Part 18

At Conques, south of Auvergne, is another church on the same plan as S. Étienne, Nevers, in almost every respect, which there is little doubt was completed in the first half of the eleventh century, by the founder Abbot Odalric. Then again to the west there is the church of Moustier-neuf, Poitiers, commenced in A.D. 1069, and consecrated in A.D. 1096, which has a _chevet_ evidently formed upon the same type as Conques; and at S. Hilaire, in the same city, consecrated in A.D. 1069, whilst the ground-plan of the chevet is just the same as that of Conques, the nave columns are analogous, there, to the half barrel-vaults of the triforium in Auvergne. Now none of these churches is earlier than the beginning of the eleventh century, and yet it is hardly credible that a province shut in as Auvergne was should have received a perfect and complete new style, or invented one and carried it to the degree of finish and perfection at which it had arrived when Notre-Dame-du-Port was erected, without our being able to trace, somewhere, the source from which it was developed. I believe, however, that its origin may be traced if we examine carefully the architecture of the church of S. Front at Périgueux, commenced in A.D. 984 and completed in A.D. 1047. This church, founded on the same type as, if not copied from St. Mark’s, Venice,[58] exercised a vast direct influence on the architecture of the day. It is seen most clearly in churches which are, like itself, cruciform, without aisles, and covered with domes. The churches of Auvergne, and those other examples to which I have referred, seem to me to be clearly derived from S. Front, or from the Eastern models on which it too was founded. The east end of St. Mark’s presents a circular wall, with a succession of semicircular recesses or apses in its thickness. S. Sophia contains the same feature, though differently treated. The Roman circular buildings which have so much in common with early Byzantine architecture have the same feature; and S. Vitale, Ravenna, whether it is Romanesque or Byzantine in its origin, is planned in a similar way. The architect of S. Front evidently copied his apses from these models, only converting the recesses of St. Mark’s into chapels projecting from the walls.[59] The Auvergne architects attempted to combine the plan of the basilica, with its nave and aisles, with the features which were seen at S. Front. They retained its external wall and projecting chapels, therefore, but placed within them the cluster of columns round the apse forming an aisle between the chapels and the choir. By this simple and natural modification of the S. Front plan to meet the necessities of their triple-aisled churches they at once invented, one may almost say, the perfect French chevet. I know no other churches in France of the same age which appear to have suggested so much in this respect; and you will realize it if you compare their plans with, among others, those of Bourges cathedral, S. Pierre at Bourges, S. Martin at Étampes, Chartres cathedral, the destroyed church of S. Martin at Tours, and finally what is, I think, almost the best complete Gothic plan, that of Rouen cathedral. In every one of these we see the surrounding aisle lighted by windows between the chapels, and the chapels are distinct and well-separated on the exterior, precisely as in these older churches in Auvergne. These buildings, therefore, have great value, not only as illustrating a chapter of the history of our art, but because the chapter which they do illustrate is just one of the most interesting I can conceive; being that which explains how and by what steps Gothic architecture, of which, as our national style, we are so justly proud, was developed from the noble architecture of the old Romans and Greeks, an architecture to which we owe, among other things, this great debt of gratitude, that it naturally led up to, and rendered possible, a Westminster, a Chartres, an Amiens, and all the other glories of our Christian architecture.

You will have gathered that there are many similar features in the churches of the two provinces which I have been describing. They are shortly these: vaults and quasi-domes alike, and carried on the same kind of squinches or pendentives; the decoration with mosaics and its detail; the design and treatment of doors, either sculptured or inlaid; the form of trefoil cusping of arches, character of mouldings, sculpture, and decoration with painting, all of these are the same throughout both districts. The only marked difference, and it is important, is in the ground-plan, the cathedral of Le Puy having no chevet, but an east end derived from Romanesque rather than Byzantine precedents; and the other churches in its neighbourhood are generally similar in their plan.

There are two important heads of my subject to be shortly discussed before I conclude. One of them refers to roofing; the other to coloured decoration. First, as to roofing. I have already explained how this was executed; let us now consider why the modes which we see were adopted. At S. Front the experiment was tried of covering a nave and transepts with a succession of domes resting on pendentives, and supported on pointed arches spanning the nave. These domes were the only covering of the church, and were visible on the outside as well as on the inside. At Conques, the architect, unable to carry domes on the comparatively delicate piers which were all that were required for the division of a nave from its aisles, contrived a barrel-vault for his nave, the thrust of which was resisted by the half barrel-vault of the triforium; a device not improbably obtained from Byzantine churches: for if we compare the section of S. Sophia with that of the crossing and central dome of Notre-Dame-du-Port, we shall find the semi-domes affording abutments for the great domes in the former, absolutely identical in their section with the half barrel-vault, which forms the abutment on the north and south sides of the central dome of the latter.[60] But it was impossible to obtain any light for a clerestory roofed and supported in this fashion, and one is rather disposed to wonder how it was that so many churches should have been built on the same gloomy scheme. It was, no doubt, because in that part of France wooden roofs were thought to be undesirable, and no other economical way was seen of combining the nave and aisles with what was intended to be an indestructible stone roof. I need hardly say that at the same period, in the north of France, in Normandy, and in England, the nave was seldom, if ever, roofed with anything but timber, and the aisles only were vaulted in stone.

At Tournus, on the Saône, another device was adopted to serve the same end as the Auvergne roof, but admitting of a clerestory: this was the covering of the nave with a succession of barrel-vaults at right angles to the length of the church, and supported on bold transverse arches. But I doubt whether it was ever repeated on a nave, though there are several examples of aisles thus roofed;[61] and it was, no doubt, ugly and ungainly. The Le Puy architect devised yet another plan, which combined to some extent all the others, and this was, as I have explained, a succession of domical vaults, which, while it was much lighter and more practicable (owing in part to the difference of scale) than the S. Front plan of a series of genuine cupolas, achieved, nevertheless, much of the effect that was there gained. A very small portion only of the weight of the vault exerted a direct lateral thrust, and it was possible, therefore, to erect such a roof upon a clerestory; and though the transverse arches limit the height of the building in one respect, in another there is no question that the height is apparently much increased; for in looking down the interior it is impossible ever to see the apex of any of the domes, and the vault lost behind the transverse arches gains immensely in mystery and infinity, so as to produce the effect of a larger and loftier building than the reality. But, on the other hand, the disadvantages were great: the piers between the nave and its aisles were so large as to render the aisles nearly useless; and I can hardly wonder, therefore, that the example set here was not generally, if, indeed, at all followed.

It is doubtful where the kind of vault used at Le Puy was first devised. The central dome of S. Michel de l’Aiguille is, perhaps, the oldest of all, and this is, in fact, a square dome, if one may use the expression. The octagonal dome-vaults of the cathedral are probably a little later, but that over the crossing of the church of Ainay at Lyon may possibly be older. A comparison will make it evident that one is copied from the other; and if the Le Puy vault was derived from Lyon, it becomes possible to make the important inference that it was an Eastern influence travelling up the Rhone and distinct from that which is seen at Périgueux, to which we owe this kind of domed roof. Further evidence of this is found in the pendentives of the dome at Brioude,[62] which are identical in intention with the plan of the church of SS. Sergius and Bacchus, at Constantinople, and yet quite unlike the kind of pendentive common in churches of the S. Front type. They are, in fact, the Le Puy and Ainay pendentive reduced to the very simplest conditions. The invention of the flying buttress adumbrated in, and possibly suggested by, the quadrant vaults of Auvergne, finally stopped these various endeavors after new forms of roofs, and set men to work to see how it might most readily be made to serve the boldest and most airy system of design and construction; and in the rage for these, that old system of roofing with domes, which had been, so far as is known,[63] first tried in France at Périgueux, and had afterward spread with such rapidity over a very large district, though with many modifications and variations, was entirely ignored or forgotten. Is it well that we too should ignore it? It is clear that the disciples of the Gothic school may claim it as their own with just as much truth as any other school can; and in some form or other it is often so attractive, so majestic on a large scale, so impressive even on a small scale, that few of us who have much work to do should altogether eschew all use of it, or treat it as though it were the exclusive property of the architects of Classic and Renaissance buildings. I do not feel, however, as most who write on the subject seem to do, that our domes must invariably be supported on what are called true pendentives. I think they are not beautiful, and I do not see that they are especially scientific. The S. Front pendentives are mere corbellings out of the wall, and in truth only imitations of pendentives. At S. Mark’s they are formed with a succession of arches of brick work across the angle of the dome, though this construction is not visible, and these, I suppose, are all wrong; but they are very similar in their intention to the kind of pendentive which I have had to illustrate to-night, and which is in truth much more Gothic and picturesque in its character than the true pendentive, for it admits of any amount of decorative sculpture, and is really precisely similar in its object to the squinches under our own English spires.[64]

I will add but a few words as to the constructional polychromy which distinguishes the exterior of the churches throughout this volcanic district. So far as I have seen, it was never, save in Le Puy cathedral, admitted into the interior,[65] and this is much to be regretted, because it seems that the vaults of their naves, the domes of their crossings, and the semi-domes of their sanctuaries, would have afforded most admirable fields for this kind of decoration. As I have stated, the walls were once covered with painting, and as long as this existed a mosaic of black and white and dull red would have been valueless; but now that the iconoclast, the whitewasher, and the restorer have done their worst, the want of some decoration on the otherwise bald surface of the vaults is painfully felt everywhere. Externally the coloured materials are used in two ways; sometimes the whole of the wall is built of the dark volcanic products, and patterns are obtained by the occasional use of white stone or by alternate courses of this and the darkest scoriae that can be found. Or else the walls generally are built of stone, and the patterns only formed with the dark material. Here, too, as is the case in all old examples of coloured constructions with which I have ever met, the colours follow the natural course of the construction. At Le Puy, for instance, the courses are alternately light and dark, producing bold horizontal bands of colour. The arch stones are continued generally in one line of colour all across an arch, even when it consists of several orders, and from the arch on into the wall. The bands of ornament are similarly arranged in horizontal stripes, generally placed where they will dignify and give value to some very prominent architectural member. They never occur below the line of the springing of an arcade, and are richest under cornices and between their corbels. And when we consider the date at which this inlaid work was executed, and compare it with what we know of our own art at the same period, or, indeed, with that of any other portion of the country which is now France, we cannot too highly extol its delicacy and grace and its carefulness of design and execution. I believe that we may regard the whole of the work in Velay and Auvergne as that of native artists. The detail of sculpture is, when compared with such work as is to be found in Provence, exceedingly rude. It is vigorous, indeed, but wanting in that extreme delicacy and refinement which marks the work of the early Provençal artists.

Were I to attempt to say anything about the buildings of a later date, it would be impossible to do more than give a catalogue, which would be as unintelligible as it would be tedious. I will only say, therefore, on this head, that Clermont cathedral well deserves careful study, and is rich in very fine glass; that at Montferrand may be seen as large a collection of mediaeval houses of all dates as in almost any small town that I know; that Riom possesses a fine S. Chapelle; and that in the abbey of La Chaise-Dieu is still preserved a very rare and complete series of tapestries of the sixteenth century. Besides these, a large number of articles of church-plate are to be found scattered up and down in the village churches, and all this goodly store of antiquities is set before you in a province whose physical features are so full of interest and beauty as in themselves to make a journey through Velay and Auvergne one which none will repent having undertaken.

APPENDIX

I. _S. Mary’s, Stone_ II. _Churches in Northern Germany_

I. _Lübeck_ II. _Naumburg_ III. _Erfurt and Marburg_ IV. _Münster and Soest_ V. _German Pointed Architecture_

I

SOME ACCOUNT OF THE CHURCH OF S. MARY, STONE, NEAR DARTFORD

(_From the papers of the Kent Archæological Society, in Archæologia Cantiana, 1860_)

Having given these preliminary notes, illustrative of the history of the church, it will be well now to give a detailed architectural description of the fabric, illustrated, as far as may be, by the discoveries which have been made in the course of its restoration.[66]

The church appears to have consisted at first of a chancel, nave with north and south aisles, western tower with the aisles prolonged on either side of it, and western porch. The only subsequent additions were, in the fourteenth century, a small vestry on the north side of the east bay of the chancel, and in the sixteenth century the Wilshyre chantry, in the space between the vestry and the east wall of the north aisle. In the fourteenth century (probably during the bishopric of Haymo de Hethe) the windows at the west end of the nave and aisles, and that in the west bay of the south wall, were inserted; and at the same time the tower-piers were altered. Probably they were, like the other piers throughout the church, exceedingly delicate, and were thought to be not sufficiently solid to carry the weight of the steeple; but at any rate it is clear that the piers, with their capitals, are not earlier than _circa_ A.D. 1350, whilst the arches have earlier mouldings, and are of the same character as the rest of the church. It was at the same time that additional support was given to the eastern piers of the tower, by the addition of bold flying buttresses, spanning the aisles, and visible only on the inside of the church. The staircase to the tower, placed against the south-west angle, appears to me to have been added at the same time; whilst the upper part of the tower retains nothing but poor fifteenth-century work, and was probably entirely rebuilt at that time, if, indeed, it is not a work of the seventeenth century, undertaken after the fire which melted the bells, in A.D. 1638.

No other alteration was made in the church before the Reformation, and in 1638 the church suffered from the fire caused by lightning, mentioned by Hasted and in the Petitions to Parliament. The roofs throughout must have been burned, and, covered as they were with shingle,[67] it is not surprising that when once set on fire no part of them was saved. Traces of the fire are very evident, particularly on the stones of the tower arches, which are reddened by its action. We found also in the upper part of the aisle walls portions of molten lead, which had run into the interstices of the stone work at the time of the fire. The Petitions of the Parishioners of Stone give most exact information as to what happened before and after the fire; from them we learn (1) that before the fire the stone groined roof existed on the chancel, but was much dilapidated, and that the glass in the chancel-windows was in a sad state of decay: (2) “that the chauncell received little damage by the late fire,” yet that a very large part of the brief-money, raised for the repair of the church, was “uncessantly wasted and bestowed on the same, soe that the church is like to remayne unfynished.” This was in A.D. 1640, and I think we may gather from it the exact date of the alterations in the chancel. Its groined roof was taken down, its walls lowered some five feet, the tracery of the window in the north wall of the chancel partly destroyed in order to lower the walls, and the window then built up; the east window and probably one in the south wall destroyed, and imitations of perpendicular windows--poor in character, but nevertheless very good for their date--inserted in the place of the original windows in the north, east, and south walls of the chancel. The wall was rebuilt on either side of these windows with numerous fragments of the old groining ribs, thus affording the final proof that the windows were inserted and the groining taken down at the same time. This discovery was most grateful to me, inasmuch as it had been objected to the restoration of the original windows in the chancel, that those which we had to remove were fair examples of perpendicular work, and valuable in their way: in truth, they were examples of Gothic work in the years 1638–40, of no value at all in relation to the architecture of the rest of the church, though undoubtedly affording very interesting evidence of the undying love of Gothic architecture in this country, and of a not unsuccessful attempt at its revival.[68]

I have been unable to learn the exact date of the repair and re-roofing of the remainder of the church. The living was sequestered in A.D. 1650, and Mr. Chase must, I should think, in the ten years between the petitions and this date, have put his church into tenantable condition. The nave roof appears to be of about this date, and is framed with tie-beams, queen-posts, and purlines, with arched braces above the collars, and, though not very ornamental, has been re-opened, with the very best result on the general effect of the church. Subsequently to the erection of the new roofs, they had been churchwardenized, in the usual way, by the addition of plaster ceilings,[69] and in a less usual way, by the addition of a second roof over the other, and supported by it to the serious damage of the walls and piers.[70] The vestry seems never to have been repaired after the fire, and the Wilshyre chantry was roofed with a steep lean-to against the north wall of the chancel, and ceiled with a flat ceiling, for which I cannot be too grateful, as it made it impossible to insert a new window at this place in the A.D. 1640 restoration, and afforded me the only chance of discovering and restoring the original chancel windows. Knowing this before making my plans, I cut into the wall at this point, and was rewarded, even beyond my greatest expectations, by the discovery of the window-jamb, the monials, and a sufficient portion of the tracery to enable me to restore it exactly to its original design in every respect.

Having thus completed the notice of the alterations in the fabric, it is time to give a proper account of all its architectural peculiarities. The church is internally a rare example of a building as nearly as possible in the same state as when it was first built. For a village church its character is unusually sumptuous and ornate; and perhaps there is no example of any first-pointed building in England in which the grace and delicacy which characterize the style have been carried to greater perfection. It is impossible, indeed, to speak too highly of the workmanship or of the design of every part, and close as is its similarity in many points to our glorious abbey at Westminster, it is a remarkable fact, that in care and beauty of workmanship the little village church is undoubtedly superior to the minster. This might well be, for with all its beauty, and with all its vigour, the mere execution of much of the work at Westminster is not first-rate, and hardly such as one might expect in so important a position.