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
Lyons played so important a part in the revival of late-Gothic art that
it was called the French Florence. Its new school of glassmakers
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 Espérance.
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 façade 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 God 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
régime. A passageway was broken open in the walls of the cathedral to
permit the entry of a chariot bearing the Goddess of Reason.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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