Le Puy Cathedral
Excerpts from 'The Cathedrals of Southern France' by T Francis Bumpus, 1895
The Auvergnat school of Romanesque was one with a distinct and marked tradition of its own, and as important a family in the Romanesque era as that of Cologne, Normandy, Pisa and Lombardy, and a typical Auvergnat church has a character of its own which it is impossible to mistake.
Most of my travelled readers must have noticed how much the style and character of ecclesiastical work depends on its materials. The ironstone of Northamptonshire; the red sandstone of the Western Midlands and the flint of East Anglia; the granite of the Limousin; the red brick of Languedoc, Lombardy, the Netherlands, Pomerania, Denmark and parts of Bavaria, all had a vast influence upon the architecture of these districts.
In Auvergne the visitor makes his first acquaintance with the dark lava of Volvic, an admirable stone in everything but colour for ecclesiastical purposes. Its tone is, generally speaking, dark slate, with the slightest possible tinge of green; and it has the unpleasant quality of coming off when rubbed. By employing different kinds of lava a natural polychrome is produced, which is very pleasing; and this more especially in the heads of the Romanesque windows, and in checkwork introduced in the spandrels between them.
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 which I have ever met, the colours follow the natural course of the construction. In the cathedral 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 mostly 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 the richest under cornices and between the corbels.
What one remembers best of Le Puy is the approach to its cathedral along a steep street, which breaks presently into steps, continuing on through a mighty porch, not distinguished by anything very characteristic or at all rich in design, but whose great length and depth are strangely impressive; it is conceived with imagination, and it stimulates that faculty in us in a remarkable way.
The raison d'etre of this abnormal porch was this. The precipitous rock on which the church was built was only long enough to admit the erection of a choir, transepts and a nave of three bays. At a later period the extension of the nave to six bays was felt desirable, so, in order to form a substructure for the three new bays, this vast porch was reared against the western face of the precipice.
Another reason for the erection of this great cavernous porch was that the concourse of worshipper crowding the steps within it on great festivals could see as they knelt there, outside the church, the ceremonial at the high altar; but the actual entrance from it to the nave has long since been closed, and the steps finally branch off, on the left to the cloisters, on the right by a roundabout way to the south aisle of the nave, near the transept.
The singular manner in which the pilgrims entered the church, and having paid their devotions at the shrine, passed out by doors on the eastern side of either transept, gave rise to an old saying that 'In Notre Dame du Puy one entered by the navel and went out by the ears.'
The majesty, I may say the awfulness, of this western porch can hardly be exaggerated. It owes little to delicate detail or enrichment of any kind, for though these have been they are no longer. It is the gloom and darkness, the simple nervous forms of arch and pier, the long flight of steps lost in obscurity, which constitutes the strange charm of this strangest of entrances.
Whilst we should assign the earliest portion of the church to about the end of the tenth century or the commencement of the eleventh, the second portion would be dated about 1050; and finally, there is little doubt as to the whole having been completed in the course of the twelfth century.
The oldest portion comprises the transepts and crossing and the two easternmost bays of the nave. [The present termination of the choir is 19c.] The arches of the crossing are semicircular and carried upon coupled detached shafts. These arches carry a low square tower surmounted by an octagon, but the junction of the two is concealed from within by a low-domed ceiling having an aperture at its top through which the walls and dome of the octagon are seen. The space left between the apex of this lower dome and the base of the octagonal lantern is floored and forms a gallery. Much of the work in this central lantern of Le Puy is modern, though the universality of this feature in the churches of the district makes it probable that it is, to some extent, a legitimate restoration.
The transepts have barrel-vaults, and are crossed by tribunes carried by two round arches on coupled shafts. The views across the nave from the transepts are grand in the extreme; indeed it would be difficult to name an interior which conveys so great an impression of size and importance with such small dimensions as that of Le Puy Cathedral. This grandeur of effect is due in a great measure to the manner in which the nave is crossed at the interval of each bay by a bold arch – round in the eastern and pointed in the western parts – uniting with the walls over the arches opening to the aisles to support a lantern covered by an octopartitely-groined dome. The manner in which the junction between these square lanterns and their eight-sided domical roofs in the first four bays counting from the west is effected is so very remarkable and instructive as to merit some analysis.
To the walls of the lantern are attached eight arches in alternate courses of light and dark stone, one on each face and one in each angle. These arches spring from coupled colonettes with foliaged capitals surmounted by an abacus or narrow strip of moulding. This abacus, which serves for both capitals, sweeps round each angle of the lantern in a graceful curve; the space between it and the circumscribing arch assumes the form of a semi-dome, and thus constitutes what is termed a pendentive, or device for effecting an agreeable transition from the square of the lantern to the octagon of its domical roof. These pendentives are also constructed in alternate courses of light and dark stone, and the difference between their semi-circular plan and the square angle in which they are placed is skilfully concealed by coupled shafts placed under the strip of moulding which forms a continuation of the abaci to the shafts on the four sides of the lantern.
Much elaborate sculpture is introduced in their capitals, but it is nowhere of any very high merit, and is so inferior in delicacy and beauty to the contemporary work seen in Provence that one would attribute it to a native school of sculptors, acquainted probably with none but inferior Roman sculpture, from which they endeavoured to develop a style for themselves.
The cloister on the north side of the church appears to be in part coeval with the earliest, or perhaps the second portion of the fabric. The arcades of the cloister looking into the garth have semicircular arches on slender shafts, one on each face of a square pier. The capitals of these shafts are all richly sculptured, some with figures, some with foliage. The spandrels of the arches are filled in with a reticulation of coloured stones; above the arches runs a band of similar ornament, and above this again is a carved cornice, which in the later part of the cloister forms a kind of frieze.
From the northern walk one of the best views of the external side elevation of the cathedral is to be obtained. Here, even more clearly than inside, the division of the building in to different epochs is seen. The two bays of the aisle nearest the transept have coupled windows with parti-coloured voussoirs and jamb shafts. The clerestory is very peculiar in its treatment, and very effective; the windows – those which light the lanterns internally on their north and south sides – are of one light in each bay and round-headed, and on each side of them, above the springing, there is a recess in the wall, in the centre of which a detached shaft is placed to carry the cornice. A similar recess and a smaller shaft occur immediately over the arch of the window, and the window arch being built of alternately .light and dark stone, and all the sunk panels being filled with Geometrical patterns composed in the same way, an extremely beautiful polychromatic effect is obtained.
The transept gables are noticeable for the courses of inlaid pattern with which they are enriched. All these patterns are formed with white stone and lava. The latter indeed forms the whole ground of the walls, and varies in colour from a greenish grey to black, the patterns formed being of the darkest lava and stone.
Two features remain to be described on the exterior of this marvellous cathedral – the south-eastern porch and the steeple. The whole detail of the porch, which occupies the angle formed by the south aisle of the choir with the eastern side of the transept, is a very rich kind of Pointed, and abounds in half-Romanesque, half-Byzantine detail.
The steeple which adjoins the north aisle of the choir at its east end is as bizarre and unusual in design as it is remarkable in construction. It consists of no less than nine stages on the exterior, diminishes rapidly in diameter, and is, perhaps, on the whole, more curious than pleasing in its outline. At the base of the tower the internal diameter is 24 feet 6 inches, but this is reduced to only 12 feet by four detached piers, 1 foot 10 inches square. These piers are carried up from the base to the very summit, detached in the three lower stages, and forming part of the thickness of the wall in the portion above. The highest stage of the steeple, 12 feet in internal and 16 feet in external diameter, is therefore, as nearly as possible, carried up on these four piers, and the rapid decrease in the external dimensions, from 36 feet to 16 feet, was only rendered possibly by this very ingenious mode of construction.
The lower part of the steeple at Le Puy may safely be referred to the end of the eleventh century, and its completion to the end of the twelfth, whilst the planning gives one the impression that it was the work of a Byzantine artist, the construction of the piers ih the lowest stage being almost identical with that of the main piers under the domes of St Mark's, Venice, and Saint Front, Perigueux.
Photo of Le Puy by Rando_soleil on Flickr