THE CATHEDRAL OF BORDEAUX[218]
Celuy qui, d’une doulceur et facilité naturelle, mépriseroit les offenses reçues, feroit chose très belle et digne de louange: mais celuy qui, picqué et oultré jusques au vif d’une offense, s’armeroit des armes de la raison contre ce furieux appétit de vengeance, et aprèz un grand conflict s’en rendroit enfin maistre, feroit sans doubte beaucoup plus. Celuy là feroit bien; et celuy cy, vertueusement: l’une action se pourroit dire bonté: l’aultre, vertu; car il semble que le nom de la vertu présuppose de la difficulté et du contraste. Nous nommons Dieu bon, fort, et libéral, et juste, mais nous ne le nommons pas vertueux.—Montaigne (Mayor of Bordeaux from 1581 to 1585).
While Bordeaux has the warm fertility of the Midi, there is much of the north in the big commercial city. And its cathedral of St. André is typical of the dual temperament. The nave is the aisleless, wide hall preferred by meridionals, the choir has the procession path with its circlet of chapels loved by the north. Excepting Le Mans, Amiens, and Rheims, it is the longest cathedral in France.
Bordeaux was an important city in the wide possessions of the dukes of Aquitaine. In 1137 Aliénor, the daughter of the last William, was wedded in its cathedral to the prince who immediately ascended the French throne as Louis VII. When she left him after fifteen years and wedded Henry Plantagenet the rich city on the Garonne passed under English rule. In all the vicissitudes of the three hundred years that followed, from 1154 to 1453, Bordeaux’ self-interest kept her faithful to her masters beyond the sea, the chief customers in her wine trade. Bordeaux remained French, however, in race and in the expression of race, architecture. Aliénor’s second husband, Henry II of England, was, like herself, more French than English; of his thirty-four years’ reign he passed only twelve in England, and his son, Cœur-de-Lion, was another Anglo-Frenchman.
The hardy, domelike vaults carried on diagonals that span the nave of Angers’ Cathedral (c. 1150) have been considered the earliest extant examples of the Gothic of the West. And yet it is possible, thinks M. Brutails, the erudite archivist of the Gironde, that the vaults of the same type which were built over the nave of the present cathedral of Bordeaux antedated the notable ones of Angers. In Bordeaux occurred one of the premature isolated examples of Gothic ribs under the south tower of Ste. Croix. During a revival of builder’s energy, from 1052 to 1127 (under the eighth and ninth dukes of Aquitaine), Ste. Croix and St. Seurin were reconstructed and St. André begun. It seems more reasonable to suppose, however, that Anjou, where first the cupola church of Aquitaine met the diagonal ribs of northern France, should have been the cradle of that phase of the new architecture which we call Plantagenet.
The nave of St. André is a difficult page to read, Romanesque, Gothic, and Renaissance as it now is. The Romano-Byzantine church here which Urban II blessed in 1096 exists only in vestiges in the lower walls on either side of the wide hall. Originally the church had side aisles, but they were obliterated when the XII century spanned the entire width with Angevin diagonals. The side walls were then made into two stories, a lower wall arcade surmounted by a window story, such as we have seen in the cathedrals at Angers and Angoulême. In 1437 an earthquake caused the collapse of the masonry roof of the four westernmost bays, which were recovered by a Flamboyant Gothic vaulting rich with supplementary ribs.
The west front of St. André never was developed, as the church abutted there on the ancient ramparts. The main entrance was the Porte Royale in the north flank of the nave, whose statues, made in the golden hour of St. Louis’ reign, were used as models by Viollet-le-Duc when he refilled the empty niches of Notre Dame at Paris. There can be no clearer exposition of what qualities were lost in Rayonnant Gothic than to pass from this apogee portal to the smoother, more conventional images at the northern entrance to the transept; in the rugged apostles, full of character, is the touch which all time recognizes as genius; in the aristocratic churchmen of the XIV-century door is mere talent. To the nave of Bordeaux a XVI-century archbishop, Charles de Grammont, who initiated here the Italian Renaissance, added an elaborate buttress. That miniature façade is called the contrefort de Grammont.[219]
Under Archbishop de Mallemort (1227-60) St. André superseded St. Seurin as the cathedral of Bordeaux. As late as 1259 it lacked a suitable chevet. Gascony was in chaos in those years when Henry III, builder of Westminster Abbey, sent the Earl of Leicester, Simon de Montfort (son of the leader of the Albigensian Crusade), to straighten out the disorders. That strong administrator, who was on the constitutional liberal side in English politics, was frustrated by Midi corruption. Only as the XIII century closed was built the present splendid choir of Bordeaux Cathedral, a classic work of Rayonnant Gothic before that phase turned to geometric rule. How technique cramped and killed inspiration can be seen in the later Rayonnant church of St. Michel. At St. André, it is true, the capitals are slight and the profiles not overvirile. Decadence is foreshadowed, but not yet is the art academic and wiredrawn. The Midi appears in the clearstory and triforium, which do not fill the entire space between the shafts. The partiality of the meridional for unencumbered interiors had something to do with making the procession path thirty feet wide. Most grateful is the traveler for a curving aisle around the sanctuary after having sojourned among the cupola and hall-like churches of Anjou and Aquitaine. Bordeaux’ choir possesses some good stained glass of its own period, and some of its buttress statues are among the best imagery of the XIV century. Mary Magdalene, carrying her vase of ointment, appears as a chatelaine of the Middle Ages with the bandeau under her chin then fashionable; Aliénor of Aquitaine could not have been very unlike her.
The most active patron of St. André’s Gothic choir was the archbishop of the city, Bertrand de Got, who in 1305 became Clement V, the first Avignon pope. When he died, in 1314, the new choir was practically completed. His image stands at the trumeau of the transept’s north door (the head and hand are reproductions), and around him are six prelates who may be intended to represent the French bishops whom Clement raised to the cardinalate. In technique these images may surpass the weather-beaten apostles at the Porte Royale (c. 1260), but they are their inferior in spirit. Five of the statues are studies from the same model. Casts of the transept portal of Bordeaux are in the Kensington Museum and in the Trocadéro. The Avignon popes were the chief art patrons of the XV century, with the four Valois princes—Charles V of France and his brothers at Dijon, Bourges, and Angers. No pontiff was more munificent than Clement V. While he was bishop at St. Bertrand-de-Comminges (Haute Garonne)[220] he renewed that small cathedral, which consists of two unequal parts, a Romanesque façade, donjon tower, and forechurch of the day when St. Bertrand had been bishop (1073-1123), and an unaisled Gothic choir, begun by Bertrand de Got, continued by him while pope and finished by Bishop Hugues de Chatillon, who died in 1352.