date of 1465, is shaped something like a gigantic egg-cup. Its bowl
springs from the stem in eight facets, sculptured to illustrate the
baptism of Christ in the waters of the Jordan, with figures of St.
Lawrence, St. Jacques, St. Paul, St. Pierre, and St. Martin.
Holbein once made a series of decorations for the organ-case of this
church, but they exist no longer.
Beneath the edifice, with its entrance from the choir, is a crypt
nearly as large as the nave itself, with a series of massive pillars
supporting its vault and the pavement of the church proper.
There are numerous monuments within the church, including one to
Erasmus, the illustrious Hollander who had made Basel his second home.
A stairway leads from the church to the chamber where was held, from
1431 to 1444, the famous Council of Basel. It is a vast, bare room, with
no furniture whatever, except the benches upon which sat the prelates
assembled at the council.
The cloister attached to the cathedral is daintily planned and contains
a number of tombs of celebrated persons.
Behind the church is a magnificent terrace known as the Pfalz. It is
planted with chestnut-trees, and its elevation, high above the level of
the Rhine waters, makes it a magnificent promenade.
The Hôtel of the Three Kings--though it is to-day a modern structure
that one sees--was, in the ninth century, the meeting-place of Conrad
III., Henry III., and Rudolph III., the last King of Burgundy. Following
another tradition, the house derived its nomenclature from the
_reliques_ of "the Three Magi," which were lodged here when on their
journey, in 1161, from Milan to Cologne.
In the museum at Basel are two of Holbein's, sketches made from statues
in the Sainte Chapelle at Bourges in France. They represent the Duke
Jean de Berry and his wife, Jeanne de Boulogne. It seems rather curious
that a great draughtsman like Holbein should deliberately have set
himself to copying from a cast, which is practically what it amounted to
in this case, charming though these drawings be.
_Colmar_
Colmar, the chief town of the "circle of Colmar," was once strongly
fortified. It still has something more than fragments left of its seven
towered and turreted gates.
Formerly it was the capital of Upper Alsace, and later it was the
capital of the Département du Haut-Rhin. As a result of the war of 1871
it became a German city.
To Americans and Frenchmen it will perhaps be most revered as being the
birthplace of Auguste Bartholdi, the designer of the celebrated Statue
of Liberty at New York. (There is a smaller counterpart at Paris, on the
Ile des Cygnes in the Seine, which is often overlooked by visitors to
the capital.)
The church of St. Martin is a thirteenth-century Gothic church of more
than usual splendour. Its fine foundations date from 1237, and its choir
from 1315. It is of the conventional Latin cross form, with two imposing
towers and a really grand portal. It is built of red sandstone, and is
surmounted with a wonderfully massive steeple, which looks more like an
adjunct to a fortification than a dependency of a Christian edifice.
There is a counterpart of this feature in the cathedral at Dol in
Brittany, but there it has the added detail of a crenelated parapet,
which gives it a still more military air.
In other days this great tower on St. Martin's at Colmar served the
purposes of a civic belfry as well as that of a Christian campanile.
In the sacristy of this rather grim church is an admirable
fifteenth-century work of art, a Virgin surrounded by garlands of roses,
executed by Schöngauer, a native of Colmar (1450-88) and one of the
greatest painters and sculptors of the fifteenth century.
There is the restored fabric of the famous convent of the Dominicans,
known as Unterlinden, which is to be considered as one of the chief
curiosities of the town. It was built in 1232, before even the church of
St. Martin, and its history was exceedingly prominent in the records of
mysticism in Germany.
The conventual establishment was suppressed at the time of the
Revolution, but in the mid-nineteenth century it was rebuilt with a
great deal of thought for the reproduction of the Gothic architecture of
the era of its inception.
[Illustration]
VIII
FREIBURG
The steeple of Freiburg is quite the rival of that of Strasburg; some
even may think it more beautiful.
It has braved with impunity the winds and tempests of many centuries,
and stands to-day as beautiful a work of its kind, when one is away from
Strasburg, Chartres, Antwerp, or Malines, as one can well conceive.
Its appearance is indeed magnificent, with a richness of ornament which
has not been carried to the excess that would make it tawdry, and an
outline which in every proportion is just and true.
Each day brings new admirers to this shrine, and one and all,
antiquarians and cursory travellers alike, go away with an enthusiastic
regard for its charms.
Freiburg itself does not go very far back into antiquity. It owes its
origin to Berthold III., Duke of Zähringen, who founded it in 1118 and
made it the capital of Breisgau, one of the most fertile districts of
the ancient German duchy.
The cathedral at Freiburg marks the opening of a new era in the
Christian architecture of Germany. It was founded in 1122 by the Duke of
Zähringen, soon after he took over the guardianship of the city, but it
was only in 1513 that it was entirely completed.
Nothing now remains of the primitive church except the transept and the
base of the lateral portals. The nave dates from the middle of the
thirteenth century, and the choir was mostly rebuilt at the same time.
The dedication did not take place until a century and a half later.
The structure is in the conventional form of a Latin cross, with the
usual nave and aisles and a series of chapels surrounding the apside.
The façade is remarkable for the porch, which is highly ornamented with
sculpture and forms the lowest story of the tower.
The pediment above the entrance is garnished with statuary representing
the crowning of the Holy Virgin, while just below, at the sides, are two
kneeling figures, with crowns on their heads, bent in prayer.
[Illustration: FREIBURG CATHEDRAL]
Besides this gallery of saintly figures, there are also sculptured
symbols which, in such a company, might well be thought profane: figures
representing Geometry, Music, Arithmetic, and the Arts.
In the tower, above the porch, is a chapel dedicated to St. Michael,
lighted by three ogival windows. It is now a bare, uninteresting
chamber, its altar and decorations having disappeared.
The third story of the tower forms the belfry, from which springs the
gently tapering and beautiful spire which rises to a height only forty
feet less than that of Strasburg.
The dwindling spire has a dozen facets which in some mysterious way
unite with the octagon of the belfry in a manner that leaves nothing to
criticize.
Within the cathedral there are some acceptable mural decorations in the
wall space above the western arch of the transept crossing. There are
also a number of funeral monuments, finely sculptured and quite
remarkable of their kind. One, a "Christ in the Sepulchre," is admirably
executed in the sixteenth-century style of Koempf, who is responsible
also for the elaborate pulpit.
There are two other churches in Freiburg of more than usual interest;
the parish church with a fine fourteenth-century cloister, and the
Protestant temple, a modern structure in the Byzantine style, which has
been built up on the remains of the church belonging to the ancient
Benedictine convent of Tönnenbach, which existed in the twelfth century.
In the chapel of the university are a number of paintings by Holbein.
[Illustration]
IX
STRASBURG
The greatest curiosity of Strasburg is the Rhine; after that, its
cathedral.
Usually, on entering Strasburg, the first landmark that greets one's eye
is the slim, lone spire of the cathedral.
Years ago an itinerant showman travelled about with a model of the
celebrated Strasburg clock, and the writer got his first ideas of a
great Continental cathedral from the rather crude representation of the
Gothic beauties of that at Strasburg, which graced the canvas which hung
before the showman's tent.
The clock is still there, in all its mystical incongruity, but one's
interest centres in the grace and elegance of the dwindling spire and
its substructure of nave, transept, and choir, which dominates all else
round about.
Of many eras, the structure of this great Latin-cross cathedral is not
harmonious; but, for all that, it is a great Gothic triumph, and one
which might well lend most of its details of construction and decoration
to any great church, and still add a charm which was hitherto absent.
Strasburg has in all fifteen churches, but the cathedral is possessed of
more and greater glories than all the others combined.
From the days when Strasburg was the Argentoratum of the Romans, the
city has ever been the scene of an activity which has made its
importance known through all the world. It was sacked by Attila and his
Huns in 451, and was completely abandoned up to the seventh century,
when one of the sons of Clovis built it up anew and gave to it the name
of Strateburgum.
Ptolemy is said to be the first writer who mentions Argentoratum, the
ancient Strasburg.
What a bitter blow the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, of which Strasburg was
the gem, was to France can only be realized by a contemplation of the
sentiment which even yet attaches to the event.
That the allied provinces were French in spirit as well as Catholic in
religion is demonstrated by the fact that, at the time of the German
occupation, there was a population of over a million and a half of
souls, of which quite a million and a quarter were of the Roman Catholic
faith. About a million and a quarter were natives of Alsace-Lorraine,
one hundred thousand were Germans, and thirty odd thousand were
foreigners.
The present cathedral was erected on a site that had been consecrated to
religion in very early times. It had been a sacred place in the time of
the Romans, though the deities worshipped were pagan, a temple to
Hercules and Mars having been erected here.
The first Christian church was built, it is believed, in the fifth
century, by St. Amand, then Bishop of Strasburg.
This first church of Strasburg, which was a wooden structure, was
probably founded by Clovis, 504, and reconstructed by Pepin-le-Bref and
Charlemagne. It was mostly destroyed by fire in 873, and in 1002 was
pillaged and fired anew by the soldiers of Duke Hermann, who was
condemned himself to repair the damage. Lightning destroyed it again in
1007, and, by the time the new structure was thought of, nothing but the
crypt of Charlemagne's edifice was visible.
From the proceeds received from Duke Hermann, and contributions from
all Christianity, Bishop Werner conceived a vast scheme of a new church
which in time was completed and consecrated.
This in turn fell before the ravages of fire, and nothing but a mass of
débris remained, from which the present structure was begun in 1277.
The ancient church foundation of Strasburg was peculiarly arranged,
after a manner most unusual in a cathedral church. The ground-plan of
the ecclesiastical establishment was not unlike those of the monkish
communities which were so plentifully scattered over Europe, but it was
built for use as a church, and for the bishop and his clerics, instead
of being merely a secular monastery.
The following diagram explains this unusual arrangement.
The masonic theory with regard to the construction of these mediæval
ecclesiastical monuments is of much interest in connection with
Strasburg. The lodge at Strasburg was the earliest in the north of which
we have any knowledge, and Ervin von Steinbach himself seems to have
been at the head of it, which fact proves that he was one of the first
of secular architects engaged upon a great religious work.
[Illustration: _Ancient Church Foundation, Strasburg_
A--Habitation of bishops and clerics
B--Cour commune
C--Part assigned to women
D--Part assigned to men
E--For preaching
F--For penitents
G--Doors
H--Altars
I--Pulpits
K--Choir for clergy
]
Great opportunities and privileges were conferred upon him by Rudolph of
Hapsburg, and the masonic lodge of which he was the head had the power,
over a wide extent of territory, to maintain order and obedience among
the workmen under its jurisdiction.
In 1278 Pope Nicholas III. issued a bull, giving the body absolution,
and this was renewed by his successors up to the time of Benedict XII.
Iodoque Dotzinger, master of the works at Strasburg in 1452, formed an
alliance between the different lodges of Germany.
It was an appreciative Frenchman--and all Frenchmen are appreciative and
fond of Strasburg, because of what it once was to them--that said: "_La
cathédrale est un merveille unique au monde_." Continuing, he said:
"Those who have not seen it know not the _gaieté lumineuse_ of a Gothic
church."
All of this is of course quite true from some points of view.
There is, however, something pitiful about the general aspect of this
great Gothic church. Its lone spire, standing grim and gaunt against a
background of sky, makes only the more apparent the incompleteness of
the structure.
Its façade is certainly marvellous, quite rivalling those of Reims and
Toul, not so very far away across the French border.
The triple porch of the façade is rich in sculpture, the most remarkable
groups being "The Wise and Foolish Virgins," "The Prophets," "The Last
Judgment," and "Christ and the Twelve Apostles."
[Illustration: STRASBURG CATHEDRAL]
A great rose window, a reminiscence of the masterpieces so frequently
seen in France, also decorates this elaborate façade.
The south portal is in the form of two round-arched doorways, and is a
survival, evidently, of one of the earliest epochs of this style of
construction. It is ornamented with bas-reliefs and statues symbolical
of the triumph of Christian religion. There has recently been erected
before this portal a statue of the great architect of the fabric, Ervin,
and another of his son.
The spire, one of the most elevated in Europe, is 440 feet, while that
of Cologne is 482 feet, Rouen is 458 feet, and Notre Dame at Paris but
200 feet in height.
Usually church edifices are grim and gray; but Strasburg presents, in
its sandstone of the Vosges, a beautiful tone, which in the westering
sun of a summer's day can only be described as a rose-pink, and is like
no other church edifice in Europe, unless it be the cathedral at Rodez
in Mid-France, which Henry James called mouse-coloured, but which in
reality is a sort of warm, deep rose.
A fine lacework of _colonnettes_ covers the entire façade, which six
centuries have turned to the colour of iridescent copper organ-pipes.
But the real grandeur and dignity of the architecture stands out boldly
in spite of the ornate turrets and the mass of sculptured detail, in a
way which stamps the fabric imperially as a giant among its kind.
Of the spire, Victor Hugo wrote thus (Strasburg was yet French, and not
German as it is to-day): "The truly adorable achievement of the builders
of this cathedral is its spire. It is a tiara of stone crowned with a
cross. It is prodigious, gigantic, but of great delicacy. I have seen
Chartres; I have seen Antwerp. Four _escaliers à jour_ ascend spirally
the four towerlets at the angles. The steps are very high and narrow....
To mount to the lantern one would have to follow the workmen, who appear
to be continually engaged on the fabric. The stairways are no more,
simply bars of iron set ladderlike in the masonry.
"From the spire one sees three mountain ranges: the group of the Black
Forest to the north; the Vosges to the west; and the Alps to the south.
"One stands so high that the country-side appears no longer as the
country-side; but, like the view from the castle at Heidelberg, a mere
geographical map.
"At the time of my visit a great cloud rose up from the valley of the
Rhine, and framed the panorama for a dozen leagues in truly eerie
fashion. As I went from one tower to another, I saw about me la France,
la Suisse, and l'Allemagne."
It was in 1277 that the celebrated architect, Ervin von Steinbach, began
the construction of the portal of the cathedral at Strasburg, and above
its great doorway one may yet read, if he be keen of eyesight and knows
where to look for it, this inscription:
ANNO. DOMINI. MCCLXXVII. IN. DIE.
BEATI.
URBANI. HOC. GLORIOSUM. OPUS.
INCOHAVIT.
MAGISTER. ERVINUS DE STEINBACH.
Ervin died in 1318, and his son continued the work up to the first
landing, or platform, of the towers.
In the archives of the cathedral are still to be seen the designs on
which father and son worked in achieving the portal and towers, as well
as those of the spire, the north porch, the pulpit, and the
organ-buffet. Not all of these are contemporary, but the first, at
least, are the very drawings which were handled by Maître Ervin and his
son in the latter years of the thirteenth century.
The following lines of Longfellow describe the religious fervour of the
great architect perhaps more truthfully than could prose.
"...A great master of his craft,
Ervin von Steinbach; but not he alone,
For many generations laboured with him,
Children that came to see these saints in stone,
As day by day out of the blocks they rose,
Grew old and died, and still the work went on,
And on and on and is not yet completed.
"...The architect
Built his great heart into these sculptured stones,
And with him toiled his children, and their lives
Were builded with his own into the walls
As offerings to God."
It is perhaps not possible to write of Strasburg's cathedral without
giving its great clock more than a passing thought.
The legendary history of the clock at Strasburg is as follows:
The cathedral being terminated, the magistrates of the city desired to
ornament its tower with a great clock which should be unique in all the
world.
No one came forth to undertake the commission, until a workman, much
advanced in years, agreed for a certain sum to produce a clock which
should be superior to all others then existing.
After some years of incessant work, he produced the first of Strasburg's
wonderful mechanical clocks full of moving figures and symbols.
In lieu of recompense, the magistrates, desiring that their city should
be the sole possessor of such a work, accused the old man of having had
resource to the aid of the devil in producing so weird a timepiece, and
condemned him to torture and the loss of his eyesight.
Upon a pretext of making some further arrangement of the works before
the execution of his sentence, the old man was allowed once more to
mount the tower. Instead of adjusting the clock, he deranged it in some
way so that its chimes never rang out as intended, and thus the
magistrates and the citizens of Strasburg were, in a way, avenged for
the injustice done the inventor. This famous clock of Strasburg's tower
is now only a memory.
The more recent works of a similar nature have a history less sordid and
unpleasant. The first clock of the cathedral, placed inside the church
at the crossing, dated from 1352, and of course was a remarkable work
for its time.
Two hundred years later it was intended to replace it with another, but
the work was never achieved, so a third was begun with an effort to
outdo the ingenuity which had made possible the fourteenth-century
astronomical wonder.
It was planned in 1571, under the direction of Conrad Dasypodius, of
Strasburg, and his friend Daniel Volkenstein, an astronomer of Augsburg.
It was completed in 1574, restored in 1669 and 1732, and ceased its
labours through the stress of time in 1790.
The present great clock, certainly an unseemly and incongruous adjunct
of a great church, was commenced on the 24th of June, 1838, and
installed on the 31st of December, 1842. Its construction is supposed to
have reflected great credit upon its designer, one Schwilgu, a
clock-maker of Strasburg. Nothing was preserved of the more ancient
timepiece, except its elaborate case, which was restored and further
embellished.
At the base of the tower, on the summit of which is placed the crowing
cock, is a portrait of the designer. "This great man," say the local
patriots, died an octogenarian in 1856.
In 1723 a subterranean tremor sent the tower of Strasburg's cathedral a
foot out of plumb. It speaks well for the solidity of the construction
that no ill effects resulted, and to-day there are no evidences, to the
casual observer, of this deflection.
The beauty of Strasburg's cathedral was in so great repute in the middle
ages that Jean Galeaz Marie, Visconti Sforza, in 1481, demanded of the
magistrates of the city the name of an architect capable of completing
his cathedral at Milan.
In a vaulted chamber attached to the cathedral proper are two strangely
curious memorials. They are nothing more or less than two mummies which,
for their better preservation, have been varnished, and the costumes
which they anciently wore have from time to time been renewed.
One is the mummy of the Count of Nassau-Saarbruck, who died in the
sixteenth century, and the other is that of a young girl of perhaps
twenty years, supposed to have been his daughter.
The ancient church of St. Bartholomew is another of Strasburg's
ecclesiastical shrines which ranks high among great churches.
It dates from the second half of the thirteenth century, but frequent
additions have been made in more recent times.
It possesses a remarkable monument which shows a painted "Danse des
Morts," with figures of nearly life size. It is a fresco on the inner
walls of the overhanging canopy of a tomb. The painting dates from the
fifteenth century, but was only discovered in 1824, on the occasion of a
general renovation of the church.
The choir was begun in 1308 and completed in 1345. Its height and its
general airiness, and the lightness of its vaulting and arches, unite in
making it quite unusual and most worthy of note.
This ancient church to-day is occupied by the Protestants, and the
edifice has been divided up in a somewhat sacrilegious manner in order
to provide within its walls for a library and a museum.
Strasburg has another great church in St. Thomas, a vast ogival edifice
which has some good glass, but which is remarkable above all else for
the number of its sepulchral monuments, both ancient and modern.
At the end of the choir is found one of those wonders of French
sculpture, an allegorical grouping of figures on the tomb of Maréchal de
Saxe.
It was erected in 1777 by Pigalle by the order of Louis XV. For a
background it has a pyramid of gray marble, at the base of which is the
following inscription:
MAVRITIO SAXONI
CVRLANDIAE ET SEMIGALLIAE DVCI
SVMMO REGIORVM EXERCITVVM
PRAEFECTO
SEMPER VICTORI
LVDOVICVS XV
VICTORIARVM AVCTOR ET IPSE DVX
PONI IVSSIT
OBIIT XXX NOV. ANNO MDCCL. AETATIS
LV.
Standing in the centre of the pyramid is a figure of the maréchal
descending toward the sarcophagus below. A figure representing Death is
lifting the lid, and another, representing France, is endeavouring to
stay his hand. Flags, a reversed torch, and other symbols, with another
figure representing the genius of war, complete the details of this
elaborate monument.
There is little of anything but Gothic, more or less pure, visible at
Strasburg; but, in spite of this, it is alleged that, from Carlovingian
times onward, there was here a colony of artisans who had been sent from
Lombardy on account of the increased interest in the north in
church-building. If this is so, they must have pushed onward down the
Rhine, as they left but little impression here, and, while Rhenish
church-building was manifestly not Gothic in its inception, here at
Strasburg there are certainly no evidences of the Comacine builders of
Charlemagne's time.
Strasburg's ancient episcopal palace was built in 1731-41 by Cardinal de
Rohan. It was bought by the city before the Revolution and transformed
into a _château impérial_, and became later the home of the local
university.