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 church which now is Montpellier's cathedral consists of a modern
choir of the meridional type, without ambulatory or flying buttresses,
and a nave built as an abbatial by Guillaume de Grimoard, the best of
the Avignon popes, Urban V. The nave is a wide, unaisled hall, with
small clearstory windows. Even when the Midi used diagonals, says M.
Enlart, it remained faithful to Romanesque traditions. At the west
façade is an ungainly canopy held up by two round turrets of solid
stone, the sort of thing which is a builder's notion, not the design of
an architect. Urban was disappointed when he found that his architect
from Avignon had erected a big chapel rather than a church. When he came
to Montpellier in 1367 the new edifice was almost finished. He was
honored as never man was before by any city. The townspeople marched out
to meet him, every guild and corporation in the ranks, the lawyers
carrying the image of the newly canonized St. Yves of Brittany. When the
pope's visit ended, half the population walked for miles with him into
the country, and the town authorities escorted him all the way back to
Avignon.
Urban V had been educated in Montpellier and he loved its university, in
which for years he had taught law in the school where Petrarch studied.
He renewed the departments of law and art, put new life into the famed
medical school (which to-day is housed in the former bishop's palace,
fortified with propped machicolations), and founded a college for the
free maintenance of a certain number of students. To this day
Montpellier reveres him.
All over Christendom this energetic Midi baron endowed institutions of
learning, supported hundreds of students, and built monuments. He
founded the universities of Prague, Cracow, and Vienna, re-established
that of Orvieto, made a school of music at Toulouse, began the cathedral
of Mende,[246] near his birthplace, and in Marseilles rebuilt St.
Victor's, where he had been abbot,[247] and where remains his towering
tomb. At Avignon he continued the making of its walls of defense, for it
was a day when the lawless _Grandes Compagnies_ roved over France.
Urban was too wise a man not to perceive that his continued residence at
Avignon was a detriment to the papacy, and he made a valiant effort to
return to Rome. There, too, he was no sooner established than he
initiated works of art.[248] Broken by the disorders round him with
which he had not strength to cope, he returned to his beloved southern
France, where he died almost immediately, in 1370. His successor,
Gregory XI, inspired by St. Catherine of Siena, who journeyed to Avignon
in 1376, was to be the pontiff who ended what Italy, sick to death,
called "the Babylonian captivity."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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