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
Sens Cathedral contains some ancient windows, four of which are among
the best in France and allied with Suger's school, though probably
executed as the XIII century opened, since the saddle bars follow the
outline of the medallion pictures. Those four exceptional windows of the
choir aisle sparkle with the jeweled intensity of the golden age of the
vitrine art. In one of them is told the story of St. Eustace, often to
be met with in French iconography, since he figured in the _Golden
Legend_. Another describes the return to England of Thomas Becket and
his immediate martyrdom. Originally next to it hung a companion lancet,
giving Becket's early life, but this was done away with to make room for
a chapel. The other two lancets are of the _Biblia Pauperum_ type. In
one, the parable of the Prodigal Son is given. In the other is the story
of the Good Samaritan, and the half medallions on either side of each
central scene interpret it symbolically. Such correlation of the Old
and the New Testament was most popular in the Middle Ages. Beside a
medallion which shows the traveler fallen among thieves stands the
expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden; and the scene of the
charitable Samaritan is accompanied by pictures of the Saviour's death
and resurrection. They might not be able to write and read, the ordinary
men and women of that day, they had no daily journal to crowd their
minds with half-digested facts, but their souls were fed by sound
ethical truths set forth clearly in their one great book, the cathedral.
The artisan donors of such windows we may be sure knew the symbolic
meaning of every panel.
In the clearstory windows at the curve of Sens' choir is more
XIII-century glass, but it is later work, lacking the marvelous glow of
the choir-aisle lancets. The two big roses of the transept are splendid.
A celestial concert was then a favorite theme. The south rose (1500) was
made by the same Champagne artists, Lyénin, Varin, Verrat, and Godon who
filled the nave of Troyes Cathedral with its high-colored translucent
woodcuts. The north rose of the transept finished in 1504, was the work
of native masters, influenced by the noted school of Troyes. The side
windows in Sens' Flamboyant transept are equally good.[57]
Jean Cousin, born in Sens, 1501, made two of the cathedral's windows,
the rich one of St. Eutropius, in the nave, and the Tiburtine sibyl of
amplest design, in the shrine to the south of the axis chapel. Nothing
could be more resplendent as picture windows, but Gothic-Renaissance
work, whose tendency was to treat each light as an isolated picture, is
not equal to the close-woven patterns of XII-and XIII-century mosaic
glass, which kept itself in subordination to its architectural setting.
The immense superiority of the earlier windows is demonstrated in Sens
Cathedral, which offers us both types at their best.
[Illustration: _The Interior of Laon Cathedral (XII Century). View from
the Tribune Gallery_]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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