Part 3

Among the many beauties of France must certainly be accounted its "cities built upon a hill." There are a goodly number of them and their lofty position has tended to preserve them from change more than cities so placed that their expansion into suburbs was easier. Without doubt there is something fascinating, something irresistibly dominating about a town that looks down upon us. Fortunate it is for us lovers of the picturesque, whom, alas, the uses of modern convenience have made "dwellers in the plain," that during mediaeval times the vital need of safety forced its citizens to seek the refuge of heights! No one can question the right of quaint old Poitiers to be as haughty as hill towns have always been--nay, haughtier. Think of the days when through the House of Plantagenet she gave rulers to England--when these same kings governed not only England but also the whole western half of France! We do not always remember what a long strip of territory was ruled by the Angevin dynasty, stretching all the way from the Pyrenees across the Channel and up to Scotland. One of the greatest encounters that marked the long and bitter struggle between the English and French was the Battle of Poitiers, when in 1356 the English under the Black Prince defeated and took prisoner John the Good of France and slew 11,000 Frenchmen. It was, indeed, a bloody baptism when our hill town stood sponsor to such a conflict of warring nations.

There are few cities in France which more richly repay a visit than this rather out-of-the-way place, and fewer still which have so many varied inducements to offer. The architectural remains are not only interesting but differ materially in character and epoch. The situation of the city is most striking. It is perched on the top of a flat-iron shaped hill upon the point of which the picturesque Jardin de Blossac smiles down upon the winding river Clain. It is not in this book that you should look for a description of the wonderful triple interpenetrated chimney of the Palais de Justice, nor the fourth century church of St. Jean, nor the ivory-like carvings on the facade of Notre Dame de la Garde. Hie thee to a guide-book for these, and the like of them, and let us to our quest! In all glass of this period, nay, of any period or any century, we shall never find a more splendid window than the Crucifixion at the east end of the cathedral. In our introduction we said that glass should not be studied from written description, but that it must be seen. Of this window this observation is even more true than of any other. Its breadth and size indicate that it dates from early in the century. The harmony and the beauty of its colours are beyond words to describe. Indeed, so ingeniously are they combined to produce their effect, that the detail is apt to escape the observer. Even after spending some time before it he may be surprised to learn that the cross is ruby-red and that the hair of the Saviour is blue. If he had read this in a book it would have been impossible to convince him that the result could be one of such great beauty. Unfortunately for the many excellent medallion windows in this cathedral, there are also a great number of uncoloured ones. It does not take us long to decide that a medallion window should never be lighted from within, because that enables one to see the cumbersome machinery used to produce its effect. One should never become aware of the numerous small pieces of unevenly surfaced glass and the vast complexity of leads which in combination produce such glorious results, but only when the light comes from without. Not only do these white panes reveal these ugly details, but by their glare they effectually extinguish the warm glow which we are accustomed to expect from the richly-coloured mosaics of the medallions. Near the west end there is a good deal of fine strapwork grisaille evidently put there to light that end of the church in contrast to the dimmer light which must have prevailed at the east end when all the medallions were still in place. Even if there were not many fine thirteenth century panels in this cathedral, and even if the town itself were not full of many interesting sights, still we would have been amply repaid for our visit by the Crucifixion window, the chef d'oeuvre of its time.

Near the cathedral is the church of St. Radegonde. This long narrow edifice has no transepts, nor, indeed, the usual division into choir and nave, and yet it boasts of a rose window, and a fine one, too, over its northern portal. The colour is really delightful and contains much of the brilliant blue for which Poitiers is famous. Its chief interest is that instead of having its figures broken up so as to monotonously radiate from the centre (which is generally true of rose windows) they are, so to speak, right side up, and all participate in forming the picture of the "Last Judgment." There is some thirteenth century glass on the southern side of this church, but not so well preserved or so good. The windows on the northern side between the north portal and the east end are of the next century and will be considered later (page 172). We may say, however, in passing, that they are unique in that they have bright figures distributed upon a grisaille background which is surrounded by a border of rich colour.

TOURS

Of all the great battles which have marked the world's history there are few, if any, which so distinctly stand out from the centuries as the Battle of Tours. It was this bloody victory which in 732 rolled back the world-conquering Saracens and determined that Europe should be Christian and not Moslem. On that epoch-making day, the bloody axe of Charles Martel graved deep his name on the annals of France. But Tours has many another claim to historic renown. Touraine, the province of which it is the capital, is strewed with magnificent chateaux, whose very elaboration and beauty testify to how greatly French royalty and nobility loved its temperate climate. On our way from Poitiers to Tours, we shall pass through several charming little valleys and find attractive, though quiet, scenery, during most of the journey. The immediate surroundings of Tours are not pleasing. It impresses one as a dull, grey city seated demurely beside the sands that so ungracefully border most of the lower part of the river Loire. There is little to recall the echoes of the great battle and less still to remind one of the delightful mediaeval residences which are such an attractive feature throughout the rest of Touraine.

Although the cathedral was under construction all the way from the twelfth century to the sixteenth, its various styles are so combined as to make it an interesting building. It does not, however, seem to merit the enthusiastic praise lavished upon it by Henry IV and many another of its admirers. The chief objection to the interior is that it appears oppressively narrow. The explanation of this cramped effect is that the architect did not avail himself of the usual device of slightly increasing its width as the walls rose. This was generally done elsewhere and served to correct the contracted appearance which perspective tends to give as one looks up from the floor. This architectural trick is an old one, for we know that the Greeks used it not only in shaping the sides of their columns, but also to preserve the appearance of straightness in the chief horizontal lines of their buildings. In the absence of this device the walls seem to crowd together above us, thus accentuating the unpleasant narrowness of the nave.

The fine rosaces in the ends of the transepts contain fourteenth century glass, and the western rose with its gallery of eight lancets below, excellent Renaissance glazing. The chief glory of the interior, however, is the fine medallion panels all through the choir, not only in the chapels, but also, and most unusually, in the fifteen large lights of the clerestory. These clerestory medallions date from the latter part of the century, and their lateness is evidenced in a number of ways, among others, by the fact that the medallions are oval instead of round and also that they extend to the edge of the embrasure, leaving little or no room for the border. This can also be observed in the easternmost choir windows of Coutances Cathedral. We have noted before that the choir clerestory at this time was generally given over to large figures of kings, bishops, etc., in order to secure more light than medallions would admit. In the Tours clerestory the fifth window on the right and the fifth on the left (just above the great altar) show an attempt to correct the darkening effect of the medallions by alternating with them horizontal stripes of grisaille. Notice that in the easternmost embrasure the three medallions of the second tier, when considered together, form a picture of The Last Supper. This is a more elaborate exposition of the same idea exemplified by the Annunciation at the east end of the Clermont-Ferrand clerestory. A quaint touch is observable in the two medallions which show little figures of donors, each holding up in his two hands a model of his gift window. One of these is in the left-hand lower corner of the window just left of the eastern one, and the other in the right-hand corner of the sixth on the right. Some of the Tours choir chapels are glazed in white, which combined with the pierced triforium, serves to correct the lack of light caused by the unusual treatment of the clerestory.

ANGERS

A bad name dies hard and often lingers years after it is no longer deserved. A striking example of this is found in the now unjust appellation, "Black Angers." Black it may have been in the days when its streets were dirty and narrow, but black it is no longer. Black it may have seemed to the townspeople when their humble dwellings were frowned down upon by the seventeen gloomy towers of its haughty thirteenth century castle. Now the towers of the castle are razed, the walls that girdled the city are tumbled into the great moat to form broad boulevards, and altogether it is as agreeable a place as was ever vilified by an outgrown name. Its most important edifice, St. Maurice Cathedral, is not only a perfect treasure-house of glass, but is also the depository of a profusion of admirable tapestries. Those interested in the latter will find here (even more than at Rheims) what an added inducement they provide for the sightseer. All around the nave are suspended the series of the Apocalypse (as they are called), while on the walls of the transepts are yet others dating from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Nor are these all, for packed away in chests are many more, which upon the occasion of certain church festivals are brought out to hang in a row around the outside of the cathedral. In fact, it is only on these festival days that one learns that the interior wall space is insufficient to display half of the church's possessions. Having set out this additional reason for visiting St. Maurice Cathedral, let us now turn to its chief charm, the splendid twelfth and thirteenth century glazing. We shall find the nave windows filled with the largest and best preserved collection of twelfth century glass that exists. They are very wide and high, characteristic of that early period. In the choir there are fourteen excellent examples of the thirteenth century medallion type, and there are others in the transepts. We shall not now speak of the two great fifteenth century rose windows, nor of the very large canopy ones which adorn the transepts, nor of the few sixteenth century panels. It is proper to say here, however, that they are excellent examples of those later periods, thus rendering this cathedral one of the best in which to compare glass styles all the way from the twelfth century to the sixteenth. The chief glory of the edifice, however, consists of those which date from the early mosaic period. So few and so unsatisfactory are the remains elsewhere found of twelfth century glass, and so excellent are they here, that it is to this church that one should come to study it. It is a most fortunate coincidence for the student that the same interior also contains many of the best types of the thirteenth century, because this very contiguity enables him to conveniently contrast them with those of the twelfth. The finer distinctions between their traits are much more noticeable to him where the examples are side by side than they would be if he had to carry the picture in his mind from one place to another. He will at once notice that the earlier borders are much wider than the later ones; some of those in the nave occupy nearly one-fourth of the window space on each side, or in other words, if brought together, the borders would fill nearly half of the entire width of the embrasure. He will also observe that the figures in the earlier ones are made of larger pieces of glass and have the draperies more tightly drawn about them. It is very significant that the pieces of glass are larger in the earlier windows: note this carefully, because in many books we are told that the later artist of the thirteenth century had no choice but to content himself with the small morsels of glass, as he had no others. Thus they would have us believe that his wonderful jewelled glow was merely the lucky result of having nothing but small fragments at his disposal. Even so brief a study of twelfth century glass as to show that the pieces then used were uniformly larger than those of the thirteenth or jewel period, is enough to demonstrate that the later artist deliberately used the smaller bits even with the added trouble of more leading. He did so for the very purpose of obtaining the sparkle and sheen that was never achieved before nor since, and therefore he should receive due credit for his results. A close examination of both the choir and nave windows will yield us many quaint and interesting details. The first on the left contains a large Virgin placed upon a panel occupying all of the window that is not given over to a wide grisaille border. Six small medallions are arranged about this panel, half of each on the panel and half protruding over the border. One of these small medallions is placed at each corner and one in the middle of the two long sides, like the pockets on a pool table. The charming elaboration and colour work of the twelfth century borders throughout the nave cannot fail to be noticed.

The set of thirteenth century windows placed about the choir have some gorgeous blues and brilliant rubies. The fifth, counting from the left side, proves to be a Tree of Jesse window, a sort of pictorially genealogical tree which we will frequently encounter on our travels. In this case the treatment is unusual, as the vine, winding up throughout the window from the loins of Jesse in the lowest medallion, not only distributes its historical personages over the central panes, but also up and down the borders as well. The very wide embrasures of this church give us an excellent opportunity of studying the colours of this period.

While we are in Angers we must visit the church of St. Serge. As we are now seeking early glass the chief interest of this small interior consists of the five grisaille windows of the twelfth century which, with their graceful design of pale brownish strapwork picked out and accentuated by points of colour, leave little to be desired in their soft beauty. They are to be found in the choir, and are considered by most authorities to be the best type of twelfth century grisaille work that exists. During a later pilgrimage we shall come again to this church to inspect the attractive fifteenth century canopy windows which decorate the nave clerestory (see page 175).

LE MANS