The Slow Breath of Stone: A Romanesque Love Story. Pamela Petro
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extinct and obsolete, itself the very agent that had thrust irrelevance on the church of Perse five hundred years earlier, that I momentarily lost faith in my adventure. Here at the beginning of my journey was every reason to abandon it. If a nineteenth-century antelope-headed mallet was no longer useful to the residents of Espalion, how could eleventh-century Romanesque sculpture be relevant to me? It rendered an increasingly discredited theology of judgement and damnation in thoroughly discredited artistic shorthand: what could be more irrelevant than that? St Bernard’s question – ‘What profit is there in this art?’ – had got inside my head. What did I want of it, not to mention the Porters and Lucy’s photographs?
The facts I’d gathered about their lives were as so many exhibits in these cloudy glass cases. Lucy liked to garden; Kingsley was driven to distraction by the unruly clanging of church bells in French villages; they were both bothered by flying insects in the night. Knowing these things didn’t begin to answer why I was so drawn to them.
Instead they rendered the Porters in a kind of Romanesque perspective. Lucy and Kingsley moved about in my imagination, but they did so within the constricted, one-dimensional space of the past. They were like photographs shot by my mind’s eye – as yet a camera without a depth-perceiving lens, restricting its subjects to the surface plane. My mental images of them reminded me of the sculpted tympanum figures on the church of Perse. Although the Perse sculptures were shaped in the round, they had been conceived to inhabit a flat universe. Christ is depicted sitting, but because he sits in one dimension, his knees occupy the same plane as his torso. Writing about Romanesque sculpture, Meyer Schapiro tried to explain how three-dimensional carvings could be rendered in one dimension: ‘They are’, he wrote, ‘like shadows cast on a wall’ – the antithesis, in other words, of real photographs, which are themselves flat but depict depth.
At this point in my journey I felt like that eleventh-century sculptor who had shaped the awkward little figures at Perse. Perhaps, over time, Lucy’s photographs and their stony subjects, abetted by her journal and Kingsley’s letters, even the French countryside itself, might begin to lend the couple shading and spatial depth. Perhaps my own younger self would flesh up a bit, too, and speak to me of the real reasons she’d felt such an affinity for this strange art; at the moment she was little more than a shadow cast behind the present Pamela. It seemed odd to be looking for answers – for personalities, even – in stone. But then I thought of Lucy’s words about winter in Paris; how she’d seen frozen sprays of ice issuing from the mouths of gargoyles, and how they’d revealed the way the wind had been blowing on the first cold day.
I, too, wanted to know which way the wind had been blowing; I wanted to catch secrets on the breath of stone. Lucy had found traces of the wind’s restless passage in ice; perhaps I would be lucky enough to find answers – or at least clues – in sculpture.
I chatted again with the pea-shellers, who directed me to an excellent greengrocer. I was feeling better about things. For good or ill – for now, anyway – let the Porters be a pair of Romanesque photographs cast on the wall of my mind’s eye. About the old sculptures Schapiro had also written: ‘Although they represent incidents … drawn from a real world, it is another logic of space and movement that governs them.’ His words gave me a way to think about Lucy and Kingsley that honoured them for what they were at present: not a living, breathing couple who had stood outside the church of Perse eighty years earlier, perhaps chatting with Joseph Vaylet, their three-legged view cameras at the ready, but guides reshaped on the focusing-plate of my imagination by the logic of my journey. The questions that propelled my travels governed my acquaintance with them. I was not so much their biographer as their fellow traveller, in the same place but another time, and their own painstakingly constructed, black-and-white photographs would be my maps.
There are 1,527 photographs in Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads, and only three, to my count, have people in them. In one, a priest poses in front of St Michel de Cuxa near the Spanish border; in another, three children line up before the entrance to a church in Western France; the third, labelled ‘Baptism of Christ; Shepherds; Magi’, is the most curious. Lucy shot the other figures, but Kingsley took this picture, and as a documentary photograph of column capitals it is an abject failure. The capitals are barely legible – the carvings look like webs secreted by a clumsy, stone-spinning spider – but below them, in sharper focus, stand two young peasant children, a boy with a hat pulled low over his eyes and a girl whom Kingsley half-cropped out of the picture.
It wasn’t unusual for the Porters to take pictures of the children who gathered to watch them work, but it was a rare portrait that Kingsley allowed into print. Lucy noted in her ‘Devastated Regions’ journal that, ‘I let the Le Duc brothers – aged 11, 9, and 5 – stand in my picture. They were clad in cast-off soldiers uniforms.’ That photograph was not included in Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads.
Everything about Kingsley’s picture is curious. The capitals and the children are pushed to the extreme left side of the image; the right simply shows a blank, masonry wall. Had he been fully concentrating on the sculpture he could have got much closer to it, as he did with a different set of capitals in the next photograph. That he didn’t suggests he was taking a portrait of the children, and yet the little girl is half missing. It is either a rare display of sentiment, if not quite sentimentality – both children look solemnly obstinate – or a display of wry humour. From their dress and the rural setting of the church, it’s a good bet the children are shepherds. The fact that they stand directly beneath their carved, biblical colleagues suggests that Kingsley was making a visual pun and a subtle reference to the rural pastureland in which he and Lucy, the church, and the children found themselves.
This photograph is from Volume IV, somewhat misleadingly called ‘The Aquitaine’, of his multi-volume work. In Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads Kingsley set himself an exhausting mission: to examine the sculpture of Romanesque churches along the great medieval pilgrimage ways that led to Santiago de Compostela, in Spain (the route flows like a straight river across northern Iberia, fed by tributaries that branch out into France, Italy, and northern Europe). He and Lucy took photographs in northern Italy and Spain and throughout France; then, using comparative analysis, he determined his thesis. Kingsley rejected the idea of national schools of medieval art, suggesting instead that Romanesque forms and iconographies, like the chansons de gestes, had grown up along the roads, flowing freely across linguistic and political boundaries. The French art historian Émile Mâle also postulated that there was an ‘Art of the Road’. Mâle, however, believed that the Romanesque flowered first in Toulouse and spread from there to Spain. Kingsley countered with the notion that pilgrims and masons carried the new art in both directions, though he thought it might have originated on the Iberian Peninsula. His nine volumes of photographs – totalling 21 pounds on their own, 23 with the volume of text – were the ammunition in his battle (most art historians today have left the battlefield, preferring instead to study Romanesque form rather than date it).
Kingsley amassed six volumes of principally French photographs; one of Italian; and two of Spanish. I chose to concentrate on ‘The Aquitaine’, which includes not only the area around Bordeaux, but almost all of southwest France from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, stretching as far north as the lower Limousin. I picked this volume for two practical reasons. One, I can get by in French, but speak not a word of Spanish or Italian; and two, as opposed to other volumes, which are liberally sprinkled with photographs taken by the Porters’ assistants or purchased from photographic services, almost all of the plates in ‘The Aquitaine’ were shot by either Lucy or Kingsley. Pride betrays this last fact, as each of the 1,527 plates in all nine volumes is attributed to the photographer who made it. The image of the shepherd children is labelled ‘A.K.P. phot.’, and the Espalion pictures ‘L.W.P. phot.’ – a rare practice in a scholarly text, but a fair clue as to how much both Porters valued their work.
There was a third, personal, reason I chose Volume IV as my map to Romanesque France. Nestling within the central portion of its geography, in the corrugated landscape of Quercy and the Rouergue, lie three of the churches I have wanted to see since I was an undergraduate: the great abbeys of St Pierre in Moissac, Ste Foy in Conques, and Ste Marie in Souillac. This litany of names, for me, summoned up the accessible majesty of Romanesque sculpture