grec par le caractère. Inquiets et volages dans le bonheur;
constant et invincibles dans l'aversité; formés pour les arts;
civilisés jusqu'à l'excès durant le calme de l'État; grossiers et
sauvages dans les troubles politiques; flottants comme des
vaisseaux sans lest au gré des passions; enthusiastes du bien et du
mal; aimants pusillanimes de la vie pendant la paix; prodigues de
leur jours dans les batailles; charmants dans leur pays;
insupportable chez l'étranger; tels furent les Athéniens
d'autrefois, tels sont les Français d'aujourd'hui.--CHATEAUBRIAND.
If the traveler has chosen little Avallon as the center from which to
explore Burgundian churches, Semur-en-Auxois, lying a few miles to its
east, will soon be visited. Picturesque and well kept, it is perched on
a crest round which loops the river, a site such as a feudal baron
chose, when possible, for his lair. The donjon towers at Semur belonged
to a fortress built by Duke Philippe le Hardi.
The collegiate church of Notre Dame, included with the best Gothic work
in Burgundy, derived indirectly from the choir of Auxerre Cathedral,
through the church of Our Lady at Dijon. About 1225 the builders began
to replace the XI-century Notre Dame at Semur by the present edifice,
which reproduced the columnal piers with salient crockets that
distinguish the most beautiful of Dijon's churches. By 1250 they had
terminated the choir, transept, and the bay of the nave touching the
transept. The nave and transept are too narrow for their height, because
they followed the same ground plan as the antecedent Romanesque church.
Burgundy seemed to enjoy a problem in construction. Here, the arches of
the vault being excessively pointed, the flying buttresses were made
with a radius greater than is to be found elsewhere.
Early in the XIV century, three new bays were added to the nave, as is
shown by their main arches, which are more pointed than those of the
earlier bays. Then about 1370, probably after a fire, the nave's stone
roof was rebuilt and its triforium suppressed. The religious wars of the
XVI century played havoc here in Notre Dame. During the Revolution, for
two entire weeks, cartload after cartload of art treasures was carried
away from the collegiate. Happily, the transept's northern portal
escaped destruction, for it is a small masterpiece of Burgundian
sculpture. Its tympanum relates the adventures in India of St. Thomas
the Apostle, whose builder's rule was said to be of gold, in emblem of
his spiritual masoncraft. St. Jerome would not sanction the Indian
legends of the architect apostle, but the story of King Goldoforus and
St. Thomas lingered in popular favor.
In one of the chapels of Semur's collegiate church is a XIV-century
window dedicated to no saint, telling no Scriptural story, but merely
setting forth, in large, clear panels, the working day of various
artisans--dyer, vintager, butcher, tailor. The theologians who directed
the iconography of mediæval churches permitted the old guildsmen to
translate into sign language their sensible idea that honest work was
prayer.
The keystone over the sanctuary of Notre Dame, where eight ribs meet, is
the most beautiful ever carved--a Coronation of the Virgin. Throughout
the church the sculpture is exceptional. In the choir and transept,
carved heads lean out from the triforium's spandrels, heads of monarch,
bishop, monk, nun, and chatelaine, with here and there a grinning mask
or grotesque. The restorer has followed a wrong path when he makes the
exaggerated images in XIII-century sculpture exceed the ideal or
realistic ones. Semur's triforium is among the most beautiful in Gothic
art. On some of the capitals of the collegiate are vintage scenes, as
was natural in this land of famous wines. There are noted modern
vineyards, such as Chambertin and Vougeot, which were cultivated by the
monks of Cluny and Cîteaux for many a long century.
THE CATHEDRAL OF AUXERRE[297]
J'erre à pas muets dans ce profond asile,
Solitude de pierre, immuable, immobile,
Image du séjour par Dieu même habité,
Où tout est profondeur, mystère, éternité ...
La voix du clocher en son doux s'évapore;
Et, le front appuyé, contre un pilier sonore,
Je le sens, tout ému du retentissement,
Vibrer comme une clef d'un céleste instrument ...
Les rayons du soir que l'Occident rappelle,
Éteignent au vitraux leur dernière étincelle,
Au fond du sanctuaire un feu flottant qui luit,
Scintille comme un oeil ouvert sur cette nuit;
Alors, portant mes yeux des pavés à la voûte
Je sens que dans ce vide une oreille m'écoute,
Qu'un invisible ami dans la nef répandu,
M'attire à lui, me parle un langage entendu,
Se communique à moi dans un silence intime
Et dans son vaste sein m'enveloppe et m'abîme.
--LAMARTINE (1790-1869; born in Burgundy).
At Auxerre, on the Yonne, two Gothic edifices stand imposingly above the
city, the cathedral of St. Stephen and the abbatial church named after
that bishop of Auxerre, St. Germain, who foretold the sanctity of _la
pucellette_ Geneviève in the village of Nanterre by Paris, and whose own
sanctity was so assured that more churches have been called for him than
for any other saint of France save the supreme St. Martin himself.
Paris put her church of St. Germain l'Auxerrois under his protection. He
had been the ruler of this region of middle France under the Emperor
Honorius, and was a soldier and devoted to sports; yet the old bishop of
Auxerre, St. Amâtre, chose him as his successor, divining in him a man
destined to do great things for God.
The splendid abbey church at Auxerre stands on the site of the oratory
which rose over the grave of St. Germain. Queen Clotilde on her way to
wed Clovis, pausing here in 490, renewed the shrine by a church, which
became the nucleus for an abbey favored by all three dynasties of
France--Merovingian, Carolingian, and Capetian.[298] The monastery was a
noted school whither came St. Patrick, and many generations later St.
Thomas Becket studied here after he had finished his law courses at
Bologna.
In memory of Auxerre's reputation as a teacher, the cathedral has twice
represented the Liberal Arts, in glass and in sculpture. The choir of
St. Étienne Cathedral was begun about 1215 by a well-known schoolman,
Bishop Guillaume de Seignelay, who undertook it at his own expense,
stimulated thereto by some of the parish churches which had lately been
rebuilt in the new way. The crypt (c. 1130), retained under the choir of
the new cathedral, had been begun by the bishop, St. Hugues de Châlons,
a friend of St. Bernard, and probably finished by his successor, Hugues
de Mâcon (1137-51), the first abbot of Pontigny, and St. Bernard's
kinsman and childhood intimate. Of the cathedral of their day only the
present crypt remains.
When Bishop Guillaume de Seignelay was transferred to the see of Paris,
in 1220, he worked on the west façade of Notre Dame of the capital, and
his successor at Auxerre, Henri de Villeneuve, completed the choir of
St. Étienne in 1234. Two lancets in the sanctuary are his gifts. The
cathedral of Auxerre was building at both ends, while between lay the
ancient Romanesque nave. The easternmost bay of the nave is XIII
century, but the next five bays were erected only during the XIV
century, at which time most of the statues of the western portals were
done. With the choir's superb stained glass they form the supreme
accessory of this cathedral. M. Enlart holds Auxerre's imagery to be,
for delicacy and charm, among the best produced by the XIV century, and
that the statuettes of the Liberal Arts, in the spandrels over the
canopies of the David-Balthazar groups, are equal to Greek terra-cotta
figurines. The Judgment of Solomon by the northwest door is excellent.
Within and without the stonecutting of the transept's southern façade
should be observed. At that entrance appeared an early example of an
accoladed arch, cited by M. Enlart as an indication of the English
derivation of Flamboyant Gothic in France, since during the XIV century
they were masters of Auxerre for a time.
As the Hundred Years' War relaxed building enterprise, the nave was not
covered by a masonry roof till the XV century, about the time when
Jeanne d'Arc paused to pray in Auxerre Cathedral on her memorable
journey of eleven days from Lorraine to Touraine, across a France
ravaged by civil and foreign wars.[299] The gracious Flamboyant west
front of Auxerre's chief church is an expression of the hope and
national pride renewed in France by the Maid's feat at Orléans. The
well-designed north tower proves that the final phase of Gothic art in
France did not pass away in decrepitude; had only the south tower been
raised above the roof, this frontispiece could claim foremost rank.
For bold and light construction Auxerre's choir is notable, and it made
a school in Burgundian Gothic. It has only one radiating chapel--that in
the axis--because it followed the ground plan of the Romanesque crypt,
its foundation. The charming Champagne disposition of planting columns
between chapel and ambulatory was made use of; perhaps the pillars and
stilted arches of Auxerre are rather too frail in their proportions. The
same feature was used in the abbey church of St. Germain, and when the
church of St. Eusèbe[300] rebuilt its chevet, in the XV century, pillars
were again placed to divide the curving aisle and the radiating chapels.
Auxerre Cathedral showed another trait of the Champagne school of
Gothic--an interior passageway beneath the aisle windows. The plain wall
below it is relieved by a kind of arched corbel course not very
satisfactory; the arches and the capitals upon which they rest are
present, but there is no shaft to support the capitals, from above each
of which reaches out a well-sculptured head. One of these busts
represents the Erythræan priestess referred to in the _Dies iræ_:
That day of wrath, that dreadful day,
When Heaven and Earth shall pass away,
As David and the Sibyl say.
The XIII century distinguished only that one sibyl whom St. Augustine's
_City of God_ had popularized as the prophetess of the Last Judgment,
but later in the Middle Ages all ten of them were represented, and
certain Renaissance windows represented as many as twelve pagan
prophetesses.
The placing of sculptured heads in the spandrels of arches was not
infrequent in Burgundy, though occasionally merely one salient crocket
was used. The cathedral of Nevers,[301] south of Auxerre, went a step
farther and chiseled a small figurine in the spandrels of its triforium,
like the angels of Lincoln's choir. Moreover, the colonettes of Nevers'
triforium are borne on the backs of small crouching caryatides--a
Lombard echo. In France, Nevers' cathedral of St. Cyr was exceptional in
having an apse at both east and west ends, like a Rhenish church. One is
forced to relegate the beautiful little capital of the Nivermois to a
footnote, which is what France herself seems to be doing to the well-set
town on the Loire which in England or beyond the Rhine would be made
into a small residence city. Its palace, parks, cathedral, and numerous
churches, its faïence industry and fortifications give it the air of a
little capital.
Auxerre is another Mecca of stained glass in France. Its choir possesses
almost forty windows (1220-30) of the school of Chartres, half of them
being in the ambulatory and Lady chapel. Unfortunately, the lower
panels were wrecked in 1567, and the east window of the axis chapel was
destroyed in the Franco-Prussian war; the grisaille design throughout is
mastery. The opaline loveliness of the choir's clearstory grisaille has
drawn from M. Viollet-le-Duc one of his most eloquent pages.[302] Each
bay is filled with twin lancets surmounted by a rose; each lancet has a
large figure set in uncolored glass--one of the first attempts made to
give more light to an interior. Those crusading generations visioned
their Heavenly Jerusalem in sculpture at Vézelay, in color at Auxerre:
With jaspers glow thy bulwarks,
Thy streets with emeralds blaze,
The sardius and the topaz
Unite in thee their rays:
Thine ageless walls are bonded
With amethyst unpriced;
The saints build up its fabric,
And the corner stone is Christ.
They stand, those halls of Zion,
Conjubilant with song,
And bright with many an angel,
And all the martyr throng:
The Prince is ever in them;
Their daylight is serene,
The pastures of the blessed
Are decked in glorious sheen.
There is the throne of David,
And there, from care released,
The song of them that triumph,
The shout of them that feast;
And they who, with their leader,
Have conquered in the fight,
For ever and for ever
Are clad in robes of white.[303]
In the roses of the two bays neighboring the central lancets are the
Liberal Arts and virtues contrasted with vices. The choir aisle has a
Creation window, and lancets of the popular St. James, St. Nicolas, and
St. Eustace. The transept's south rose is Rayonnant. Its north one is
Flamboyant, and with the eight golden lights below it was given by
Bishop François de Dinteville, the younger (1530-52), who donated also
the _Gloria in Excelsis_ west rose. But no sooner were all these
precious things installed when came the bitter civil wars of the XVI
century. No place in France suffered more than Auxerre. An eyewitness of
the 1567 sacking wrote: "All the woes of Jerusalem when it fell to the
infidel are heaped on our city." Many a citizen died of grief at the
town's desolation, and so devastated was every single church that for
months no services were held.
A restoration was accomplished by Bishop Jacques Amyot (1571-93), the
noted Hellenist, who first brought flexibility and amenity into French
prose.[304] His translation of Plutarch--a French classic--molded the
ideals of French youth for generations. Unfortunately, because imported
foreign taste had won the victory over the national art, this
enlightened Renaissance prelate removed some of the ancient windows to
light his high altar. His marble bust adorns a pier of the choir of
Auxerre Cathedral.
DIJON[305]
Eternal, je me tais; en ta sainte présence
Je n'ose respirer, et mon âme en silence
Admire la hauteur de ton nom glorieux.
Que dirai-je? Abîmés de cette mer profonde,
Pendant qu'à l'infini ta clarté nous inonde,
Pouvons-nous seulement ouvrir nos faibles yeux?
* * *
Cessez: qu'espérez-vous de vos incertitudes,
Vains pensers, vains efforts, inutiles études?
C'est assez qu'il ait dit: "Je suis Celui qui suis."
Il est tout, il n'est rien de tout ce que je pense;
Avec ces mots profonds j'adore son essence
Et sans y raisonner, en croyant, je poursuis!
--BOSSUET, _Tibi silentium laus_ (1627-1704; born in Dijon).
[Illustration: _Notre Dame at Dijon (1220-1245). Burgundian Gothic_]
And finally we come to the capital of Burgundy, to a city of prime
importance in the art history of France, although it can claim no one
supreme monument. Dijon's leadership was from 1364 to 1477, under the
four art-loving Valois princes, Philippe le Hardi (1364-1404), Jean sans
Peur (1404-19), Philippe le Bon (1419-67), and Charles le Téméraire
(1467-77). "Never," says Brantôme, "were there four greater princes one
after the other than the great dukes of Burgundy." Each in turn on
his formal entry into Dijon came to the abbey church of St. Bénigne to
take oath to defend the special privileges of his capital. Tradition
says that St. Benignus was sent to Christianize Gaul by St. Polycarp,
who had known John the Evangelist. The hypothesis is possible, since it
is historically certain that Polycarp provided Lyons with its first two
bishops. Many a son of Dijon has borne the revered name of Bénigne, none
with greater honor for his native city than Bossuet, descended from
ancient parliamentary stock. The neo-classic taste of the great
preacher's day might prevent his knowing Gothic architecture rightly,
but without the centuries that built mediæval cathedrals he had not been
what he was.[306]
Dijon became the capital of Burgundy under the first line of Capetian
dukes who governed the province from 1032 to 1361 and who gave the city
its franchise and privileges. A duke of Burgundy led the right wing at
Bouvines, another fought under St. Louis at Mansourah. From Burgundy's
reigning line came Pope Calixtus II (1119-24), whose brother went
crusading in Spain, where he founded the house from which descended
Queen Isabella; Burgundian Capetians also reigned in Portugal. Cluny and
Cîteaux were favored by the first line of Burgundy's dukes, to which
belonged, by ties of blood, the two greatest abbots of their respective
Orders, St. Hugues and St. Bernard. In 1361 the last duke died childless
and the duchy returned to the French crown.
Three years later the Valois Capetian king, Jean le Bon, gave Burgundy
to his youngest and favorite son, Philippe le Hardi, who won his surname
of valiant when fifteen years of age through his defense of his father
at the battle of Poitiers. When Philippe, by the generous aid of his
brother, King Charles V, wedded the richest heiress in Europe, the very
plain Marguerite of Flanders, there resulted the political union of
Burgundy with the Netherlands that was of important influence on French
art. It led to the formation at Dijon of a French-Flemish school of
sculpture. The robust middle region of France impressed its own
character on the masters from the Lowlands who flocked to the semi-royal
court of the dukes, and equally it assimilated the artists who came from
Lyons and neighboring regions. The Flemish-Burgundian style controlled
the first half of the XV century. Its fusion of national and local art
traditions with Flemish realism renewed the vigor of French sculpture,
and a truly French Renaissance had already set in before the advent of
the Italian spirit. In Dijon took place the evolution that changed the
sculpture of the Middle Ages to that of modern times.
The artists who had gathered around Charles V in Paris, were scattered
by that king's premature death and the subsequent disorders in the royal
domain, and they flocked to the Burgundian court of his brother. Among
them were André and Guy de Dammartin, who erected outside the gates of
Dijon the Chartreuse of Champmol (1388-96) as a burial place for the
Valois line of dukes. The work of the Dammartin family--with whom
Flamboyant Gothic became a heritage passing from father to son--can be
found at Bourges, Poitiers, Tours, Le Mans, and Nantes.
What parts of the Chartreuse monastery now remain constitute an asylum.
The sculptured portal of the church shows kneeling images of Philippe le
Hardi and his duchess Marguerite, and in the cloister is the noted Well
of the Prophets, conceived, and in part executed, by Claus Sluter in
1395, and finished by his nephew, Claus de Werve, in 1403. The _Puits de
Moïse_ was so called because the statue of Moses, alone of the six
prophets, shows religious analogy with the biblical character it stands
for. The others are realistic studies of tradesman, rich citizen, or
Jew, in eccentric costumes that probably were copied from those in the
mystery plays of the day. With these prophet images of Claus Sluter,
modern sculpture took birth.
The two most regal tombs of the Middle Ages, those of Philippe le Hardi
and his son Jean sans Peur, were originally in the Chartreuse church,
but were broken up by the Revolution. They were reset, for a time, in
St. Bénigne's church, and now are installed in the XV-century guard hall
of the ducal palace, a part of Dijon's Art Museum, raising that
collection to first-class rank. Near them are placed the elaborately
carved and painted altarpieces brought from Termonde by the dukes. The
pomp and pageantry of the knighthood described by Froissart and Commines
breathes in the two grandiose tombs of Dijon, and the progeny of
sumptuous funereal monuments they inspired. Cowled figures called
_pleureurs_ are set in niches around each sarcophagus. They seem like
symbols of the lesser people's sufferings in the dire Hundred Years'
War, when France became a field of carnage. Foreign invasion, the Great
Schism of the West, pest, massacres, misrule, lawlessness--such was the
accumulation of miseries that only the heaven-sent Jehanne la Pucelle,
from the far borders of the land, could right the immeasurable _pitié_
there was in the kingdom of France.
Though Burgundy suffered less than the royal domain, the lesser people
had to pay heavily for the prodigal largess of their dukes. At times the
lavish giving of Philippe le Hardi bordered upon folly; while on visits
of state he was forced to put his jewels in pawn to obtain sufficient
funds for his home journey. When he died, in 1404, it took six weeks for
his funeral _cortège_ to journey from Brussels to Dijon, and those of
his household who accompanied the body were provided with Capuchin capes
of black cloth. That is the procession represented by the statuettes
around his sarcophagus, though, unfortunately, the original order of
their march has been lost. Among the eighty _pleurants_ of the two ducal
tombs are only eight restorations.
Jean de Marville, a Lorraine master, designed Duke Philippe's monument,
whose imagery is in greater part from the hand of Claus Sluter and Claus
de Werve, Netherlanders (1384-1411). De Werve made most of Duke Jean's
monument, a replica of his father's tomb; it was finished by an
Aragonese sculptor, Juan de Heurta, and Antoine le Moiturier from
Avignon. The latter was nephew of Jacques Morel of Lyons, trained in the
Dijon studios, who made for the daughter of John the Fearless, the
Duchess of Bourbon, a tomb in Souvigny's abbatial near Moulins, which M.
Enlart has called the most masterly work in sculpture of the XV century.
Dijon built no XIII-century cathedral. What to-day is its cathedral was
originally the abbey church of St. Bénigne, not of architectural
pre-eminence, but rich in historic memories. Abbot Hugues d'Arcy began
it in 1280, in the hour of hope and energy that followed on the Council
of Lyons, where Greek and Latin churches fraternally united. In 1286 the
choir was dedicated and the relics of St. Benignus transferred from the
crypt to the new sanctuary.
St. Bénigne of Dijon is a secondary church compared with its neighbors,
the cathedrals of Bourges and Lyons. The profiles are emasculated, the
clearstory windows lack sufficient height, the wall surface above the
triforium is monotonous, the denuded triforium of the nave lacks
capitals, and despite the warm brown color of the stone, the general
aspect of the interior is glacial. The Gothic effect has been marred
further by the numerous busts and statues brought here from other
churches after the Revolution.
Far surpassing in interest the somewhat pinchbeck Gothic upper church of
St. Bénigne is its crypt, the oldest Romanesque monument in Burgundy. It
lies beyond the actual apse. For eight hundred years it was the
foundation of a rotunda church of the same type as the round church at
Cambridge, England, the prototypes for both being certain Roman
mausoleums. Originally the Dijon crypt opened westward on a crypt now
lost--the basement for a Latin cross church--and where that juncture
occurred are vestiges of buildings that antedate the actual crypt. The
round church beyond the apse of St. Bénigne's Gothic abbatial was
destroyed during the Revolution, and its crypt filled in and forgotten.
In 1858, while digging foundations for a new sacristy beyond the choir,
the circular chamber was unearthed, in which was found a tombstone,
apparently the ancient one of St. Benignus. Once again the venerable
subterranean shrine became a pilgrimage for Burgundy.
St. Bénigne's crypt has double circular aisles. Its sculpture is rude,
even amorphous, and testifies to the extinction of the art during the
Barbarians' immigrations. These rough designs on the capitals of St.
Bénigne are, as it were, the first stutterings of the national pæans in
praise of God and country that are the imaged portals of Gothic
cathedrals.
Abbot William of Volpiano, who made St. Bénigne's Romanesque rotunda and
its adjacent basilica, came from Cluny to reform the spiritual life of
the Dijon monastery and rebuild its church. Born on an island in the
lake of Orta, he had crossed the Alps with Abbot Majolus of Cluny. For
over thirty years he exercised his double function of administrative
reformer and architect in Burgundy[307] and in Normandy, introducing
certain Lombard features such as alternating piers, arched corbel
courses, and superimposed arcades for decorative effect, this latter
being a Ravennate motive adopted by Lombardy. He began his two
connecting churches at Dijon in 1001, and completed them in 1018, when
there was a solemn dedication at which St. William preached most
movingly. St. Bénigne is, therefore, the first-recorded monument built
after the terrors of the year 1000, described by Raoul Glaber, who lived
in this monastery.
William of Volpiano founded schools, taught the plain chant to children,
revised Gregorian music, and established centers for craftsmen. In
manner he was authoritative, but one on intimate terms with him wrote:
"No one can tell to what degree in him rose mercy and compassion. In
famine time, he sold the gold plate of the church to feed the people."
To this day a gateway of Dijon bears his name, the Porte Guillaume.
A century later Abbot Jarenton of St. Bénigne invited monks from Cluny
to reanimate the spiritual life of his monastery. Paschal II blessed the
Dijon abbatial, repaired after the fall of a tower in 1096. When in 1107
Aleth de Montbard, mother of St. Bernard, died in her castle two miles
from Dijon, Abbot Jarenton hastened out to Fontaine-lès-Dijon to claim
the body of the saintly woman for his hallowed crypt of St. Bénigne, and
an enthusiastic procession carried the Blessed Aleth to the city. St.
Bernard was an unknown lad at the time.
In 1131, Pope Eugene III blessed the Dijon abbatial subsequent to still
other restorations. Finally, in 1271, the easternmost church of William
of Volpiano was wiped out by fire (though his rotunda church was to
stand till 1792), and the present St. Bénigne was begun immediately on
the site of the destroyed Latin cross basilica.
If the ex-abbatial which is now Dijon's cathedral is secondary in size
and character, the parish church of Notre Dame is a veritable gem of
Gothic architecture, faultless in construction and of singular purity
and unity. Its influence on the Gothic art of the province was
widespread. After a fire in 1137, which consumed half the city, a
Romanesque Notre Dame had risen. It was cited, in 1178, as the first of
the town, its bells sounding the opening and the shutting of the city
gates and alarms for fire.
The present church of Notre Dame was begun about 1220; a record referred
to it as in use in 1245. The architect had to contend with difficulties.
His funds were so small that a minimum of building material was
necessary. Three sides of his edifice were bounded by public
thoroughfares; hence it was impossible to spread out the piles required
by flying buttresses; at the same time the limited plot of ground made
it imperative not to encumber the small interior by clumsy piers. How to
construct a secure edifice without big piers, thick walls, or flying
buttresses was the problem.
The builder showed his genius when he used the inclosure wall to
counterbut the vault thrust and yet dared open these walls by generous
Gothic windows. For ten feet above the ground the walls are heavy; then
they become a mere shell, skillfully doubled by the use of colonnettes
of durable stone, each slender shaft being so weighted that it stands
with the security of iron.
The interior of Notre Dame appears charmingly spacious and airy. The
XVII century added circular windows to the triforium of the apse, in
character with the church, however. The exterior of the apse is plain
and neat and, with the central lantern tower, composes an architectural
group of simple elegance. The eastern buttresses fulfill a triple
function as piers, as walls, and as counterbutting members. Technical
subtlety is to be found throughout Notre Dame. The vaults of the side
aisles were constructed to brace the principal span. The piers are
uniform monoliths, but a sexpartite vault was built, though for a
generation that system had been discarded in the north. The coping
stones over the capitals of each alternate pier were enlarged to catch
there the heavier weight.
There are so many points of resemblance between Notre Dame of Dijon and
the choir of Auxerre Cathedral, begun in 1215, that M. Charles Porée has
thought that the same architect designed both. Their profiles are alike,
their capitals have similar salient crockets, and their colonnettes were
cut from the quarry according to the rock's horizontal strata, and not
by the usual method of vertical cutting.
In boldness of technique the small Dijon church is a masterpiece to
which many an eloquent page has been devoted.[308] Beneath an apparent
simplicity is unsurpassed scientific construction. The great engineer
Vauban praised it, as did Soufflot, the XVIII-century architect of the
Panthéon at Paris. The balanced equilibrium of the national art can be
carried no farther, and only the use of hard Tonnerre stone permitted
this successful audacity. Were a modern student to present such a plan
to any commission, said M. Lassus, he would be dismissed as mad.
While the nave was building a narthex was added before the western
entrance, consisting of a fifty-foot-deep porch. Notre Dame's west
façade rides astride two rows of pillars set close together before the
narthex, again a case of strength being attained by the able use of
double walls. The façade's superimposed arcades, used merely as
decoration, as at Pisa, prevented the employment of strong buttress
ridges, and give to the western front of the church a most un-Gothic
aspect. It cannot be said that the lamp of truth is upheld, since the
frontispiece makes no pretense to express the three-aisled interior, but
rises above the roof like an abstract screen. The gargoyles that
alternate with some ancient superbly cut panels of foliage across the
west front, date only from 1881, and, as usual with restorations, the
grotesque element has been overemphasized. A manuscript of the XIII
century relates that the original gargoyles were removed when a
bridegroom (a money-lender) about to enter the church was killed by the
fall of a protruding image that represented a man gripping a money bag.
The imagery of Notre Dame's portal has been entirely obliterated. When
the Revolution voted to destroy "all signs of fanaticism," an apothecary
of Dijon mounted a ladder each morning and leveled with his hammer all
the stonecutters' work. The present image at the trumeau is a fragment
saved from the late-Gothic Chartreuse of the Valois dukes. To Notre Dame
Philippe le Hardi gave the Jacquemart[309] clock, one of his spoils from
the sacking of Courtrai in 1382, whereat he had been assisted by the
Dijon citizens _par loyauté et parfait amour_.
SAINT BERNARD, AND CISTERCIAN INFLUENCE IN GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE[310]
What is genius? It is a mind in which imagination, intelligence,
and feeling exist in an elevated proportion and in an exact
equation. It is a mind which has a penetrating view of ideas, which
incarnates them powerfully in marble, in brass, in language, and in
that dust which we call writing, which also communicates to ideas
an impulse from the heart to precipitate them, living, into the
hearts of others. Genius is, with conscience, the most beautiful
endowment of humanity.... Genius is the greatest power created by
God for grasping truth. It is a sudden and vast intuition of the
connections which bind beings together.... It is the faculty of
rendering ideas visible to those who would not have discovered them
by themselves, of incarnating them in speaking images, of casting
them into the soul, enlightening it, subjecting it, thrilling
it.--LACORDAIRE (1802-61; born in Burgundy).
Although modern Dijon may momentarily blot out much in its past history
by renaming the square before Notre Dame _Place Ernest Renan, auteur de
"La vie de Jésus"_ (which work depicts the Saviour as an unconscious
charlatan), and christening the square before the cathedral _Place
Blanqui, grand Révolutionnaire_ (Blanqui being the Communist who founded
the journal _Ni Dieu ni Maître_), although it may mark one street sign
_Rue Babeuf, écrivain politique, démocrate très ardente_ (the socialist,
Babeuf, was executed under the Directory), and another with an equal
pedantry that is most un-French, _Rue Diderot, auteur principale de
l'Encyclopédie_ (the encyclopedia which railed at the Christian
religion), none the less will the greatest honor of the ancient capital
of Burgundy be the monk in whom western monasticism culminated, Bernard
of Clairvaux, who led Dante to the Supreme Vision in Paradise, "who
spoke to kings as a prophet, to the people as their leader, and
transported Christendom by his eloquence," the greatest of Cistercians,
the greatest of Burgundians, and the last great Doctor of the Church.
As the XI century drew to a close, certain pious Benedictines, who
regretted the laxity of rule in their own convent, retired to the marshy
woods near Beaune, to Cîteaux, some twelve miles south of Dijon. There
was started a new Order which languished during fifteen years, fever
decimating the postulants, till the third abbot, St. Stephen Harding,
stormed heaven with petitions to spare his dwindling flock. And
efficacious prayers they appeared to be, for one spring day in 1113
there came to the abbey gates (Cîteaux' name signifies _Sistite hic_,
Halt here!) a group of thirty young nobles, whose conversion was to set
all Burgundy talking.
Their leader was Bernard of Fontaine-lès-Dijon,[311] then in his
twenty-fourth year. When he experienced the call to a monastic life, he
drew after him brothers, cousins, uncle, and friends. His mother, the
Blessed Aleth, had impressed ineffaceably on his soul her own ardent
love of God. As Peter the Venerable said in that same generation: "With
us the virgin, the wife, the mother, expand the soul of the country by
the breath of their piety."
When the small band of enthusiasts were quitting the château of
Bernard's father, the elder brother and heir, Guy, told Nivard, the
youngest of the six sons of Aleth, that now he alone remained to inherit
the estate. "Ah," cried the lad, "you would leave me the earthly reward
while you gain the eternal? The exchange is not fair." And in time he,
too, sought his brothers in the cloister as did his father, who died in
a Cistercian robe.
All the nations of Europe were meeting then in the internationalism of
monastic institutions. St. Stephen Harding, who was practically the
founder of the Cistercian Order, who drew up its charter and began its
centralized system of chapters-general, was an Englishman, educated in
Sherborne abbey in Dorset, and later at Paris University. Feeling the
desire to visit Rome in pilgrimage, he went there afoot, reciting each
day, as he walked, the entire Psaltery. It is said that benignant joy
shone in his face. To-day a Bible he translated is treasured in Dijon;
he used to consult the learned rabbis of his acquaintance whenever in
doubt concerning the Hebraic text. It was an hour of internationalism. A
frequenter of St. Bernard's own Clairvaux was St. Malachy O'Morgair,
archbishop of Armagh, who died in Bernard's arms in 1147. The Burgundian
saint loved Malachy for his gentleness, his holiness, his delicacy of
soul, and his noble majestic presence, and for him trained young Irish
monks to serve in the reform needed then in the Celtic church, thus
paying back to Ireland the debt incurred by the mission of Columbanus.
With such souls as Bernard and his kinsmen, the new Order governed by
Abbot Stephen Harding took on fresh vigor. Pontigny was founded a year
later, and in 1115 Bernard and twelve companions were sent to establish
Clairvaux[312] in a former robber haunt given by the Count of Champagne,
a valley of wormwood which they turned into a valley of light. By the
middle of the XIII century there were five hundred Cistercian houses in
Europe. In England, from 1125 to 1200, rose a hundred monasteries of the
white monks, Fountains, Furness, Tintern, Kirkstall, "God's castles,"
wrote a contemporary, "where the servants of the true anointed King do
keep watch, and the young soldiers are exercised in warfare against
spiritual evil." Many a Cistercian house was in Scotland and
Ireland--Melrose, Mellifont, Boyle; in Germany and the north--Maulbronn,
Arnsberg, Warnhem, and Sorö; in Spain--Poblet and Santa-Creus; in
Portugal--Alcobaça. St. Bernard himself founded Chiaravalle near Milan,
and on the spot of the Roman Campagna where St. Paul was beheaded
flourished the Cistercian house of Tre Fontane, whose first abbot,
trained under Bernard at Clairvaux, mounted Peter's Chair as Eugene III.
Wherever the Cistercians went they promulgated the new Gothic building
lore of France. Their churches with square east end, square chapels
opening on transept arms, and neither tower, triforium nor clearstory,
were built exactly alike whether it was in the far north as at Alvastra
in Sweden, or in the far south as at Girgenti in Sicily. Burgundy's
abbatial at Fontenay is the type at its purest.
M. Camille Enlart was first to draw attention to the active rôle played
by Cistercian monks in the dissemination of Gothic architecture in
Europe.[313] All Cistercian churches were dedicated to the Mother of
God, and the use of the gracious term _Notre Dame_ spread from their
abbatials to the cathedrals. Dante opens the final canto of the
_Paradiso_ by a eulogy of the Queen of Heaven, put into the mouth of St.
Bernard, who never flagged in her praise, culling from Scripture every
mystic and lovely name for her. _Io sono il suo fedel Bernardo_, the
Burgundian proudly boasts in Paradise. Though Bernard's devotion to his
_Dame souveraine_ was poles apart from Puritanism, his rules for
ecclesiastic plainness were as rigid as those of the Puritans. His
severe ideas concerning art restrained the earlier Cistercian churches,
though his apostolate quickened the spiritual forces that soon were to
rear the cathedrals.
It has been said that to relate St. Bernard's life is to resume the
history of the XII century during half its course. He ended the schism
of an anti-pope; he went up and down Europe preaching unity and peace
and reconciling enemies; he journeyed into Languedoc to combat, by word,
the Catharist heresy; fearlessly he rebuked scandal in high places. He
drew up the Rule for the Military Order of Templars. His _Book of
Considerations_, written for Eugene III, became a manual of behavior for
the papacy. His treatise on Grace and Free Will defined so perfectly the
Church doctrine of Justification that almost textually it was repeated
by the Council of Trent. No man ever received more overwhelming ovations
than Bernard; at Toulouse they crowded to kiss his hand till his frail
arms were swollen past all movement; at Albi a jeering crowd was
subjugated by one sermon; in northern Italy, such was the reverence for
the maker of peace between the rival cities, that Genoa chose him as a
patron, and Milan placed herself under his protection. As he crossed the
Alps, word passed among the mountaineers, and his way became a triumphal
procession. He was worn to a shadow in the service of Christendom when
Eugene III commissioned him to preach the Second Crusade, and when the
expedition proved a lamentable failure, Heaven sent this strong man, who
had passed unscathed through the intoxication of human glory, the
severer test of human disgrace.
The figure of the greatest proselytizer since St. Paul is no vague one
in history. Bernard was tall and slender, with chiseled features like
polished ivory; his hair was red-blond; in his blue eyes was a flame of
celestial purity. Many have testified to the serenity of his visage, the
modesty of his attitude, and the almost superhuman influence he exerted
on those who saw him. They say that the very sight of him preached.
Apart from the numerous descriptions of him by his contemporaries,
there are over four hundred of his own letters extant, letters
straightforward, abrupt, ironic here and there, fearless, and
warm-hearted. He swayed emperors and kings, yet retained always his
personal humility. Reluctantly he tore himself from the peace of
Clairvaux to direct the affairs of Europe, and eagerly he returned to
the life of prayer and brotherly love. A preacher, he said, must be a
man of prayer if he would convert men. He must be a reservoir kept full
and overflowing, not merely a canal that can run dry.
Some to whom the spiritual life is a dead letter have called the abbot
of Clairvaux unsympathetic and superhuman. Others, while admiring him,
regret his brusqueness and hardy invectives. It was not a day when
controversialists handled their adversaries with gloves; witness
Abélard's onslaughts on those who disagreed with him on the most
abstract theological points. No doubt, in some cases, Bernard's zeal
exceeded propriety; perhaps his father had touched exactly on the defect
of his qualities when he advised him to keep measure in all things. But
who that appreciates this great man would tone down his splendid
vehemence? His love for morality and pure doctrine was a glorious
passion. He struck at the sin, not the sinner. Such censures are the
anger of love.
And remark how the men whom Bernard rebuked accepted the humiliation of
his public censures. When he asked the archbishop of Sens--the feudal
lord, Henri le Sanglier, who began that cathedral--if he thought justice
had disappeared from the rest of the world as it had from his own heart,
the proud churchman set about curbing his autocratic tendencies, and
died an honored pastor. No disputants ever more soundly berated each
other than Abélard and Bernard, yet their reconciliation, brought about
by kindly, large-minded Peter of Cluny, was frank and complete. And we
have seen how Abbot Suger changed his worldly ways of life, how he
reformed his monastery, and how the revenues hitherto wasted on a
retinue of sixty horsemen were devoted to building the first Gothic
monument in France.
St. Bernard was, without question, the most eloquent preacher of the
Middle Ages, but the conversions he wrought were due as much to the
purity, charity, and humility of his own life as to his unparalleled
powers of persuasion. The ideal of that harsh age, despite its
shortcomings, was saintliness, and when men found it incarnate in this
Burgundian, they accepted him as their leader. Bernard held that it was
false principles that led to social corruption, and to punish the evil
act while the mental crime which led to it went unchastened, was
illogical. So whenever the purity of Christian doctrine was threatened,
this champion of the Cross emerged from his seclusion full armed for its
defense. His vigilance was not bigotry. When a fanatical German monk
preached a persecution of the Jews, the abbot of Clairvaux came to their
defense: "The Just," an old rabbi called him, "without whom not one
among our people had saved his life. Honor to him who came to our succor
in our hour of mortal anguish."
In all Bernard's writings is not one word of disloyalty to what he
thought was right, not a trace of the hypocrite. If he thundered against
ambition, cupidity, and that hypocrisy which moves about in dim corners,
_perambulante in tenebris_, he knew that scandals there have been and
will ever be, since even among the chosen twelve Judas betrayed, Peter
denied, and Thomas doubted. He might flagellate ecclesiastic disorders
as openly as Luther himself, but the pope called him the pillar of the
Church and its guide. Towering above his fellow men morally, he took up
his Master's cord whips to drive the traffickers from the temple, but he
left an altar in the sanctuary and a high priest at the altar, and his
own life was blameless.
The choicest spirits of the age sought Bernard's friendship. He was
loved by St. Norbert, whose new Order of Prémontré spread over Europe
with the same rapidity as that of Cîteaux. He had links with the mystics
in St. Victor's abbey at Paris; Hugues de St. Victor submitted cases of
conscience to him; Richard de St. Victor asked of him criticism on his
book on the Trinity; and the Latin hymns of Adam de St. Victor breathe
the selfsame spirit as that of the Burgundian mystic. Geoffrey de
Lèves, who built the tower at Chartres, traveled with him in Italy and
Languedoc. Pierre de Celle, who built the choir of St. Remi, at Rheims,
wrote of Bernard: "His life, his fame, his works, his writings, his
miracles, his faith, his hope, his charity, his chastity, his
abstinence, his words, his visage, his gestures, the attitude of his
body, all, in a word, rendered homage to his sanctity. He was the
well-beloved disciple of the Lord, in whose honor he built, not only one
basilica, but all the basilicas of the Order of Cîteaux. If, then, thou
wouldst touch the pupil of Our Lady's eye, write against Bernard." And
the bishop of Paris, who worked on the façade of Notre Dame, the
schoolman, Guillaume d'Auvergne, testified that Bernard "lived in the
highest perfection," that his "wisdom proceeded not from human
instruction, but from divine inspiration." The first great master of
scholasticism, Guillaume de Champeaux, the progenitor of Paris
University, was bound to Bernard in loving friendship till his death,
and asked to be buried in the abbey church at Clairvaux.
Detachment from the things of the world never weakened this saint's
human affections. What cry from a stricken heart is more moving than
Bernard's lament for his brother Gerard? That elder brother was
following a knight's career when Bernard won him for God's service in
the cloister. There for twenty-five years they lived side by side. They
had just returned together from Italy when Gerard suddenly died.
Dry-eyed, Bernard attended the burial, and dry-eyed he went about his
daily tasks. He mounted the pulpit to continue an exposition of the
Canticle of Canticles which he was conducting, and all at once his grief
broke forth irresistibly in one of the sublime elegies of literature,
recorded by a monk of Clairvaux who heard it: "What is there in common
between this Canticle of joy and me who am in bitter anguish!... I have
done violence to my heart.... Grief shut in but wounds with deeper
sting. It has vanquished me. What I suffer must have its way. I must
pour out my trouble before you, my sons, who knew the faithful comrade I
have lost and the justice of my sorrow. You knew his vigilance, his
sweetness; you knew my need of him. When I was weak in body, he
strengthened me; when I hesitated he spurred me on; when I grew
negligent he cautioned me. My Gerard! why have you left me to stumble
alone on the road we two trod together, my brother by blood but still
more by religion! Ah! I would know if you still think of one whom you
loved, if, in God's presence, you can lean toward our distress? You have
shed your mortal weaknesses, but surely not your human tendernesses, for
charity endures, says the apostle. No! my Gerard does not forget me in
eternity! It was our joy to be together, inextricably were our spirits
interlinked, the same thoughts, the same emotions, the same will; one
only heart, one only soul between us; with one blow, the sword has
pierced my heart and his.... That I might have tranquillity he took on
his own shoulders the material cares of the convent. It was his heart
bore my troubles. His eyes led my steps. Now, when a need rises I turn
to where I think to find him, and he is not there!... I am deprived of
the best part of myself and I must not weep. My heart is torn from my
bosom, and I must not suffer.... But my courage is not of stone.... I
suffer, I weep, and my grief is ever before me...."
And so on it runs, this lamentation with its Hebraic note of sorrow's
passion. Impregnated through and through was Bernard with the Bible, and
his speech fell naturally into its cadences. To mark the biblical
references in his works would be, says the student, to fill half the
pages with annotations.
There is a book of interior consolation, precious to humanity, which has
preserved for us intact the spiritual teachings of this Cistercian abbot
who led the XII century. Scholars say that the _Imitation of Christ_
bears the direct impress of St. Bernard's spirit, that it reproduced and
analyzed his writings. Whoever its author, his prayer _Da mihi nesciri_
has been answered.
Those who have been comforted by the book which, next to the Bible, has
been chief solace for the stricken heart, have leaned unaware on the
purpose, the faith, and the purity of the greatest saint of the Middle
Ages, the man who made Burgundy as illustrious by its Cistercian
reformers and missionary builders as it had been by its Benedictines
when Cluny was a world power.