Chapter IX: The Gothic Art of Burgundy267 (1)

_Be strong in humility and humble in authority:
Be austere in tenderness and tender in austerity:
Be amiable in sorrow and grave in prosperity._
--ST. COLUMBANUS' Antitheses.

Burgundy, "a country placed on Europe's highways," was a land of monasteries. They dotted the fertile province. There were "prodigious Cluny," and Vézelay "the superb," scenes of historic gatherings; at Auxerre was St. Germain's monastery; at Dijon, the abbey of St. Bénigne, pioneer in the Romanesque renaissance of the region. There were Cîteaux, the mother house of missions over the entire Christian world, Pontigny, that harbored three archbishops of Canterbury, Fontenay with its industrial forge, Tournus, Saulieu, Paray-le-Monial, and Flavigny, that reminded Chateaubriand of Jerusalem set on its hill. Up and down the land the _laus perennis_ never ceased.

On the confines of the old kingdom of Burgundy, as the VI century closed, St. Columbanus founded at Luxeuil, between the sources of the Moselle and the Saône, an abbey which was to mold the religious life of the VII century, most fertile of epochs in the number and fervor of its religious institutions. Luxeuil became the popular school of Gaul, the mother house of hundreds of monasteries. Her monks filled the sees of France. The Celtic Rule was harsh, a compound of the Orient, of Lerens, and of Bangor in Ireland; even on feast days fish was a luxury. It was only the personal genius of the impetuous Irish missionary that caused it to be accepted for a few generations; then as the VII century closed, the Benedictine Rule which conformed better to human limitations superseded the Columban. "Where Columbanus sowed, Benedict reaped."[268]

Three hundred years later there rose in Burgundy the most splendid monastic institution that Christendom has ever known, Benedictine Cluny, that stood shoulder to shoulder with the reforming popes in their fight for the purification of the Church.[269] Cluny initiated the Truce of God, the peace movement of the XI century that permitted the art renaissance which was to culminate in the Gothic cathedrals. Peace meant an unmolested commerce, peace meant city charters and stable laws. A reformed clergy meant the renewal of the people's love of the altar, and their generous contributions toward the erection of churches. With Cluny as leader there was then formulated the architecture which was a stepping stone to a greater system.

Two hundred years after Cluny's foundation, Burgundy again gave birth to a monastic movement which was to carry to the ends of Europe the Gothic system of building. Cîteaux, in the extent of its conquests and its centralized administration, has been compared with the Roman Empire. Cistercian monks carried Burgundian Gothic to Spain, to Italy, to Greece, to England, Germany, and Scandinavia. Owing to the conditions of society and of the episcopacy, the cloister then was chief patron of art. Simony infected the bishoprics and it is not under unworthy prelates that churches are reared. Gregory VII, Cluny, that supplied him with his army of reformers, and St. Bernard, with his white-cowled brethren, warred unceasingly on simony, concubinage, and investiture (the tormenting question of layman control of churchmen). And since it was monasteries that fought that battle of regeneration, monastic churches and not cathedrals were the first tangible proof of the ethical rebirth of Europe. _À la peine ... à l'honneur._ When the reform achieved by Cluny and Cîteaux had filled the sees with worthy bishops, then were built the great cathedrals.

We have seen how the problem of roofing churches in stone caused the evolution from Romanesque to Gothic art. Burgundy's struggle to achieve a permanent stone roof was bolder than that of other regional schools in France, and perhaps it was overhardy, since her abbatials, in Gothic times, had to be buttressed to keep them standing. Though the Burgundian discarded too early the Romanesque principle of equilibrium by dead load, his temerity was a step forward in the march toward new principles of construction. These monks on Europe's highway made churches of ample width and height, and, rather than sacrifice their proper lighting, opened windows in the upper walls of the central vessel. However, they must have felt that their clearstory windows were an experiment, for they essayed, occasionally, an embryo flying buttress, keeping it hidden under the lean-to roof of the aisles.

The militant Romanesque school of Burgundy was too well developed for it to bow instantly before the new art. Not here did the generating member of Gothic architecture first come into common usage, but in that region of northern France whose pre-Gothic school was of less importance. The Burgundian clung stubbornly to his early ways of building, and even after other provinces had accepted the ogival style he erected thoroughly Romanesque churches; St. Philibert at Dijon is the contemporary of the cathedrals at Chartres and Paris. Flying buttresses at no time found favor in Burgundy. Groin vaults were persisted in simultaneously with diagonals, and the sexpartite vault used long after the north had dropped it. Firm plain profiles for archivolts and window molds were preferred.

Once the Burgundian frankly accepted the new system, his bold genius led him to push its principles to their limit. Within the confines of the duchy were the quarries of hard Tonnerre stone that permitted audacious experiments in building. He dared traverse his exterior buttresses by circulation passages, he dared catch his heavily weighted diagonals on corbels (carved with original heads), and to poise a mass of material on the slenderest of colonnettes. Often he surmounted his triforium by a passage that passed directly through the active wall shafts, as in cathedrals of Auxerre, Nevers, and Semur. By the middle of the XIII century Dijon achieved a marvel of Gothic technique in its church of Notre Dame. Despite much notable Gothic work one is inclined, none the less, to maintain that Burgundy found her fullest expression in her earlier monastic churches. Alas, that the greatest of them, Cluny, should to-day be but the phantom of its once colossal self!

CLUNY[270]

Time will be ending soon, heaven will be rending soon, fast we and
pray we: Comes the most merciful; comes the most terrible; watch we
while may we.

--BERNARD DE MORLAIX, "Jerusalem the Golden"[271] (c. 1140).

The "mother abbey of Europe" lies in a fertile valley some fifteen miles off the express route that passes through Mâcon. The property was given to the monks by a duke of Aquitaine, who thus anathematized future despoilers: "I conjure you O holy Apostles Peter and Paul, to cut off from life eternal all robbers, invaders, or sellers of that which I herewith donate with full satisfaction and entire free will."

When Cluny was founded in 910, the victory of Christianity over the Barbarians still hung in the balance. It was Cluny that weighed down the scale for justice and progress, Cluny that gave to Rome the needed reforming popes. Hers should be a name as honored in humanity's history as Athens: "We leave college," wrote Montalembert, "able to cite the list of Jupiter's mistresses, but ignorant, even to their names, of the founders of the religious Orders that civilized Europe." And the testimony of the Protestant Leibnitz is: "Without monks we should have no erudition, for it is certain that we owe to monasteries the preservation of letters and books." Four of the best among the popes came out of Cluny's cloister: Gregory VII, Urban II, Paschal II, and Urban V.

The modern French school of mediæval archæology, delving into the past, has drawn Cluny from its long oblivion. In 1910 was celebrated with national honors the millennium of the Burgundian "abbey of abbeys," and to the festival the French Academy sent M. René Bazin as its representative to voice the gratitude of French letters to the "great Order of Cluny which in the France of the Middle Ages exercised in its plenitude the mission of civilizer, apostle of the Gospel, apostle of peace, guardian of the whole field of knowledge, founder then, of all works of charity, initiator of both literary and agricultural progress, creator of an art which she spread over Europe."

During the Middle Ages the silent Burgundian valley was a busy hive of arts and crafts[272] with goldsmiths' work, illuminating, carving in ivory and in stone, foundering of bells, and the making of stained glass. All that went toward the adornment of God's house was fostered in Cluniac schools, but above all was the master art of the builder honored. In bands of twelve the monks carried not only the Gospel, but the arts to every part of Europe, and even farther afield, for there were houses of the Order on Mount Tabor, in Nazareth, and in Bethany. No uniform Cluniac building lore was followed; it was the usual custom for the monks to conform to the local traditions in each different country.[273]

It was natural that the big abbey church at Cluny proper should have been Burgundian Romanesque. Hazelon, a monk of Cluny, was the master-of-works, a learned man who had once occupied a high position in the world; he is said to have himself worked here with trowel and mortar. The tunnel vaulting was braced by transverse ribs that were slightly pointed; clearstory windows were opened in the upper walls. The channeled pilasters were a heritage from the classic traditions of the region; near by, in Rome's former capital of Autun, were many monuments of antiquity.

Cluny's abbey church of St. Peter was the largest in the world, and covered an area about equal to that of the present St. Peter's at Rome. It was over five hundred and fifty feet long; the cathedral at Paris is not four hundred feet in length. There were double aisles and double transepts. St. Hugues of Cluny, the sixth abbot, "a man of God greatest among the great," "the pupil of the papacy's eye," ruled the Burgundian mother house during the sixty years that Cluny guided Christendom (1049 to 1109). No flattery, no subtlety could turn him from pure justice. Under him were trained Hildebrand, the future Gregory VII, who led the forces of church reform. "The giving up of justice is the shipwreck of the soul," said Gregory VII. Abbot Hugues trained also Urban II, who preached the First Crusade. Among the houses he founded were St. Martin-des-Champs at Paris, and St. Pancras at Lewes; in England there were thirty-five Cluniac establishments in the time of Henry VIII.

Twice St. Hugues went into Spain, where his niece was the Queen of Castile, engaged in substituting the liturgy of the Church universal for the Mozarabic rite. To the town of Cluny he granted a commune, and he built two of its parish churches, Notre Dame and St. Marcel.[274] When he felt death approaching, he had himself carried before the altar of St. Marcel, there to breathe his last on a bed of ashes, and a few days earlier than the Easter Tuesday of 1109 on which he passed away, his dear friend and frequent visitor at Cluny, St. Anselm of Canterbury, died, being privileged, he said, to go to meet his Saviour in time for the blessed Easter feast. Those two great men of the cloister by their ethical and intellectual leadership laid the basis for the Gothic cathedrals.

The choir of St. Peter's, at Cluny, was blessed by Urban II, in 1095, when he came into France to preach the First Crusade. He passed a week in his old home, after which he and his beloved master, St. Hugues, proceeded to the historic gathering at Clermont. The nave of St. Peter's was carried forward by succeeding abbots of Cluny, and many a pope was to watch the edifice rising. Paschal II passed the winter of 1106-07 in Cluny, and his successor, Gelasius II, died there in 1119; he had recently consecrated the new Romanesque cathedral of Pisa.[275] On the site of the wing of the cloister where he lodged now stands a XIV-century building called by his name. On his death the cardinals at Cluny held conclave, electing as pope a member of the ducal house of Burgundy, the bishop of Vienne, who took the name Calixtus II; in Cluny church he canonized the great Abbot Hugues.

St. Hugues' successor, Pons de Melgueil, after an estimable career, was led by pride to a downfall. On his resignation, Pierre de Montboissier, an Auvergne noble, known in history as Peter the Venerable, became the ninth abbot (1122-56). At that time he was but thirty years of age. Pons returned, seized Cluny abbey, and in the ensuing disorders the vaulting of the new nave collapsed. Abbot Peter restored the stone roof, and Innocent II dedicated the completed church in 1131.

The capitals then carved are to be seen in the town's Museum. Some of them personified the eight tones of liturgical music, for Cluny excelled in song, and every twenty-four hours her vast basilica echoed to the chanting of the entire book of Psalms; never, says the old chronicle, was there pause in the _saintes clameurs_, the _laus perennis_ started by Irish Columbanus in the valleys of Burgundy. Some of the capitals from the abbatial are contemporaries of the statuary at Vézelay, where Peter the Venerable had been prior, and where his brother, Pons de Montboissier, was abbot. Vézelay was a pilgrimage church, so that its imagery was made of more popular character than that of Cluny, where worshiped an intellectual élite.

Cluny began the carving of the Bible for the Poor. The Burgundians were the first to develop the imaged portal which the Gothic cathedrals were to elaborate into their sumptuous triple entrances. While Cluny was building, a monk in the monastery composed a poem of some thousand lines, opening with a vision of the heavenly Jerusalem. Bernard of Morlaix must have found inspiration in his own Burgundian basilica, which we know to have contained over three hundred windows of translucent mosaic. He dedicated his poem to his beloved abbot, Pierre de Montboissier.

Peter the Venerable was no Puritan in art, as was his friend St. Bernard, with whom he had many a skirmish, owing to their temperamental differences and the rivalship of their respective Orders. The abbot of Cluny never wavered in his reverence for the "fellow citizen of angels," as he called the abbot of Clairvaux, and Bernard saw in Peter, man of the world though he was, "a vessel of election full of truth and grace."

Like Abbot Suger, Pierre de Montboissier was the type of the liberal culture of the Benedictine, and he was to live again in the XVII-century scholars of the St. Maur reform, even as Bernard's uncompromising spirit reappeared then in De Rancy and his Trappists, a reform of Cîteaux. Like Suger, Peter the Venerable was a quoter of the classics, and a literary man. "To write was for an abbot of Cluny a hereditary tradition," said a XII-century historian. He had Arabic taught at Cluny for mission purposes. Journeying in Spain, he was the first to have the Koran translated for Europe; he held it to be Islam's best refutation. Very modern appears this old-time abbot in the zest with which he set out to travel, to inspect the houses of his Order. When he died in 1156, he was ruling over two thousand establishments, in every part of Christendom.

In person Peter was distinguished, and in character most generous, humane, and free from narrowness. He was wisely moderate always, and simple and direct. The letters of his which still exist make him a living personality. Though as keen a theologian as his friend Bernard, Abbot Peter kept the defeated Abélard with him at Cluny until his irritated spirit was soothed, and when the great schoolman died in 1142, Abbot Peter wrote to Héloïse, in her nunnery of the Paraclete, in Troyes diocese, to arrange that Abélard's body be brought there for burial, and he himself went to preach the funeral sermon.[276] In his letter to Héloïse he said that never had he seen truer humility and retirement than Maître Pierre's; "after which," as M. René Bazin remarks, "none of us need despair."

Cluny's abbatial of St. Peter was enlarged in the XIII century by a forechurch of several bays, with double aisles. An antechurch or narthex was a frequent addition to the Burgundian basilica; sometimes it was open as at Autun and Beaune, sometimes wholly inclosed as at Vézelay. Although Cluny's narthex was built as late as 1220, groin vaulting was used for the aisles.

In 1245 Innocent IV paused for a month at Cluny, having in his train a dozen cardinals and their suites, and Louis IX came for a fortnight's conference with the pope, accompanied by the queen mother, his brothers, and courtiers. The emperor of Constantinople and the heirs both of Castile and Aragon were guests at that same time, and yet so immense was the establishment, that all were accommodated without the monks quitting their usual quarters. In 1248 St. Louis paused again in Cluny before his first crusade.

With material success came spiritual decline. The tale runs the same in most of man's organizations. As a reformer Cluny was succeeded first by the Cistercians, whose fervor lasted for a century, when were needed the two mendicant Orders of Francis and Dominic. The system that allowed the king to appoint abbots, initiated by the Concordat of 1516, proved fatal, and there is truth in the saying that the court prelates paved the way for the religious wars. Three times in those bitter years of strife was Cluny sacked, its famous library ravaged, and its art treasures burned.

The Revolution completed the ruin. The first mob that marched out from Mâcon to wreck the abbey was dispersed with firearms by the townspeople. The municipality of Cluny wrote to the National Assembly to tell of the constant benefits it had derived from the monks--so the rationalist Taine relates in his _Ancien Régime_--but the impious wrecking of the great monastery went on. Day after day cartloads of rare books were brought to feed the bonfires in the square. All through 1793 bands of looters came out from Mâcon to break windows and destroy images. The indignant townspeople looked on impotently at the vandalism that spelled their own material decline. At Napoleon's advent they sent petition after petition to try to save the big church, but the Mâcon merchant who had purchased it proceeded to open a road right up its nave and sold the stones as building materials. First the narthex was blown up with gunpowder; then a transept arm. When the huge central tower fell with stupefying noise the people shivered with a nameless fear. The history of France was being obliterated before their eyes.

To save what remained the town offered in exchange its communal lands and market halls. In vain; the grandest monastic church in the world was demolished piecemeal after the nineteenth century opened. Some seven or eight towers had crowned St. Peter's. In 1811 the one over the choir was destroyed. Gunpowder blew up the stately pillars of Pentelic marble and Italian cipolin set around his sanctuary by St. Hugues seven hundred years before. They destroyed the frescoes of the apse, which were so fresh that one who then sketched them said that they seemed to have come straight from the artist's brush.

To-day little of the abbey church is standing. There are vestiges of the choir, a small tower, and the south arm of the main transept with a big tower over it. There also remains the Flamboyant Gothic chapel built by Abbot Jean de Bourbon (1456-81), out of the smaller transept. In the town street are evidences of where the western doors of the abbatial once stood. The entrance arches to the abbey grounds are intact, and some few of the towers of the inclosure walls. The museum is now housed in the monastery's guest quarters built by Jean de Bourbon. His successor, Abbot Jacques d'Amboise (1481-1514), erected the pavilion which now serves as Town Hall. Both of those art-loving prelates constructed at Paris the Hôtel Cluny as town residence for the abbot of the Burgundian mother house.

THE ROMANESQUE ABBATIAL OF PARAY-LE-MONIAL[277]

The world is very evil,
The times are waxing late,
Be sober and keep vigil,
The Judge is at the gate!
The Judge that comes in mercy,
The Judge that comes with might,
To terminate the evil
To diadem the right.
--BERNARD DE MORLAIX, "Jerusalem the Golden."[278]

Not far from Cluny lies Paray-le-Monial, "a town very dear to heaven," said Leo XIII's brief of 1896. The monastery was founded by the second abbot of Cluny, St. Majolus, who was instrumental in bringing to France William of Volpiano, the leading spirit in the renaissance of architecture after the year 1000. The present abbatial resembles on a very small scale that of Cluny. Its barrel vaulting is braced by pointed arches and there are the channeled pilasters of Rome's tradition in the region. The exterior of the apse and the carven doorway are gems of pre-Gothic art. Towers and porch date from the end of the XI century, and the remainder about 1130. At present the monastery church (which is abominably marred with whitewash) is dedicated to the Sacré Coeur, a devotion that was initiated by the Blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque, who died in the Visitation convent of this town in 1690. Paray-le-Monial has become one of the pilgrimages of modern France.

St. Odilo, who governed Cluny for the half century preceding the sixty-year rule of Abbot Hugues, loved especially the priory of Paray-le-Monial. He inspired and organized the Truce of God, the _Treuga Dei_, by which war was prohibited on certain days and in certain holy seasons. The monk, Raoul Glaber, to whom Odilo was patron, has described in a chronicle covering the period from 900 to 1047 (an invaluable document for the sources of the Capetian line) how the war-wrecked populace flocked to the church councils that were their only hope, their hands uplifted, with the beseeching cry, "Peace! Peace! Peace!" In the rebirth of hope and energy that succeeded to the terrors of the year 1000, Glaber has told us how the earth reclothed herself in a white mantle of churches. He had been spurred on to write his history by the chief builder of the age, William of Volpiano. The great monastic churchmen of Burgundy were leaders in the movement that was to culminate, within four generations, in Gothic cathedrals. To Abbot Odilo is attributed, also, the founding of the feast of All Souls, which he set on the day following All Saints, as if to place the suffering ones in the care of the elect. From the observance of this feast in Cluny houses it spread to the entire Church.

THE ROMANESQUE CATHEDRAL OF AUTUN[279]

Et c'est ainsi que Dieu travaille quand il veut nous châtier sans
nous perdre, quand il ne veut pas que la guerre finisse, par le
feu, le sang, la désolation générale, la ruine entière et le
changement d'un État. _Il sépare les gens de bien_: il faut que les
uns se mettent avec choix au parti qu'ils estiment le plus juste,
et que les autres se trouvent dans le parti qu'ils approuvent
quelquefois le moins.--LE PRÉSIDENT JEANNIN (1540-1622; born in
Autun).

Autun's chief church, one of the few cathedrals in France which is Romanesque, was begun in 1120 and consecrated in 1132 by Innocent II. In that same year he blessed Cluny's nave and Vézelay's narthex. A friend of St. Bernard, Bishop Étienne de Baugé (1112-36), was its chief benefactor, as he was, also, of the Burgundian abbey of Saulieu.[280]

The Last Judgment over Autun's west door, signed by one Gislebertus, dates from that period. Its strange, elongated figures are not the culmination of an old art, but a first effort in a development that was to produce the imaged portals of Gothic cathedrals. Autun's curious tympanum was saved from the iconoclasts of the Revolution because the _gens de goût_ of the XVIII century had covered it over with the neo-classic plaster ornamentation they preferred. The graceful trumeau images of Lazarus, Martha, and Mary are restorations. Before the western door an open narthex for the use of lepers was added about 1178.

In the first part of the XII century, the cathedral school was directed, during thirty years, by Honoré d'Autun, whose popular book, _The Mirror of the Church_, introduced the use of animal symbolism into the iconography of cathedrals. M. Mâle discovered that the New Alliance window in Lyons Cathedral copied his book verbatim. In the learned Honoré's day Autun Cathedral had not yet laid claim to the relics of the risen Lazarus. Originally the church was consecrated to St. Nazaire, which name was changed to Lazare after the Burgundian abbey of Vézelay had spread the story that Mary Magdalene had died in Provence. No one knew how Autun obtained the relics said to be those of Lazarus of Bethany. They were first exposed for veneration in the cathedral in 1147. Monseigneur Duchesne has thought that the legend grew by unconscious fabrications. It certainly did the Burgundian towns little harm to honor those whom the Lord had cherished. Through long centuries Burgundy delighted to call her sons Lazare.

The cathedral of Autun has a barrel vault undergirded by pointed arches. Channeled pilasters,[281] great and small, abound; they are on all four sides of the piers. In Autun stand gateways of Rome's empire to serve as classic models. The acanthus leaves of the cathedral's triforium can compare with those of the Porte d'Arroux. Autun was a Roman capital in Gaul, founded by Augustus. It covered then twice its present area. Agrippa, son-in-law of Augustus, built the great military road that ran from Lyons to Autun, Autun to Auxerre, Auxerre to Troyes, Troyes to Châlons-sur-Marne, Châlons to Rheims, Rheims to Soissons, Soissons to Senlis, Senlis to Beauvais, Beauvais to Amiens, and thence to Boulogne-sur-Mer.

The graceful central tower of the cathedral was added in the Flamboyant Gothic day by Cardinal Rolin (d. 1483), son of the builder of Beaune Hospital, Nicolas Rolin (a native of Autun), the self-seeking but able chancellor of Duke Philippe le Bon. Another son of Autun was Pierre Jeannin, president of the parliament of Burgundy and minister of Henry IV. His father, a tanner, was a man of civic importance in the town. President Jeannin's kneeling statue and that of his wife, Anne Gueniot, are now in the cathedral choir, being all that remained, after the Revolution, of his tomb made by Nicolas Guillan of Paris. No man ever had a truer passion for the public weal than this Burgundian magistrate who saved Burgundy from the stain of blood on St. Bartholomew's day in 1572. Word came from the king to kill, but the Catholic Jeannin on the governor's council at Dijon urged delay, saying that when a king's orders were given in anger, the wisest course was procrastination. He was to live long enough to aid Henry IV in drawing up the Edict of Nantes in 1598.

Jeannin's attitude in 1572 was all the more meritorious because Burgundy had suffered acutely from the Calvinists, who invited their co-religionists from Germany to fight their fellow citizens. In 1569 a band of the invaders left behind them a trail of four hundred burned villages. Cluny was attacked, and Cîteaux was sacked from top to bottom; to-day some XIV-century debris is all that marks the mother house of the Cistercian Order. The destruction of Cîteaux was irreparable for art, since during centuries its abbatial was the St. Denis of the first Capetian dukes who ruled Burgundy. The leading families of the province felt it an honor to be buried at Cîteaux. In its church was once the splendid tomb (now in the Louvre) of the seneschal of Burgundy, Philippe Pot (d. 1494). The effigy of the baron in armor is carried on the shoulders of eight black, cowled figures--a further development of the _pleurant_ type of tomb.

In a chapel of Autun Cathedral is a beautiful modern statue of Pope Gregory the Great, presented to Cardinal Perraud (1882-1906) of the French Academy, as bishop of this ancient city whose prelate in the VI century had entertained Augustine and his monks on their way to missionize England. Cardinal Vaughan of Westminster was the donor of this grateful souvenir.

THE HOSPITAL AND ROMANESQUE COLLEGIATE AT BEAUNE[282]

L'art du Moyen Âge--aussi ennemi de l'art académique figé dans ses
moules conventionnels que du désordre matérialiste--est une
esthétique très simple, très certaine, très puissante et très
libre. Cette esthétique n'invoque pas un idéal abstrait; elle
impose le culte de la réalité, de la plus humble comme de la plus
éclatante; elle pourrait s'appeler un réalisme trancendant,
respectant la forme telle que Dieu l'a faite, et en même temps la
transfigurant par la grand frisson de l'au-delà.--ROBERT
VALLERY-RADOT.[283]

The Hospital of the Holy Ghost, built by Chancellor Nicolas Rolin from 1444 to 1457, is a gem of the province, reminding us of the close union of Burgundy and the Netherlands under the four great dukes of the West. The third of those rulers, Philippe le Bon, patronized Jean Van Eyck, as did the enterprising man who was the duke's chancellor during forty years. For a church at Autun, Rolin ordered of Van Eyck, in 1425, the magnificent Madonna now in the Louvre in which he kneels as donor--a shrewd, hard-featured, capable man.

For his new hospital at Beaune he commissioned Roger Van der Weyden to paint, in many panels, the Last Judgment now in the little museum of the establishment, but originally installed in the large raftered hall. After the Van Eyck's Adoration of the Lamb it was the most important work of Flemish art undertaken. Philippe le Bon is portrayed in it twice, and so is the donor. The outside of the panels is painted in monochrome--what the French call _camaïeu_ from its cameo effect, and the Italians call chiaroscuro. When this superb painting hung at the end of the hospital hall that ended in a chapel like the XIII-century hospice at Tonnerre, the patients could see it from their beds. The Hôtel Dieu at Tonnerre had been founded by Marguerite of Burgundy, in 1293. After the death of her husband, Charles d'Anjou, whose cruelty roused the Sicilian Vespers, she retired to the city of which she was hereditary countess, and with two other dethroned ladies, the Empress of Constantinople and the Countess of Tripoli, gave herself up to good works. _La bonne Reyne_, the people called this princess who passed her days serving the sick poor in a hospital where the spirit of the Beatitudes ruled. None was dismissed from its door without new cloak and shoes. To-day the great rafter-covered hall at Tonnerre lies empty; the raising of its pavement has somewhat impaired its proportion.

Beaune's hospital hall, that indubitably copied Tonnerre's, serves still the charitable purpose for which it was founded. Its quiet courtyard is a vision of Flanders. In the kitchen the ancient iron crane of the fireplace is ornamented with I.H.S.; the Middle Ages made even work artistic. On feast days, such as Corpus Christi, the quaint half-timber hospice is hung with beautiful XV-century tapestry. It is deemed an honor for the leading families of the region to count one of its members among the nuns whose service is for a few years, after which they may return to their own people.

The collegiate church of Notre Dame at Beaune is a typical Burgundian Romanesque edifice of the XII century, to which the following century added a graceful open narthex of two bays. It possesses seventeen embroidered panels relating Our Lady's life, presented in 1500 by the Chanoine Hugues le Coq, and held to be among the most lovely tapestries in France, evoking memories of Memling and the Flemish primitives.

AVALLON, MONTRÉAL, FLAVIGNY, AND FONTENAY[284]

L'esprit humain, poussé par une force invincible, ne cessera jamais
de se demander: qu'y a-til au delà? Il ne sert à rien de répondre:
au delà sont des espaces, des temps, ou des grandeurs sans limites.
Nul ne comprend ces paroles. Celui qui proclame l'existence de
l'infini accumule dans cette affirmation plus de surnaturel qu'il
n'y en a dans tous les miracles de toutes les religions. La notion
de l'infini dans le monde j'en vois partout l'inévitable
expression. Par elle, le surnaturel est au fond de tous les
coeurs. L'idée de Dieu est une forme de l'idée de l'infini. Tant
que le mystère de l'infini pesera sur la pensée humaine, des
temples seront élevés au culte de l'infini. Et sur la dalle de ces
temples, vous verrez des hommes agenouillés, prosternés, abimés
dans la pensée de l'infini. Où sont les vraies sources de la
dignité humaine, de la liberté, et de la démocratie moderne, sinon
dans la notion de l'infini devant laquelle tous les hommes sont
égaux?--LOUIS PASTEUR (1822-95; born in Burgundy).[285]

The hill town of Avallon, above the gorge of the Cousin, with a square that would do honor to any capital, makes a convenient center from which to explore various Burgundian churches. Its own church of St. Lazare still possesses the apse and absidioles of the edifice blessed by Paschal II in 1107. The remainder of the church was built in mid-XII century, and the portal (in five orders richly carved, with channeled and twisted columns) belongs to the end of the century. A copy of Avallon's door is in the Trocadéro Museum at Paris where it can be compared at close range with the two other notable Romanesque portals of the province--those of Autun and Vézelay. The interior of St. Lazare is excessively plain, having a high expanse of unbroken wall over the pier arches, with the clearstory opened merely by little circular windows.

Twenty miles from Avallon is the church of Montréal, like a feudal fort guarding one of the main passageways from Champagne. The lord of Montréal was among the few hundred barons who returned from the dire experience of famine, treason, and death which was the Second Crusade, on which had set forth a hopeful hundred thousand knights and pilgrims. In the latter part of the XII century he built Montreal's collegiate church, one of the earliest Gothic ventures in the province, showing a simultaneous use of Romanesque and Gothic vaulting. Its two westernmost bays were added early in the XIII century. The beautiful alabaster reredos of the XV century, and the carved choir stalls, are well worth studying. Beyond Montréal, to the north of Avallon, lies Tonnerre's hospital hall and to the south can be visited the abbatial at Saulieu and the XIII-century castle of Chastellux, a son of which ancient house fought in America with Rochambeau and was the good friend of George Washington.[286]

To the east, at Flavigny, set picturesquely on a hill near the last stronghold held by the Gauls against the Romans, stood one of the most interesting of abbey churches, of which portions of the XIII-century sanctuary remain, a few arches of the nave, and a Carolingian crypt built by the abbot who ruled here from 755 to 768, hence that subterranean chamber can claim to be the oldest dated monument extant in France. Over the choir of Flavigny was a cupola, and the Lady chapel was an XI-century octagon like that which William of Volpiano constructed for his abbey at Dijon. This precious Benedictine abbatial was destroyed in the XIX century. At Flavigny are two ancient parish churches. What is now the Pension Lacordaire was the Dominican convent opened in 1849 by that brilliant son of Burgundy, with funds donated by his admirers of Dijon.

To the northeast of Avallon, at Fontenay, near Montbard, is the oldest extant Romanesque church of the Cistercian Order, built from 1139 to 1147, on land given by the lord of Montbard, the maternal uncle of St. Bernard; on his mother's side St. Bernard was of the blood of Burgundy's first line of Capetian dukes. The great abbot of Clairvaux himself conducted hither the twelve monks who were to found the new house and reclaim the marshy region; and for his brethren of Fontenay he wrote his treatise on Pride and Humility.

The first small sanctuary at Fontenay was soon replaced by the actual one, built on the same lines as the church at Clairvaux, which no longer stands. Both followed the Cistercian plan; no tower; no triforium nor clearstory; uncut capitals; the east end rectangular; square chapels opening on the eastern wall of the transept. Funds for the new constructions at Fontenay were provided by a wealthy English prelate who had retired here, Evrard de Montgomery, of the Arundel family, who, while bishop of Norwich, completed the long Norman nave of that cathedral. In 1147 the church was consecrated by Pope Eugene III, St. Bernard being present. As it was frequent in Cistercian monasteries to make a specialty of some branch of manual work, Fontenay conducted a forge, and the massive XII-century building which housed it still stands. The forge, the abbey church, and the refectory to-day comprise part of a paper factory whose proprietor has taken a patriotic pride in restoring these precious monuments of ancient Burgundy.

THE PRIMARY GOTHIC ABBATIAL AT PONTIGNY[287]

Whatever draws us from the power of our senses, whatever makes the
past, the distant, or the future predominate over the present,
advances us in the dignity of thinking beings. Far from me and
from my friends be the frigid philosophy as may conduct us
indifferent and unmoved over any ground which has been dignified by
wisdom, bravery, or virtue.... That man is little to be envied
whose patriotism does not gain force on the plain of Marathon, or
whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona.--DR.
SAMUEL JOHNSON.

The oldest Gothic church in Burgundy is the Cistercian abbatial at Pontigny. "Cradle of bishops and asylum of great men," Pontigny is _parfumée de souvenirs_, to use a charming stilted French phrase. It was the first daughter of Cîteaux, founded in 1114. When a pious canon of Auxerre proposed to endow a house of the new Order, the abbot of Cîteaux, St. Stephen Harding, came to overlook the site on the confines of Champagne, and then sent twelve monks to found the house, under the leadership of Hugues de Mâcon, kinsman and childhood friend of St. Bernard.

The Cistercians had not the Benedictines' weakness for a noble site, but if they planted their monasteries in a marsh--as at Fontenay and Pontigny--their agricultural industry soon made the desert bloom. The earlier Cistercian churches obeyed St. Bernard's ascetic admonitions for architecture, a Puritanism that became monotonous in the Italian churches of the Order. In France the Cistercians ceased to adhere to church simplicity, raising sanctuaries such as Ourscamp, Longpont, and St. Julien-le-Pauvre at Paris.

No towers adorned Pontigny, and stained glass was eschewed, but the leaded design of the grisaille windows is so lovely that, as M. André Michel has said, "one could not be poor with more nobility." The architect of Pontigny made skillful use of certain essential constructive features to obtain his decorative effects. Thus, though monastic sobriety was followed by omitting the triforium, the bare wall between pier arches and clearstory was relieved (at the sanctuary curve) by carrying down the moldings from the upper windows; and in the procession path a fifth rib was introduced into each vault section, which rib fell on a corbel set above the entrance to each of the radiating chapels--a constructive subtlety by which was produced a graceful wall arcade.

The present abbatial was begun a generation after the foundation of Pontigny, with funds contributed by Thibaut the Great, Count of Champagne. The transept, which is Romanesque, rose from 1150 to 1160. While the walls of the nave were mounting, the master-of-works began to prepare for a Gothic vault over the principal span. The lower windows were round-headed; the upper ones used the pointed arch. As the keystone of the diagonals was raised far above the arches framing each section, a pronounced _bombé_ shape resulted. From 1160 to 1180 this transitional nave of Pontigny was building, and the most famous of the English exiles, who sought the hospitality of Pontigny, must have watched the works. The choir, as first erected, had a rectangular eastern wall after the usual manner of Cîteaux's churches. Then, from 1170 to 1200, the present choir was erected with Gothic ambulatory and radiating chapels.[288] Alix of Champagne, daughter of the abbey's generous patron, and mother of the French king, Philippe-Auguste, was buried in the new choir, in 1208. From 1207 to 1213 Pontigny harbored a second archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton, of Magna Charta fame. During the studious years he passed here he divided the Bible into chapters for the first time, and even the Greeks accepted his rulings. In later life Archbishop Langton often looked back to this byway of Burgundy; "his garden, his solace, his abode of peace," he called it.

His predecessor at Pontigny was St. Thomas Becket, one of the outstanding figures of the XII century, whose story is told in many a French window and sculptured group. If ever an Englishman was all of a piece it was that son of a Rouen merchant settled in London. During his life as a courtier Becket was so lavish in grandeur that when he passed through France as Henry II's ambassador, the countryside turned out to see him, since few were the king's retinues that could equal his. When Henry raised him to the highest post in the English Church he instantly dropped luxury. He stood firm as a rock in defense of ecclesiastical rights against the king's attempt at Church supremacy. Tennyson's "Becket" says, "I served King Henry well as Chancellor; I am his no more, and I must serve the Church."

To the end of time such a character will be discussed; some for, some against, him; admired he certainly was by that sincerest and cleverest of men, John of Salisbury, who lived in his intimacy.[289] Both in England and France the populace felt that Becket was the champion of their civic rights by his defense of church independence--then the only supreme court against lay tyranny. Undeviatingly and enthusiastically they supported him all through his seven years' exile. One of the articles of the Clarendon Constitutions which Henry Plantagenet tried to impose on English ecclesiastics was that no peasant could become a priest without his lord's permission. The poet voiced the indignant outcry: "Hath not God called us all, bond or free, to his service?"

When Henry II, with his usual Angevin bad faith, duped his new archbishop into a promise to maintain the customs of the kingdom, and thereupon proceeded to revive obsolete customs, Becket, repenting the concessions he had made, fled, in 1164, to Sens, to lay the case before Alexander III. The pope decided that certain of the Clarendon propositions were impossible for any churchman to accede to. The abbot of Pontigny offered hospitality to the persecuted primate and Becket stayed with him till 1168, conforming to the severe Cistercian Rule. He quitted the Burgundian monastery when Henry, in a burst of vindictive anger, threatened to shut up every house of the white monks in England as well as in his continental possessions if they harbored the rebellious churchman. Soon after Becket's arrival at Pontigny, the irate king sent thither the primate's relatives and friends, turned out to beggary, in order that their plight might oppress the archbishop's spirit.

The third exile from Canterbury, and the saint who has given his name to Pontigny's abbatial, was a gentler spirit. St. Edmund Rich knew France as well as his native region of Oxford, having studied in Paris University and taught there for years. It is told how his mother, Mabel, sent him to the foreign schools with a hair shirt and a cord whip in his gripsack in order that he might learn to chastise and thus curb himself. She was a merchant's wife, and alone reared her family, to enable her husband to follow the call he felt for the cloister; two of her daughters died the saintly abbesses of Catesby. At the knee of that XIII-century mother the little Edmund, as a child, recited every Sunday the entire book of Psalms. While lecturing at Oxford he initiated the study of Aristotle. In Paris, St. Edmund watched the cathedral of Notre Dame perfecting itself, and at Salisbury, while treasurer, he assisted at the laying of the corner stone of the Gothic cathedral in 1220.

Worsted in the struggle to right crying abuses in English church affairs where the king kept bishoprics vacant for his financial profit, and the queen filled the sees with her own unpopular foreign relatives, the archbishop, accompanied by his chancellor, St. Richard, was on his way to Rome to remonstrate. He thought it wrong to condone further by his presence evils he was powerless to correct. He paused in Burgundy, and there death came to him in 1243. To-day his tomb stands over the high altar of the abbey church named St. Edmé, in his memory. Puritan Bernard most certainly would not approve the gymnastic-limbed angels that decorate the present Renaissance tomb of St. Edmund, but one fears that he would give his sanction to the whitewash that disfigures the interior of the interesting Primary Gothic church.

To the canonization ceremonies at Pontigny in honor of St. Edmund of Abingdon came St. Louis (who had known him well in Paris) and Blanche of Castile, and notables such as the archbishop-builder of Bourges Cathedral, and St. Richard, now become bishop at Chichester, in which cathedral his tomb was destroyed, in 1538, by order of Henry VIII. Few spots in France are more entirely apart from the come-and-go of modern life than is forgotten Pontigny, _parfumée de souvenirs_.

THE ABBATIAL OF VÉZELAY[290]

Il y a des lieux qui tirent l'âme de sa léthargie, des lieux
enveloppés, baignés de mystère, élus de toute éternité pour être le
siège de l'émotion religieuse ... l'héroique Vézelay, le mont
Saint-Michel, qui surgit comme un miracle des sables mouvants ...
lieux qui nous commandaient de faire taire nos pensées et d'écouter
plus profond que notre coeur. Silence! les dieux sont ici! Il y a
des lieux où souffle l'Esprit.--MAURICE BARRÉS, _La colline
inspirée_.[291]

The supreme excursion from Avallon is that to Vézelay, ten miles away. One can drive to it or walk to it, since no railway touches the valley which once was the beaten thoroughfare for Christendom marching to crusades. A good way to approach it in the proper spirit of pilgrimage is to walk from the station at Sermizelle with the church of St. Magdalene as the lodestar to guide one's steps. Vézelay has the aspect of a hill city of Umbria. The abbey church, Gothic in its choir, Romanesque in its nave, transition in its forechurch, and practically all of it of the XII century, crowns the hill like a cathedral.

"_Le grand nom de Vézelay sonne aux oreilles avec une sauvage poésie. La majesté du site est digne de la splendeur du monument._"[292] Always afterward will you remember this abode of reverie with that uplift of the heart which high art and high thoughts arouse. Like loved sites in Umbria, this, too, is "one of the earth's oases of spiritual rest and refreshment."

The abbey was founded in the IX century by Girard de Roussillon[293] of _chanson de geste_ fame, but its position as a leading pilgrim shrine was not established till Abbot Geoffrey was installed in 1037. Only then did the relics of the Magdalene appear here, given, it was claimed, by Charles Martel as reward for Burgundian aid during Saracen inroads in the Midi. Monseigneur Duchesne thinks that from Vézelay started the legends so loved in Provence, that the privileged family of Bethany, with others who had known the Lord, fled from persecution in Syria to the mouth of the Rhone about A.D. 40. Up to the XI century the Christian world had accepted Ephesus as the burial place of the Magdalene, and the tomb of Lazarus was claimed by Cyprus. In 899 the Emperor Leo VI had removed both bodies to Constantinople, where he built a church for them. Not a trace of the tradition concerning the Bethany sisters and brother is to be found in France before Vézelay monastery claimed the possession of the relics of the Magdalene and dedicated its church to her.

The founder of Vézelay freed its abbot of the control of local bishop or baron by establishing him as feudal proprietor of the town. The result was that the history of the abbey was a stormy one. The neighboring proprietors, resenting the abbot's independence, excited against him the townspeople who had grown rich from the fairs held during the pilgrimages. The burghers chafed at their serfdom to the monastery, and in 1106, during riots, they murdered Abbot Artaud. He probably was the builder of the Romanesque choir to which was originally attached the actual nave, since there is record of a dedication ceremony at Vézelay in 1104. As the archives were burned by the Calvinists in 1560, no precise dates exist for the church, but M. Lefèvre-Pontalis thinks that the crypt under the choir is of Abbot Artaud's time.

A fire in which hundreds perished occurred in 1120. The present nave could not have been in use before then. When it was completed the builders proceeded to erect a forechurch of three bays, and between it and the nave was opened the famous portico which has been called worthy of Paradise. Innocent II, in 1132, blessed the new parts of the abbatial. He had lately consecrated the cathedral of Piacenza, and at Pavia in that same year was blessed San Pietro-in-Ciel-d'Ore. North and south of the Alps the same energies were astir, but no sculpture of that period in Italy equals that of Vézelay. The date of the imaged portal of Ferrara Cathedral is 1135, and that of St. Zeno at Verona, 1183.

The nave at Vézelay had no triforium, nor was there a tribune over the aisles. However, in the narthex they built upper galleries, under whose lean-to roof was concealed a quarter-circle wall that did the work of a continuous flying buttress. The principal span was still further counterbutted by the side aisles themselves. Over the easternmost bay of the narthex appeared a vault section with Gothic ribs, but the diagonals were more decorative than functional; the vault web of rubble in a bed of mortar was molded on a temporary frame like a groin vault. Pointed arches were employed in the main arcade of the forechurch.

Vézelay's capitals rivet attention, so dramatic are the Bible stories related--the suicide of Judas, David and Goliath, Absalom, Moses, some symbolized vices and virtues, too, and a few _genre_ studies. The capital of the fifth pier on the north side of the nave shows field laborers who carry cones which some say were used for scattering grain, and others think were for the vintage, or for honey-gathering; the same agricultural scene was represented at Cluny. Vézelay even ornamented with sculpture some of the bases of its piers.

The triple doors between narthex and nave are a supreme work. At the middle trumeau stands John the Baptist, he who was sent before to prepare the way, the announcer as well as the witness. On the disk which he holds was once carved the Lamb of God who taketh away the sins of the world. Observe that the trumeau was made narrow at its base, in order to let pass the pilgrim throngs. At each side of the door stand a few apostles, and among them M. Viollet-le-Duc cited St. Peter as one of the earliest attempts to escape the stereotyped Byzantine models by portraying individual expression in imagery.

In the tympanum is the Pentecost, or perhaps it may be called more exactly the Messiah's mandate to the apostles: Go, teach all nations. Christ is surrounded by a gloria, and the Greek cross of his nimbus symbolizes divinity. From his outstretched hands spread rays which touch the head of each apostle. The explanations of the lintel stone have been various. It would seem to represent the strange peoples of the world to be won by Gospel preaching. Around the tympanum are eight medallions, thought to interpret John the Evangelist and the seven churches of Asia he exhorted.

In 1136 an Auvergne noble, Pons de Montboissier, became abbot of Vézelay (d. 1161), when the forechurch was practically finished, but without doubt while its statuary was in progress, for certain uncut sides of the capitals prove that the stones were set up in the rough and carved _in situ_. Under Abbot Pons, Vézelay emancipated itself from Cluniac rule. He was the brother of Peter the Venerable of Cluny, who had become prior of Vézelay at twenty years of age. In vain the amenable Peter counseled Pons to show a more conciliatory spirit toward the restless townsmen, but Pons was as stubbornly convinced of the righteousness of his monastery's privileges as is many a modern landlord who holds vast areas among the unlanded millions. He held a stiff head against popular demands, the trouble grew aggravated, and the embittered burghers passed beyond their first fair demands and compromised their cause. Abbot Pons was driven out, but returned a victor after Louis VII had investigated the case and imposed a heavy fine on the citizens. Some have thought that the penalty money was expended on the elaborate sculptures of the abbey church. The people might oppose their feudal master, but they were aware that their material prosperity came from the pilgrimage church of the monastery, and each Burgundian was proud to show the visiting strangers the region's exceptional ability in stonecutting.