Through the filial piety of Anne, her birthplace possesses the canto cygni of Gothic sculpture, “the most unscathed monument of the Middle Ages,” intact because it was taken apart and buried during the Revolution. The tomb of Anne’s parents, Francis II, the last duke of Brittany, and his duchess, is the work of a Breton, for an authentic manuscript has proved that Michel Colombe was born in Finistère, within sight of the Kreisker. His genius was fortified by long years passed in the art atmosphere of Tours, and strengthened, too, by the Flemish realism which had come into France by way of the Dijon school that led the first half of the XV century, even as the school of Tours, whose chief master was Colombe, led its latter half. Nor did this Breton, fecundated by Touraine and sturdy Burgundy, ignore the incoming Italian culture, as is shown by his preference for ideal beauty over absolute realism: Celt, Teuton, and Latin—all were needed for the making of the last of the great Gothic masters, one who held loyally to the spiritual essence of the Middle Ages in a day when Renaissance pomp was fast rising to supremacy.
Michel Colombe was seventy years of age when Anne of Brittany, on a visit to Tours shortly after her second marriage, commissioned him to make a mausoleum for her parents, for which she had imported white marble from Genoa, and black from Liège. From 1502 to 1507 Colombe worked on the larger images, in his studio at Tours. His are the recumbent figures of the duke and duchess, and the entrancing little angels who support their headcushion, ministering with the same loving willingness as the XII-century angels of Senlis’ lintel. From Colombe’s master hand are the four allegorical figures at the corners of the tomb, robust and graceful women, of the local type to be seen in central France to-day. They typify qualities of the defunct, Fortitude, Temperance, Prudence, and Justice—this last image said to be a study from Duchess Anne herself.
Centuries later a similar arrangement of symbolic figures was used by Paul Dubois for his noble tomb of General de Lamoricière (a son of Nantes), which balances, in the north arm of the transept, the ducal tomb to the south. Valor, Faith, Charity, and History, are the four corner statues that commemorate the pioneer of civilization in French Africa, who was so loved by the natives that he went freely among them unarmed, a modern hero who proved himself a true Breton by assuming the leadership of a lost cause.
Lesser masters of the school of Tours worked on the noted ducal tomb of Nantes; Guillaume Regnault made the small images and Jerome of Fiesole the arabesques, the same two masters who composed the tomb of the children of Anne of Brittany and Charles VIII, now in the cathedral at Tours. And when Michel Colombe had finished his statues, Anne had the Lyons master, Jean Perréal, one of the most active agents in popularizing in France the new art standards of Italy, visit Nantes to supervise the erection of the mausoleum whose ordinance he had designed.
THE CATHEDRAL OF QUIMPER[382]
Ce qui me charme en toi, Quimper de Cornouailles,
C’est ton cœur paysan sous tes airs de cité.
—Anatole Le Braz.
Like the chief church at St. Pol-de-Léon, and that of Tréguier, St. Corentin at Quimper is “widowed of its bishop.” Admirably situated, it stands with all the dignity of a cathedral above the pleasant little “river city of gables and fables,” which etches itself on the memory. It is a well-cared-for shrine, full of warm Breton piety, seen at its richest during the pardon gatherings of August 15th.
Bishop Rainaud laid the first stone of Quimper Cathedral in 1239. Its ambulatory copied a disposition first used in Soissons Cathedral, but repeated only here and at Bayonne, though across the Rhine it became popular. The vault ribs of each chapel meet in the same keystone as the ribs of that section of the procession path on which the chapel opens. About 1280 a little shrine, which had stood in the rear of the cathedral, separated from it by a lane, was joined to the ambulatory of the new Gothic choir by means of a canted bay. This improvised Lady chapel increased the irregular alignment of the church. The deviation of Quimper’s axis is extraordinary. Standing in its central aisle, at the rear of the nave, you cannot see the first of the three bays that usually are apparent at the apse curve, and such is the bend of the choir that its southern aisle possesses one more bay than does the aisle to the north. When the time came to replace the Romanesque nave by the actual one, that new Gothic edifice might have straightened somewhat the axial line by following the false orientation of the choir. But apparently the proximity of the episcopal quarters prevented this being done.
The choir of St. Corentin retains the canopy-image windows of Jamin Sohier (1417), and the nave, those of the Jamin Sohier of a second generation; a western window is dated 1496. The shield and helmet of one of Brittany’s dukes of the Montfort line, Anne’s immediate forebear, adorn the gable of the main façade. The cathedral works ceased during the first part of the Hundred Years’ War; the choir was not roofed in stone till the first quarter of the XV century. In 1424 the nave was begun and the foundations of the west towers laid. Quimper’s towers derive directly from the famous one of St. Pierre at Caen. There are the same deep, elongated twin-window recesses serving as buttresses. After another period of inactivity, the cathedral’s nave was vaulted. In the latter part of the XIX century the west towers received their crowning of crocketed spires, paid for by a popular collection called “the penny of St. Corentin.”
How these dwellers by the sea love their obsolete local saints! How certain they are that to forget them is to lose infinitely precious links with the past. The solidarity of ancestors with descendants is no dead letter in Finistère, that lives not by bread alone. One knows that the white-coiffed women of Quimper—and their daily gathering in their mediæval church makes a brave showing—would not love this shrine of St. Corentin so well had it a name common to western Christendom. But St. Corentin, St. Tugdual, St. Huec, St. Iltud, St. Budoc, St. Jacut, St. Jubel, St. Gulstan, St. Comery—ah, those are the potent ones before the heavenly throne when a true Breton needs assistance!