It is said that twenty centuries of human effort are represented by the stones of Tours Cathedral.[156] In the base of its façade towers are remains of the city’s III-century walls, which had been constructed in their turn with the big stones stolen from the local Roman temples of 50 B.C. For sixteen centuries Mass has been said on this site. In the southwest tower are vestiges of Gregory of Tours’ VI-century church, and in the northwest tower traces of the Romanesque cathedral on which worked the philosopher and theologian, Hildebert de Lavardin, the most popular poet of his age and one of the builders of Le Mans Cathedral before promoted to be Tours’ sixty-fourth archbishop (1125-34). In refuting Berengar, a canon of Tours, who taught a confused doctrine concerning the Eucharist, Bishop Hildebert was the first to use the term “transubstantiation” in its theological sense. It is said that the custom of elevating the Host in the Mass resulted from the eucharistic controversies started by Berengar.
In 1167 a fire, caused by a quarrel over crusaders’ treasure, between Louis VII and Henry II Plantagenet, destroyed the Romanesque cathedral of Tours. Bishop Joscion, who died in 1173, planned to construct a Plantagenet Gothic church, since Touraine was in large part under Angevin control, and to the church he began belongs the graceful bombé vault borne on eight slender branches beneath the northwest tower. In 1191 Richard Cœur-de-Lion came to his city of Tours to receive the crusaders’ insignia before his venture to the East. His ransom drained the land of building funds. For that cause or another, the projected work at Tours languished. The actual choir was begun only about 1210, when the city had become a part of the royal domain, and its new master Philippe-Auguste wrote that he held the church of Tours to be one of the chief jewels of his crown, and that whosoever molested it touched his (the king’s) person.
We do not know who was the original architect of la Gatienne. Étienne de Mortagne, who designed the Benedictine church at Marmoutier, is mentioned, in 1269, as master-of-works at the cathedral, but by that time its choir was completed. That choir, while making no pretense of being sublime, is a monument of noble robustness, displaying within and without the veriest genius of good taste. The vista closing the eastern end of the church is one of the most satisfactory in France, owing to its right proportion. In this, Tours derives directly from Amiens. Its pier arcade comprises one-third of the interior wall elevation; and the triforium and clearstory make up the other two-thirds—clearstory being double the height of triforium. At Tours the relation of span and height is admirable, and both are well correlated with length. Seen in perspective down the nave, the three stories of colored glass around the sanctuary are the supreme impression of this church interior, and seldom does one pass from its west portal without turning back for a lingering look at that harmonious chevet of consecrated light. Through the pier arches can be seen symmetrically the windows of the apse chapels. The design of the glazed triforium is excelled by no other in France; though serving as a kind of pedestal for the upper lights, it retains its own entity.
When the choir of Tours was completed, the builders proceeded at once to erect the transept which, the stones themselves say, must have been finished as the XIII century closed. The nave’s easternmost bays touching it belong to the first years of the next century, as do the two rose windows of the transept. The northern rose is irreproachable in design and of the same scintillating jewel tradition as XIII-century glass.
The Hundred Years’ War, here as elsewhere, checked building activities. When they were resumed at Tours, happily the first plans were adhered to, so that choir and nave are homogeneous. As the church advanced toward the west, the window tracery changed from Rayonnant to Flamboyant, the profiles grew prismatic, and the sculpture of the capitals became naturalistic rather than an architectural interpretation of foliage. The nave was made narrower than the choir, probably with the intention of joining it to the XII-century façade. Of the four triumphal piers at the transept-crossing, the two westernmost ones stand closer together than those flanking the choir, whose spacious procession path causes the side aisles of the nave to appear meager.
What might seem an overreasonableness in the architecture of Tours metropolitan church is offset by the glory of its jeweled windows. Between 1260 and 1270 the choir’s upper lights were placed, and considering their date, they are exceptional in still being of the legend-medallions type rather than large single figures. Blue is set in greenish white with good effect, contrasting happily with certain contemporary windows at Paris, where the juxtaposition of blue and red produced melancholy purple. The joyous sparkling tone of Tours’ lights proves a skillful use of pot-metal yellow. More care was taken to tell the legends plainly than to put borders round each medallion.
The glass of Tours belongs to the Paris school, though made, doubtless, by local workers. Were a floor laid below the triforium of the choir, its fifteen upper windows, composing a veritable pavilion of glass, would be almost a replica of the Sainte-Chapelle, and one recalls that it was Archbishop Odo of Tours who on April 25, 1248, dedicated for St. Louis his new shrine at Paris. The donors of Tours’ great windows were churchmen and laymen, the lowly and the mighty. Bishop Geoffrey de Loudon, builder of Le Mans’ glorious choir, presented a light, as did Tours’ own prelate and a group of parish priests. Small craftsmen were donors, drapers, and day laborers, and of course Queen Blanche’s donjons of Castile are to be seen. Her window, devoted to St. James, the patron of Spain, is splendid in hue.
The fourth clearstory window on the north excels in color harmony. They call it the Adam window, after the first tiller of the soil. It was presented by plowmen, and relates their field labors as well as the story of Genesis. On one side of the central light of the clearstory is a dazzling Tree of Jesse, the gift of a furrier and his wife. Next to it is a window devoted to St. Martin, whose story is told again, in the late XIII-century glass of an apse chapel. More French churches have been dedicated to St. Martin than to any other patron save Notre Dame. The windows of the sanctuary north of the axis chapel, though mixed in design, excel all others in exquisite color, being composed of fragments from St. Martin’s abbatial reset here. The New Alliance window in the Lady chapel has medallions of Christ bearing His Cross and the Crucifixion accompanied by such symbols and prefigurings as Elisha resuscitating the child, Jonah issuing from the whale’s jaws, the brazen serpent, and Moses striking the rock.
All the world was a symbol to the men of those Ages of Faith. The interlinked petals of the transept’s northern rose meet in a symbol of the Divinity—a knot without beginning or end—the forma universal visioned by Dante. There are Frenchmen who think that the splendid rose windows in their Gothic cathedrals suggested to the exile of Florence his conception of the empyrean. Heaven as Dante visioned it had neither roof of gold nor pillars of jasper, but was an expanded, supernal, white rose.
Once the nave of Tours Cathedral was filled with late-Gothic windows, but storms wrecked many of them. Some of its glass has been set in a line of lights beneath the transept’s north rose, XV-century panels representing members of the Bourbon Vendôme family, that was to mount the French throne with Henry IV. Jean Fouquet might have drawn them. Under the XVI-century rose in the west façade is another row of windows containing good portraits of art patrons as munificent as the Bourbons—the Laval-Montmorency family. All over France we find them as donors of beautiful things.