In Clermont, though the cathedral of 1095 has been superseded by the present Gothic structure, there is intact a venerated sanctuary where Urban had a votive Mass chanted on the eve of the historic council. Every morning one can see the men and women of the city gather in the crypt of Notre Dame-du-Port to beg a blessing on their working day. They may not be able to put into words what it is each feels in that subterranean chamber impregnated by the petitions of those of their race who have gone before them, but each knows that here his prayer has plenitude and patriotic aspiration. A custodia matutina in Notre Dame-du-Port, usque ad noctem in the cathedral. One fears God in the cathedral, one loves God in Notre Dame.
Notre Dame-du-Port is a masterpiece of the Romanesque school of Auvergne.[209] When it was built lava stone was not in use for construction, but solely for decorative purposes. So curiously alike are all the pre-Gothic churches in this province that one architect might have planned them. The venerable crypt of Notre Dame-du-Port was built in the XI century. The Romanesque church above it was constructed during the XII century and has all the Auvergnese traits: a central tower in two stories set on a barlong which forms a kind of upper transept, a compact apse with snug absidioles whose exterior walls are decorated by colored volcanic stones in marquetry designs, a western narthex, and a principal span covered by a half-barrel vault undivided by transverse arches and buttressed by side aisles surmounted by tribunes, which meant that light entered the middle vessel indirectly. Auvergne, like Burgundy, attempted to light her upper church by a clearstory, but found the experiment hazardous and gave it up. Her churches have stood intact through centuries of harsh winters. The very mortar lines were made means of decoration; wide bands of red mortar were found to be effective with blocks of black lava.[210] In the volcanic soil of Auvergne were elements that rendered mortar as resistant as stone. The local Gallo-Romans had used the polychrome lava as decoration.
The interior apse of Notre Dame-du-Port is a gem of masoncraft. Around the tiny processional path stand engaged pillars that are decoration and buttresses, too. The regional skill in sculpture appears in the capitals of the main piers, where the story is related with animation, even if the figures are too squat and the heads too large. The armor indicates that the work was done early in the XII century. The doorjamb images at the southern entrance of the transept were sculptured in the years when St. Thomas Becket came to Clermont wearing the white robe of the Cistercians who had given him hospitality in France. Crowds gathered every day to receive his blessing, for all Christendom held him to be a saint defending right and liberty. A cast of Clermont’s archaic portal, whose charm is exceptional, with its seraphim of the mystic triple wings, has been placed in the Trocadéro Museum at Paris. When this side entrance was completed, Richard Cœur-de-Lion was making over his claims in Auvergne to his lifetime rival, Philippe-Auguste, which cession was to lead, in time, to the erection of the Ile-de-France Picardy cathedral of Clermont.
Some of the most admirably sculptured capitals in Auvergne are at Mozac, a suburb of Riom.[211] The nave of Mozac’s abbey church was built from 1131 to 1147 by a brother of Peter the Venerable, who made Cluny’s nave, and of the doughty abbot, Pons de Montboissier, who erected Vézelay’s portico of paradise, all three of them belonging to a feudal family of Auvergne. The small abbatial holds a priceless treasure, the reliquary of St. Calmin, which an abbot presented in 1168. Its fourteen panels of Limoges enamel are ornamented in gold. A bold attempt was made to rob the church of this national heritage, so it is now protected by electric bells and every kind of burglar alarm.
“Clermont le riche, Riom le beau,” so ran the old saying. Riom, the small but proud rival of the capital of Auvergne, was a town of magistrates who built themselves Gothic Renaissance houses as individual as the pre-Gothic work of the province. The church of St. Amable has a Romanesque nave and an early-Gothic choir. Jean, Duke of Berry, had Guy and André de Dammartin design the XIV-century Sainte-Chapelle for his palace at Riom. Its brilliantly cold stained glass was commanded for the wedding, in 1389, of sixty-year-old Duke John and the thirteen-year-old heiress, Jeanne de Boulogne. Froissart has described the curious union. Each window panel has a single statue under a canopy; the prophets and apostles carry appropriately inscribed scrolls. A XV-century window, representing the Bourbon dukes, Jean II and Pierre II, patrons of Moulins, contains a St. Marguerite so similar to one in the “Book of Hours” which Jehan Fouquet painted for Étienne Chevalier that the window is thought to be designed by the great primitif of Tours.
It may be to artists of Jean de Berry’s entourage that we owe the most entrancing Madonna of Flamboyant art, the vierge à l’oiseau, an image in the regional stone which stands at the trumeau of the XV-century church of Notre Dame-du Mathuret. One student after another has discussed the date of this exquisite figure, so purely French in essence, whose simplicity is as ample and unaffected as the best XIII-century art. Work as exceptional as this is of no date or school, but is due to some unrecorded individual genius. In that same late-Gothic day the spirit of St. Louis and Joinville lived again in The Very Joyous, Pleasing and Diverting History of the Gentle Lord of Bayard, written by the Loyal Servitor.
The serrated foliage of the Madonna’s crown proves the sculpture to be late-Gothic. M. Gonse places it midway in the XIV century, M. Vitry early in the XVI, and M. Enlart thinks that it could not have been produced before the XV century. MM. Mâle, Palustre, Merimée, and others have discussed it. In the ideal innocence and dignity of the Virgin is Michel Colombe’s charm. The legend was that in Egypt the infant Jesus modeled images of birds, then breathed on them, imparting life. This is the mystic moment which the unknown master of Riom chose to render; there is a brooding reverence in the young mother’s face as she gazes at her Son, who ponders in a divine wonderment at a bird about to fly from his hand.
THE ROMANESQUE CATHEDRAL OF LE PUY[212]
Into whatever country you carry war, remember that children, women and churchmen and the poor are not your enemies.—(Dying words of Bertrand Duguesclin, killed near Le Puy, 1380).