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
Each cathedral in France possesses a few traits peculiar to itself.
Noyon is unique in having both ends of its transept terminate in
hemicycles, like a Rhenish church.[47] The Romanesque school of the
Rhine had derived the feature from the early chapels of Rome. Probably
Noyon's transept apses came from retaining the foundations of the
previous cathedral. A church which was long in the jurisdiction of
Noyon--the cathedral at Tournai--still possesses its Romanesque transept
with semicircular ends. Cambrai Cathedral, destroyed by the Revolution,
once had a similar pre-Gothic transept; its choir, built from 1220 to
1237 in the golden day of the national art, was an irreparable loss.
Noyon Cathedral showed another Germanic trait in what may be called a
western transept, made by the lower stories of the façade towers and the
middle section of the first bay.
The nave of Noyon is a noble vessel, with an interior four-story
elevation of happier proportions than was achieved in the transept. No
longer do annulets bind the clustered shafts, thus breaking the
ascending line as in the choir. Throughout the church is to be found the
simultaneous use of round and pointed arches, and, curiously enough, it
is the lower stories, pier arcade, and tribune, that used the pointed
arch; in the triforium and clearstory the arches are semicircular.
Everywhere the sculptured capitals are of rare beauty. The Romanesque
acanthus leaf is found in juxtaposition with the Gothic crocket.
Noyon is exceptional in having retained its annexes: the treasure hall
built by Bishop Baudouin II, the chapel of the episcopal palace, a
half-timber library, and a beautiful chapter house (c. 1240). This
latter, opening on a fragment of the cathedral cloister, is a hall
divided into two aisles by a row of slender pillars, the type preferred
by the French, whereas in England the circular hall whose vault ribs
were gathered on a central pier was more popular. Noyon's chapter house
was built by Bishop Pierre Chalot, who died at sea, off Cyprus, on St.
Louis' crusade of 1248.
When in late-Gothic times Noyon was adding chapels and side aisles, her
master-of-works was Jean Turpin, who at Péronne--pitiful Péronne la
Pucelle entirely a ruin to-day--erected a Flamboyant Gothic church which
was a veritable gem.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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