The cathedral of Angoulême shares with St. Front and Fontevrault the distinction of being the finest cupola church in France. It is unsurpassed in the setting on the edge of the city’s steep hill above the Charente valley. In ancient Angoumois, now the department of the Charente, are over five hundred XII-century Romanesque churches.[179]
Angoulême Cathedral was begun in 1109 by Bishop Gérard (1101-36), who had taught at Périgueux in the cathedral school and no doubt learned there to admire cupolas. His first dome at Angoulême—the easternmost one—is slightly later than the older cupola of St. Étienne at Périgueux. Bishop Gérard had the moral courage to rebuke the sinful union of the troubadour-duke, Guillaume IX, and the fair Vicomtesse Malbergeon, whose portrait he wore on his shield when he marched into battle. Guillaume informed Gérard that only when hair grew on his bald, prelate pate would he give up the lady of his affections. Gérard was papal legate in Gaul for Pascal II, Calixtus II, and the second Honorius, and was the prelate chosen, because of his eloquence, to be spokesman for the bishops who opposed Paschal II’s compromise with the German emperor on the question of investitures. And yet this able man, because Innocent II had not renewed his dignities, joined the anti-pope faction and took with him Guillaume X of Aquitaine. Only the passionate genius of St. Bernard was able to end the scandal.
The cathedral built at Angoulême by Bishop Gérard, like most of the churches of the southwest, lacks the charm of perspective, since it has neither curving processional path nor side aisle. A note of force is given to the interior by the strong projection of the buttress piers, more salient within the church than without. Farther to the south, when the Gothic day had dawned, buttresses were to be disguised as walls between the side chapels. The three cupolas that roof the nave—each covering a large square bay—are among the largest in France. The side walls are divided at mid-height: below is a huge blind arch, while above are two round-headed windows. Angoulême’s hemispherical domes on pendentives were sufficiently well constructed to dispense with plaster coatings, an advance over Cahors Cathedral and St. Étienne at Périgueux.
At the transept-crossing is an immense dome forming within the church a lantern lighted by a series of round-headed windows that open in its pedestal. The arrangement derives directly from the Orient and is rare in France. A very fine tower, whose stories lessen as they rise, covers the northern arm of the transept, and till the cathedral was sacked, during the XVI-century wars, a similar tower spanned the transept’s southern limb.
Angoulême’s elaborate XII-century façade is one of the noted pages of monumental decoration in France, a frontal more of ornate beauty than of power, in which M. André Michel finds the influence of old ivories. Tier on tier rise its carven scenes, with a Christ in Majesty crowning the whole. The XIX-century restorer, M. Paul Abadie, who worked such havoc at Périgueux, took equal liberties here. He made the upper story with its turrets topped by conical spires, and over-restored the principal sculptural groups. These pre-Gothic churches of southwest France obsessed his imagination, for when he came to design a church of his own he put up on the Mount of Martyrs in Paris a neo-Byzantine, neo-Gothic basilica most strangely reminiscent of Aquitaine as it stands in exotic isolation under the cold, northern sky.
Angoulême’s west façade had not long been completed when under its portal passed John Lackland to be married to the fourteen-year-old daughter of the Count of Angoulême, Isabella, already affianced to a Lusignan. Henry III of England, the builder of Westminster Abbey, was the fruit of that union. Twenty years later Isabella married the son of her discarded fiancé, and her jealousy filled France with war. Jezebel, the people called her. She rests in effigy at Fontevrault, beside the tomb of her great father-in-law, Henry II, the first Plantagenet.
FONTEVRAULT ABBEY CHURCH.[181]
A trait peculiar to this epoch is the close resemblance between the manners of men and women.... Men had the right to dissolve in tears, and women that of talking without prudery. The women appear distinctly superior. They were more serious, more subtle. Richard Cœur-de-Lion, the crowned poet-artist, a king whose noble manners and refined mind, in spite of his cruelty, exercised so strong an impression on his age, was formed by the brilliant Aliénor of Aquitaine. St. Louis was brought up exclusively by Blanche of Castile, and Joinville was the pupil of a widowed and regent mother.—Gareau, Social State of France During the Crusades.