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
With book in hand should be read the complicated story of St. Remi's
nave and transept, the ancient Romanesque edifice re-dressed as Gothic
in 1170. Nothing remains of the church built in the IX century under
Bishop Hincmar of Rheims. The oldest parts extant are the piers of the
nave, which belonged to the reconstruction of the abbatial by Abbot
Airard (1005-33). His successor, Thierry (d. 1041), decided that the
works then under way were on too elaborate a scale to be within his
means, so he simplified the plan. The outer side aisles were suppressed,
the archivolts were doubled, the bays widened, and the old columns
replaced by compound piers. In the transept his work still exists in the
west wall (north arm) where are two stories of arcades supported by
thick, short, cylinder piers whose capitals are coarsely carved acanthus
leaves.
The rest of the transept (save what was added in 1170 to connect it with
the Gothic choir and the re-dressed nave) is the work of Abbot Herimar
who raised the west towers. Under him occurred the notable dedication of
St. Remi's new Romanesque church, in 1049, by Leo IX, the reformer, with
whom the Benedictine Order took possession of the papacy for some vital
years of needed regeneration.
St. Bruno of Cologne, the future founder of the Carthusian Order, was a
student in the episcopal school of Rheims while Romanesque St. Remi was
building. And later he returned from Germany to direct the school from
1057 to 1075 with great prestige. His most notable pupil, Eudes de
Châtillon, became the pope of the First Crusade, Urban II. Feeling the
call for a life of prayer and retirement, Bruno thought of joining the
group of earnest men about to commence the Cistercian Order, but his
destiny led him to Grenoble, near which in the mountains he began the
Grande Chartreuse (1084) where they say reform never was needed.[66]
In St. Remi's abbatial the last phase of Gothic art was to be
represented. The transept's south façade is Flamboyant, and over its
sculptured portal is a highly colored XV-century window. The façade was
finished by Abbot Robert de Lenoncourt (d. 1531), who later became
archbishop of Rheims. To his abbey church he presented ten rich
tapestries relating the life of the first bishop of the city, St.
Remigius, who baptized Clovis in 496, and whose rule of seventy years is
the longest spiritual reign on record. Clovis and Clotilda founded the
abbey. At its church altar St. Louis was knighted. On the day of Charles
VII's coronation the barons rode their steeds into the basilica,
dismounting at the sanctuary to ask for the sacred ampulla needed for
the king's anointing in the cathedral.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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