"Puits?" interrogated a sullen maid, laconically, as she opened to us. We followed in silence. Truly the present home of the Well is depressing, and I wish the authorities would remove it to a safe and more cheerful spot in the precincts of the ducal palace.
But the work itself, though despoiled, by wind and rain, of the calvary that crowned it, and though quite denuded of the gold and brilliant colours with which it once blazed, remains one of the strongest and most impressive pieces of sculpture in existence. Naturally, as one would expect in the case of a work completed so early as the sixth year of the fifteenth century, there are serious and obvious faults—for instance, the figures are too short, the hands and feet generally too small, and the drapery, in some points, badly handled—but all the personalities are so striking, so individual, the whole is so strongly grouped, that the effect is more than majestic. As M. Germain well says: "Il y a un souffle épique dans ces figures." Stand for five minutes before the stern, inflexible face of the law-giver; compare that statue, mentally, with the Moses of Michael Angelo, to which alone it is inferior, and you will begin to realize Claus Sluter's genius as a sculptor of the human face and form. He broke away boldly from primitive and conventional traditions, and went straight to nature, to the men about him, for his types. These strong physiognomies and massive forms are eminently Burgundian.[152]
In the portal of the chapel the guide will show you other, and rather earlier work, generally attributed to Claus Sluter, namely, five statues representing Philippe le Hardi and his wife Margaret of Flanders, being presented to the Virgin by Saint Catherine and Saint John. Four of them may well be from the chisel of the famous sculptor, but I think, with M. Germain, that the figure of the Virgin is wrongly attributed, chiefly for the reason that the proportions are much longer than those of other Sluterian statues.
And what of the man whose genius was to exercise such influence upon Burgundian art? Little is known of him. He remains an enigmatic, mysterious figure, living for us only through his work, and that of the school of which he was the inspiring force. He died in 1406, the same year in which he had finished his Puits des Prophètes; leaving to his nephew, Claus de Werve, the task of further realizing their new ideals in sculpture.
Thus it came about that the second Claus—an artist not unworthy to follow his uncle—was entrusted with the construction of the next great Burgundian monument we have to consider, the tomb of Philippe le Hardi, now in the great hall of the musée, once the "salle des gardes" of the Ducal Palace. The commission had been given originally, in 1384, to Jean de Marville, who died after completing the masonry and the alabaster gallery. Claus Sluter made some progress with the pleurants, but it was not completed until the end of 1410, when young De Werve had been at work upon it for four years.
The masterpiece was received with universal acclamations. Jean sans Peur, with a Valois' eye for the beautiful, recognised the merit of his new imagier, and commissioned him forthwith to do his (the Duke's) own tomb. Claus accepted the task, but was never able to get to work. Money lacked; and the Duke of Burgundy was too deeply involved in the political struggles of his time to give heed to such trifles as financing the construction of a tomb, even though it were his own. So poor Claus, filled with a glorious ideal that he was never able to see realized in stone, wasted his life in waiting, waiting, until, in 1439, death found him, poor and unknown, and laid him in an obscure tomb, not of his own design, in the Chartreuse de Champnol. So fare they who hang upon princes' favours.
When Jean sans Peur had expiated, at Montereau, the crime of which I shall presently tell, his son, Philippe le Bon, had perforce to look about him for another imagier to do the work. His choice fell, unwisely, upon a Spaniard from Aragon, one Jean de la Huerta, an unscrupulous rascal, who bolted from Dijon in 1455, taking with him cash that he had not earned, and leaving behind him the tomb, void of sculpture, except the angels and the tabernacles of the gallery. The monument was completed, in 1466-1470, by his successor, Antoine le Moiturier, of Avignon.