[Original]
This forms the beauty, so to speak, the intellectual beauty, of the cathedral of Noyon. But its most original character, by which it enchants our imagination and impresses itself in our memory, is the marvelous combination of the pointed and the circular arch. [19] It is charming among all those charming churches which rose in the twelfth century in the valleys of the Oise and the Seine, and in which architects endowed with genius knew how to bring together the round arcs of the declining Romanesque and the pointed arches of the Gothic at its dawning. In no other place did the art of these constructors display itself in so refined and subtle a manner; nowhere else can we find so complete a success; in no other region has the marriage of tradition and moderation given birth to a more exquisite work.
Consider the elevations of the nave: the arches which separate the nave from the side aisles break in ogives; the tribunes are pierced with pointed apertures divided by little columns and surmounted by trefoil windows; the light penetrates this triforium through Romanesque windows; above these tribunes runs a little gallery whose arches are circular, and higher still the twin windows of the clerestory are framed with semicircular arches. In the transepts, whose two arms end in apses, there are other combinations, but the two varieties of arches are always fraternally associated; the Gothic and the Romanesque alternate from the ground to the vaulting. In the choir, finally, the arcades, round-arched in the two first bays, are pointed at the back of the apse and the lines of the clerestory reproduce the same arrangement; the tribunes are cut in points and the arches of the gallery are divided in trefoil. To this diversity of lines we must add the diversity of decoration. Two styles are here juxtaposed: here are the monsters, the grotesques and the foliage of Romanesque art, and there the more sober and truthful sculpture of Gothic art.
But—here is the miracle—all these contrasts appear only when we closely analyze the elements of the edifice. They never make discords; they never enfeeble the impression of grace, ease and perfection which we experienced when we entered Notre Dame de Noyon.
There has been much discussion about the date of the construction of this church.
This question was not in the least embarrassing to Jacques Le Vasseur, the dean of the chapter, who published in 1633 a volume of 1400 pages, entitled Annales de Véglise cathédrale de Noyon. For him, the choir where he went every day to sing the psalms had been built by Saint Médard in the sixth century; Charlemagne had constructed the nave; then, after the year 1000, "our choir was refreshed, our nave completed, our belfries added, for the accomplishment of the work." Nevertheless he added: "At least the experts judge that these works and manufactures are of these times...." The excellent Le Vasseur was not, in any case, the man to contradict them in their judgments, for he consecrated a chapter of his book to demonstrating that the foundation of Noyon by Noah was "probable"; and it is easy to guess the reasons which he extracted from philology.
The "experts" of the nineteenth century looked a little closer. When they had learned to distinguish Romanesque art from Gothic art, they quickly succeeded in classifying the cathedral of Noyon among the monuments of the transition. In a vital and eloquent study which he published in 1845, in which in describing the cathedral of Noyon he studied the origins and celebrated the beauties of Gothic art, Vitet maintained that this cathedral was "conceived and entirely outlined from 1150 to 1170 and that it was entirely carved, finished off and completed only toward the end of the century or perhaps even a little later." These dates are not quite exact: M. Eugène Lefèvre-Pontalis has demonstrated this by the archives and by the archaeological examination of the monument itself; he has proved that the choir was finished in 1157, the nave in 1220, that the vaultings fell in a fire at the close of the thirteenth century and that the church was then repaired.... And I refer you to his excellent Histoire de la cathédrale de Noyon. [20]