How France Built Her Cathedrals Part 21

In Tours Cathedral, April, 1429, knelt St. Jeanne for a solemn benediction before she went forth to accomplish her feat at Orleans. An artist of Tours made for her the banner she loved better than her sword.

When Tours heard that she was taken prisoner, public prayers were ordered and a procession marched with bare feet, in penitential intercession for her deliverance. Charles VII had been married in Tours to his cousin Marie of Anjou, who was, says the modern student, more his incentive to patriotism than Agnes Sorel. The son of Charles, Louis XI, also was married in the cathedral of Tours, and preferred to live in the environs of the ancient ecclesiastic city.

Under the saintly Archbishop Robert de Lenoncourt, installed here in 1488, were finished Tours' western portals. Their foliage is tormented, serrated, and deeply undercut, almost too prodigally and delicately sculptured for an exterior decoration. The entranceways are to-day shorn of their imagery, the statues having been shattered in 1562. In the Renaissance day the facade's twin towers were gracefully topped; _deux beaux bijoux_, Henry IV called the belfries of Tours.

Throughout the Loire region an astounding number of monuments rose during the last half of the XV century and the early part of the XVI.

Tours was the foyer for a school of sculpture that spread to Le Mans, Angers, Nantes, Poitiers, and Bourges. From 1480 to 1512 the school of the Region-of-the-Loire, as M. Paul Vitry calls it, was at its prime. It culminated in the ducal tomb at Nantes and the entombments at Solesmes.

Dijon, the leader of the first half of the XV century, benefited Tours by its realism, and the Italian artists, gathered here in the dawn of the foreign Renaissance in France, contributed certain qualities. But the art of Michel Colombo is predominatingly of the Middle Ages, and a product of Touraine, a measured, contained, and charming art, _de pur esprit francais_. Colombe simplified the draperies of the Franco-Flamand school and eschewed the Dijon roughness. His grace is never petty, however, nor his idealism conventional. As the XVI century opened he made, in his Tours studio, the statues for the ducal tomb at Nantes. In 1509 his nephew, Guillaume Regnault, sculptured the rec.u.mbent images of the children of Anne of Brittany and Charles VIII for the sarcophagus, now in the cathedral of Tours, the base of which was covered with arabesques by Jerome of Fiesole. Colombo's contemporary, Jehan Fouquet, a son of Tours, delighted in painting the regional types. He decorated the walls of Notre-Dame-la-Riche, but his work is lost, though some of the dazzling Renaissance windows of that late-Gothic church of Tours have survived. A certain Jean Clouet emigrated from Brussels to Tours in those days, and his son and grandson, born by the Loire, are two of the French _primitifs_ whose work the traveler does not care to miss in any gallery that can boast their Holbein-like canvases. During the Revolution, plans were afoot to destroy the cathedral of Tours, but two artists of the city (so loyal through centuries to art interests) risked their lives to save their n.o.ble Gothic church.

THE CATHEDRAL OF LYONS.[158]

What Christian does not approach with veneration this city that was in France the cradle of the true religion, and where amid persecutions and tortures rose for the first time the Cross of Christ? Who does not tread with veneration the soil impregnated with the blood of so many martyrs and forever consecrated by the glories of a see that justly claims the t.i.tle Primate of Gaul?--CHARLES DE MONTALEMBERT, visiting Lyons in 1831.

In its early Christian memories Lyons outrivals all other cities of France. It claims a clear apostolic tradition, and boasts that, next to Rome, it shed most Christian blood witnessing to the planting of the Cross. And modern Lyons is the center of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, which sends forth to non-Christian lands more missionaries than any other group in western Christendom--apostles who obey the mandate given to Lyons' first martyr-bishops: Go, teach ye all nations, baptizing in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.

Imperial Rome, that foreshadowed many things, chose Lyons, before the birth of Christ, as starting point for her network of highways and aqueducts over Gaul. Augustus made it the capital of Celtic Gaul. It was the bishop of Smyrna, St. Polycarp (d. A.D. 166), the disciple of St.

John the Beloved (d. A.D. 100), who sent the first two bishops of Lyons to Christianize Gaul, Pothinus (d. A.D. 177), an Asiatic Greek, and Irenaeus (d. A.D. 202), one of the most remarkable writers of the early Christian era, lettered in Greek literature and writing in Greek. With profound knowledge of Christian doctrine, he advocated, for the guidance of the Church, tradition, or the spoken word of the Apostles, as well as their written word. Often with just pride did Irenaeus boast that his doctrine came direct from the contemporaries of the Saviour: "I could describe to you the very spot where the blessed Polycarp sat when he preached G.o.d's word.... His discourse to the people is engraved in my heart. He had talked with John and the others who saw the Lord."

For twenty years St. Irenaeus served as priest in Lyons under Bishop Pothinus, and then when that holy prelate, at ninety years of age, was martyred during the persecutions of the Christians under Marcus Aurelius, Irenaeus went to Rome to be consecrated primate of Gaul in his place. When the pagan judge asked Pothinus who was the Christians' G.o.d, the aged man made answer: "Merit him and you will know him." For twenty years, till his death in 202, St. Irenaeus evangelized the country with such success that Lyons was almost a Christian city when the persecution of Septimus Severus broke out. Then followed evil days when the streets of Lyons ran red with blood, and her learned bishop perished with nineteen thousand Christian martyrs.

During the first persecution, in 177, the Christians of the city wrote a famous letter describing how forty-eight of their number were tortured day after day in the Roman Forum of Lyons, till even the pagans allowed that never a woman had suffered so much and so long as the fragile slave Blandina. The letter of "the servitors of Christ who inhabit Vienne and Lyons in Gaul, to the brothers of Asia and Phrygia who partake of our Faith and our hope in the Redemption," is not only an historical doc.u.ment, precious for Lyons, but, as Renan said, is "one of the most extraordinary pages that any literature possesses."[159]

The hill of Fourviere looms over the scene of the martyrdoms, the _forum vetus_, the forum of Trajan, which gave its name to the neighboring eminence to which many generations have come as to a pilgrimage shrine.

On the flank of the hill a hospice marks where St. Pothinus breathed his last. The sumptuous new basilica that stands on the crest of the hill beside an ancient chapel, now its annex, persistently dominates the old, gray city. Lyons fulfilled its war vow of 1870 by the erection of this church wherein are strange echoes of Greek, Sicilian, Byzantine, and Gothic art that surely will make archaeologists in the far future wonder at much in our civilization. On its walls the city's proud apostolic traditions are set forth in mosaics.

Equally venerated is the ancient church of St. Martin d'Ainay which marks the holy ground where many of the martyrs were slaughtered at the confluence of the Saone and the Rhone. There once had stood the temple of the sixty nations of Gaul consecrated to the glory of Augustus.

Haunted by imperial visions, Napoleon at St. Helena suggested that his burial site be where the Rhone met the Saone. No city is more n.o.bly girdled than Lyons. From the altar to Augustus came the four pillars at the transept crossing of St. Martin's; two lofty cla.s.sic columns were cut in two to make them. The Burgundian queen, Brunehaut, of tragic memory, rebuilt Ainay's original oratory over the Christian martyrs'

bones, and founded the monastery which is one of the oldest in France.

In the course of time it became affiliated with the world-power, Cluny.

The present church of St. Martin was blessed in 1106 by Paschal II, who on this same journey had dedicated various new basilicas in northern Italy. In the XII and XIII centuries St. Martin's outer aisles were added. The crypt under the chapel of Ste. Blandine is not later than the V century. A contemporary of St. Martin's is the little Romanesque building touching the cathedral's facade, the _Manecanterie_ (to sing in the morning).[160] Originally it formed the outer wall of a gallery of the cloister.

The cathedral of St. John the Baptist faces the hill of Fourviere and its apse overlooks the Saone. The Baptist was the first teacher of St.

John Evangelist to whom the city traces its Christianity. A preceding Romanesque cathedral, building in 1084 and completed by 1117, was destroyed during disorders between the two warring local authorities, the archbishop and the counts of Forez. Lyons for a time was under the t.i.tular jurisdiction of the Holy Roman Empire, but to all intents and purposes was a free city with well developed communal rights. While the Romanesque cathedral was building, St. Anselm of Canterbury pa.s.sed sixteen months in Lyons as guest of Archbishop Hugues.

The present cathedral was undertaken by Archbishop Guichard (1165-80), and in its foundation walls were incorporated some of the polished stones from the forum of Trajan, hallowed by the martyrs' blood. So thick were the apse walls made that flying b.u.t.tresses were never needed.

The windows were set in deep embrasures. The absence of an ambulatory, and the flat roof, are reminders that this city neighbors the Midi. The cathedral's apse, as seen from across the Saone, is admirable. Over the arms of the transept are towers whose breadth indicates that the tower of St. Martin d'Ainay created a school in the district. In comparison with the transept towers, the western belfries of the cathedral appear meager.

The nave of Lyons rises twenty-five feet above the choir, and, furthermore, is covered by an inappropriate high-pitched roof. Within the church, the difference in height between the two main parts has been gracefully veiled by piercing, in the flat wall over the triumphal arch of the choir, a rose window and two lancets. In size this church may be modest, but its sincere, grave dignity is such that the impression conveyed is that of a very great cathedral. The nave derived from the north. The choir emanated from the south, and its creamy, sculptured marbles and Greco-Italian incrustations compose an interior of sober elegance, the peer of any sanctuary in the land. A unique feature in France is Lyons' incrustations--patterns cut in white marble and filled in with a reddish-brown cement--found only here and in the cathedral of Vienne.[161] St. Sophia in Constantinople first used the decoration, which was imported into Italy and thence pa.s.sed up the Rhone.

The choir of Lyons' Cathedral, up to its vault-springing, is Romanesque, of the Burgundian and Provencal type. The cla.s.sic pilaster strips are channeled; on each arm of the transept is an apsidal chapel. The prelate who began it, Guichard, had, while abbot of Pontigny, been the host of St. Thomas Becket, and in Pontigny's church he was buried in 1180. His successor, Jean de Bellesmaine (1180-93), born in Canterbury, was another of Becket's friends, and soon after he was transferred here from the see of Poitiers, then under English rule, he inspired the building of a collegiate church dedicated to the new English saint. Archbishop John undertook the second campaign of works on Lyons' choir, which was now vaulted in the Gothic way. On the capitals of the upper walls are the familiar crockets of the north.

In the transept is to be seen the same change from the round arches and fluted pilaster strips of the Romanesque day to the Primary Gothic characteristics. During the first third of the XIII century the transept was vaulted, its two towers raised, and the choir's four easternmost bays built. Lyons was then governed by one of its best rulers, Archbishop Renaud de Forez, who laid here the base for several centuries of prosperity. Circ.u.mstances forced him into the position of a leader of armies, but his natural inclination led him to the cloister's peace to end his days. In 1226, as president of a free city, he received Louis VIII, shortly before that king's sudden death.

This capable churchman presented to his cathedral the seven magnificent lancets in the curving sanctuary wall, that glow with the sparkling jewel-radiance achieved before 1220, but never equaled afterwards. The windows at Lyons are linked with those at Sens, and Sens' lancets we know to have been related to the earlier school of Chartres. What differentiates Lyons' medallions from those in the north was their use of certain Byzantine arrangements, such as the Virgin reclining on a couch in the Bethlehem grotto, or the representing St. John with a beard.

The first light in the Lyons' chevet celebrates the local martyrs. The axis window is a New Alliance, wherein the Old Law symbolizes the New.

The meaning of its animal allegories was first explained by Pere Cahier, who observed that they were taken from the ancient book called the _Bestiaires_. M. Male further discovered that Lyons' New Alliance window showed only those animals spoken of in Honore d'Autun's popular _Mirror of the Church_. Honore, who taught in Autun's cathedral school early in the XII century, was the initiator of animal symbolism in French cathedrals.

In the upper lights of Lyons' choir are some XIII-century archaic figures of big gaunt patriarchs with strange white eyes. The upper choir's triplet windows of different heights are most artistic. Under the north rose of the transept is a large lancet of surpa.s.sing effect, and in the transeptal chapel, close by, is a window that is like a sublimated topaz. The small pieces of gla.s.s used, their varied thicknesses and roughnesses are causes producing such sparkle. One cannot stress too strongly the exceptional character of Lyons' gla.s.s.

Centuries later, in the Flamboyant day, this city produced again a bevy of notable masters.

The nave of Lyons Cathedral advanced, bay by bay, in slow progress all through the XIII century, and sculpture and tracery in triforium and clearstory show the gradual change to Rayonnant design. The nave of northern Gothic conformed itself with sound instinct to the Romanesque southern choir. This is a cathedral that kneels more than it soars. The ancient city exulted on Fourviere's hill, but it thought best to keep its cathedral as a solemn cenotaph for its white army of unburied martyrs.

There came to Lyons, while its nave was building, the great Englishman, Robert Grosseteste (d. 1253), who at Lincoln made an angel-choir, "one of the loveliest of man's works," to shrine the relics of his predecessor, St. Hugh of Avalon, born in this semi-southern region. And many another enthusiast for the art of the builder studied the nave of Lyons in the course of its construction. Here gathered in 1245 a general Council of the Church. Modern congresses are sometimes dull affairs, but they must have been thrilling in the days when cathedrals were building and each prelate championed his regional ideas and yet looked about eagerly to seize on new ones.

The two westernmost bays of Lyons Cathedral were finished by 1310, and then were sculptured the facade portals with hundreds of little panels as full of frolic and fancy as the marginal gaieties of illuminated missals. A few years earlier the transept doors at Rouen had made similar medallions. Vice in them was rendered hateful. Where Lot's story should have been was left a blank s.p.a.ce. Not until Flemish realism entered French art, in the XV century, were certain gross scenes rendered. The medallions at Lyons are "Gaulois but without obscenity."

From 1308 to 1332 the wide, plain west facade of St. Jean's cathedral was done. Two of the Avignon popes were crowned here in those days, Clement V, the builder of Bordeaux's choir, and John XXII. The great dukes of the west, Philippe le Hardi and his son Jean sans Peur, being hereditary canons of the cathedral, often sat in its choir stalls. Of their time is the astronomical clock in the transept. For ten years, prior to 1429, Jean Gerson lived in the old Christian city, teaching little children their catechism, and the only payment he craved was that they should pray: Lord have mercy on your poor servant Gerson. He had been worsted by his century's treachery, bloodshed, foreign rule, and church schism; but after his death Lyons revered him as a saint, and carved his device, _Sursum Corda_, on a chapel in the church of St.

Paul. Scholars have decided against Gerson as author of the _Imitation of Christ_, yet during two centuries he was so believed to be, and his memory will be dear to those who have found inspiration in that precious book.

Lyons played so important a part in the revival of late-Gothic art that it was called the French Florence. Its new school of gla.s.smakers decorated the church of Brou, at Bourg-en-Bresse, not far away.[162] Two elaborate Flamboyant Gothic tombs were put up in the cathedral--that of Archbishop de Saluces (d. 1419) by Jacques Morel, and that of Cardinal Charles de Bourbon, a grandson of John the Fearless of Burgundy, and son of the Bourbon duke commemorated by the Souvigny tomb. From 1486 to 1501, he and his brother Pierre de Bourbon, son-in-law of Louis XI, added to Lyons Cathedral the splendid chapel of their name whose walls are carved with their winged stag and the device Esperance.

Unfortunately the windows, made by the Lyons master Pierre de la Paix, exist no longer, save a few upper panels, in one of which is an angel of rare beauty holding the Bourbon arms. Frequently in France one meets the donations of Henry IV's art-loving forbears, at Chartres, Tours, Souvigny,[163] Champigny-sur-Veude. Henry was married in Lyons Cathedral, in 1600, to Marie de Medici, daughter of another line of connoisseurs.

Like many a cathedral of France, Lyons was at its richest when it was sacked most piteously both in 1560 and 1562. Every church in the city was devastated by the cruel Baron des Adrets, who led the Huguenots one year, the Catholics the next, for in those bitter civil wars religion was often the thinnest cloak. The Huguenots destroyed the tomb of Cardinal de Saluces, with its eighteen alabaster statuettes, smashed the Bourbon chapel and tomb, broke up the Flamboyant rood screen, and dragged through the streets a silver statue of Christ that had surmounted it. On the west facade some fifty large statues were brought down, though happily the lovely little scenes chiseled under their brackets were spared. It is told how an archer shattered Our Lady's image, but when he attempted to dislodge that of G.o.d the Father, on the pignon, it fell and killed him. Lyons was again the scene of saturnalian havoc during the Revolution, when by the thousand her citizens were mowed down with grape shot because they chose to adhere to the old regime. A pa.s.sageway was broken open in the walls of the cathedral to permit the entry of a chariot bearing the G.o.ddess of Reason.

Of all the happenings in Lyons Cathedral, the most momentous was the Ec.u.menical Council of 1274. Christendom never witnessed a greater gathering. At the Council held at Lyons in 1245, Innocent IV had preached his famous sermon on the five wounds of the Church, but he was less concerned with healing them than with excommunicating Frederick II.

St. Louis tried in vain to make peace between pope and emperor on his visit to Lyons in those days. When the saint-king died on his last crusade his ashes rested in honor in Lyons Cathedral on their long journey from Tunis to St. Denis. Till the death of Frederick II, the pope lived in Lyons, whose independent position, neither wholly of France nor of the Empire, caused it to be a chosen spot for exiles.

Innocent contributed toward the building of a stone bridge over the Rhone to replace one that had collapsed under the troops of Philippe-Auguste and Coeur-de-Lion as they marched to the Third Crusade.

The Council of 1245 had been held in a cathedral of whose nave only four bays were completed. For the far greater gathering of 1274, Lyons Cathedral could seat over two thousand prelates and princes. The chief visitors were placed in the choir with Gregory X (formerly a canon of this church). Among them was Aragon's king, Jaime el Conquistador, mighty builder of churches and untiring crusader, Guy de la Tour, the bishop-builder of Clermont Cathedral, and the bishop of Mende, Guillaume Durandus, author of the universally read liturgical treatise. St.

Bonaventure, whose book of meditations was soon to inspire Giotto, preached at the opening Ma.s.s. His fellow teacher in Paris University, St. Thomas Aquinas, journeying north to attend the congress at Lyons, had died suddenly in the prime of life.

The Council of 1274 was not political, as had been that of 1245; its main purposes were the Holy War in the East and the reconciliation of the Greek and Latin churches. The Emperor of Constantinople had sent officials to reconcile him with Rome, and to this day memorials of that short reunion--Greek and Latin processional crosses--stand behind the chief altar of Lyons Cathedral. The emperor's amba.s.sadors solemnly abjured the twenty-six propositions condemned by Rome, then took the oath of fidelity to the pope. With swelling heart the vast throng rose to chant the _Te Deum_. Gregory X intoned the _Credo_ in Latin, and the Greek patriarch repeated thrice the _Filioque_ phrase which, centuries earlier, had been the occasion of the break with Rome, _qui ex Patre Filioque procedit_. Before the century ended the union was a dead-letter, though the emperor till his death remained faithful to his pact. The Greek priesthood proved irreconcilable.

The day before the Council closed St. Bonaventure died, and around his grave, in the Franciscan church at Lyons, stood the most imposing group of mourners recorded in history, pope, kings, and five hundred princes and prelates of note. The sermon was preached by Bonaventure's pupil of the Paris schoolroom, the learned Pierre de Tarentaise, archbishop of Lyons, soon to mount Peter's chair as Innocent V. All Christendom was bidden to offer up a prayer for the soul of Brother Bonaventure. The city adopted him as a patron. In 1562 the ashes of the Seraphic Doctor were flung into the Rhone, but there still stands in Lyons a late-Gothic church that bears his name.

LE MANS CATHEDRAL[164]

A cathedral is a book, a poem, and Christianity, true to its promise, has drawn voice and song from stone, _lapides clamabunt_.--FReDeRIC OZANAM.

Like Bourges and Lyons, the cathedral of Le Mans shows the influence of different schools. An Angevin architect made the _bombe_ vaults of its nave, and from the Ile-de-France and Normandy came the masters who designed its mammoth choir. The nave of Le Mans is a masterpiece of Romanesque despite its diagonals; the choir a masterpiece of Apogee Gothic. In the nave appear different stages of pre-Gothic art, and in the choir, the transept, and the nave's masonry roof are represented--Primary, Apogee, Rayonnant, and Flamboyant Gothic.

To read the stones of this composite church with intelligence, one must trace its story step by step. It is named after the first bishop of the city, St. Julian, who brought Christianity into the region. Several earlier cathedrals succeeded each other on the site. The one erected after the Northmen sacked Le Mans was falling into ruin when, about 1060, Bishop Vulgrim began a new cathedral, carried on by his successor, Arnould. Their Romanesque choir exists no longer, but vestiges of the church are to be traced in the walls of the present nave, and in the gable of the Psallette, a building to the north of the cathedral, which in Bishop Vulgrim's day formed part of his transept's north tower.

The nave of Le Mans as we have it to-day shows three distinct campaigns of work undertaken by the three bishops, Hoel, Hildebert de Lavardin, and Guillaume de Pa.s.savant. Bishop Hoel (1085-97), a Breton, able, handsome, patriotic, continued the Romanesque transept and the towers that terminate its arms. His works exist in the base of the southern tower and also in those two pier arcades of the nave that touch the transept. The groin vaulting of the side aisles is of Hoel's time, as well as the aisle walls, decorated with blind arcades, the capitals of whose shafts are carved crudely with chimerical animals. As the capitals opposite those of the engaged shafts show more skill, they must have been done later in the XI century.

Good Bishop Hoel, in famine time, sold the gold and silver plate of his cathedral to feed the poor, and on his deathbed distributed his possessions among them. After a visit to Rome, he accompanied Urban II back to France, on the momentous occasion of the launching of the First Crusade. When the Council of Clermont ended, the pope came to Le Mans, in February of 1096, to visit his friend the bishop, to the intense pride of all the city. Such episodes reflect clearly the unison of aspiration which was presently to express itself in mighty movements.

The Greek princess who saw the first crusaders arrive in Constantinople has told in graphic phrases how Europe, unloosed from its foundations, hurled itself on Asia, and with a like impetuosity western Christendom was about to fling itself toward heaven in cathedrals.

The church on which Bishop Hoel had worked was destroyed in large part by fire, and his successor, the ill.u.s.trious Hildebert de Lavardin (1097-1125), began a reconstruction about 1110. Hildebert was the most popular poet of his day and in the mediaeval schools his letters were committed to memory. A lover of the Latin authors, he composed verses of such facture that some of them have been mistaken for ancient cla.s.sics.

He was philosopher, orator, and architect as well. The best years of his life were pa.s.sed in Le Mans, though he was to die in Tours as archbishop of that city. While a teacher in Le Mans' cathedral school, he accompanied Bishop Hoel on his travels, and knew well Cluny and its great abbot Hugues, whose biographer he became. Hildebert possessed _esprit_, a sound judgment, and much independence. Life tested him harshly. The ordeal of prison he suffered several times, and the worse ordeal of calumny, which is disproved by the affectionate friendship felt for him by St. Anselm, St. Bernard, and Bishop Ives of Chartres. No man, he himself said in one of his sermons, should be a bishop whose life has not always been irreproachable. His contemporaries called him "a prelate attentive to the distribution of the bread of the word of G.o.d," a man zealous for discipline, charitable to the poor, and with a love for the House of Prayer that made him a builder both at Le Mans and Tours.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Le Mans' Choir_ (_1217-1254_). _The Double Aisles_]

Like St. Anselm, he was bullied by William Rufus. Maine lay between Anjou and Normandy and was fought for by each of those expanding powers, a duel settled only by the marriage of the heiress of Maine to the heir of Anjou, the son of which union was Geoffrey the Handsome, the first Plantagenet so called, who married the heiress of Normandy and England.

Geoffrey's son, Henry II of England, inherited Maine, Anjou, and Normandy before he fell heir to the kingdom across the Channel.