The Cathedrals of Southern France. M. F. Mansfield
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this time onward the art of church-building gave rise to that higher skill and handicraft, the practice of architecture as an art, of which ecclesiastical art, as was but natural, rose to the greatest height.
The next century was productive of but little change in style, and, though in the north the transition and the most primitive of Gothic were slowly creeping in, the well-defined transition did not come until well forward in the twelfth century, when, so soon after, the new style bloomed forth in all its perfected glory.
The cathedrals of southern France are manifestly not as lively and vigorous as those at Reims, Amiens, or Rouen; none have the splendour and vast extent of old glass as at Chartres, and none of the smaller examples equal the symmetry and delicacy of those at Noyon or Senlis.
Some there be, however, which for magnificence and impressiveness take rank with the most notable of any land. This is true of those of Albi, Le Puy, Périgueux, and Angoulême. Avignon, too, in the ensemble of its cathedral and the papal palace, forms an architectural grouping that is hardly rivalled by St. Peter's and the Vatican itself.
In many of the cities of the south of France the memory of the past, with respect to their cathedrals, is overshadowed by that of their secular and civic monuments, the Roman arenas, theatres, and temples. At Nîmes, Arles, Orange, and Vienne these far exceed in importance and beauty the religious establishments.
The monasteries, abbeys, and priories of the south of France are perhaps not more numerous, nor yet more grand, than elsewhere, but they bring one to-day into more intimate association with their past.
The "Gallia-Monasticum" enumerates many score of these establishments as having been situated in these parts. Many have passed away, but many still exist.
Among the first of their kind were those founded by St. Hilaire at Poitiers and St. Martin at Tours. The great Burgundian pride was the Abbey of Cluny; much the largest and perhaps as grand as any erected in any land. Its church covered over seventy thousand square feet of area, nearly equalling in size the cathedrals at Amiens and at Bourges, and larger than either those at Chartres, Paris, or Reims. This great church was begun in 1089, was dedicated in 1131, and endured for more than seven centuries. To-day but a few small fragments remain, but note should be made of the influences which spread from this great monastic establishment throughout all Europe; and were second only to those of Rome itself.
The lovely cloistered remains of Provence, Auvergne, and Aquitaine, the comparatively modern Charterhouse—called reminiscently the Escurial of Dauphiné—near Grenoble, the communistic church of St. Bertrand de Comminges, La Chaise Dieu, Clairvaux, and innumerable other abbeys and monasteries will recall to mind more forcibly than aught else what their power must once have been.
Between the seventh and tenth centuries these institutions flourished and developed in all of the provinces which go to make up modern France. But the eleventh and twelfth centuries were the golden days of these institutions. They rendered unto the land and the people immense service, and their monks studied not only the arts and sciences, but worked with profound intelligence at all manner of utile labour. Their architecture exerted a considerable influence on this growing art of the nation, and many of their grand churches were but the forerunners of cathedrals yet to be. After the twelfth century, when the arts in France had reached the greatest heights yet attained, these religious establishments were—to give them historical justice—the greatest strength in the land.
In most cases where the great cathedrals were not the works of bishops, who may at one time have been members of monastic communities themselves, they were the results of the efforts of laymen who were direct disciples of the architect monks.
The most prolific monastic architect was undoubtedly St. Bénigne of Dijon, the Italian monk whose work was spread not only throughout Brittany and Normandy, but even across the Channel to England.
One is reminded in France that the nation's first art expression was made through church-building and decoration. This proves Ruskin's somewhat involved dicta, that, "architecture is the art which disposes and adorns the edifices raised by man … a building raised to the honour of God has surely a use to which its architectural adornment fits it."
From whatever remote period the visible history of France has sprung, it is surely from its architectural remains—of which religious edifices have endured the most abundantly—that its chronicles since Gallo-Roman times are built up.
In the south of France, from the Gallic and Roman wars and invasions, we have a basis of tangibility, inasmuch as the remains are more numerous and definite than the mere pillars of stone and slabs of rock to be found in Bretagne, which apocryphally are supposed to indicate an earlier civilization. The menhirs and dolmens may mean much or little; the subject is too vague to follow here, but they are not found east of the Rhône, so the religion of fanaticism, of whatever species of fervour they may have resulted from, has left very little impress on France as a nation.
After the rudest early monuments were erected in the south, became ruined, and fell, there followed gateways, arches, aqueducts, arenas, theatres, temples, and, finally, churches; and from these, however minute the stones, the later civilizing and Christianizing history of this fair land is built up.
It is not possible to ignore these secular and worldly contemporaries of the great churches. It would be fatal to simulate blindness, and they could not otherwise be overlooked.
After the church-building era was begun, the development of the various styles was rapid: Gothic came, bloomed, flourished, and withered away. Then came the Renaissance, not all of it bad, but in the main entirely unsuitable as a type of Christian architecture.
Charles VIII. is commonly supposed to have been the introducer of the Italian Renaissance into France, but it was to Francois I.—that great artistic monarch and glorifier of the style in its domestic forms at least—that its popularization was due, who shall not say far beyond its deserts? Only in the magnificent châteaux, variously classed as Feudal, Renaissance, and Bourbon, did it partake of details and plans which proved glorious in their application. All had distinctly inconsistent details grafted upon them; how could it have been otherwise with the various fortunes of their houses?
There is little or nothing of Gothic in the château architecture of France to distinguish it from the more pronounced type which can hardly be expressed otherwise than as "the architecture of the French châteaux." No single word will express it, and no one type will cover them all, so far as defining their architectural style. The castle at Tarascon has a machicolated battlement; Coucy and Pierrefonds are towered and turreted as only a French château can be; the ruined and black-belted château of Angers is aught but a fortress; and Blois is an indescribable mixture of style which varies from the magnificent to the sordid. This last has ever been surrounded by a sentiment which is perhaps readily enough explained, but its architecture is of that decidedly mixed type which classes it as a mere hybrid thing, and in spite of the splendour of the additions by the houses of the Salamander and the Hedgehog, it is a species which is as indescribable (though more effective) in domestic architecture as is the Tudor of England.
With the churches the sentiments aroused are somewhat different. The Romanesque, Provençal, Auvergnian, or Aquitanian, all bespeak the real expression of the life of the time, regardless of whether individual examples fall below or rise above their contemporaries elsewhere.
The assertion is here confidently made, that a great cathedral church is, next to being a symbol of the faith, more great as a monument to its age and environment than as the product of its individual builders; crystallizing in stone the regard with which the mission of the Church was held in the community. Church-building was never a fanaticism, though it was often an enthusiasm.
There is no question but that church history in general, and church architecture in particular, are becoming less and less the sole pursuit of the professional. One does not need to adopt a transcendent doctrine by merely taking an interest, or an intelligent survey, in the social and political aspects of the Church as an institution, nor is he becoming biassed or prejudiced by a true appreciation of the symbolism and artistic attributes which have ever surrounded the art of church-building