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
In 1254, when St. Louis was returning from his unsuccessful crusade, he
paused in Clermont, to replenish his depleted treasury. Ten years later
he presented windows to the cathedral, on the occasion of his son
Philippe's marriage there to the daughter of Jaime el Conquistador of
Aragon. The lights in the Lady chapel show the fleur-de-lis and the
donjons of Castile, and are apparently the work of Paris craftsmen, who
controlled the vitrine art of the later XIII century. That unskilled
local workers set them in place would seem to be indicated by the
armature bars which do not follow the contour of the medallions, as was
then the custom. In the choir's clearstory are the single figures and
grisaille that were in vogue during the next century.
Jean Deschamps made the plan of Clermont Cathedral. He may have studied
in the north, since certain traits of Picardy appear here, but the
spirit of the work is regional. His windows do not fill the entire upper
space between the active members. Under Bishop Guy de la Tour he
directed the building of the cathedral for almost forty years, till
1287. Perhaps he designed the cathedral of Limoges, in west-central
France, since its plan and details closely resemble those of Clermont.
Bishop Aymar de Cros, who carried on the works in Auvergne's capital,
was another of the schoolmen who were builders of churches; such was his
intellect that St. Thomas Aquinas willed to him his manuscripts in the
hope that his _Summa_ might be completed.
Under Bishop Aubert Aycelin de Montaigu a new master-of-works took
charge--Pierre Deschamps (1287-1325), the son probably of Jean who had
made the plans. He erected the four westernmost bays of the choir, the
transept, and the easternmost bay of the nave in its lower parts. From
1340 to 1359 the master-of-works was Pierre de Cabazat, who added three
more bays to the nave, and was employed in those same years in making,
with Hugues Morel, the abbey church of La Chaise Dieu in the Forez
mountains across the plain from Clermont.[208] An Avignon pope, Clement
VI, was the patron who undertook that gaunt granite structure, as full
of sorrow as the times that produced it. Clement had been abbot at La
Chaise Dieu, so naturally he contributed toward the erection of the
cathedral of Auvergne as did his successor at Avignon, Innocent VI (d.
1362), a former bishop of Clermont.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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