Patrick Bade
French Gothic: The Age of Cathedrals
Patrick Bade - French Gothic and the Cathedrals of France
- Thank you, Lauren. I’m really happy to be back with you again after a month of travels in which it feels like my feet have never touched the ground. I’m also happy to be embarking on a course of lectures on French culture. I’m in London that moment, but I will be back in Paris tomorrow. So today I’m going to undertake a survey of French Gothic architecture, so that’s a very big subject. It’s a long period that stretches from the 12th century to the 16th century. And the French Gothic building I visit most often is Saint-Eustache, which you can see on the screen, and that’s for a very simple reason: it’s right next to my favourite restaurant in Paris. So very often if I arrive a few minutes early, before my friend’s there, I will go and sit in this church to gather my thoughts. It’s enormous. It’s bigger than many cathedrals. And it dates from the 16th century. So it dates from the, it’s really the last-gasp you could say, of the Gothic style in France. And when you walk into it, it’s like walking into a great stone forest of columns, and ribs, and vaults. As I said, it’s the end of the Gothic style. So some of the detailing is already Renaissance, but the overall conception is completely Gothic construction. It’s like so many Gothic churches. It’s just an astonishing piece of engineering.
You think, “My god, what holds all of this up?” And actually, what holds it up is a system of flying buttresses, which you can see on the outside, really a great complicated structure of stone scaffolding. And the 19th century, both the British and the Germans somehow imagined that Gothic was their national style. And it was after 1815, and the defeat of Napoleon, Gothic was adopted in both Britain and Germany, partly in reaction to French taste, which was, by this time, was associated with Classicism. So when the British Houses of Parliament, which were a genuinely mediaeval complex of buildings, they burnt down in 1834, there was a competition. And the rules of the competition stipulated that the new building had to be in a national style, either Gothic or Elizabethan. Elizabethan really is, I would say, a genuinely English style. There’s nothing like it anywhere else in Europe. Gothic, and in fact, the form of Gothic that was chosen for the building designed by Pugin and Barry, we see on the left-hand side, Perpendicular Gothic. That is certainly a typically English variation on the style. On the right-hand side is a building which came to symbolise German nationhood. This is Cologne Cathedral. It was left unfinished in the 16th century. The original plans for the whole building were discovered, or rediscovered, in 1814. And between 1842 and 1890, the building was completed to the original plans. But Gothic, despite what Pugin and all those people thought was a French invention of the 12th century, and the first building that combines all the key elements that we associate with the Gothic style, is the choir of the Basilica of Saint-Denis on the outskirts of Paris. It’s now a very a working-class, and actually predominantly Muslim area of Paris. But here is the choir of Saint-Denis that was commissioned by Abbott Suger, and it was built between 1135 and 1144.
So here we see the pointed arch, and we see the rib vaults. And so this, all the weight of the building is concentrated through the ribs on certain points, and this enables, so Gothic, really, is about building higher; it’s about covering larger spaces with stone vaults, and with the ribs, of course, you can, the stone in between can be much thinner, much lighter. The walls can be thinner and lighter. You can have much larger areas of the walls devoted to windows. Here again is the choir of Saint-Denis, which is still very beautiful, really worth visiting, even though it suffered a great deal of damage and vandalism during the French Revolution. Now, Gothic is an engineer’s style. As I said, it’s all about building higher; it’s about vaulting over larger spaces. So a great Gothic building is, as I said, a piece of, it’s supported by stone scaffolding as you see in these diagrams. And it was a style that evolved and developed through trial and error. There were many disastrous errors. Many Gothic buildings, fact, hardly any of the mediaeval cathedrals were completed, were finished as they were originally envisaged. They were built usually over many generations, sometimes over hundreds of years. So there are great many Gothic cathedrals like Strasbourg, which you see on the left, which are very evidently in a incomplete state, particularly towers. Towers were, of course, the last thing to be completed. And on the right is the great massive fragment, extraordinary fragment of Beauvais Cathedral. This was overweeningly ambitious building, but it’s suffered from two major collapses.
It was, I think it still is, actually the highest vaulted space in Europe dating from the Middle Ages. But the nave collapsed during construction in the Middle Ages, just leaving the vast choir. And the spire, which when it was constructed, was the tallest manmade structure in the world, 502 feet tall. You can see a drawing of it in the middle, there. That collapsed in the 16th century, leaving what we have, which is certainly very impressive in itself. Now, this is, again, an image, a diagram of a typical French cathedral, which differs very much from English cathedrals. This is Amiens. And Amiens was built unusually quickly. So the great bulk of the church was actually built in just over a generation, between 1220 and 1270. So it has a coherence, which is very unusual in any great mediaeval building. This is the facade of Amiens Cathedral where you can see many typical features of French Gothic cathedrals. The western twin towers, which of course were intended to be much higher, and to be crowned with spires, you have an arcade, a sort of screen to present statues across the middle of the facade. There is a great rose window, which actually dates from a little bit later. And you have the portals, three great portals of the west end. Mediaeval churches are full of number symbolism; three was very important, representing the Trinity of God the Father, God the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Here’s another view of Amiens Cathedral. And once again, you can see it’s a very compact design. And on the east end of the church, you have a semicircular ambulatory with radiating chapels.
That’s very typical of French architecture. It’s exactly contemporary with Salisbury Cathedral, built over the same decades. And Salisbury is, whereas Amiens might represent the absolutely typical French Gothic cathedral, Salisbury represents the typical English Gothic cathedral. And you can immediately see the differences that the French church is much higher, and it’s shorter. The English, the Salisbury Cathedral is elongated. It’s very, very long. The main emphasis in a French, the west towers are always very important in a French Gothic church; whereas, the west end of Salisbury Cathedral is relatively insignificant. Instead, we have the main emphasis is on this huge spire, which is in the centre of the church. The transepts-of course the whole thing is cruciform- symbolic of a cross on which Christ was crucified, tend to be more emphasised. I hope you can see this. My image is… I wonder if I can… Yes. The east end of the church is quite different with Salisbury. So instead of being semicircular with radiating chapels, it’s just like it’s chopped off. And another, a Lady Chapel, another chapel is added onto the end of the church. This is Notre Dame, of course undergoing restoration after this terrible fire a couple of years ago, Notre Dame, which dates, it’s built over a rather longer period from 1863 to 1260. But you can see it’s quite similar in plan to Amiens, quite compact with the semicircular ambulatory and the very important towers on the west end of the church. This is the Cathedral Laon, which was begun in 1160. Like so many of these cathedrals, it was only partially completed. It was intended to actually have seven, no less than seven towers with spires on top. The most dramatic feature of this church now are the towers at the west end of the church with these extraordinary sculptures, life-size sculptures of oxen.
Nobody knows exactly what they’re there for. It’s been suggested that they’re inspired by the oxen that were actually used to pull the materials, the stone for the building of the church. But they’re a wonderfully quirky, almost surreal element in the exterior of this church. Here we are, these amazing oxen on the towers of the cathedral of Laon. Back here again with the fragment of the choir of Beauvais. This is an incredibly impressive church to walk into, partly because of its absolutely extraordinary height inside. As I said, the Gothic architects, they aspire, it’s like they’re reaching up to heaven with the incredible height, very daring. And, and of course here, the daring didn’t entirely pay off with the two collapses that I mentioned. Here we are again looking up into the vaults of Beauvais Cathedral. And you get a glimpse here also of the splendid mediaeval stained glass. This is one of the best collections of mediaeval stained glass surviving in any church in Europe. So this 12th-century glass is the most intensely coloured. There is deep, rich, amazing, strong colours; incredibly rich, dense reds and blues. So of course there would’ve been colour everywhere in a mediaeval church. We tend to think of mediaeval churches being rather grey, because often they’ve lost their, a lot of their surface, original surface decoration. But it would’ve been a riot of colour walking into a great mediaeval church. And the idea is, it’s still, I think, a heart-stopping experience to walk into a church like Beauvais, or Chartres, and, or Sainte-Chapelle, which I’ll be talking about later. So simple people, peasants, you can imagine, who couldn’t read or write, living a very rudimentary existence, when they walked into a church like this.
They must really have thought for a moment that they’d died and gone to heaven. Here are some details of the glass in Beauvais in these wonderful rich colours. Now, sculpture. So a mediaeval church is a “Gesamtkunstwerk”: it’s a total work of art, and it’s a fusion of architecture, sculpture, painting, stained glass. And it would’ve worked on all the senses, and it would’ve smelled very nice. I think probably the Middle Ages, on the whole, didn’t smell very nice, but, you know, we would’ve walked into a great Catholic church, and you would’ve smelled incense, candles, and so on. This is the royal porch of Chartres. And once again, of course, we’ve got the symbolism of the three entrances. And in the tympanum, that’s the semicircular spaces above the door, we have three representations of Christ. On the left, you can see him supported by angels, so this is the Ascension; this is Christ ascending to God and heaven. In the middle, you have Christ in majesty in a mandala, an almond shape, with the beasts of the Apocalypse around him. On the right-hand side, you have him in the arms of his mother, and this represents the central doctrine of Christianity, which is the Incarnation: that God was made flesh through Jesus Christ. And in the jambs underneath either side of the doors, we have these wonderful representations of Old Testament kings. And so, these quite early… This is really, they’re transitional, I would say, between Romanesque and Gothic.
So they’re still very stiff. They’re very columna. They look like columns. And they’re restricted in their space, and there’s very little sense of, they’re very hieratic. There’s very little sense of movement or expression. This is a somewhat later, more fully Gothic portal at Chartres. We see the figures beginning to free up a little bit. They’re no longer like hieratic columns. There’s a greater freedom of movement and gesture. And here we move on to, this is the general direction of development in Gothic sculpture between the 12th century, up until the 15th century. And here we have the great portal of Strasbourg Cathedral. And you see again, the figures are beginning to move. You have this lovely swaying rhythm, particularly the figure on the left-hand side, which is very typical of 13th-century Gothic. And here also from Strasbourg, we have an illustration of the story of the “Wise and the Foolish Virgins.” And as I said, you start to get much more, it’s less hieratic; more movement, more expression. So these are the wise virgins, and they’re looking quite pleased with themselves, and quite smug. And on the other side, we have the foolish virgins. They certainly look very foolish, don’t they? And the one on the right looks really quite cross. And these extraordinary figures from the facade of Strasbourg Cathedral of Ecclesia and Synagoga. This symbolism you find on a great many mediaeval cathedrals. And you even find it on later Catholic churches.
So that the opposition between the Christian faith and the Jewish faith. Ecclesia is represented Christianity as triumphant; the Jewish faith is represented as defeated. Note her spear is broken, and she’s blindfolded because this represents the Jews’ refusal to recognise the divinity of Jesus Christ. And this is also Strasbourg, but this is again, where, this is the very tail-end of the Gothic with this fantastically virtuoso, amazing frilly, lacy, cutting of stone in the canopies. This is the portal of St. Lawrence, and you can see him under the central canopy being grilled, and I’ll show you him in a bit more detail in a minute. So this dates from, we know by this time, we’re beginning to know the names of the artists. And we know that the sculptor who made this was called Hans von Aachen, and this dates from 1495 to 1505. So in Italy, of course, the Renaissance is happening by this time. Here we can see, maybe this is a transition from the mediaeval to the Renaissance, but I think probably the influences come more from Flanders than they do from Italy, and that, I think, you can see particularly in this very crinkly, angular treatment of the drapery, which you will probably recognise is similar to the treatment of drapery in Flemish painting, artists like Van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden. And here is the hapless St. Lawrence, who’s martyred, of course, by being grilled. And you can see a figure in the foreground kneeling to light the coals underneath St. Lawrence.
Now we come to a very spectacular building. I think anybody compiling a list of the 20 most beautiful and most amazing buildings in the world, the Taj Mahal, or… I don’t know what your list would be, but I think most architectural, that you’d be very likely to find the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris on any list of the greatest and amazing, most amazing buildings in the world. And it dates from 13th century, and the phase of Gothic, which in France is called the Style Rayonnant. In England, of course, we also have the three phases of Gothic: Early English, Decorated, and Perpendicular. And the Style Rayonnant is the French equivalent of the Decorated Gothic that we have in England. And in both cases, there’s a new emphasis on very sophisticated and refined decoration. Skills were developing; there were new instruments for cutting stone, and skill in cutting stone develops greatly in this period. Now the Sainte-Chapelle is essentially a giant reliquary, that’s a precious box to hold and display religious relics. And it was built for this man: this is King Louis IX. He’s also St. Louis. He’s the only French king who was made a saint and is very widely venerated, also in later periods, and in other countries. So this is actually a Spanish painting on the left-hand side by Pacheco-the master of Velazquez-of Saint Louis. And on the right-hand side is a contemporary representation of Louis.
He was born in 1214, of course, English people will have 1215 in their minds, Every English child learns the date 1215, it’s the date of Magna Carta, and he had a very long reign. He came to the throne in 1226, and he lived until 1270. And he was widely admired and revered as a very saintly man, he certainly did some very good things. He reformed the French legal system; he made it more humane. He banned the practise of trial by ordeal, you know, of people having to put hands into a fire, or boiling water or, you know, the worst, I suppose, the trial by ordeal was for witches, ‘cause, you know, drowning them, they’re only innocent if they drowned, 'cause witches were thought to float on water. So I said a very, very pious, religious man. This is his hairshirt, and the instrument he used to flagellate himself on the right-hand side, which are preserved in Paris at Notre Dame. Now, the reason he wanted to build the Sainte-Chapelle was that in 1238, he had acquired a very prestigious collection of relics associated with the Passion of Jesus Christ, notably the Crown of Thorns. Well, of course, all these things, I think we know today that they’re all fakes. There was a huge industry in the Middle Ages in faking holy relics. And it’s often been commented on that there’s enough True Cross to build, in various churches in Europe, to build a fleet of battleships, but he obviously found all these relics credible. And he paid a sum, an absolutely enormous sum to the Byzantine emperor, via the Venetians. It was a big business deal. It’ll be like, you know, taking over Microsoft or something today. It was a deal that involved the equivalent of billions of pounds or dollars.
And here is a contemporary image of the Crown of Thorns being handed over to Louis. In fact, the last part of the journey, he carried it himself, and he walked barefoot and wearing the clothes of a penitent, presumably that hairshirt that I’ve just shown you. And it still exists. There was a lot of anxiety, 'cause it was preserved until recently inside the Cathedral of North Dame, and it came very close to being incinerated. And so some people regarded it as some kind of a miracle that the crown of thorns, here in its very elaborate setting, survived that fire of Notre Dame. There’s a darker side to Saint Louis, and I’m sure Trudy has talked to you about this, that in his religious orthodoxy, he was a great scourge of the Jews, and he burnt enormous quantities of Talmuds and Jewish religious books, and this is a 15th-century representation of the burning of Talmuds. Now, Sainte-Chapelle, of course, you can visit it in Paris, I go past it on the bus 38 that I take every week to the flea market, and there are always long queues. It’s quite a business. In fact, I think if you do go to Paris, you might be better off buying a ticket for a concert to see, to avoid the queues. Although, of course, a concert is likely to be in the evening, and then you’ll miss out on one of the most dramatic features of the Sainte-Chapelle, which is the stained glass, which you really want to see in daylight.
So you want the light coming through the glass. It is a very tall structure, and it’s actually two chapels on top of one another, as you can see from the section on the left-hand side. So you walk, this is the lower chapel of the Sainte-Chapelle, and this was reserved for courtiers and servants, And the upper chapel, where the precious relics were kept, was restricted to members of the royal family and very important and very honoured guests. It’s an extraordinary sensation to walk into this dark, lower chapel with relatively low vaults, and then you go up a spiral staircase and you, wow, it’s a really extraordinary sensational moment to walk into this huge glass box. Most of this, the wall surface, is glass. And miraculously, much of the original mediaeval glass survived, again with this wonderful, intense, jewel-like colour. Here is a detail of one of the panels. So we now move on to the final phase of Gothic in France, which is called “Flamboyant”, flaming, and that takes its name from the undulating forms of the tracery, the decoration. So I think you could say the Flamboyant, it’s the equivalent of Perpendicular in England, but very, very different. They couldn’t be more different, really. Late Gothic England and Late Gothic in France. It has been seen, some people see it as a decadent phase of the Gothic style. You can see that with quite a number of styles, with the Renaissance; with Baroque, they reach a high point, and then, in a way, they become almost parodies of themselves. The Late Baroque, Late Renaissance, or Mannerist style, it’s the same kind of thing. The virtuosity of the stone carving is absolutely jaw-dropping and astonishing. This is the Church of Saint-Maclou in Normandy. This dates from the 1430s.
And we move on to, this is the church in Vendome, also 15th-century, with this incredibly elaborate, lacy decoration. You can see in the tracery of the main window, these undulating forms that suggest flames, that give the name Flamboyant to the style. And this is the church at Louviers, so really extraordinary in its elaboration. It’s really over the top. You may think it’s actually too much. So in Paris, the most visible, and oh, this is again in Louviers, the most visible and spectacular example of the Flamboyant style is the Tour Saint-Jacques. This is all that survived of a great church that was called Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie that was destroyed during the French Revolution. Of course, the French Revolution, one of the most destructive episodes in the history of European culture. Enormous amounts of great mediaeval architecture was lost during the Revolution; many, many churches destroyed. This image, you can see, I mean, the church, this tower, just left on its own, and luckily also survived the Haussmannization of Paris, in this image I’m showing you, you can see apartment blocks of the Haussmann era, either side of it. And it’s got these wonderful gargoyles. Often the gutters and drains were very spectacularly decorated in these Late Gothic-Flamboyant buildings. I don’t know how much of the original sculpture survives, this is, in my lifetime, this structure has undergone two very radical restorations. And of course, these kind of gutters that project, you know, they erode, and they can become quite dangerous.
They can drop off. So I think most of them, probably, have been replaced in modern times. And here we are back at the Church of Saint-Eustache in the Ile in Paris. The great bulk of it built in the 16th century. You can see that the west facade, which is on the left-hand side of this image, wasn’t actually completed until the 18th century. So it’s in a completely different style. Here again, you see this elaborate system of flying buttresses which support the building. Just four minutes’ walk from this building, there is of course the Pompidou Centre by Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano. And I really like the juxtaposition of these two buildings, because you can see that actually Piano and Rogers took a leaf out of the mediaeval architect’s book in that the Pompidou Centre is an inside-out building. You know, the structure that holds it up is on the outside of the building, and the building is largely a glass box that hangs from the external structure, very much as this did. Of course, the materials differ in that the structure in the Pompidou Centre is metal rather than stone. And so we are looking at again, at Saint-Eustache in more detail. So by the 16th century, Italian influences are, well, even from early in the 16th century, you remember Leonardo was imported to Italy by Francis I, and the court style in Italy, in the more aristocratic style, has really absorbed many elements of the Italian Renaissance. The ecclesiastical architecture was somewhat more conservative and slower.
And often, the details you see here on this building, and you can see pilasters with Corinthian capitals; you can see a frieze with triglyphs. So actually quite correct Italian elements that have probably been taken from a pattern book, but are just applied to the surface of what is still really a Gothic building. This is the last church I’m going to talk about today. It might be my favourite church in Paris. It’s certainly Trudy’s favourite church. Whenever she comes to Paris, she always insists that we go and see this church. It’s Saint-Etienne-du-Mont, St. Stephen of the Mountain. It’s on the hill on the Left Bank, it’s right behind the Panteon. And like Saint-Eustache, it’s essentially a 16th-century building, although the very Classical portico that you see stuck on the front with the rather oddly, underneath the Gothic rose window, that actually wasn’t added to the church ‘til the early 17th century. So it’s a wonderful fusion, really; very odd fusion of Classical and Gothic with the main structure being still completely Gothic. But as you can see, much of the detail here being very Italianate and Classical, and the most spectacular feature of this church is this amazing, very elaborate screen, that separates the choir from the nave of the church. This church, incidentally, was the church where Maurice Durufle was the organist over many decades. That’s, of course, was a great tradition in France in the 19th and 20th century, that French composers like Cesar Franck, Saint-Saens, Faure, Gounod, even up to Messiaen, they would have a sinecure as the organist of the church.
So up until the 1980s, you could have heard Durufle playing the organ on a Sunday in this church. And here is another view, we’re in the nave here looking up into the choir of the Church of Saint-Etienne-du-Mont. And, well, actually, the reason that Trudy likes this church so much is a set of 16th-century stained glass windows in the cloister. In fact, they weren’t made for this church. They were made for another church, which was presumably demolished, and then these windows were brought here. And this window tells a really horrible story, actually. It’s an incident in the Middle Ages where there was a Jew who lived on the Left Bank of the River Seine who was accused of corrupting and seducing a Christian woman, and persuading her to steal the Host, the biscuit, which is, of course, Catholics believe it is actually the Body of Christ. You know, Catholic children, when they take First Communion, are always instructed you must not chew it; you must not bite on it, you must just swallow it. It’s a very sacred thing. And then there are all these fantasies that fueled anti-Semitism in the Middle Ages that Jews would steal and desecrate and do terrible things to the Host.
You think, “Oh god, why would they want to?” But there you are. And so this wicked Jew was driving nails through the Host and boiling it. And when he’s boiling it, it pops up out of the water, and a kind of pop-up Jesus on a crucifix comes out of it and then like a homing pigeon, the Host goes back across the River Seine to the church that it came from. And this was of course, this was a great miracle, and everybody thought this was absolutely wonderful. And there was a day where, of course pogroms and persecutions broke out in Paris as a result of this. And this incident was celebrated every year in Paris, right up to the 19th century. Here is, here are the wicked Jews doing frightful things. You can see, can you see on the right-hand side there is somebody trying to drive a nail through the Host. Anyway, sorry to end on a rather macabre story, but that is it for tonight. So I’m going to see what questions we have.
Q&A and Comments:
Thank you, Susan. I’m very glad to be back, too. Very glad. Yes, I mean, 'cause I love going into Catholic churches. I suppose it’s partly from my childhood.
When I travel with Trudy, she restricts me. She says, you know, “Enough churches, already,” and she restricts me to three in a day.
No, French Gothic is not the same as Romanesque. Romanesque is the style that precedes Gothic. Romanesque is a style that develops in the ninth and 10th centuries. And you have round-headed arches as opposed to pointed arches, and you have thick wall construction. So in Romanesque churches, the walls are really load-bearing. They need to be very, very thick. Whereas with Gothic, increasingly, the architects are developing very sophisticated methods of directing the weight to particular points, and that’s what enables the churches to grow in height and the much wider vaults, and so on.
Q: “What is the building behind Saint-Eustache in my photo?”
A: I’d have to go back and think about that. What would be behind Saint-Eustache? As I said, it’s very, very, it’s probably the Halles, I think probably the Halles, you know, which was the old food halls. They’re right next to it. Must be that, I think. Thank you, Carla.
Oh, Ron! You are in Paris. He says he walked by Saint-Eustache.
Q: “How were the buildings paid for?”
A: Well, of course through taxes that were paid to the Catholic Church, and usually, of course, it was the poor people who paid the taxes. I mean, right up to the French Revolution. Of course, the aristocrats and the wealthy prelates themselves weren’t paying taxes. It was the poor people who were.
Q: “Who designed them?”
A: Well, we don’t really know, in many cases, who designed them. There are occasional records associating a particular name with the design of a particular cathedral.
Yes, there are, there is something incredibly uplifting and moving, I think, about going to a great… An ambulatory is, well, you walk around it, I suppose. That’s the name of it. It’s a semicircular end to a church, and it usually, it goes around the back of the high altar.
Yes, I think it is true, Janet, that the colour, that incredible richness of colour that you get in the best mediaeval stained glass, it is very difficult, or almost impossible to replicate. Actually, I think one of the most effective recreations of the effect of mediaeval glass is in the windows designed by Chagall. I think they do give you something of the same kind of glorious richness and harmony of colour.
Q: “Who or what did they blame the various collapses?”
A: Well, I bet some of them get blamed on the Jews. When in doubt, always blame the Jews. But, and well, people are always good at blaming others, aren’t they? 'Cause in England, when anything disastrous happened, they always blamed the pope or the Catholics, like the Great Fire of London, for instance. I mean, the monument in London, of the Fire of London, had an inscription on it until, I think, the 19th century, blaming the pope for the Fire of London.
Q: “Why were they built?”
A: That’s very, theoretically, of course, it would be to the glory of God, but I think often, it was very often, it was a demonstration of the power of the Church. There are much more venal motives that come into it as well. And with sometimes churches, particularly in Italy in the Renaissance and so on, it was a prestige thing for the person that commissioned them.
Q: “How much damage has been done by pollution?”
A: Enormous damage. Enormous damage. So, the sculptures, for instance, on the exterior of, well, of most churches actually, you’ll find all over Europe, that mediaeval Renaissance churches that the original sculptures will have been removed and put in museums, and are replaced by copies. That’s even, well, even on the front of the Paris Opera, the sculpture of “La Danse” by Carpeaux, which is 19th-century, has been removed and put in the Musee d'Orsay, because it was being attacked by pollution.
Helen saying, “Statues on Strasbourg Cathedral are fabulous.” I don’t think it’s, as I said, it’s quite rare to know the names of sculptors, and not usually until you get to the later period into the 15th century.
Q: “How did the Constantine and Greek Churches affect Church architecture in Catholic?”
A: The very big influence, of course, in Italy and Ravenna, and in my month away, I had a wonderful short visit to the north of Italy to Udine and that region right up at the top of Italy, and there, there are many very early mediaeval churches that are strongly influenced by Byzantine architecture. Let me see, where have we got to?
“Wooden doors are…” I don’t know, actually, whether the wooden door is original. I can’t answer that question.
No, Rayonnant Gothic is not the same as Flamboyant. Rayonnant is the style that precedes Flamboyant and leads into it.
Q: “Would I say something about the workforce in the construction of cathedrals?”
A: My guess it was a very, very dangerous job. There is, if you, I don’t really know in great detail about it, I’m not sure that all that much is known. But there is, there are some paintings that would help you understand it. There’s a wonderful Van Eyck, I think, at St. Barbara, which shows her tower being constructed. And of course Van Dyke is such-Van Eyck, rather- Van Eyck is such a truthful artist, and he shows you all the elaborate scaffoldings and the stones being hauled up. So that’s probably your best source of information. And also, of course, the famous Bruegel paintings of the construction of the Tower of Babel. So you can learn a lot from those, as well. Let me see. Thank you.
Q: “How did they make those exquisite colours?”
A: Well, of course the colours are all either mineral, or vegetable. They, you know, they’re all from, they’re all derived from nature.
Q: “How long did it take to build this cathedral?”
A: Well, how long is a piece of string? It’s quite rare for a cathedral, as I said, Amiens and Salisbury are really exceptional in that the bulk of those two cathedrals was built in one go and in not much more than a generation. Usually, it took hundreds of years, and most of them were never finished.
Q: “How much of the decoration on the buildings were original?”
A: Of course, fashions changed, people in the 16th, 17th, 18th century, well, into the early 18th century, didn’t have any respect for the original decoration. So especially in places in important cities, in places where there was wealth, the original decoration tended to get effaced, or painted over. You are more likely to find original decoration in places that became remote or went into decline. In fact, in Britain, the Puritans inadvertently saved many of the original decorations by whitewashing them. And so in the 20th century, many English churches that were whitewashed, the whitewash has been removed and the original decoration has been revealed underneath.
Q: “Where did the money come?”
A: The peasants. The sweat on the brow of the peasants, usually. Obviously built to glorify Jesus, and the hatred, yes, I know. I know. It’s kind of hard to reconcile the incredible beauty with the Church’s, of these churches and the terrible crimes that were committed in the name of religion between Christians, as well. You know, think of the, you know, people, heretics being burnt alive in the 16th century, 15th and 16th century.
No, I haven’t read “The Spire” by William Golding, and I should read that.
Q: “Were there fixed pews?”
A: I’m sure there were fixed pews for important people, and there would’ve been fixed pews, of course, in the choir of the church. But in the main body of the church, people, the ordinary people, they stood, and I’m sure you know the origin of the phrase, “Going to the wall.” “Going to the wall” was the very weak people who couldn’t really stand anymore in the middle of the church, so they had to go to the wall to support themselves.
“A few words about the evolution of tracery.” Well, it is to do with, I mean, the word… New, more sophisticated tools for the cutting of stone in the later Middle Ages. You get more and more elaborate tracery; of course this also has a big effect on the stained glass windows. So those wonderfully rich, coloured windows, the glass becomes paler in colour once you start to have much more elaborate stone tracery. So it’s actually the stone tracery that becomes the chief decorative element in the window rather than the glass, itself. Judy in Vancouver, thank you.
“A Lady Chapel.” A Lady, well, a Lady Chapel is a chapel that’s devoted to the Virgin. And in England, in particular, a Lady Chapel might be added to the east end of a church. There is a Paris church, Saint-Philippe-du-Roule, that actually has a Lady Chapel exactly like that, added to the end of the nave. “Sacre-Coeur.” Well, of course, Sacre-Coeur, I always think Sacre-Coeur, I love Sacre-Coeur in the distance. It’s the most, it’s like, of course Sacre-Coeur and the Eiffel Tower, they dominate the Paris skyline. Sacre-Coeur looks absolutely magical on top of the Hill of Saints. I’m not so keen on it when you get up close to it and inside it, but it’s certainly a very important element in the skyline of Paris, 19th century; late 19th century. Of course it’s not Gothic at all.
This is Catherine who’s visited the Metz Cathedral, which has the third-highest nave in France. I’ve never been there. “It’s curious that with today’s technology we get square, boring boxes.” I wouldn’t say that. I think architecture is going through quite an interesting phase at the moment. It’s a lot less boring than it was a generation or so ago.
No, I haven’t read “The Pillars of the Earth” by Ken Follett. I’m afraid I’m not so well-read, particularly with fiction. I haven’t been to Metz, and like you, I do… Chagall, I’m not so keen on his later paintings. I love the earliest paintings, and later on in his career, I think the windows are the best things that he did.
Yes, Peter, it is really amazing that, well, they didn’t really have the technology. As I said, they were really playing it by ear, and they were not always getting it right. And this is Marion whose mother worked in Freiburg. I suppose the stone, it varies. It depends on what was available. So all over Europe, it varies. Paris, of course, has a wonderful source of limestone underneath the city. So Paris, most of Paris is built with stone that is from right from there, from underneath the city. Sculptures, I think it’s a mixture of the two. Sculptures were, they could very often be brought, made in workshops elsewhere and brought to the building. But also sculptures could certainly be finished in situ.
Yes, Rouen, of course, immortalised particularly by the Monet paintings, the facade of Rouen Cathedral. It’s not usually considered to be one of the greatest Gothic cathedrals in France, but the facade is certainly very spectacular. Right.
Q: “Did they ever use brick?”
A: Yes, they did. In areas where there was no stone available. The cathedral in Albi is made out of brick.
Q: “Did workers ever include body parts?”
A: Oh, I don’t know. That’s a very intriguing idea.
Q: “What about Chartres?” I
A: ’m not sure what you’re asking, Jonathan. I wasn’t trying to talk about every single cathedral in France. Of course I did talk about the sculptures of Chartres.
But I think that’s it. And I’m going to move on next lecture to the splendours of the French Renaissance.