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
Some of the most admirably sculptured capitals in Auvergne are at Mozac,
a suburb of Riom.[211] The nave of Mozac's abbey church was built from
1131 to 1147 by a brother of Peter the Venerable, who made Cluny's nave,
and of the doughty abbot, Pons de Montboissier, who erected Vézelay's
portico of paradise, all three of them belonging to a feudal family of
Auvergne. The small abbatial holds a priceless treasure, the reliquary
of St. Calmin, which an abbot presented in 1168. Its fourteen panels of
Limoges enamel are ornamented in gold. A bold attempt was made to rob
the church of this national heritage, so it is now protected by electric
bells and every kind of burglar alarm.
"_Clermont le riche, Riom le beau_," so ran the old saying. Riom, the
small but proud rival of the capital of Auvergne, was a town of
magistrates who built themselves Gothic Renaissance houses as individual
as the pre-Gothic work of the province. The church of St. Amable has a
Romanesque nave and an early-Gothic choir. Jean, Duke of Berry, had Guy
and André de Dammartin design the XIV-century Sainte-Chapelle for his
palace at Riom. Its brilliantly cold stained glass was commanded for the
wedding, in 1389, of sixty-year-old Duke John and the thirteen-year-old
heiress, Jeanne de Boulogne. Froissart has described the curious union.
Each window panel has a single statue under a canopy; the prophets and
apostles carry appropriately inscribed scrolls. A XV-century window,
representing the Bourbon dukes, Jean II and Pierre II, patrons of
Moulins, contains a St. Marguerite so similar to one in the "Book of
Hours" which Jehan Fouquet painted for Étienne Chevalier that the window
is thought to be designed by the great _primitif_ of Tours.
It may be to artists of Jean de Berry's entourage that we owe the most
entrancing Madonna of Flamboyant art, the _vierge à l'oiseau_, an image
in the regional stone which stands at the trumeau of the XV-century
church of Notre Dame-du Mathuret. One student after another has
discussed the date of this exquisite figure, so purely French in
essence, whose simplicity is as ample and unaffected as the best
XIII-century art. Work as exceptional as this is of no date or school,
but is due to some unrecorded individual genius. In that same
late-Gothic day the spirit of St. Louis and Joinville lived again in
_The Very Joyous, Pleasing and Diverting History of the Gentle Lord of
Bayard, written by the Loyal Servitor_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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