Burgundian architecture
The Romanesque style of Burgundy - from T Francis Bumpus' 'Cathedrals of Southern France'
Burgundy, the most eastern of the French architectural provinces, is the home of a Romanesque and Pointed Gothic having very strongly marked peculiarities. The leading characteristics, especially those of the former epoch, may be thus enumerated:
The western porch, or narthex, either open, as at Autun, Beaune, Dijon, Paray-le-Monial and Semur; or closed, and forming spacious ante-churches, as at Tournus, Vezelay, and formerly at Cluny.
The strong Classic feeling in details and mode of construction, such as the employment of the fluted pilaster and the Corinthian capital.
The early use of the Pointed arch, almost stilted,. The sculpture and the carving. The roofs, which are either barrel-vaulted or groined domically, the diagonal groining rib, though the arches be Pointed, being generally absent.
The ornamental cut stonework externally forming patterns, which is found only in the southern districts of the province, and which is really more characteristic of the Auvergnat work.
Most of the peculiarities above enumerated are not confined to Burgundy, but assert themselves more or less in the adjacent districts, eg the Lyonnais, the Nivernais, the Bourbonnais and the Franche-Comté. Even in the thirteenth century the Burgundians did not fear to preserve certain Romanesque ideas in the construction of the flying buttress, in the enlargement of windows, and the development of the chevet.
The whole of Burgundy was artistically under monastic rule, and acknowledged as its suzerain the Abbey of Cluny. The Order, started at the commencement of the tenth century, rapidly developed, and reached its zenith about the middle of the eleventh, its rule extending not only over the duchy but far beyond it. Indeed, the influence of this great monastic establishment on art, on letters, on civilisation, and on the modern polity of all Europe, although it has never been completely realised, can never perish.
Photo of Autun by Adrian Dimitescu; photo of Cluny by Richard Peat, both on Flickr
