The portal of the west façade greatly resembles another at St. Gilles, near by. It is a profusely ornamented doorway with richly foliaged stone carving and elaborate bas-reliefs.
The tympanum of the doorway contains the figure of a bishop in sacerdotal costume, doubtless St. Trophime, flanked by winged angels and lions. The sculptures here date perhaps from the period contemporary with the best work at Paris and Chartres,—well on into the Middle Ages,—when sculpture had not developed or perfected its style, but was rather a bad copy of the antique. This will be notably apparent when the stiffness and crudeness of the proportions of the figures are taken into consideration.
Cloisters, St. Trophime d'Arles
The wonderful cloister of St. Trophime is, on the east side, of Romanesque workmanship, with barrel vaulting, and dates from 1120. On the west it is of the transition style of a century later, while on the north the vaulting springs boldly into the Gothic of that period—well on toward 1400.
The capitals of the pillars of this cloistered courtyard are most diverse, and picture in delicately carved stone such scenes of Bible history and legend as the unbelief of St. Thomas, Ste. Marthe and the Tarasque, etc. It is a curious mélange of the vagaries of the stone carver of the Middle Ages,—these curiously and elaborately carved capitals,—but on the whole the ensemble is one of rare beauty, in spite of non-Christian and pagan accessories. These show at least how far superior the classical work of that time was to the later Renaissance.
The cemetery of Arles, locally known as Les Alyscamps, literally teems with mediæval and ancient funeral monuments; though many, of course, have been removed, and many have suffered the ravages of time, to say nothing of the Revolutionary period. One portion was the old pagan burial-ground, and another—marked off with crosses—was reserved for Christian burial.
It must have been accounted most holy ground, as the dead were brought thither for burial from many distant cities.
Danté mentions it in the "Inferno," Canto IX.:
| "Just as at Arles where the Rhône is stagnant |
| The sepulchres make all the ground unequal." |