How France Built Her Cathedrals: A Study in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries. Elizabeth Boyle O'Reilly

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      The tomb of Francis I (1549–59) was designed by Philibert de Lorme. Pierre Bontemps fashioned the bas-reliefs that celebrate the wars in Italy; he and other masters made the priants and gisants. The tomb of Henry II and Catherine de Medici (1570) of less artistic value, has a complicated history. The Italian, Primatici, directed the works; Domenico Florentino made the king’s kneeling figure, and Germain Pilon his gisant; Jerome della Robbia chiseled the queen’s death image.

      To sum up: there are in St. Denis’ abbatial three totally different parts, built in different periods. There is Suger’s forechurch, in which linger Romanesque echoes; there is the ambulatory of purest Primary Gothic built a little later by the same great abbot; and finally there are nave, transept, and the main parts of the choir erected during the reign of St. Louis in the zenith of Gothic art.

      As one stands in the center of the church, gazing along its vaulting, it is easy to perceive that the axis is broken three times, and each divergence from the straight line conforms to one of the different stages of work. The deviation of the axis line once was called poetically inclinato capite (et inclinato capite, emisit spiritum—St. John xix:30). It was thought to symbolize the inclining of Christ’s head on the Cross. When M. Robert de Lasteyrie proved that a constructive miscalculation was the cause of the irregular line, the beautiful idea had to be renounced.[35] In each successive addition to a church it was difficult for the architect to start the new part exactly on the same axis as the old, since usually a temporary wall shut off the portion of the church already finished and in use. The slightest miscalculation at the start led to a very apparent deflection of alignment. Those churches which show irregular alignment are known to have been built in successive stages. A number of church choirs slant to the south, whereas were the figure on the crucifix taken as model they would deviate to the north. In churches without a transept, or, in other words, churches that lack the extended arms of the cross, is sometimes found a decided slant to the north. Moreover, the crucifix of that epoch represented a triumphant Christ with erect head, for the art of the XIII century was serene; the pathetic in religious iconography was a later development. No writer of the period mentions a symbolic interpretation of the deviated axis, not even Bishop Guillaume Durandus, in his noted Rationale, or Signification of the Divine Offices. There is, instead, a text of the XIV century which says that a certain architect was so chagrined at having built a tortuous axial line that he never returned to be paid by the cathedral chapter. Mr. Arthur Kingsley Porter thinks that the deviation of the axis was intentionally done, in order to overcome that tendency of perspective which lessens the apparent length of a church by foreshortening its far bays. By slanting the east end, the distant bays could be brought into view, and thus the edifice would seem longer.

       St. Denis-en-France and Its Royal Mausoleums

      The Royal Abbey of St. Denis suffered during the Hundred Years’ War, from which period dates the crenelated wall at the birth of the towers. In those checkered times the silver tombs of St. Louis, of his father Louis VIII, and of his grandfather Philippe-Auguste, disappeared. In the XVI-century religious wars the abbey was pillaged, and its library, a national treasure, was burned. The Calvinists carried off Suger’s altar vessels of silver and gold, on which the learned little abbot had inscribed Latin verses. The Revolution completed the havoc; of the monks’ quarters nothing remains to-day. The Committee of Public Safety voted to destroy the tombs of “our ancient tyrants” on the first anniversary of the August 10th that had unseated the monarchy. So the mob sallied forth to St. Denis and scattered the dust of the patriot Suger, whose life work had been the public weal, and the dust of St. Louis, the most conscientious man who ever ruled a nation and the first to give France her written laws. The gruesome account of the wrecking of the royal tombs was written by an eyewitness.[36]

      In the opening years of the XVIII century, the abbey church was described by Chateaubriand as in a ruinous state, with the rain falling through its roof and grass growing on the broken altars: “The birds use its nave as a passageway; little children play with the bones of mighty monarchs. St. Denis is a desert.” Napoleon began its restoration, and many of the scattered tombs were brought back. During the first half of the XIX century some deplorably bad work was carried on, and the robust primitive profiles were chiseled away. No sooner was the spire on the north tower finished than cracks showed, and the tower was dismantled to the level of the roof. Later changes have repaired some of the stupidity of those tasteless renovators.

      The very history which had been enacted within the walls of the great abbatial would suffice to make it a national relic. To the Primary-Gothic church which Suger was building came Louis VII for the oriflamme, the banner carried before the army in momentous wars. He shared bed and board with the monks the night before he set forth on the Second Crusade. To the same early-Gothic church, in 1190, came his son Philippe-Auguste, to receive the oriflamme for the Third Crusade. The flame-colored abbey gonfalon on its gold lance flouted the German emperor when Bouvines’ great victory was won in 1214. At the funeral of Philippe-Auguste, in 1223, a little lad of eight marched to St. Denis’ behind his grandfather’s bier. It was the first time that the populace had beheld their future saint-king, and an old record tells how his noble bearing gladdened their hearts. At his side walked Jean de Brienne, king of Jerusalem, leader of the recent Fifth Crusade. When St. Louis came to St. Denis for the oriflamme in 1247, it was to find a totally reconstructed church, for Pierre de Montereau had been many years at work. Joinville in his memoirs described the landing in Egypt of the Royal Abbey’s banner, how for miles the sea was dotted with the gleaming ships of the crusaders, how the king, standing head and shoulders above the rest, on perceiving that the leading vessel which bore the oriflamme had touched shore, leaped into the sea, sword in hand, with the cry, “Montjoye St. Denis!” And uttering the same battle cry of France, princes and knights followed. Five years later, tested by defeat and imprisonment, as fine gold is by fire, Louis IX brought back the oriflamme to St. Denis. Again he returned for it in 1270 for his last crusade. Within a year, the whole nation, in mourning, came out to the abbey. In a reliquary, the king’s bones, embalmed with fragrant spices, had been brought from Tunis, and the new king bore the châsse solemnly, and wherever he paused, on the way from Notre Dame to St. Denis, a memorial cross was erected. But, to give the annals of the abbey church would be to tell the history of the French monarchy.

      The first time that the gonfalon of St. Denis was carried against Frenchmen was in 1413, two years before the defeat at Agincourt, in the black days of the Hundred Years’ War, days as fatal to the builders’ art as to the civic life of France. What those dire times were that rent France to shreds, and how la fille de Lorraine à nulle autre pareille came to the rescue, have been sung by a poet whose high destiny it was to fall in recent battle. Charles Péguy, in his poem, linked the momentous epochs of the capital: St. Denis, who brought the Light; Ste. Geneviève, the sentinel patroness of Paris, who guarded it, and Jeanne d’Arc, who lifted up the torch from the mire—the torch which the fallen heroes of the World War have passed on refulgent.

      In the V century it was at Geneviève’s instigation that a basilica was raised to honor St. Denis. In the XV century Jeanne d’Arc paid tribute to the first martyr of Paris. Her troops lodged in the town of St. Denis, then moved in closer to Paris, and in a shrine dedicated to St. Denis, in the village of La Chapelle, Jeanne heard Mass, the morning that she led the assault on the walls of Paris, September 8, 1429. When wounded she was carried back to La Chapelle (to-day a dense industrial faubourg of the city), and on St. Denis’ altar she offered tribute. During her trial at Rouen they asked her what arms she had offered to St. Denis.[37]

      “A complete knight’s outfit in white, with a sword that I had won before Paris,” was Jeanne’s reply. “And why did you make that offering?” asked the judge, bent on twisting her every act to sorcery. Jeanne answered hardily: “For devotion, and because it is the custom for all men-of-arms when they СКАЧАТЬ