How France Built Her Cathedrals: A Study in the Twelfth and Thirteenth CenturiesO'Reilly, Elizabeth Boyle
History
How France Built Her Cathedrals: A Study in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries
O'Reilly, Elizabeth Boyle
Architecture, Gothic; Cathedrals -- France
The "masters of the living stone" who built Rheims Cathedral are known
to us to-day. Their names were commemorated in a labyrinth that once
formed part of the nave's pavement, a drawing of which has been
unearthed by M. Louis Demaison. The obliterated figure in the middle of
the labyrinth no doubt represented the bishop who laid the foundation
stone. He was Albéric de Humbert, formerly archdeacon of Notre Dame at
Paris while the bishops Maurice and Eudes de Sully were raising that
cathedral. Builder and crusader, Albéric was a true product of his age.
He marched into Languedoc, in 1208, to chastise the Albigensian
heretics; he attended Innocent III's great Council of the Lateran in
1214, and when he ventured again to the East to take part in the crusade
of Jean de Brienne, he was captured by Saracens and ransomed by the
Spanish knights of Calatrava. He died on the return journey, 1218.
For a man of such energy, it could have been with slight regret that he
witnessed, in May, 1210, the destruction by fire of the decrepit church
he had inherited, one of whose builders had been Archbishop Hincmar in
the IX century. That early cathedral of Rheims had been redressed with a
façade by Archbishop Sampson, a friend of Abbot Suger's, and among the
prelates who attended the memorable dedication of St. Denis. His Primary
Gothic work, wiped out in the conflagration of 1210, was a loss indeed
for art.
Bishop Albéric de Humbert set vigorously to work, and within a year of
the fire had laid the corner stone of the present cathedral (1211). By
1241 services were held in the finished choir. An archbishop of the
Dreux line (1227-40) gave windows to the upper apse, and although he and
the townsfolk were at bitter odds, the building of the great church by
both prelate and people went on unabated. The imperious Henri de Dreux,
like Pierre Mauclerc, the donor of Chartres' south rose, was a grandson
of that brother of King Louis VII who built the beautiful church of St.
Yved at Braine on the highway between Rheims and Soissons. While the
cathedral of Rheims was building, another of its archbishops was a
Joinville, and in 1270 its sixtieth ruler died on St. Louis' last
crusade.
The plan of the cathedral was made by Jean d'Orbais, who had watched the
erection of the abbatial (1180) in his native town of Orbais,[115] a
church modeled on the choir of St. Remi which the celebrated schoolman
Pierre de Celle had built from 1170 to 1180. Thus Orbais is the
intermediary between the big abbey church of Rheims and Rheims
Cathedral.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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