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
About 1370 Duke Jean of Berry, born connoisseur like his brothers
Charles V, Philippe of Burgundy, and the Duke of Anjou, presented to
Bourges Cathedral its immense western window. Before the Medici, this
Valois prince collected cameos and medals and bric-à-brac. Among the
twenty castles he built were those of Poitiers, Riom, and Bourges, on
which were employed the noted Flamboyant Gothic architects, the
Dammartin brothers. When the Sainte-Chapelle of the palace in Bourges
was destroyed (1759), the duke's tomb, which his nephew Charles VI had
ordered of Jean de Cambrai (1477-83), was brought to the cathedral. The
sarcophagus was once surrounded by alabaster statuettes, some of which
are in the Museum. The arrangement of mourners came from his brother's
world-famous tomb in Dijon. In his old age the spendthrift, unstable
Jean de Berry married the very youthful Jeanne de Boulogne, and kneeling
images of both duke and duchess have been placed on either side of the
entrance to the axis chapel of the cathedral. Apparently art-loving John
of France was in person the homeliest of men. The Revolution damaged
these images, which were restored by means of drawings made of them by
Holbein in the time when Bourges was a Mecca for the artists of Europe.
Some of Duke Jean's friends presented early XV-century windows to the
side chapels of Bourges Cathedral. His physician, Aligret, gave one.
The Hundred Years' War put a stop to the accumulation of art treasures
in the metropolitan church. When Charles VII, "the little king of
Bourges," as the English had dubbed him ironically, went with the
victorious Maid of Orleans to be crowned king at Rheims, his gentle
queen, Marie of Anjou, stayed in Bourges with her mother, Yolande of
Aragon. Marie's brother, then a youth under Jeanne's command, was to
become the good King René of history. To Bourges Jeanne herself came
later. She lodged with an estimable widow of the town who, years
afterward, during the inquest conducted for the Maid's rehabilitation,
bore testimony to the young girl's simple goodness. She told how
gallantly Jeanne mounted a horse and how adroitly she managed a lance so
that "everyone was in admiration of her, for no knight could have done
better."[137]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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