The Slow Breath of Stone: A Romanesque Love Story. Pamela Petro

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СКАЧАТЬ than opened to applied pressure. I lost my balance and stumbled inside, into the bear hug of a large priest who was on his way out into the night. His white cassock glowed against the black space beyond. We both spoke in wine-scented whispers. Yes, I was welcome to come in, the abbey was open. But attention! The paving stones were uneven.

      I stepped inside: the great building was dissolving into echoes of darkness. At first greys, masonry greys, hovered at eye level. As they rose upwards they grew less substantial, optical memories more than illuminated stones, until the visual echoes faded entirely and the majestic barrel vault of Conques Abbey ceased to be, and for me, not knowing if the stars were out yet or not, became heaven itself. Soon the foundations of the massive pillars and the exterior walls disappeared too. I was inside an idea of a Romanesque church, nothing more concrete than that, but that idea was strong, and it was enough. I felt the muscle of architecture flex around me, repeating in pleats of rounded arches down the side aisles – and there was a quiet undertone of pleading in that repetition, too – the twelfth-century message of God’s tough love.

      I sat down on one of the curiously tiny, rush-back chairs that filled the nave. The night-time had brought singularity back to the abbey. I could smell the church far better than I could see it – it smelled like the rock in my pocket, only damper – and that limy scent defined its space as unique, something different from the green smell of spring drifting on the night-mists outside. By contrast, daylight had revealed not only Conques Abbey itself, but its endless repetition throughout the village. Despite being a ‘Grand Site de France’ – advertised as such by banners on nearby auto-routes – Conques village has remained wondrously small and self-contained, coiled into deep, wooded countryside halfway down the steep declivity that separates the Causse de Comtal from the Dourdou Valley. There is not a modern bone in the village’s medieval body, and yet one of the first things that struck me upon leaving my car and walking into town was wave upon wave of photographic reproduction. I’ve rarely seen such a plural place.

      So many images of a single spot! Granted the almost shocking magnetism of the abbey – imagine Big Ben, or the Empire State Building, surrounded by a rural hamlet – and yet still the proliferation of postcards overwhelms. There are old ones, new ones, black-and-white and in colour; postcards in matte finish, shiny finish, printed on textured paper. Postcards of parts of the abbey that are off-limits to visitors, like the one I’d bought of a mermaid clasping her forked tail in each hand, carved onto a capital in the upper gallery. To purchase for 35 centimes an image never intended to be seen from the ground seemed, somehow, a violation of the abbey’s privacy. But then photography heedlessly violates the privacy of time past as well as space delimited, for I had approached the great western façade of Conques, surrounded by its little apron of a cobbled place, with a fixed, black-and-white moment from the morning of 18 August 1920 clasped in my hand.

      Unlike Lucy’s, my moment – afternoon, 20 April 2002 – came with distracting colour and sound. An announcer commented on a women’s gymnastics championship on a television set in the Salon de Thé opposite the abbey. ‘I am just ringing to say I am standing in front of the church,’ repeated a blond woman, loudly and carefully, into her mobile. Beside her an Irish setter was hopelessly knotted up in her leash in a patch of shade. Above us all rose the massive, no-nonsense towers of the abbey, braided ‘round above and below by the shimmering roofs of the village’ (Conques is so steep that windows of two-storey houses one block from the church overlook its nave). Hannah Green, in her memoir Little Saint, likened the roofs to dragonfly wings. The standard comparison is fish scales. The traditional Rouergat lauzes, thin, round roof-tiles, here cut from silvery schist and overlapped very much like gills – reminded me of braided leather, arresting my eye again and again with intricate fugues of texture.

      I thought of Lucy and Kingsley in Vézelay in 1919, the summer before they had visited Conques. They had fallen in love with the village that clustered around the great Burgundian abbey just as I was becoming smitten with Conques. Lucy had written in her journal that their travelling companion, Bernard Berenson, had fallen asleep in the car on the way back to Paris, and she and Kingsley had been free to fantasize. They’d decided that if their taxes kept going up at home they would return to Vézelay to live in one of the little houses that framed the abbey, and have a garden in front and a view at the back.

      I smiled at the familiar daydream, and began to commence on one of my own. But there was the setter to untangle, and a photo to be taken of three Brazilians from Belo Horizonte. After that, my moment in Conques merged with Lucy’s, and I forgot everything but the great, scarcely weathered tympanum before me, to which traces of coloured paint still cling. A Conquois friend of Hannah Green’s called the tympanum ‘one of the four wonders of the world’ (she neglected to name the other three). Just a glance reveals its importance. The early twelfth-century abbey is predominantly built of buttery yellow limestone (salted butter, to be exact; the interior is the paler shade of whipped sweet butter), with rosy mortar and mottled grey schist in-fill. The tympanum, however, and the pierres de tailles – the fitted stones – of the surrounding portal are pure, creamy, ochre-coloured sandstone. The very best stuff the quarry had to offer.

      The eye notes this and marks it; only when you move in closer do you realize that the golden stones were set there as a lure, to lead you to one of the most magnificent spectacles of Romanesque art. And it is a spectacle, like a parade or a circus, with a multitude of incidents, intimate and grand, frightening and beatific, some grimly funny, mushrooming throughout every inch of the sculpted half-moon. The theme is the Last Judgement. At the church of Perse in Espalion the great reckoning was compactly and clumsily depicted in shorthand – just a reference to ignite whatever associations already existed in the viewer’s mind. Here the theme has become art, supplying visual images of its own, supplanting others. Imagine that a director of greatness, of real vision and inspiration, working with a troupe of earnest amateurs, has set out to perform skits from the Second Coming of Christ – not to convey the idea of judgement, but to narrate it. The result is the tympanum of Conques.

      Back at university my professor had thought that the little sculpted actors, the saints and the saved, the devils and damned, had a ‘folk-art quality’; my guidebook found them ‘endearingly anecdotal’. What I think they both meant is that the carvings are not types, representing ideas, but individuals acting out very particular rewards and punishments. This is an impolitic thing to say, but then travel books permit the occasional lapse into sentimentality: they are heart-achingly sweet. Even the devils look like nice guys in masks, trying to be mean. An abbot takes the hand of Charlemagne, depicted as an old, stooped, shuffling king, and kindly leads him into heaven. And it was a compassionate heart that imagined the justice of the damned – nowhere else but the tympanum of Conques would a rabbit be given the opportunity to roast the man who had hunted him, on a spit, eternally, in Hell.

      Ste Foy, to whom Conques Abbey is dedicated, kneels under a miniature eave on the left-hand side of the composition, blessed quite literally by the hand of God. Foy, the ‘little saint’ of Hannah Green’s book, was beaten, broiled, and decapitated at the age of twelve, in the year 303, for refusing to pay lip service to the Roman pantheon. She was canonized a century later. Her remains lay at Agen, near Toulouse, for over four hundred years, until she was either stolen, lent, or borrowed (the facts are unclear) and brought to Conques, where a piece of her skull was set into a portable reliquary statue around the year 900. Foy had already been working miracles, but she seemed to like the reliquary, with its golden face – probably originally that of a Celtic god – and feverishly granted prayers as fast as they came in, rendering the abbey not only a stop on the Via Podiensis, but a pilgrimage destination in itself.

      Of all the incidents on the busy tympanum, Lucy typically found and focused on the moment of greatest tension. It is a tension her black-and-white photograph enhances, making the weary graininess of the thousand-year-old carvings into a kind of elemental cognate to the fraught scene (more appropriate to its mood than the cosy sunlight that pampered the stone when I saw it). On the lowest tier of the tympanum, right in the centre, just beneath an angel and devil tensely weighing souls, is a divide; СКАЧАТЬ