R. Howard Bloch - Paris and Her Cathedrals

ALSO BY R. HOWARD BLOCH

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The Anonymous Marie de France

A Needle in the Right Hand of God: The Making and Meaning of the Bayeux Tapestry and the Norman Conquest of 1066

One Toss of the Dice: The Incredible Story of How a Poem Made us Modern

To Ellen Joan Handler, whose love of beauty and knowledge of beautiful things has been a source of inspiration and of counsel from the grandest understanding of how art makes meaning to what it means to live a loving life of the mind.

F OR SEVERAL DECADES I HAVE VISITED, STUDIED, AND ENGAGED with students about the cathedrals in the orbit of Paris. Such long experience has taught me that standing before or inside a monumental Gothic church may spark wonder at its size or beauty, but knowing something about it makes for a closeness that borders on love. What more can one ask from any work of art, even a total work of art like a cathedral, which bears witness to prodigious changes in worldview between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance of the sixteenth century when art came to occupy some of the psychic and social space that once belonged to religion.

Much of what one finds in scholarly writings about cathedrals is inaccessible to readers without a deep knowledge of medieval architecture or culture. On the other hand, guidebooks for tourists show insufficient interest in what went into the making of the Gothic structures of northern France, or how they have changed over time. Paris and Her Cathedrals bridges the gap between scholarly and popular literature. If you know nothing about the history of art or architecture, you will find here an introduction to the construction of some of the most astonishing buildings the world has ever known. If, however, you are versed in medieval history, you may discover new ways of looking at familiar things. The chapters of this little book can be read separately in preparation for an enlightened visit. Read as a whole, they open a window upon the High Middle Ages in France, one of the great moments of turning in the West.

My aim is that you experience as well as understand the glorious churches of Saint-Denis just north of Paris, of Notre-Dame and the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris proper, and of Chartres, Amiens, and Reims in the cities of those names. Each chapter is organized along the lines of a walk around and then through the space of the cathedral such that the actual or virtual visitor feels the rich sweep of the church. That experience is, of course, visual, and I focus primarily on what can still be seen, and not, as do many historians of art, on what was first there or what the original builders had in mind. The underlying premise of what follows is that seeing is enhanced by knowing, the cathedrals themselves being part of the teaching and preaching culture of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. And so the images of the buildings are framed first by descriptions of what they look like, and then by considerationsreligious, social, economic, culturalof how they came to be: how they were made and who made them; how they were used and who used them; how they changed the world around them; and how they have fared between the Middle Ages and the presentall keys to what a particular cathedral might mean today.

Nature has not been kind to these exquisite high buildings, subject over centuries to damage visited by rain, strong winds, and lightning strikes, even now called acts of God. Storms and lightning took down the north tower of Saint-Denis in the 1840s; hail badly damaged the west rose window of Reims in 1886. History was especially cruel to religious monuments in France, symbols of the alliance between altar and crown, after the Revolution of 1789 and before the extensive restorations of the nineteenth century. Wars, too, have taken their toll: Amiens was caught in the midst of the Hundred Years War, Reims was shelled throughout World War I. Cathedrals have suffered as a result of accidents and human error. In the seventeenth century, the explosion of a powder mill in the city of Amiens blew out stained glass on the proximate side of the church. The spectacular fire that destroyed the roof of Notre-Dame Paris in April 2019 was caused either by a faulty electrical circuit or a discarded cigarette. Thus, we shall follow the fate of cathedrals not only as they rose to full height in the Age of Cathedrals, but as evolving masterworks of stone, glass, wood, and metal in the post-medieval world.

There are ways of knowing cathedrals apart from historical or technical understanding. These lie in the realm of the imagination and of feelings, which may be subjective, different for each of us, but not without overlap or limits. We can no longer see the past, but we can imagine it, and we can still feel the emotional pull of what is left of it. I have tried to accountthen and nowfor the cathedral effect, what one might have felt or imagined when they were covered inside and out by the bright colors of painted stone, visible at present only in traces, as by the deeply saturated glazings that in some places have been replaced by transparent glass. Cathedrals were once filled with gleaming liturgical objects, rich clerical vestments, tapestries, and rugs, and with the protracted sounds of organ and chant which made the vast volume of the medieval church as powerful a total work of art as anything ever produced in a large public festival, modern theater, or opera house. Though less visually vivid now and less acoustically rich, the wonder of Gothic churches continues to move and impress, and to inspire delight, ecstasy, terror, awe, and even pathos at what they have lost alongside admiration for what they have kept.

Part of acquainting ourselves with Gothic cathedrals has to do with vocabulary. The word cathedral comes from the Latin cathedra, meaning an easy chair, and came to refer to the church or seat of a bishop, or the site of a bishops seat. The cathedral functioned as the central church of a diocese, which derives from the Greek word for administration. The diocese or bishopric may be divided into smaller units or parishes under the care of a priest. Not all the monuments we shall consider are, strictly speaking, cathedrals, nor have they always enjoyed that title. For centuries Saint-Denis was known as an abbey church attached to the monastery on its southern flank. After the Revolution of 1789 and the dispersal of religious institutions associated with monarchy, it became the Basilica of Saint-Denis; and only after 1966, when the diocese of Saint-Denis became a bishopric, did the old abbey church officially become a cathedral. Similarly, the Sainte-Chapelle was originally built as the private chapel of King Louis IX, and has never been associated with a bishop, though most visitors today think of it, alongside of Notre-Dame Paris or Chartres, as one of the cathedrals of France. The status of religious buildings has blurred in the wake of the state appropriation of church property, now managed by the French Ministry of Culture.