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 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_.--FRÉDÉRIC OZANAM.
Like Bourges and Lyons, the cathedral of Le Mans shows the influence of
different schools. An Angevin architect made the _bombé_ 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, Hoël, Hildebert de Lavardin,
and Guillaume de Passavant. Bishop Hoël (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 Hoël'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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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