The idea of the Gothic cathedral : interdisciplinary perspectives on the meanings of the medieval edifice in the modern period [Bilingual ed.] 9782503568133, 2503568130

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The Idea of the Gothic Cathedral

Ritus et Artes

General Editor Nils Holger Petersen, University of Copenhagen Editorial Board Gunilla Iversen, Stockholm University Richard Utz, Georgia Institute of Technology Nicolas Bell, Trinity College, Cambridge Mette B. Bruun, University of Copenhagen Eyolf Østrem, University of Copenhagen

Previously published volumes in this series are listed at the back of the book

Volume 9

The Idea of the Gothic Cathedral Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Meanings of the Medieval Edifice in the Modern Period Edited by

Stephanie A. Glaser

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

© 2018, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. D/2018/0095/142 ISBN: 978-2-503-56813-3 e-ISBN: 978-2-503-56814-0 DOI: 10.1484/M.RITUS-EB.5.110418 Printed on acid-free paper

Comment pourrions-nous comprendre l’unité profonde de la grande symphonie gothique? Auguste Rodin, Les Cathédrals de France (1914)

Contents

List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgements xvii Introduction: The Medi­eval Edifice in the Modern Period Stephanie A. Glaser

1

Part I. The Cathedral and the Nation The Moorish-Gothic Cathedral: Invention, Reality, or Weapon? Matilde Mateo

Acting Medi­eval, Thinking Modern, Feeling German Michael J. Lewis

L’Histoire d’une cathédrale: Viollet-le-Duc’s Nationalist Pedagogy Elizabeth Emery

The Gothic Cathedral and Historiographies of Space Kevin D. Murphy

47

81

101

131

Contents

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Part II. The Cathedral between Art and Politics The Anarchist Cathedral Maylis Curie

L’Imaginaire de la cathédrale à l’épreuve de la Grande Guerre Joëlle Prungnaud

Church, Nation, and the ‘Stones of France’ Ronald R. Bernier

149

171

197

Part III. The Cathedral in the Arts Patterns of Behaviour: Architectural Representation in the Romantic Period Klaus Niehr

Frozen Music and Symphonies in Stone: Gothic Architecture and the Musical Analogy from the Enlightenment through the Fin-de-Siècle Stephanie A. Glaser

Délires opiomanes et gothicomanes de Thomas De Quincey à Wilfred Sätty Jean-Michel Leniaud

The Cathedral as Time Machine: Art, Architecture, and Religion Richard Utz

233

263

313

337

Select Bibliography

353

Index

365

List of Illustrations

Matilde Mateo Figure 1.1. Nathaniel Armstrong Wells, Interior of the Cathedral, Seville, print from N. A. Wells, The Picturesque Anti­quities of Spain. 1846. . . . . . 48 Figure 1.2. David Roberts, Seville Cathedral, Entrance to the Court of the Orange Trees, print from Thomas Roscoe, The Tourist in Spain: Andalusia. 1836. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 Figure 1.3. F. J. Parcerisa, Catedral de Cuenca (nave del crucero), print from Jose María Quadrado, Recuerdos y bellezas de España: Castilla la Nueva, vol. iii. 1853. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 Figure 1.4. F. J. Parcerisa, Interior de la catedral de Avila, print from Jose María Quadrado, Recuerdos y bellezas de España: Salamanca, Avila y Segovia, vol. x. 1865. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 Figure 1.5. F. J. Parcerisa, Claustros de la catedral de Segovia, print from Jose María Quadrado, Recuerdos y bellezas de España: Salamanca, Avila y Segovia, vol. x. 1865. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 Figure 1.6. N.-M.-J. Chapuy, Galerie du Jardin de la Cathédrale de Barcelonne, print from Nicholas-Marie-Joseph Chapuy, Le Moyen âge monumental et archéologique, pt. 4. 1840–43. . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 Figure 1.7. Jenaro Perez Villaamil, View in the Choir of the Cathedral at Toledo, from James Fergusson, The Illustrated Handbook of Architecture, vol. ii. 1855. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 Figure 1.8. David Roberts, West-Front of the Cathedral at Burgos, print from Thomas Roscoe, The Tourist in Spain: Biscay and the Castiles. 1837. . . . . . 55

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list of iLLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1.9. David Roberts, The Court of the Lions, print from Thomas Roscoe, The Tourist in Spain: Granada, vol. i. 1835. . . . . . . . . . . . 66 Figure 1.10. Girault de Prangey, Vue intérieure de la mosquée, Cordove, print from Girault de Prangey, Monuments Arabes et Moresques de Cordove, Séville et Grenade, pt. 1. 1836–39. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 Figure 1.11. John Frederick Lewis, The Mosque at Córdoba (The Cathedral), print from J. F. Lewis, Sketches on Spain and Spanish Character. 1834. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 Figure 1.12. Girault de Prangey, Mirah ou Sanctuaire de la mosquée, print from Girault de Prangey, Monuments Arabes et Moresques de Cordove, Séville et Grenade, pt. 1. 1836–39. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 Figure 1.13. Jenaro Pérez Villaamil, Torre de Santa María de Illescas, print from La España Artística y Monumental, vol. ii. Paris, 1844. . . . . . . 70 Michael J. Lewis Figure 2.1. Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Gedenkdom für die Freiheitskriege (Dom der Freiheit) auf dem Potsdamer Platz, Berlin, side elevation, print on paper, 41.5 × 61.6 cm, Berlin, Architekturmuseum TU Berlin, Inv. Nr. 15421. 1814. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82 Figure 2.2. [Kölner Dom: Aufriss der Südseite in antizipierter Vollendung], from Sulpiz Boisserée, Ansichten, Risse und einzelne Theile des Domes von Köln, Weimar, Klassik Stiftung Weimar. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 Figure 2.3. Caspar David Friedrich, Abtei im Eichwald (The Abbey in the Oakwood), oil on canvas, 110.4 × 171 cm, Berlin, Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. 1809/10. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88 Figure 2.4. August Wilhelm Julius Ahlborn, copy of Schinkel’s lost 1813 painting, Gotischer Dom am Wasser (Gothic Cathedral by the Water), oil on canvas, 80 × 106.5 cm, Berlin, Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. 1823. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 Figure 2.5. Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Berlin. Friedrichswerdersche Kirche. Aus­geführter Entwurf. Perspektivische Ansicht, Quill in black and grey over preparatory graphite drawing with compass on paper, 29.1 × 39.7 cm, Berlin: Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. 1828. . . . . . . . 92

list of iLLUSTRATIONS

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Figure 2.6. Wilhelm Stier, Berliner Dom. Perspektivische Ansicht Entwurf IV, coloured print on paper, 33.1 × 44.5 cm, Berlin, Architekturmuseum TU Berlin, Inv. Nr. 17018. c. 1840. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 Figure 2.7. Anton Hallmann, Entwurf zu einem neuen Dom, Berlin: Perspektivishe Ansicht von der Spree aus, Sketch, pencil painted in watercolours on cardboard, 72.8 × 86.6 cm, Berlin, Architekturmuseum TU Berlin, Inv. Nr. 1710. 1840. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 Figure 2.8. Vincent Statz, Berliner Dom. Ansicht, ink-wash drawing on paper, 110 × 79 cm, Berlin, Architekturmuseum TU Berlin, Inv. Nr. 16924. 1868. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 Figure 2.9. Lyonel Feininger, Kathedrale. Titelblatt für das Programm des Staatlichen Bauhauses in Weimar, woodcut on red paper, 31 × 19.1 cm, Chemnitz, Kunstsammlung Chemnitz. 1919. . . . . . . . . . . . 98 Elizabeth Emery Figure 3.1. Advertisement for Hetzel’s various book collections, featuring Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale as a new publication for the Christmas season, L’Illustration, 14 December 1878. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102 Figure 3.2. Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Cathédrale idéale, thirteenth-century cathedral based on the model used in Reims, Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française du xie au xvie siècle, vol. ii, fig. 18, p. 324. . . . . . . . 105 Figure 3.3. Viollet-le-Duc, Vue de la cathédrale de Clusy commencement du xiiie siècle, Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale, fig. 22. . . . . . 105 Figure 3.4. Viollet-le-Duc, Armes de la ville de Clusy, Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale, frontispiece. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 Figure 3.5. Viollet-le-Duc, Le Maire empêche la destruction des statues de la cathédrale, Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale, fig. 48 bis. . . 123 Figure 3.6. Viollet-le-Duc, title page of Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128

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list of iLLUSTRATIONS

Kevin D. Murphy Figure 4.1. Bisson Frères, Notre-Dame de Paris, façade, photograph, 48 × 31 cm, Paris, Musée d’Orsay. Second half of nineteenth century. . . 141 Maylis Curie Figure 5.1. Camille Pissarro, title page of Turpitudes sociales, pen and brown ink over graphite drawings on paper pasted in an album, 31 × 24 cm, private collection, Switzerland. 1889–90. . . . 154 Figure 5.2. Camille Pissarro, Vue de Rouen, cours la Reine, print, 14.8 × 19.9 cm, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Estampes et de la photographie. 1884. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156 Figure 5.3. Camille Pissarro, La Rue Malpalue, à Rouen, print, 19.8 × 15 cm, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Estampes et de la photographie. c. 1883–85 . . . . . . . . . 157 Figure 5.4. Camille Pissarro, Les Toits du vieux Rouen, temps gris (la cathédrale) / The Roofs of Old Rouen, Gray Weather, oil on canvas, 72.3 × 91.4 cm, Toledo Museum of Art, 1896. . . . . . . . . . . 160 Figure 5.5. Camille Pissarro, Rue de l’Épicerie, Rouen, oil on canvas, 81.3  × 6.1 cm, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 1898. . . . 162 Figure 5.6. Maximilien Luce, Le Quai Saint-Michel et Notre-Dame, oil on canvas, 73 × 60 cm, Paris, Musée d’Orsay. 1901. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166 Figure 5.7. Maximilen Luce, Notre-Dame, oil on canvas, 81.28 × 60.64 cm, San Diego Museum of Art, 1985.77, c. 1900. . . . . . . . 167 Joëlle Prungnaud Figure 6.1. Dessin inédit de Mérovak, « L’Homme des cathédrales », dans Léon Riotor, « L’Homme des cathédrales », La Plume, no 225, 1er sept 1898, p. 527, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France. . . . . . . . . . 176 Figure 6.2. Dessin inédit de ­Mérovak, « L’Homme des cathé­drales », dans Léon Riotor, « L’Homme des cathédrales », La Plume, no 225, 1er sept 1898, p. 529, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France. . . . . . . . . . 177

list of iLLUSTRATIONS

xiii

Figure 6.3. [Mérovak], première de couverture, La Cathédrale des morts, Aix-les-Bains, imprimerie P. A. Gerente [1918], Paris, Biblio­thèque nationale de France. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185 Figure 6.4. [Mérovak], La Cathédrale des morts, Aix-les-Bains, imprimerie P. A. Gerente [1918], Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France. . . . . . . . . 187 Ronald R. Bernier Figure 7.1. Auguste Rodin, Les Cathédrales de France, lithographic proofs of drawings, retouched in graphite, 12 7/8" × 9 7/16" c. 1910–14. . . . . . . . . 201 Klaus Niehr Figure 8.1. Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc / E. Guillaumot, Gothic Window, wood engraving, from Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française du xie au xvie siècle, 10 vols (Paris: Librairies-Imprimeries Réunis, [n.d.]), v, 385. . . . . . . . . . . 232 Figure 8.2. George Lewis / I. Byrne, Rouen, Rue du Bac, etching, 22.3 × 13.6 cm, from Dibdin, A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour, i, plate facing p. 112. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239 Figure 8.3. Thomas Frognall Dibdin, Angel at the Tomb of Christ. Benedictional of Archbishop Robert, Rouen, Bibliothèque municipale, MS Y 7, fol. 21v, woodcut, 14 × 10.5 cm, from Dibdin, A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour, i, 171. . . . . . . . . . . 240 Figure 8.4. George Lewis / H. Le Keux, Rouen Cathedral. South Transept, etching, 16.4 × 19.1 cm, from Dibdin, A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour, i. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 242 Figure 8.5. George Lewis / S. Rawle, Front View of Strasbourg Cathedral, etching, 24 × 15.9 cm, from Dibdin, A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour, iii, plate following p. 12. . . . . . . . . . . 247 Figure 8.6. Alexandre-Évariste Fragonard / G. Engelmann, Ruines de la grande Église de l’Abbaye de St. Wandrille (Ruins of the Abbey Church of Saint-Wandrille), lithograph, 30.9 × 23.8 cm, from Voyages pittoresques: Ancienne Normandie, i, plate 23. 1820. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 252

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Figure 8.7. Alexandre-Évariste Fragonard / G. Engelmann, Fragmens, grande Église l’Abbaye de St. Wandrille (Northern transept of the Abbey Church of Saint-Wandrille), lithograph, 32.9 × 23.8 cm, from Voyages pittoresques: Ancienne Normandie, i, plate 24. 1820. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253 Figure 8.8. E.-Hyacinthe Langlois / Espérance Langlois, Vue générale des ruines de l’église abble. de St. Wandrille Prise du fond de l’abside (Ruins of the Abbey Church of Saint-Wandrille), etching, 24.7 × 15.9 cm. From Langlois, Essai historique et descriptif sur l’abbaye de Fontenelle ou de Saint-Wandrille, plate III, following p. 26. 1827. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 254 Figure 8.9. E.-Hyacinthe Langlois, Vue du Cloître de St Wandrille prise de l’Angle Nd.Ot. (Cloisters of Saint-Wandrille), etching, 13.9 × 15.7 cm, from Langlois, Essai historique et descriptif sur l’abbaye de Fontenelle ou de Saint-Wandrille, plate V, following p. 86. 1827. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255 Figure 8.10. Edward Cresy / C. L. Taylor / J. Le Keux, Canterbury Cathedral Church, Section of nave and aisles at the west end; with elevation of the two towers, etching, from John Britton, The History and Antiquities of the Metropolitical Church of Canterbury, plate III. 1821. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257 Jean-Michel Leniaud Figure 10.1. Musée des monuments français. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 314 Figure 10.2. Ernst Ferdinand Oehme, Dom im Winter (La Cathédrale en hiver), huile sur toile, 127 × 100 cm, Dresde, Galerie Neue Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen. 1821. . . . . 315 Figure 10.3. Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Mittelalterliche Stadt an einem Fluß (Ville médiévale au bord d’un fleuve), huile sur toile, Berlin, Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. 1815. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 316 Figure 10.4. J. M. W. Turner, Tintern Abbey, the Transept, aquarelle, 34,5 × 25,4 cm, Londres, British Museum. c. 1795. . . . . . . . . . 317 Figure 10.5. John Constable, Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows, huile sur toile, 153,7 × 192,0 cm, Londres, Tate Gallery. 1831. . . . . . . . . 318

list of iLLUSTRATIONS

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Figure 10.6. William Kent, Merlin’s Cave (The Section of Merlin’s cave in the Royal Gardens at Richmond — As designed by Mr Kent), gravure, Some Designs of Mr Inigo Jones and Mr Wm. Kent, plate 32. 1744. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 319 Figure 10.7. Alexander Carse, « Willow Cathedral » Built by Sir James Hall in his Garden, dessin, Londres, Royal Institute of British Architects, Library Drawings Collection. 1792. RIBA Collections. . . . . 320 Figure 10.8. Heinrich Christoph Jussow, Löwenburg, Kassel, Löwenburg. 1793–1801. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 321 Figure 10.9. Charles Wild, North-West View of Fonthill Abbey, aquarelle sur papier, 29,2 × 23,5 cm, collection privée. Autour de 1815. . . . . . . . . 323 Figure 10.10. Bellut (charpentier), Charpente de la flèche de la Sainte- Chapelle, Paris, photo. 1853–55. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 324 Figure 10.11. Wilfried Sätty, Neogothic Vision, dans Fitz Hugh Ludlow, The Hasheesh Eater. 1975. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 331 Figure 10.12. Louis Morin, L’Église, dans Claude Farrère, Fumée d’opium. 1904. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 332 Figure 10.13. Henri Mayeux, Chapelle de Saint-Guénolé, dans Fantaisies architecturales, planche 51. 1890. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 332 Figure 10.14. Henri Mayeux, Clé pendante, dans Fantaisies architecturales, planche 10. 1890. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 334

Acknowledgements

T

he idea for this volume originated with the colloquium ‘The Idea of the Gothic Cathedral from the Post-Medi­eval to the Post-Modern’ held at the Uni­ver­sity of Copenhagen in 2005. Hosted by the Centre for the Study of the Cultural Heritage of Medi­eval Rituals, it was the first of its kind to bring together a group of international specialists on post-medi­eval interpretations and uses of the Gothic cathedral. The original group, Elizabeth Emery, Luc Fraisse, Stephanie Glaser, Séolène Le Men, Jean-Michel Leniaud, Matilde Mateo, Kevin Murphy, Klaus Niehr, and Joëlle Prungnaud, profited from a rousing exchange about the crossovers and differences in national discourses on the Gothic, which brought our attention to the different emphases of the national scholarly discourses outlined in my introduction. The volume took shape over time, as other scholars whose research would throw light on particular aspects of the subject were invited to contribute, namely, Ronald R. Bernier, Maylis Curie, Michael J. Lewis, and Richard Utz. I wish to extend my heartfelt thanks to each contributor for their unfailing patience and unceasing willingness to work with me through all the volume’s stages. This volume would not have been possible without outside help. I am grateful for the generous support of the Danish National Research Foundation and the Centre for the Study of the Cultural Heritage of Medi­eval Rituals. I would like to make special mention of my colleagues at the Centre, Margrete Syrstad Andås, Mette Birkedal Bruun, Sven Rune Havsteen, Jeremy Llewllyn, and Eyolf Østrem, and thank them for years of productive collaboration. I am indebted to Nils Holger Petersen, who headed the Centre, for his faith in the project and for being one of its most enthusiastic supporters. The volume has greatly profited from our external reviewer’s knowledge about the subject and its cultural context, and I express my gratitude for the detailed suggestions which enriched the individual essays and helped us improve the weaker spots. My sincere appreciation goes to Sophie Duval for her meticulous proofreading of the French essays. All remaining errors and shortcomings are my own.

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Many institutions have granted their support of this volume, and I would particularly like to thank Richard B. Sieber and the Philadelphia Museum of Art for generously providing the beautiful Rodin drawing that graces the cover of this book. I gratefully acknowledge Joel Silver and his staff at the Lilly Library at Indiana Uni­ver­sity, Rosemary Paprocki at the Rochester Library in New York for her kind assistance with Merlin’s Cave, Nathalie Strasser, Julia M. Hayes at the Toledo Museum of Art, Cory Woodall at the San Diego Museum of Art, and the staff of the Architekturmuseum der Technischen Universität Berlin. Every effort has been made to obtain permissions from the relevant copyright holders; however, if there should be any omissions, please contact the editor, and I will see that this is rectified in the next printing of the work in hand. My gratitude also goes to the board of the Ritus et Artes series for their encouragement and backing of this project. Grateful mention should also be made to Brepols Publishers, especially to Guy Carney and his assistants for making the publication of this volume possible. Last but not least, my thanks and love to Bodo for his unwavering support and to Gabriela for always cheering me on.

Introduction: The Medi­eval Edifice in the Modern Period Stephanie A. Glaser

W

ith the awakening interest in medi­eval artefacts and the re-evaluation of the Middle Ages in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, the Gothic cathedral stood out as a politically weighted object. Contemporary sociopolitical circumstances and aesthetic debates sometimes overshadowed and sometimes polemicized its religious origin and purpose, as antiquarians, archaeologists, dilettantes, enthusiasts, and theoreticians sought to understand the heretofore incomprehensible architectural style as a product of local genius that was inextricably intertwined with local and national history. As a result, the medi­eval edifice was appropriated into various discourses and thus became many things, including a ‘realm of memory’,1 a space sacralized for national interests, a touristic site and one of aesthetic pilgrimage, a symbol of co-operative labour and the work of a society toward a common good, a commensurate artistic work, an encyclopaedia of religious doctrines, as well as a manifestation of medi­eval and modern spirituality. Indeed, during this 1 

In the sense established by Pierre Nora, Les Lieux de mémoire [1984–92], 2nd edn, 3 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1997); translated as Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, 3 vols (New York: Columbia Uni­ver­sity Press, 1996–98). More recently Jacques Le Goff has called the cathedral a space of collective memory and emphasized its social, religious, and artistic vitality through the ages: ‘Lieu de mémoire collective, mais surtout lieu de vie’; see ‘Les Cathédrales françaises’, in 20 siècles en cathédrales, ed. by Catherine Arminjon and Denis Lavalle (Paris: Éditions du patrimoine, 2001), pp. 17–29 (p. 29). Stephanie A. Glaser ([email protected]) lectures in the Department of Comparative Literature at the Ruhr Uni­ver­sity, Bochum.

The Idea of the Gothic Cathedral: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Meanings of the Medieval Edifice in the Modern Period, ed. by Stephanie A. Glaser, RITUS 9 (Turn­hout: Brepols, 2018) pp. 1–44 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.RITUS-EB.5.115734

Stephanie A. Glaser

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tumultuous time of nation-building and war, of spiritual and religious resurgence, and of political, social, industrial, and artistic revolutions, the Gothic edifice possessed an ultimately modern significance.

The Idea of the Gothic Cathedral: The Gothic Discourse This is the complex, multifaceted, and multilayered discourse whose various aspects the essays in this volume explore in depth. Focusing neither on one specific cathedral nor on cathedrals as architectural structures, the volume treats what we have called the idea of the Gothic cathedral, that is to say, the culturally constructed meanings attached to and imposed upon Gothic cathedrals. It thus investigates the qualities that were attributed to Gothic edifices and the significance these held for particular groups or individuals from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries. Together the essays shed light on what may be called the ‘Gothic discourse’, which comprises literary and artistic representations, theoretical treatises and scientific tracts, antiquarian studies and popular entertainments, historical writings as well as politically or religiously motivated works about Gothic architecture that contributed to the constructions of meaning built up around the Gothic after the Middle Ages.2 During the modern period the Gothic discourse permeated nearly every aspect of culture, society, and thought. Reasons for Differences in the National Discourses The most influential traditions of the Gothic discourse developed in Great Britain, France, and the German-speaking lands. The emphases and objectives of these national Gothic discourses differed according to the particular historical situations of each geographical area and were shaped by politics, religion, social developments, and aesthetics. A major reason for these differences had to do with the policies of (and funding for) architectural restoration and 2 

I use the term ‘Gothic discourse’ to refer to the architectural revival and use of Gothic forms, the scholarly tracts and theories of the origin, development, and nomenclature of Gothic architecture; the historical, political, and religious texts that describe or interpret Gothic architecture; and the literary, visual, and musical representations of Gothic architecture; see Stephanie A. Glaser, ‘Explorations of the Gothic Cathedral in Nineteenth-Century France’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Indiana Uni­ver­sity, 2002), and ‘The Gothic Façade in Word and Image: Romantic and Modern Perspectives on Notre-Dame de Paris’, in Media inter Media: Essays in Honor of Claus Clüver, ed. by Stephanie A. Glaser (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), pp. 59–94 (p. 60).

Introduction: The Medi­eval Edifice in the Modern Period

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church building. In France the state had taken over religious property during the revolution, and in 1830 the government established a centralized policy for the upkeep and repair of ecclesiastical buildings.3 Monumental restoration was led by Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814–1879), whose aim was to re-establish Gothic edifices in their ‘original’ thirteenth-century state; accordingly, church building stringently followed the principles of thirteenth-century Gothic.4 England took a different route, as a policy of non-invasive restoration came late in the nineteenth century thanks to the efforts of individuals, primarily John Ruskin (1819–1900) and William Morris (1834–1896).5 Already 3 

For an overview of the particular political status of cathedrals in France, see Jean-Michel Leniaud, ‘Die Kathedrale im Frankreich des 19. Jahrhunderts: Ein Denkmal des Kondordats’, in Kunst Macht, und Institution: Studien zur Philosophischen Anthropologie, soziologischen Theorie und Kultursoziologie der Moderne, ed. by Joachim Fischer and Hans Joas (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag 2003), pp. 569–76. 4  Viollet-le-Duc clearly stated his philosophy: ‘restaurer un édifice ce n’est pas l’entretenir, le réparer ou le refaire, c’est le rétablir dans un état complet qui peut n’avoir jamais existé à un moment donné’ (‘Restauration’, in Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française du xie au xvie siècle, [1854–68], 10 vols (Paris: Librairies-Imprimeries Réunies [ancienne maison Morel], [n.d.]), vii, 14). For church building in nineteenth-century France, see Robin D. Middleton and David Watkin, Neoclassical and 19th Century Architecture, vol. ii (Milano: Electa, 1980); Michael J. Lewis, The Gothic Revival (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002), pp. 101–03; and Barry Bergdoll, ‘The Ideal of the Gothic Cathedral in 1852’, in A. W. N. Pugin: Master of Gothic Revival, ed. by Paul Atterbury (New Haven: Yale Uni­ver­ sity Press, 1995), pp. 103–35. French monumental restoration policies have been treated by Kevin D. Murphy, Memory and Modernity: Viollet-le-Duc at Vézelay (Uni­ver­sity Park: Pennsylvania State Uni­ver­sity Press, 2000). Jean-Michel Leniaud has written a comprehensive work on nineteenth-century restoration, Les Cathédrales au xixe siècle (Paris: Economica, 1993). 5  Ruskin praised the handcrafted work of the medi­e val artisan and his loving attention to detail in The Seven Lamps of Architecture [1849], in The Works of John Ruskin, ed. by E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols (London: George Allen, 1903–12), viii (1903); ‘The Nature of Gothic’, in The Stones of Venice [1851–53], vol. ii, The Sea-Stories, in Works, ed. by Cook and Wedderburn, x (1903), 180–269; and in the fourth part of The Bible of Amiens [1884], in Works, ed. by Cook and Wedderburn, xxxiii (1908). He understood medi­eval sculpture and carving to be the finest and most personal expression of an artist’s mind, world view, and devotion. Therefore any restoration which tampered with the original work of an artist destroyed the ‘true’ work and annihilated memory, that treasure of the historical past. To protect England’s medi­eval architectural and artistic heritage against the losses that were occurring through restoration, William Morris founded the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings in 1877, whose campaign was known as ‘Anti-Scrape’; see Barry Bergdoll, European Architecture (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 2000), p. 222. Morris’s Manifesto has been reprinted in William Morris on Architecture, ed. by Chris Mile (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996), pp. 52–55.

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in the 1840s Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin’s (1812–1852) writings had led to the establishment of Ecclesiology, the science of church building,6 and later on, Victorian architects Sir George Gilbert Scott (1811–1878), George Edmund Street (1824–1881), and William Butterfield (1814–1900) infused creativity into science to give the neo-Gothic an unequalled variety and beauty as it proliferated throughout Britain.7 Non-centralization characterized the situation of the German Confederation and the Prussian Empire, where each principality or state had its own policy, and architects accepted restoration jobs wherever and by whomever they were offered.8 While some architects like Carl Schäfer (1844–1908) advocated restoration, others, like Georg Dehio (1850–1932), argued for conserving monuments and letting their age show.9 Protestant church building was officially regulated in 1861, though revised in 1891, when it was decided that the Catholic roots of the Gothic made it an inappropriate style for their churches. This, in combination with Gottfried Semper’s (1803–1879) anti-Gothic, neo-Renaissance campaign, contributed to making the Gothic only one of several accepted building styles.10 Other factors that led to differences in the national Gothic discourses were the personalities, professions, and national importance of the major proponents 6 

Nikolaus Pevsner gives an overview in Some Architectural Writers of the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), pp. 123–28. See also Lewis, The Gothic Revival, pp. 90–93, and Georg Germann, The Gothic Revival in Europe and Britain: Sources, Influences and Ideas, trans. by Gerald Onn (London: Lund Humphries, 1972), pp. 104–35. See especially Timothy Brittain-Caitlin, Jan De Maeyer, and Martin Bressani, Gothic Revival Worldwide: A. W. N. Pugin’s Global Influence (Leuven: Leuven Uni­ver­sity Press, 2017). 7  See Bergdoll, ‘The Ideal of the Gothic Cathedral’, and Bergdoll, European Architecture, pp. 196–205. See also Chris Brooks, The Gothic Revival (London: Phaidon, 1999), esp. pp. 307–29, as well as Pevsner, Some Architectural Writers of the Nineteenth Century, Middleton and Watkin, Neoclassical and 19th Century Architecture, and Lewis, The Gothic Revival. 8  I thank Klaus Niehr for discussing this with me. 9  Roland Recht focuses on the differences in national policies of monumental restoration in his article ‘Gottfried Semper et Viollet-le-Duc: Leurs conceptions du patrimoine monumental’, Revue germanique international, 131 (2000), 155–68. 10  On cathedral restoration in particular, see Nicola Borger-Keweloh, Die mittelalterlichen Dome im 19. Jahrhundert (München: C. H. Beck, 1986). On church building, see Heinz Gollwitzer, ‘Zum Fragenkreis Architekturhistorismus und politische Ideologie’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 42 (1979), 1–14 (pp. 7–11), and In What Style Should We Build? The German Debate on Architectural Style, ed. and trans. by Wolfgang Hermann (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1992). For an introduction to Semper, see Pevsner, Some Architectural Writers of the Nineteenth Century, pp. 252–68.

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of the Gothic — Pugin and Ruskin in England, Victor Hugo (1802–1885) and Viollet-le-Duc in France, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), and later Sulpiz Boisserée (1783–1854) and August Reichensperger (1808–1895) in the Rhineland.11 Religious questions also lent a particular character to the national Gothic discourses: Anglican and Catholic concerns battled in England; Protestant and Catholic tensions compounded the friction between Rhenish and Prussian interests; and in France, clerics and parishioners celebrated the Catholic heritage of Gothic architecture and were periodically forced to take a stand against the restoration politics of the liberal state.12 11  Works on Pugin, Ruskin, Hugo, and Viollet-le-Duc abound. On Pugin, most noteworthy are Rosemary Hill’s biography, God’s Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain (London: Allen Lane, 2007), and Margaret Belcher, The Collected Letters of A. W. N. Pugin, 5 vols (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 2001–15). Viollet-le-Duc’s bicentenary in 2014 was celebrated by many publications, notably Martin Bressani’s comprehensive biography, Architecture and the Historical Imagination: Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), in which he demonstrates, among other things, how deeply Viollet-le-Duc’s theories of the Gothic developed out of the intellectual and ideological context of nineteenth-century France. Conceived in a different style, Françoise Bercé’s, Viollet-le-Duc (Paris: Éditions du Patrimoine, Centre des monuments nationaux, 2013) offers a beautifully printed panorama of Viollet-le-Duc’s drawings, prints, paintings, and photographs. On Boisserée, see particularly Klaus Niehr, Gotikbilder — Gotiktheorien: Studien zur Wahrnehmung und Erforschung mittelalterlicher Architektur in Deutschland zwischen ca. 1750 und 1850 (Berlin: Gebrüder Mann, 1999), pp. 159–76 and 251–65. On Reichensperger, see Michael J. Lewis, The Politics of the German Gothic Revival: August Reichensperger (Cam­bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993). The study of Goethe and the Gothic has developed over time, starting with Ernst Beutler, Von Deutscher Baukunst: Goethes Hymnus auf Erwin von Steinbach. Seine Entstehung und Wirkung (München: F. Bruckmann, 1943); W. D. Robson-Scott, ‘Goethe and the Gothic Revival’, Publications of the English Goethe Society, 25 (1956), 86–113, and The Literary Background of the Gothic Revival in Germany: A Chapter in the History of Taste (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965). See also Stephanie A. Glaser, ‘“Ein, ganzer, großer Eindruck füllte meine Seele”: German Romanticism and the Gothic Facade’, in Changing Borders: Contemporary Positions in Intermediality, ed. by Jens Arvidson and others (Lund: Intermedia Studies Press, 2007), pp. 239–55. 12  See Leniaud, ‘Die Kathedrale im Frankreich des 19. Jahrhunderts’, pp. 570–73. Bergdoll, ‘The Ideal of the Gothic Cathedral’, p. 110 and p. 133, n. 13, lists a number of studies on the relationship between the clergy and the state. Jean-Philippe Schmit, head of the Ministère des cultes from 1832 to 1840, exerted a great deal of influence on restoration by defending Catholic needs and criticizing the state’s position in Les Églises Gothiques (1837). On this subject, see Glaser, ‘Explorations of the Gothic Cathedral’, pp. 300–308, and Michael Paul Driskel, ‘The “Gothic”, the Revolution and the Abyss: Jean-Philippe Schmit’s Aesthetic of Authority’, Art History, 13.2 (1990), 193–211. Leniaud describes the conflicts between the local and the national in the case of Évereux Cathedral in Les Cathédrales, pp. 328–36, and at the Rouennais church, Saint-Ouen, in Fallait-il achever Saint-Ouen de Rouen? Débats et polémiques,

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Of wide-reaching importance was the artistic and literary appropriation of the Gothic cathedral which gave it a vital cultural presence: the German Romantics venerated it as the symbol of spiritual transcendence and of art; Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) inspired all areas of French society and influenced the major French writers of the century;13 from the eighteenth century on a fascination with Gothic ruins and forms ran through English painting and architecture, which in turn influenced the creation of the Gothic novel, a genre which remained popular through the nineteenth century and whose trappings are still very present in literature.14 1837–1852 (Rouen: ASI Editions, 2002). In the midst of the anticlerical climate which ultimately brought about the Law of the Separation of Church and State of 1905, Marcel Proust wrote ‘La Mort des cathédrales’ [1904], in Contre Saint-Beuve: Précédé de ‘Pastiches et mélanges’ et suivi de ‘Essais et articles’, ed. by Pierre Clarac and Yves Sandre (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), pp. 141–49, in defence of France’s medi­eval churches and their religious use. 13  Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris: 1482 [1831] (Paris: Gallimard, 2002). On this subject see Louis Maigron, Le Romantisme et la mode (Paris: Librairie ancienne Honoré Champion, 1911). Ségolène Le Men has tracked the novel’s influence in many areas of popular culture from the ‘livre “à la cathédrale”’ through popular spectacles to Impressionism; see La Cathédrale illustrée de Hugo à Monet: Regard romantique et modernité (Paris: CNRS, 1998). 14  While having his villa at Strawberry Hill turned into a ‘little Gothic castle’ (1749–76) Horace Walpole (1717–1797) wrote The Castle of Otranto (1764), subtitled A Gothic Tale, using the word ‘Gothic’ to mean ‘medi­e val’ and thereby justifying his use of elements from medi­e val romance such as the supernatural and the dream. With its medi­e val castle, spectre, dark and secret passageways, sinister mood, female prisoner, inhumane punishment, and bloody revenge, Otranto is the father of the Gothic novel. Gothic novel conventions and motifs appear throughout English Romantic, Victorian, and fin-de-siècle literature, as well as in the German Schauerroman, exemplified by E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Die Elixiere des Teufels (1815), and in the French ‘roman noir’; see Alice M. Killen, Le Roman terrifiant ou roman noir de Walpole à Anne Radcliffe et son influence sur la littérature française jusqu’en 1840 (Paris: Champion, 1976) and Joëlle Prungnaud, Gothique et Décadence: Recherches sur la continuité d’un mythe et d’un genre au xixe siècle en Grande-Bretagne et en France (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1997). Richard Davenport-Hines has traced the spread of Gothic from its architectural and literary origins through to twentieth-century popular and underground culture in Gothic: Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil and Ruin (New York: North Point Press, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000). An excellent catalogue from the Walpole exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (March–July 2010) has been edited by Michael Snodin, Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill (New Haven: Yale Uni­ver­sity Press, 2009). Visited by many prominent people in Walpole’s day, Strawberry Hill influenced other buildings in the style, particularly the Gotisches Haus in Wörlitz, conceived by Fürst Leopold III Friedrich Franz von Anhalt Dessau (1740–1817) and constructed 1773–1813. In it he housed his art collection, and it was the site of the recent Cranach exhibition. The catalogue Cranach im Gotischen Haus in Wörlitz, ed. by Wolfgang Savelsberg (München: Hirmer, 2015) has a section on the British influence on the park at Wör-

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The different national perspectives were also a product of homespun theories: the French considered thirteenth-century Gothic to represent the perfection of a rational constructive system; the British celebrated creativity and sought to develop the Gothic further; whereas German speakers privileged regional diversity and individuality. Another crucial factor in the development of national discourses lay in archaeological research and discoveries. Each claimed the Gothic as its own, and the competitive search for Gothic origins and nationalist explanations begun in the eighteenth century came to a dramatic climax in the 1840s when France was incontestably proved to be the birthplace of the Gothic; consequently, non-French proponents like Ruskin and Reichensperger were hard pressed to reconcile this fact within the existing national discourses, an endeavour that can be seen to culminate in the nationalistic treaties of Wilhelm Worringer (1881–1965) and Kurt Gerstenberg (1886–1968) on the eve of World War I.15

litz and its architecture, including essays on English neo-Gothic garden architecture and Walpole. On Wörlitz and German garden Gothic, see Robson-Scott, The Literary Background of the Gothic Revival in Germany, pp. 29–34. 15  On the Cologne-Amiens debate, see Lewis, The Politics of the German Gothic Revival, pp. 81–82; Niehr, Gotikbilder — Gotiktheorien, pp. 251–65; and Glaser, ‘Explorations of the Gothic Cathedral’, pp. 150–54. After the 1840s the main line of argument asserted that the Gothic was northern European, i.e. Germanic — an idea which Friedrich Schlegel had put forward in ‘Briefe auf einer Reise durch die Niederlande, Rheingegenden, die Schweiz und einen Teil von Frankreich in dem Jahre 1804 und 1805’, in Poetisches Taschenbuch für das Jahr 1806 (Berlin: Friedrich Unger, 1806), pp. 257–390 — and the prevailing reasoning was that, though originating in France, the style had been perfected in Germany, where it had reached its most beautiful expression (Niehr, Gotikbilder — Gotiktheorien, p. 264; Glaser, ‘Explorations of the Gothic Cathedral’, p. 152). Ruskin discussed the qualities of the northern peoples throughout ‘The Nature of Gothic’ (x, 182–88; Glaser, ‘Explorations of the Gothic Cathedral’, pp. 57–59). In The Bible of Amiens he attributed the Gothic to the Franks (xxxiii, 32–76; Glaser, ‘Explorations of the Gothic Cathedral’, p. 70). Both Wilhelm Worringer, Formprobleme der Gotik (München: R. Piper, 1911), and Kurt Gerstenberg, Deutsche Sondergotik: Eine Untersuchung über das Wesen der deutschen Baukunst im späten Mittelalter [1913] (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1969), embraced the racial theory: Worringer underlined the Germanic northern character manifested in the Gothic (see Arne Zerbst, ‘Gotische Gestimmtheit, zu: Formprobleme der Gotik’ [1911], in Wilhelm Worringer, Schriften, ed. by Hannes Böhringer, Helga Grebing, and Beate Söntgen (München: Willhelm Fink, 2004), ii, 1338–50), and Gerstenberg characterized the particular development of late Gothic (‘Spätgotik’) in Germany as an expression of the German peoples (Deutsche Sondergotik, pp. 125–44), referring to it as ‘Sondergotik’ (‘Special Gothic’), a term which fell out of favour for its overtly nationalist tone.

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The British, German, and French Gothic Discourses These facts give insight into the driving questions that led to the conception of Gothic architecture as English, French, and German; they help explain how a Gothic cathedral could serve Catholic, Lutheran, and Anglican aims; and they underlie the political motivations for appropriating the Gothic, whether by English liberals or conservatives, by French monarchists or republicans, or by the German states in the face of Prussian imperial control. They also provide background for the increasing nineteenth-century interest in Gothic cathedrals as audacious engineering feats and as consummate works of art. Nonetheless, this positive acceptance of the Gothic came only after the long-standing prejudices against it as a barbaric and degenerative architecture were overcome, as the taste for the picturesque and the sublime spread, and as national interest in what was seen as an ‘indigenous’ architecture increased. These stages manifested themselves differently in each of the national discourses. The British discourse was characterized by a nostalgic longing for a medi­eval Golden Age. Since Gothic architecture had persisted until a very late date,16 the revival of interest can be said to have occurred in the seventeenth century, when, in the midst of political instability surrounding the English Civil War (1642–49), antiquarian works on medi­e val ecclesiastical architecture such as Sir William Dugdale’s (1605–1686) Monasticon Anglicanum (1655–73) contributed to legitimizing authority and simultaneously raised awareness of England’s architectural heritage. At that time liberal defenders of Parliament associated Gothic architecture with their Germanic ancestors, the Magna Carta of 1212, and political freedom. This connection was made through neo-Gothic garden architecture, such as the Temple of Liberty at Stowe Gardens (1741), and solidified with the rebuilding of the Houses of Parliament in High Gothic style (1836–68).17 At the same time, conservatives came to see Gothic architec16 

Both Lewis (The Gothic Revival, pp. 10–12) and Megan Aldrich (Gothic Revival (1994; repr. London: Phaidon, 1997), pp. 35–38) maintain that Gothic survival in the late seventeenth and very early eighteenth century crossed over with the beginnings of the revival. Chris Brooks criticizes this conventional view in The Gothic Revival, pp. 24–34. 17  Samuel Kliger has written about the political associations of the Gothic in The Goths in England: A Study in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Thought (Cam­bridge, MA: Harvard Uni­ver­sity Press, 1952). Gollwitzer compares the English and French association of the Gothic with freedom (‘Zum Fragenkreis Architekturhistorismus’, pp. 3–6) and contrasts this with the German situation, which he details in the second part of the article. On the Temple of Liberty, see Aldrich, Gothic Revival, p. 48; Lewis, The Gothic Revival, pp. 18–20; Brooks, The Gothic Revival, pp. 51–56.

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ture as a symbol of long-standing social hierarchy granted by ecclesiastical and monarchical authority, and so in the eighteenth century both Catholics and the landed gentry built neo-Gothic country mansions, ‘powerhouses’ that justified their aristocratic claims and religious beliefs.18 Similar dynamics infused the visual arts. Topographical painters such as Thomas Girtin (1775–1802) and Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851) painted Gothic ruins and thereby satisfied both the contemporary taste for the picturesque and the sublime as well as the interest in national history (see Leniaud, Figure 10.4). Turner sketched many of Britain’s ecclesiastical buildings, and his watercolours of cathedrals give their corporeal presence in the modern world an otherworldly character.19 Both he and John Constable (1776–1837) made extensive studies of Salisbury Cathedral, one of the most celebrated Gothic edifices of the time.20 Constable associated the edifice with political stability based on the sovereignty of king and church, which was threatened by the parliamentary and ecclesiastical reforms of the 1820s (see Leniaud, Figure 10.5).21 Nationalistic associations of the Gothic went hand in hand with scholarship, as antiquarians were avidly investigating the origins, development, and workings of ‘English’ architecture. Through organs such as the widely read Gentleman’s Magazine appreciation for the Gothic grew rapidly, and almost every volume from the 1790s on contained articles on Gothic buildings, especially cathedrals.22 With the flood of patriotism brought on by the Napoleonic wars, enthusiasm for the Gothic peaked. During this time John Carter (1748–1817), John Britton (1771–1857), and Thomas Rickman (1776–1841) 18 

See Glaser, ‘Explorations of the Gothic Cathedral’, pp. 15–18; and Davenport-Hines, Gothic, pp. 62–93. Aldrich discusses the Catholic predilection for the Gothic, which was considered a refuge for English Catholic beliefs and lifestyle, in Gothic Revival, pp. 69–72. 19  Donat de Chapeaurouge, ‘Die “Kathedrale” als moderns Bildthema’, Jahrbuch der Hamburger Kunstsammlungen, 18 (1973), 155–72 (p. 156); Glaser, ‘Explorations of the Gothic Cathedral’, pp. 36–38. 20  Selby Whittingham, Constable and Turner at Salisbury, 2nd edn (Salisbury: Friends of Salisbury Cathedral, 1980). 21  Michael Rosenthal, Constable: The Painter and his Landscape (New Haven: Yale Uni­ver­ sity Press, 1989), pp. 227–36. 22  Whittingham, Constable and Turner at Salisbury, p. 5. For example, J. Mordaunt Crook provides a definitive bibliography of John Carter’s contributions to the magazine in John Carter and the Mind of the Gothic Revival (London: W. S. Maney & Son in association with the Society of Antiquaries of London, 1995), pp. 80–89. In 1801–02 Carter wrote a series on Durham Cathedral (ibid., p. 82).

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developed chronologies of medi­e val architecture and established nomenclatures for its various stages.23 At this time Britton began publishing Cathedral Antiquities of England (1814–35), a fourteen-volume celebration of England’s Gothic Cathedrals.24 By mid-century the British discourse had modulated from the nostalgia that consciously sought a connection with the past to become one that brought out the contrasts between the idealized past and the dissatisfactory present. In the 1840s and 1850s Pugin and Ruskin associated Gothic architecture with social issues and better living conditions for the workers, seeing in it practical, moral, and aesthetic solutions to the evils brought on by the Industrial Revolution. Where Pugin wanted to initiate a revival of Christianity, Ruskin 23 

Carter is known for his passionate defence of Gothic architecture as English. He published Specimens of Ancient Sculpture and Painting (1780–94) and Views of Ancient Buildings in England with his own drawings and engravings, 6 vols (1786–93). He republished these as Specimens of Gothic Architecture and Ancient Buildings in England; comprised in One Hundred and Twenty Views, 4 vols (London: Edward Jeffery and Son, 1824). In 1790 he began a series on English cathedrals, including St Stephen’s Chapel, Westminster (1795), Exeter Cathedral (1797), Bath Abbey (1798), Durham Cathedral (1801), and St Alban’s Abbey (1810); see Crook, John Carter and the Mind of the Gothic Revival, pp. 8–11, 23. In The Ancient Architecture of England (1795–1814) he established a chronology of ‘English’ architecture, distinguishing between Saxon or Norman (i.e. Romanesque) and Pointed (Gothic), which set a precedent for classification and nomenclature (Crook, John Carter and the Mind of the Gothic Revival, p. 42). In the first volume of The Architectural Antiquities of Great Britain, 5 vols (1807–26), John Britton proposed the following nomenclature: Anglo-Saxon (597–1066), Anglo-Norman (1066–1189), English (1189–1272), Decorated English (1272–1461), Highly Decorated English (1461–1509), Debased English (from 1509); see Paul Frankl, The Gothic: Literary Sources and Interpretations through Eight Centuries, trans. by Priscilla Silz (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni­ver­sity Press, 1960), pp. 497–98. In 1817 Thomas Rickman published his chronology in An Attempt to Discriminate the Styles of English Architecture, from the Conquest to the Reformation; with Notices of Eight Hundred English Buildings: preceded by a Sketch of the Grecian and Roman Orders, 2nd edn with additions (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, [1819]): Norman style (from c. 1066), Early English style (from 1189), Decorated English style (from 1307), Perpendicular style (from 1377 or later to 1630–40); see Germann, The Gothic Revival in Europe and Britain, p. 44; Lewis, The Gothic Revival, p. 48; Glaser, ‘Explorations of the Gothic Cathedral’, pp. 22–35. 24  John Britton, Cathedral Antiquities: Historical and Descriptive Accounts […] of the following English Cathedrals, Canterbury, York, Salisbury, Norwich, Winchester, Lichfield, Oxford, Wells, Exeter, Peterborough, Gloucester, Bristol, Hereford, and Worcester, 14 vols (London: Longman, Hurst, Reese, Orme and Brown, 1814–31). See also Klaus Niehr’s analysis of Britton’s monograph on Canturbury in Bilderlust und Lesefrüchte: Das illustrierte Kunstbuch von 1750 bis 1920, ed. by Katharina Krause, Klaus Niehr, and Eva-Maria Hanebutt-Benz (Leipzig: E. A. Seemann, 2005), pp. 202–05.

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wrote to educate the working classes.25 Concentrating specifically on French and Italian Gothic in his writings, he praised the medi­e val craftsman for his loving attention to his work, and thereby influenced Morris, who led the Arts and Crafts movement and made Gothic architecture central to his political writings.26 With Ruskin, the British discourse moved its focus from indigenous to Continental Gothic: Scott, Street, and Butterfield found inspiration for their neo-Gothic designs outside Britain,27 and the fin-de-siècle aesthetes Walter Pater (1839–1894) and the Welshman Arthur Symons (1865–1945) celebrated the aesthetics of Gothic cathedrals, primarily French ones. In fact, Pater esteemed the Gothic so highly that he claimed its beginnings in twelfthcentury France to have inaugurated the Renaissance.28 In contrast to the nostalgic looking-back in Britain, the German Gothic discourse was primarily future-oriented, characterized by a yearning for spiritual, cultural, and political renewal. Given that the discourse focused first on the single-spired Strasbourg Cathedral and then on the unfinished Cologne Cathedral, it seems almost inevitable that its primary concern would be with architectural fragments. The privileged status of the fragment in the larger context of Naturphilosophie and Romantic thinking certainly contributed to this interest.29 25 

A. W. N. Pugin, Contrasts: Or, a Parallel between the Noble Edifices of the Middle Ages, and Corresponding Buildings of the Present Day; Shewing the Present Decay of Taste (1836; repr. London: Charles Dolman, 1841) and The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture (London: J. Weale, 1841). John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, and especially Lectures on Architecture and Painting [1853], in Works, ed. by Cook and Wedderburn, xii (1904). 26  Ruskin’s influence is present in Morris’s early work, ‘Shadows of Amiens’ [1856], in Prose and Poetry (1856–1870) by William Morris (London: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 1913), pp. 617–31. See also Morris, ‘Architecture and History’ [1884] and ‘Gothic Architecture’ [1889], in William Morris on Architecture, ed. by Mile, pp. 99–121 and 143–56. 27  From 1849 to 1850 William Butterfield built All Saints, Margaret Street, London, employing brick and structural polychromy: ‘The flirting with continental forms in All Saints, Margaret Street, was a sign of the broadening horizons of the Gothic Revival’ (Lewis, The Gothic Revival, pp. 108–10). See also the writings of George Edmund Street, The Brick and Marble Architecture of Northern Italy (1855) and Street, Some Account of Gothic Architecture in Spain (London: John Murray, 1865); and Scott, Remarks on Secular and Domestic Architecture, Present and Future (1857) and Lectures on the Rise and Development of Mediæval Architecture, 2 vols (1879). 28  Walter Horatio Pater, ‘Notre-Dame d’Amiens’ [1894], in Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays (London: Macmillan, 1924), pp. 109–25; and The Renaissance (1873; repr. New York: Modern Library, [n.d.]), pp. 1–3. In ‘Cathedrals’ (1903) Arthur Symons wrote about the cathedrals of Canturbury, Cologne, Amiens, and Bourges; see Studies in the Seven Arts (London: Constable, 1906), pp. 150–72. 29  In German Romanticism the fragment was considered a means of attaining the Infi-

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Gothic fragments and ruins were thematized by the writers Georg Forster (1754–1794) and Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) and by the painters Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840), Carl Gustav Carus (1789–1869), Carl Georg Hasenpflug (1802–1858), and Carl Blechen (1798–1840). The appeal of the fragment also comes to the fore in the creation of idealized edifices in German Romantic literature and in paintings by Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781–1841, see Leniaud, Figure 10.3) and Friedrich, who combined elements of existing edifices into ‘protestantized’ neo-Gothic fantasies.30 Finally, fascination for the fragment was manifested in the drive to complete ‘unfinished’ edifices: Goethe and Schinkel at Strasbourg, and Boisserée, Hasenpflug, and others at Cologne.31 These aspects of the German discourse wove into and were fully realized in the completion of Cologne Cathedral, a project which lasted nearly a century, from its inception by Boisserée in 1808 and the discovery of the medi­eval plans for the façade by Georg Moller (1784–1852) in 1814 to its completion in 1902.32 Other aspects of the German discourse revolved around aesthetics, politics, and religion. In 1772, Goethe praised the Germanic character of Strasbourg Cathedral, and in so doing simultaneously overturned the traditional categories of classical taste and validated Gothic architecture as possessing its own genial aesthetic.33 Romantic writers celebrated the Gothic cathedral as sublime, as othnite and the Absolute, as demonstrated by Novalis, Das Allgemeine Brouillon (1798) and the Schlegels’ periodical Athenaeum, 1798–1800; see also Tina Grütter, ‘Fragment und Künstlichkeit im Werk von C. D. Friedrich am Beispiel der Dortmunder Winterlandschaft mit Kirche’, in Caspar David Friedrich: Winterlandschaften, ed. by Kurt Wettengl (Heidelberg : Braus, 1990), pp. 60–65. 30  Hans-Joachim Kunst, ‘Die politischen und gesellschaftlichen Bedingtheiten der Gotik­ rezeption bei Friedrich und Schinkel’, in Bürgerliche Revolution und Romantik, Natur und Gesellschaft bei Caspar David Friedrich, ed. by Berthold Hinz and others (Gießen: AnabasVerlag, 1976), pp. 16–41. 31  See, for example, the artworks in the exhibition catalogue Die Kathedrale: Romantik — Impressionismus — Moderne (München: Hirmer Verlag, 2014). 32  Though the cathedral’s completion was celebrated in 1880, the south tower of the west façade would not be finished until late 1882, and it was not until 1902 that the Dombaumeister, Karl Eduard Richard Voigtel (1829–1902), finally declared the edifice to be completed. For a brief history of the completion of the cathedral, see Arnold Wolff, ‘Die Vollendung des Domes im 19. Jahrhundert’, in Das Kölner Dom Lese- und Bilderbuch, ed. by Arnold Wolff and Toni Diederich (Köln: Verlag Kölner Dom, 1990), pp. 41–52; and Niehr, Gotikbilder — Gotiktheorien, pp. 159–76 and 251–65. 33  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, ‘Von Deutscher Baukunst: D. M. Ervini a Steinbach’ [1773], in Von deutscher Art und Kunst: einige fliegende Blätter, ed. by Hans Dietrich Irmscher (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1995), pp. 93–104.

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erworldly, and, during the Napoleonic Wars, as a symbol of the German spirit.34 In the face of the French invaders the people rallied around Cologne Cathedral, which was held to be the symbol of a future ‘Großdeutschland’ and whose completion would coincide with the uniting of the Germanic peoples.35 At this time of rising national sentiment, Schinkel’s paintings of idealized edifices carried strong political connections. Concurrently, Friedrich was working with ruins, façades, and visionary edifices in paintings that express the transcendent nature of Christianity.36 They also, along with Carus, thematized synaesthetic relations between music and Gothic architecture in some of their works.37 34 

For an overview of the German understanding of the Gothic cathedral, see Glaser, ‘Explorations of the Gothic Cathedral’, pp. 82–169, and especially Michael J. Lewis’s essay in this volume. 35  Joseph von Görres promoted the completion of Cologne Cathedral after the defeat of Napoléon in 1813 in his article, ‘Der Dom in Köln’, Rheinischer Merkur (20 November 1814), repr. in Joseph von Görres’ Ausgewählte Werke und Briefe, ed. by Wilhelm Schellberg, 2 vols (Kempten: Verlag der Jospeh Kösel’schen Buchhandlung, 1911), i, 592–95. According to him, the finished edifice would be a German monument commemorating the liberation from French domination, and it would be a symbol of the unity and concord between the German-speaking peoples, for its completion would bring political and social unity and be a sign of having overcome religious dissidence and linguistic differences. 36  On Schinkel, see for example Karl Friedrich Schinkel: Architektur, Malerei Kunstgewerbe, ed. by Helmut Börsch-Supan and Lucius Grisebach (Berlin: Nicolai, 1981); Rüdiger Becksmann, ‘Schinkel und die Gotik: Bemerkungen zur “Komposition des viertürmigen Domes” von 1813’, in Kunstgeschichtliche Studien für Kurt Bauch zum Geburtstag von seinen Schülern, ed. by Margit Lisner and Rüdiger Becksmann (München: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1967), pp. 263–76; Georg Friedrich Koch, ‘Schinkels architektonische Entwürfe im gotischen Stil 1810–1815’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 32 (1969), 262–316; Andreas Haus, ‘Gedanken über K. F. Schinkels Einstellung zur Gotik’, Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft, 22 (1989), 215–31. On Friedrich, see for example Helmut Börsch-Supan, Caspar David Friedrich (München: Prestel Verlag 1987); Gerhard Eimer, Caspar David Friedrich und die Gotik: Analysen und Deutungsversuche aus Stockholmer Vorlesungen (Hamburg: Verlag Christoph von der Ropp, 1963); Werner Sumowski, ‘Gotische Dome bei Caspar David Friedrich’, in Klassizismus und Romantik in Deutschland: Gemälde und Zeichnungen aus der Sammlung Georg Schäfer, Schweinfurt (Schweinfurt: Weppert, 1966), pp. 39–42; and Grütter, ‘Fragment und Künstlichkeit’. 37  Schinkel, Gotische Kirche hinter Bäumen (1810), Carus, Die Musik (1826), Friedrich, Die Lautenspielerin und Gitarristin in einer Gotischen Ruine (Allegoire der weltlichen Musik), Die Harfenspielerin (Allegorie der religiosen Musik), Der Traum des Musikers (Allegorie der himmlischen Musik) (c. 1830). On this topic, see Erika von Erhardt-Siebold, ‘Harmony of the Senses in English, German, and French Romanticism’, PMLA, 47.2 (1932), 577–92; and Eva Borsch-Supan, ‘Die Bedeutung der Musik im Werke Karl Freidrich Schinkels’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 34 (1971), 257–95.

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While these aspects of the Gothic were being explored in literature and the visual arts, the facts about its origins and history were being researched by Moller, Boisserée, J. C. Costenoble (1769–1837), and others.38 Indeed, much was known about the Gothic when the Prussian government took on the completion of Cologne Cathedral in 1842. From that time until its completion ceremony, kept in the public eye by poets and painters,39 the edifice became the point where Rhenish and Prussian conflicts came to a head and upon which Catholic and Lutheran tensions were fought out and purportedly reconciled.40 Even with these hostilities, the cathedral’s building lodge was highly influential in restoration and building techniques, and it became the model for later lodges established throughout Prussia. On the principles of the lodges Walter Gropius (1883–1969) founded the Bauhaus, calling attention to its connection to cathedral building lodges and promoting the ideal of solidarity and the importance of craftsmanship by printing Lyonel Feininger’s (1871–1956) woodcut ‘Kathedrale’ on the title page of his 1919 manifesto (see Lewis, Figure 2.9).41 38  In Über altdeutsche Architektur und deren Ursprung (1812) Costenoble advocated a German origin of medi­eval architecture and studied its structural system from the eighth through the fourteenth centuries. Georg Moller wrote a comprehensive survey of German medi­e val architecture, Denkmäler der Deutschen Baukunst, i (Darmstadt: Heyer und Leske, 1815–21), ii (Darmstadt: Leske, 1822–31), iii, continued by Ernst Gladbach (Darmstadt: Leske, 1844–51), which not only introduced German cathedrals that were little known at the time, but included many lavish copperplate engravings. It is considered the most important work on the Gothic before 1830; see Robson-Scott, The Literary Background of the Gothic Revival in Germany, pp. 268–73 and 243–44. Sulpiz Boisserée, Ansichten, Risse, und einzelne Theile des Domes von Köln (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1821) and Geschichte und Beschreibung des Doms von Köln (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1823); see also Niehr, Bilderlust und Lesefrüchte, pp. 206–09. 39  See, for example, Der Kölner Dom in der deutschen Dichtung, ed. by Joseph Theele (Köln: Saaleck-Verlag, 1923); Eberhard Galley, ‘Heine und der Kölner Dom’, Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, 32 (1958), 99–110; and Herbert Rode, ‘Eine Idealansicht des Kölner Domes von Karl Georg Hasenpflug, 1834–36: Ein Beitrag zur romantischen Architekturmalerei’, Kölner Domblatt, 21/22 (1963), 89–94. 40  Many scholars have dealt with the political dimension of the Cologne Cathedral project, including Thomas Nipperdey, ‘Der Kölner Dom als Nationaldenkmal’, Historische Zeitschrift, 233 (1981), 595–613; Volker Depkat, ‘Das Kölner Dombaufest von 1848 und die politische Mehr deutigkeit des deutschen Nationalismus’, Kölner Domblatt, 45 (2004), 101–44; and Angela-Maria Corsten, ‘Das Dombaufest von 1880’, in Das Kölner Dom Lese- und Bilderbuch, ed. by Wolff and Diederich, pp. 53–62. 41  Lewis, The Gothic Revival, p. 192; Germann, The Gothic Revival in Europe and Britain, pp. 178–79. See also Christoph Wagner, ‘Gotikvisionen am Bauhaus’, in Mittelalter und Mittel­ alter­rezeption (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2005), pp. 382–406 (pp. 383–87).

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Less future-oriented than the German and more inward-looking than the British, the French discourse focused on establishing continuity between past and present, a result of the great rupture caused and willed by the French Revolution. The devastations wreaked upon medi­eval buildings during the revolutionary period had generated a new awareness of France’s architectural patrimony, and early on Gothic edifices were perceived as historical sites of national importance. Thus the Gothic cathedral was used to legitimate precarious governments and was seen as an agent of transformation in art and architecture, as well as in politics and society. Accordingly, the general admiration of medi­ eval architecture was tailored by each successive government. When Napoléon Bonaparte (1769–1821) became First Consul and reinstated Catholic worship, François-René de Chateaubriand (1768–1848) praised the Gothic’s ‘living’ connection with medi­eval Christianity.42 The Restoration of the Bourbon monarchy, particularly with the coronation of Charles X (1757–1836) in 1825, was considered to herald the return of the Christian Middle Ages, and a mode à la cathédrale spread like wildfire.43 At this time France’s medi­e val architectural heritage was celebrated in splendid verbal and visual detail in Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’ancienne France (1820–78), and her cathedrals were featured by Théodore de Jolimont (1787–1854) and Nicholas-MarieJoseph Chapuy (1790–1858) in the thirteen volumes of their Cathédrales françaises (1823–31).44 This work, which combined written history with picturesque views and ‘academic’ analytical plans and elevations, reflects the com42  François-René de Chateaubriand, ‘Les Églises gothiques’, in Génie du Christianisme [1802], 2 vols (Paris: G. F. Flammarion, 1966), i, 399–401. 43  Philippe Renaud, ‘Le Décor “à la cathédrale”, in Le ‘Gothique’ retrouvé avant Viollet-le Duc (Paris: Caisse National des Monuments Historiques et des Sites, 1979), pp. 150–55. 44  Charles Nodier (1780–1884), Isidore Justin Taylor (1789–1879), and Alphonse de Cailleux (1788–1876), Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’ancienne France: Ancienne Normandie, 3 vols (Paris: P. Didot l’ainé, 1820–78). They divided their work into regions, beginning with Normandy, followed by Franche-Comté, Auvergne, Languedoc, Picardie, Bretagne, Dauphiné, Champagne, and Bourgogne. Many well-known artists worked on the volume including Pierre Cicéri (1782–1868), Charles-Marie Bouton (1781–1853), Alexandre-Évariste Fragonard (1780–1850), Louis Daguerre (1787–1851), Richard Parkes Bonington (1802–1828), Adrien Dauzats (1808–1868), Chapuy, and Viollet-le-Duc. See Elaine Vergnolle, ‘Les Voyages pittoresques’ in Le ‘Gothique’ retrouvé avant Viollet-le Duc, pp. 105–19; and Glaser, ‘Explorations of the Gothic Cathedral’, pp. 222–27. See also Nicholas-MarieJoseph Chapuy, Cathédrales françaises dessinées, lithographiées et publiées par Chapuy, […] avec un texte historique, ed. by F. T. Jolimont, 23 vols (Paris: Leblanc, 1823–24; Paris: Engelmann, 1824–31); see Niehr, Bilderlust und Lesefrüchte, pp. 98–101.

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bination of aesthetics and science that converged in representations of Gothic architecture at the time.45 After the 1830 revolution the Middle Ages came to be understood as an era of artistic, social, and political liberty. These ideas were brought to the fore by the historians Augustin Thierry (1795–1856), Jules Michelet (1798–1874), and, with particular regard to the Gothic cathedral, Ludovic Vitet (1802–1873) in his 1845 treatise, Monographie de l’église de Notre-Dame de Noyon.46 They were also woven into the July Monarchy’s (1830–48) government programme, under which Prosper Mérimée (1803–1870) and Viollet-le-Duc headed the restoration of the medi­eval patrimony through the Second Empire (1852–70).47 In the 1830s Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris had put the Parisian cathedral in the spotlight, and its restoration by Viollet-le-Duc and Jean-Baptiste Lassus (1807–1857) from 1845 to 1870 took on national dimensions.48 In a different way than Cologne Cathedral, it was also a seat of controversies, where the proponents of archaeological fidelity, such as Lassus and Adolphe-Napoléon Didron (1806–1867), fought a losing battle against Viollet-le-Duc’s insistence on an unadulterated, ideal thirteenth-century Gothic.49 From the 1870s on Gothic cathedrals became a favourite motif in the paintings of Claude Monet (1840–1926), Camille Pissarro (1830–1903), Maximilien Luce (1858–1941), Henri Matisse (1869–1954), and Maurice Utrillo (1883–1955). After 1880 the edifice became a literary phenomenon 45 

On the tension between aesthetic sensibility and scholarly documentation, see Niehr, Gotikbilder — Gotiktheorien, pp. 159–224, and particularly his article in this volume. See also Richard Utz’s in this volume. 46  Ludovic Vitet, Monographie de l’église Notre-Dame de Noyon: Plans, coupes, élévations et détails par Daniel Ramée, Collection de documents inédits sur l’histoire de France, 3rd ser., Archéologie (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1845); see also Glaser, ‘Explorations of the Gothic Cathedral’, pp. 432–43. 47  On this subject, see for example Bercé, Viollet-le-Duc; and Bernard Crochet, Viollet-leDuc et la sauvegarde des monuments historiques (Rennes: Éditions Ouest-France, 2015). 48  It held the public’s unwavering interest, led to debates about restoration, raised the cathedral to the status of a national monument, and involved new working methods, policies, and philosophies that would influence monumental restoration through the century; see Glaser, ‘Explorations of the Gothic Cathedral’, pp. 251–56. 49  Klaus Niehr, ‘Die perfekte Kathedrale: Imagination des monumentalen Mittelalters im französischen 19. Jahrundert’, in Bilder gedeuteter Geschichte: Das Mittelalter in der Kunst und Architektur der Moderne, ed. by Otto Gerhard Oexle, Áron Petneki, and Leszek Zygner, 2 vols, Göttinger Gespräche zur Geschichtswissenschaft, 23 (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2004), i, 163–221. See also Leniaud, Fallait-il achever Saint-Ouen de Rouen?

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in the hands of Émile Zola (1840–1902), J.-K. Huysmans (1848–1907), and Marcel Proust (1871–1922).50 At the close of the nineteenth century, Émile Mâle (1862–1954) published his study of the iconography at Chartres Cathedral, and at the opening of the twentieth, Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) celebrated the Frenchness of the Gothic.51 As the Action Française was propagating a return to Roman values, liberal thinkers held up Gothic architecture as the pure manifestation of the French, that is, Gallic, artistic spirit, a lineage which Robert Delaunay (1885–1941) and Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) evoked in their paintings of Laon and Chartres Cathedrals.52 With the bombarding of Reims Cathedral in 1914, French differences were forgotten in a national outpouring of rage and grief.53

50 

Émile Zola, Le Rêve [1888] (Paris: Gallimard, 1986); J.-K. Huysmans, La Cathédrale [1898] (Monaco: Editions du Rocher, 1992); Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu [1913–27], ed. by Jean-Yves Tadié, 4 vols (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1987–89). Elizabeth Emery has written about the cathedral theme at length in Romancing the Cathedral: Gothic Architecture in Fin-de-Siècle French Culture (New York: SUNY Press, 2001). 51  Émile Mâle, L’Art religieux du xiiie siècle en France: Étude sur l’iconographie du Moyen Âge et sur ses sources d’inspiration [1898], 8th edn (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1948). Auguste Rodin, Les Cathédrales de France [1914] (Paris: Editions Denoël, 1983). 52  Adrien Mithouard (1864–1919) clearly made the connection between the Middle Ages and modernity in ‘L’Art gothique et l’art impressionniste’, in Le Tourment de l’unité (Paris: Mercure de France, 1901), pp. 311–48. On Celtic nationalism in France, see Mark Antliff ’s ‘The Body of the Nation: Cubism’s Celtic Nationalism’, in his Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni­ver­sity Press, 1993), pp. 106–34; and especially Kevin D. Murphy, ‘Cubism and the Gothic Tradition’, in Architecture and Cubism, ed. by Eve Blau and Nancy J. Troy (Montréal: Centre canadien d’architecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture; Cam­b ridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), pp. 59–76. I have discussed the historiographical context in ‘Tour de fer et tours de pierre: La Tour Eiffel et la cathédrale gothique dans l’imaginaire au tournant du xx e siècle,’ in L’Imaginaire moderne de la cathédrale, ed. by Georges Roque (Paris: Librairie d’Amérique et d’orient, Jean Maisonrouge, 2012), pp. 41–69. 53  See Joëlle Prungnaud’s essay in this volume and her book Figures littéraires de la cathédrale, 1880–1918 (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses du Septentrion, 2008). This subject was treated in depth in the French and German exhibitions Cathédrales 1789–1914: Un Mythe Moderne (Paris: Somogy editions d’art, 2014) and Die Kathedrale. See especially the chapter ‘La Grande Guerre’ in the exhibition catalogue Cathédrales 1789–1914, pp. 344–63; and the chapter by Martina Padberg, ‘1914: 1914 vor Reims — die Beschießung der “cathédrale nationale” und ihre Folgen’, in Die Kathedrale: Romantik – Impressionismus – Moderne, pp. 152–69.

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Rivalries, Exchanges, and Transfers of Knowledge Though the Gothic discourse was driven by highly national interests, it was sustained by Gothic proponents throughout Europe and their ongoing interchanges of ideas, knowledge, and expertise. Just as the Gothic had spread across Europe in the Middle Ages, the renewal of interest in and the study of the Gothic in the modern period was a transnational phenomenon of cross-linguistic fertilization. Among the aristocrats exiled in Britain during the French Revolution, Charles-Alexis-Adrien Duhérissier de Gerville (1769–1853) became acquainted with English antiquarians, who had long been investigating the origins of the Gothic. And after the Napoleonic wars, British antiquarians working in Normandy inspired Auguste Le Prévost (1787–1859) and Arcisse de Caumont (1801–1873) to study their own Norman treasures.54 Archaeological findings were shared and discussed. Buildings were classified according to style and period, with each nation adopting its own nationalistic taxonomy in the ideological and patriotic battle to claim the Gothic that raged on despite co-operation among individuals.55 This was only part of the rivalry between European nations, however, which also manifested itself in the desire to pay homage to the national Gothic heritage in lavish volumes that outdid the foreign competition.56 English works like 54 

Pevsner, Some Architectural Writers of the Nineteenth Century, pp. 16–22. Edward Kaufman discusses this in ‘Architecture and Travel in the Age of British Eclecticism’, in Architecture and its Image: Four Centuries of Architectural Representation. Works from the Collection of the Canadian Centre for Architecture, ed. by Eve Blau and Edward Kaufman (Montréal: Canadian Center for Architecture, 1989), pp. 59–85. 55  While the British celebrated the Gothic as English, many German-speakers continued thinking of medi­eval architecture as German (Robson-Scott, The Literary Background of the Gothic Revival in Germany, pp. 238–73 (especially pp. 243–44)). The French also held that the Gothic was German; nonetheless, the regional pride of the Norman antiquarians had led them to concentrate on the Gothic’s salient feature, the pointed arch. Arcisse de Caumont distinguished between ‘genre roman’, a degenerated form of Roman architecture, ‘transition’ (as the pointed arch appeared), and ‘architecture ogivale’ or ‘architecture à ogives’. He divided the Gothic into three eras, based on the chronology proposed by Le Prévost (who got it from the British): ‘gothique primordial ou à lancettes’ (1150–1250), ‘gothique secondaire ou rayonnant’ (1250–1300), and ‘gothique tertiaire ou flamboyant’ (1400–60 through the sixteenth century). On the three ‘orders’ of Gothic, see Lewis, The Gothic Revival, p. 48; on Caumont, see Glaser, ‘Explorations of the Gothic Cathedral’, pp. 309, 375–78 (especially p. 375, n. 31), and 381–82, n. 42. For the general context, see Elizabeth Williams, ‘The Perception of Romanesque Art in the Romantic Period: Archaeological Attitudes in France in the 1820s and 1830s’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 21 (1985), 303–21. 56  Niehr, Bilderlust und Lesefrüchte, p. 196; Robson-Scott, The Literary Background of the Gothic Revival in Germany, p. 265.

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James Murphy’s (1716–1814) on the Church of Batalha in Portugal (1795), and Britton’s Architectural Antiquities of Great Britain and Cathedral Antiquities were well known among German speakers, the latter being especially admired for its excellent engravings, and they set the standard for later publications.57 Britton’s work inspired Moller to present the ‘more splendid’ German monuments in his survey of German medi­eval architecture, Denkmäler der deutschen Baukunst (1815–21), and it gave Boisserée the impetus for his monumental — in content, exactitude, ambition, and physical size — two-volume work on Cologne Cathedral: Ansichten, Risse und einzelne Theile des Domes von Köln (93.5 × 73 cm, 1821), followed in 1823 by Geschichte und Beschreibung des Doms von Köln (54 × 40 cm), published simultaneously in German and in French.58 In turn, this spurred the French on to publish their own definitive work on Gothic architecture, which turned out to be Vitet’s highly political monograph on Noyon Cathedral, with its accompanying volume of extremely precise architectural drawings by the architect Daniel Ramée (1806–1887).59 57 

James Murphy, Plans, Elevations, Sections, and Views of the Church of Batalha. […] To which is prefixed an Introductory Discourse on the Principles of Gothic Architecture (London, I. & J. Taylor, 1795). Murphy’s monograph was one of the most widely read and influential monographs in the early nineteenth century and was known to all the German-speaking Gothic proponents. It was translated into German in 1815 and parts of it again in 1828. See Niehr, Bilderlust und Lesefrüchte, pp. 193–95 (especially p. 193), and Robson-Scott, The Literary Background of the Gothic Revival in Germany, pp. 264–65. For the German reaction to Britton’s volume on Canterbury Cathedral, see Robson-Scott, The Literary Background of the Gothic Revival in Germany, pp. 265 and 271–72, and Niehr, Bilderlust und Lesefrüchte, pp. 202–05 (especially p. 205). 58  Moller’s Denkmäler der Deutschen Baukunst was very popular in England, due to the anonymous translation in 1824, An Essay on the Origin and Progress of Gothic Architecture, traced in and deduced from the Ancient Edifices of Germany, with references to those of England, etc. from the Eighth to the Sixteenth Centuries, ed. by Dr George Moller (London: Priestly and Weale, 1824). Later, an amplified translation appeared as Moller’s Memorials of GermanGothic architecture, with additional notes, and illustrations from Stieglitz, etc.; by W. H. Leeds … to which are added, tables of continental lineal measure, by W. S. B. Woolhouse […] ([London]: John Wale, 1836); see also Robson-Scott, The Literary Background of the Gothic Revival in Germany, pp. 268–73. Sulpiz Boisserée, Histoire et description de la cathédrale de Cologne, accompagnée de recherches sur l’architecture des anciennes cathédrales (Paris: F. Didot père et fils, 1823), see also Niehr, Bilderlust und Lesefrüchte, pp. 206–09. 59  Both Vitet and Lassus were commissioned by Louis-Philippe to contribute to the archaeological section of a series about French history. Lassus was to write on Chartres Cathedral, but died before he finished it; see Alain Erlande-Brandenburg, La Cathédrale (Paris: Fayard, 1989), pp.  21–22. Jean-Baptiste Lassus, Eugène-Emmanuel Armaury Duval, Adolphe-Napoléon Didron, and Paul Durand, Monographie de la cathédrale de Chartres, 9 vols (Paris: Imprimerie

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In practice, however, Viollet-le-Duc’s Dictionnaire raisonné proved to be the definitive work on the Gothic. Though its theories received relatively little international acceptance among his contemporaries, its comprehensive nature made it a valuable reference work that was used by architects and builders across Europe.60 It was also read by non-specialists, notably Henry Adams (1838–1919), Pater, Rodin, Proust, and Erik Satie (1866–1925).61 Irrespective of these rivalries, an attitude of international co-operation and sharing prevailed: from early on Gothic enthusiasts, painters, and especially architects traversed Europe in the search for answers to questions about Gothic origin, for picturesque and sublime experiences, or for architectural models and inspiration, and returned home to enrich their own national Gothic discourses. Around mid-century, forums for the discussion of medi­e val art and architecture, restoration, and building in the Gothic idiom were established, the most celebrated being the Ecclesiological Society’s journal, The Ecclesiologist (1842–68), Didron’s Annales archéologiques (1844–65), and the journal of the Cologne Dombauverein, Kölner Domblatt.62 Though the emphases of these publications differed, they possessed a common spirit of inquiry and a zeal for anything regarding medi­eval architecture. They provided platforms for debate, questions, and advice.63 Partially through these organs, theorists and propoimpériale, 1842–65). See also Adolphe-Napoléon Didron, Rapport […] sur la monographie de la cathédrale de Chartres (Paris: Dupont, 1839). 60  See Robin D. Middleton, ‘Viollet-le-Duc’s Influence in Nineteenth-Century England’, Art History, 4.2 (1981), 203–19. 61  Henry Adams revered Viollet-le-Duc and referred frequently to the Dictionnaire in Mont Saint Michel and Chartres [1904] (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986). Pater, ‘Notre-Dame d’Amiens’, quotes Viollet-le-Duc; Proust and Rodin both criticized Viollet-le-Duc’s restoration methods, the former outright, the latter targeting the architect’s philosophy and its results (see, for example, Rodin, Les Cathédrales de France, p. 144). Satie is purported to have read the Dictionnaire in 1886; see Grete Wehmeyer, Erik Satie: Bilder und Dokumente (München: Spangenberg, 1992), pp. 28–29, and Grete Wehmeyer, Erik Satie (Regensburg: Bosse, 1974), p. 21. On Proust and Viollet-le-Duc, see for example Luc Fraisse, ‘Proust et Viollet-le-Duc: De l’ésthétique de Combray à l’esthétique de La Recherche’, Revue de l’histoire littéraire de la France, 100.1 (2000), 45–90, and Richard Bales, Proust and the Middle Ages (Geneva: Droz, 1975), pp. 37–38 and 67. 62  Germann writes in detail about these organs and discusses their interaction in The Gothic Revival in Europe and Britain, pp. 99–165 (especially pp. 99–100). 63  Both Pugin and Didron reprinted articles from the Kölner Domblatt (Brooks, The Gothic Revival, p. 263), and Didron enthusiastically followed the spread of the Gothic through Europe and abroad; see Bergdoll, ‘The Ideal of the Gothic Cathedral’, p. 103.

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nents of the Gothic stayed in close contact and generally helped each other out, shared experiences, passed around drawings, and exchanged the names of architects building in the Gothic style.64 Catholic proponents of the Gothic held together: Reichensperger was friendly with Didron and Charles-ForbesRené de Montalembert (1810–1870), and all three were supportive of Pugin.65 Expertise was internationally recognized: Didron and Reichensperger attended the consecration of Pugin’s St Giles Church (Cheadle, Staffordshire, England) in 1846, and English architects won the competitions for the Nikolaikirche in Hamburg (1845–63) and the cathedral in Lille (1854–1999), for which Reichensperger and Didron served on the jury (1854–56).66 In 1850 Britain’s Ecclesiological Society made Lassus and Viollet-le-Duc honorary members, and in 1866 Reichensperger became an honorary member of the Royal Institute of British Architects.67 It may in fact be said that none of the national Gothic discourses could have flourished in isolation. Cologne Cathedral was a focal point for all of Europe, and branches of Cologne’s Dombauverein were founded in many countries to raise money for the cathedral’s completion.68 Reichensperger had been inspired by Pugin’s True Principles, which he sought to implement in cathedral building 64 

Germann, The Gothic Revival in Europe and Britain, p. 99, and Lewis, The Gothic Revival, pp. 101–02. 65  Gollwitzer, ‘Zum Fragenkreis Architekturhistorismus’, p. 7; Bergdoll, ‘The Ideal of the Gothic Cathedral’, pp. 103, 109. 66  Lewis, The Gothic Revival, pp.  101–02. George Gilbert Scott, who had known Reichensperger since 1846, triumphed in Hamburg with a pan-Germanic Gothic (Lewis, The Gothic Revival, p. 98; Germann, The Gothic Revival in Europe and Britain, pp. 99–100). Bergdoll gives a short history of the controversial competition for France’s first — and only — neoGothic cathedral, Notre-Dame de la Treille. William Burges (1827–1881) and Henry Clutton (1819–1893) took first place with a Continental Gothic design, George Edmund Street (1824–1881) took second, and third place was awarded to Lassus, who had strictly adhered to thirteenth-century French Gothic. The controversy between the British idea of ‘Gothic development’ and the French doctrine of unity of style (complicated, Bergdoll implies, by national pride) brought construction to a standstill. In the end, Lassus’s plan was accepted and, after his death in 1857, was modified by the neo-Gothic architect Charles-Édouard Leroy (1816–1879). See Bergdoll, ‘The Ideal of the Gothic Cathedral’, pp. 116–19. 67  Middleton, ‘Viollet-le-Duc’s Influence’, p. 205; Lewis, The Gothic Revival, p. 101. 68  The Kölner Dombauverein was founded 1840, and according to Arnold Wolff, there were more than 144 sections: Wolff, ‘Die Vollendung des Domes’, p. 44. The Parisian section was organized in 1842 by the German-born French national Franz Christian Gau (1790–1854), who designed the first neo-Gothic church in Paris, Saint-Clothilde (1846–57), and Heinrich Heine (1797–1856); see Galley, ‘Heine und der Kölner Dom’, p. 101.

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lodges.69 Gropius not only admired the Bauhütten, but was also influenced by Morris’s writings on medi­eval guilds.70 Proust was a devoted follower of Ruskin, translating The Bible of Amiens in 1904 and adding copious notes of his own.71 Rodin, who recorded his love of France’s architectural heritage in his sketches and meditations that were published as Les Cathédrales de France (1914), travelled with Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) to Chartres in 1906, a journey that inspired the poet’s cathedral cycle in the Neue Gedichte (1907–08).72 Thus even with its deep national implications and tendencies, complete with its rivalries and exchanges, the Gothic discourse is, at its heart, a European discourse.73

Interdisciplinary Perspectives: Scholarly Discourses on the Meanings of the Gothic Cathedral In the spirit of transnational, transdisciplinary, and transmedial exchange inherent to the Gothic discourse, this volume brings together scholarship from different national and disciplinary traditions and thereby opens new trajectories for the scholarly discourse on the Gothic cathedral as a culturally constructed object. It benefits from and pushes the limits of the existing scholarly discourses in which the meanings of the Gothic cathedral have been researched. The founding study of Gothic architecture in its international importance both as a style and as a cultural phenomenon was written by the German-trained art historian Paul Frankl, The Gothic: Literary Sources and Interpretations through Eight Centuries. In its sheer breadth of detail and its emphasis on contexts and cross-disciplinary research, this mammoth work provides a useful background for research on the uses and importance of the Gothic cathedral 69 

Brooks, The Gothic Revival, pp. 263–65. Lewis, The Gothic Revival, p. 192. 71  John Ruskin, La Bible d’Amiens, trans. by Marcel Proust (1904; repr. Paris: Mercure de France, 1947). 72  Ernest M. Wolf, Stone into Poetry: The Cathedral Cycle in Rainer Maria Rilke’s Neue Gedichte, Studien zur Germanistik, Anglistik und Komparatistik, 61 (Bonn: Bouvier, 1978), p. 11. Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘L’Ange du Méridien’, ‘Die Kathedrale’, ‘Das Portal’, ‘Die Fensterrose’, ‘Das Kapital’, and ‘Gott im Mittelalter’, in Neue Gedichte [1907–08] (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1974). 73  It was also, necessarily, a colonial discourse. See G. A. Bremner’s comprehensive study, Imperial Gothic: Religious Architecture and High Anglican Culture in the British Empire, c. 1840–70 (New Haven: Yale Uni­ver­sity Press, 2013). See also Brooks, The Gothic Revival, pp. 281–88, 341–47; Lewis, The Gothic Revival, pp. 185–92. 70 

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through the twentieth century. Since Frankl, the Gothic cathedral’s pervasive cultural presence in the nineteenth century has been explored in almost all the traditional disciplines, most thoroughly in architectural history. 74 Its importance in the visual arts and literature has long been recognized, and more recently its indisputable place in the history of illustrated books has also been brought to the fore.75 Visual and literary appropriations of the edifice have been analysed in the context of word and image studies.76 And since the representation of architecture raises questions of intersemiotic transfer, the representation of the Gothic cathedral would interest scholars of intermedial stud74 

See for example the above-mentioned works by Borger-Keweloh and Niehr as well as Leniaud, Les Cathédrales; Bergdoll, ‘The Ideal of the Gothic Cathedral’; and Pierre Vaisse, ‘Le Corbusier et le gothique’, Revue de l’art, 118 (1997), 17–27. 75  On the cathedral in the visual arts, see for example Chapeaurouge, ‘Die “Kathedrale” als moderns Bildthema’ and Whittingham, Constable and Turner at Salisbury, as well as Roland März, ‘The Cathedral of Romanticism. Gothic Visions of Architecture: Lyonel Feininger and Karl Friedrich Schinkel’, trans. by Michael Robinson, in The Romantic Spirit in German Art, 1790–1990, ed. by Keith Hartley and others (London: South Bank Center; Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland; München: Oktagon Verlag, 1994), pp. 164–70; Dagmar Kronenberger, Die Kathedrale als Serienmotiv: Motivkundliche Studien zu einem Bildthema in der Malerei des französischen Impressionismus (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1996); Ronald R. Bernier, Monument, Moment, and Memory: Monet’s Cathedral in Fin-de-Siècle France (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell Uni­ver­sity Press, 2007). See especially the above-mentioned 2014 exhibition catalogues, Cathédrales 1789–1914, and Die Kathedrale. On the cathedral in literature, see Emery, Romancing the Cathedral, and the chapter on the cathedral in Elizabeth Emery and Laura Morowitz, Consuming the Past: The Medi­eval Revival in Fin-de-Siècle France (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003) as well as Luc Fraisse, L’Œuvre cathédrale: Proust et l’architecture médiévale (Paris: José Corti, 1990), and Prungnaud, Figures littéraires de la cathédrale and La Cathédrale, ed. by Joëlle Prungnaud (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses de l’Université Charles-de-Gaulle–Lille 3, 2001). Far too numerous to list here are the many articles regarding Goethe, Hugo, and Proust. For the illustrated book, see Le Men, La Cathédrale illustrée de Hugo à Monet, and on architectural monographs, see Niehr, Bilderlust und Lesefrüchte. 76  Examples include Cynthia Gamble, ‘Proust-Ruskin Perspectives on La Vierge Dorée at Amiens Cathédrale’, Word and Image, 9.3 (1993), 270–86; Kevin D. Murphy, ‘Restoring Rouen: The Politics of Preservation in July Monarchy France’, Word and Image, 11.2 (1995), 196–206, and ‘Cubism and the Gothic Tradition’; as well as Stephanie A. Glaser, ‘“Deutsche Baukunst”, “Architecture Française”: The Use of the Gothic Cathedral in the Construction of National Memory in Nineteenth-Century Germany and France’, in Orientations: Space / Time / Image / Word, ed. by Claus Clüver, Leo Hoek, and Véronique Plesch, Word and Image Interactions, 5 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), pp. 77–91. For a direct relation between text and image, see Danielle Chaperon, ‘L’Autre cathédrale: Le Rêve d’Emile Zola et de Carlos Schwabe’, and Stephanie A. Glaser ‘“Les Vitraux toujours en fleur”: Évolution d’un thème littéraire et artistique de Victor Hugo à Robert Delaunay’, in La Cathédrale, ed. by Prungnaud, pp. 99–116 and pp. 215–28.

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ies, though such approaches are as yet few.77 Importantly, the broad discourses of medi­e valism and Gothic Revival have offered engaging contexts and valuable perspectives for exploring the phenomenon of the Gothic cathedral in the modern period. Medi­evalism Medi­evalism is a vibrant, multifaceted, interdisciplinary field of inquiry that, very broadly stated, studies the continual reception, revival, and reuse of the Middle Ages and medi­eval forms and artefacts in all aspects of culture, ranging from the popular to the scholarly to the ideological.78 Its subject matter covers anything from the eighteenth-century fashion for chivalry to medi­ eval subjects of contemporary film, comics, and games. Scholarly monographs such as Lionel Gossman’s Medi­evalism and the Ideologies of the Enlightenment (1968) and Norman F. Cantor’s Inventing the Middle Ages (1991) were pivotal in demarcating the subject.79 The International Society for the Study of Medi­ evalism, the scholarly journal Studies in Medi­evalism (published since 1979), and The Year’s Work in Medi­evalism have established medi­evalism as a scholarly discourse, especially among English- and German-speaking scholars. Medi­ evalism also has a dedicated following among French speakers, who founded the society Modernités Médiévales in 2006.80 The journal Perspicuitas has provided a German forum for ‘Mittelalterrezeption’, and since 2010 postmedi­eval: a journal of medi­eval cultural studies has been bringing provocative and innova77  I deal specifically with questions of intermedial transfer in my articles ‘The Gothic Façade in Word and Image’ and ‘“Ein, ganzer, großer Eindruck füllte meine Seele”’. 78  In the 1980s Leslie Workman defined medi­evalism as ‘the study of the Middle Ages, the application of medi­eval models to contemporary needs, and the inspiration of the Middle Ages in all forms of art and thought’ (Editorial, Studies in Medi­evalism, 3.1 (1987), 1), a definition that has since been reworked and expanded. See especially Medi­evalism: Key Critical Terms, ed. by Elizabeth Emery and Richard Utz (Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 2014). 79  Lionel Gossman, Medi­evalism and the Ideologies of the Enlightenment: The World and Work of La Curne de Sainte-Palaye (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni­ver­sity Press, 1968); Norman F. Cantor, Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great Medi­evalists of the Twentieth Century (New York: Morrow, 1991). More recent works include Kathleen Biddick, The Shock of Medi­evalism (Durham, NC: Duke Uni­ver­sity Press, 1998) and Alicia C. Montoya, Medi­evalist Enlightenment: From Charles Perrault to Jean-Jackques Rousseau (Cam­ bridge: Brewer, 2013). 80  Their publications offer theoretical reflections on medi­e valism, see for example Médiévalisme: Modernité du Moyen Âge, ed. by Vincent Ferré (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2010).

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tive theoretical and interdisciplinary approaches to the forefront of the medi­ evalism discourse.81 Online blogs also offer platforms for scholars and amateurs worldwide.82 A number of scholars, though not officially affiliated with these groups, have been researching the reception of the Middle Ages in various aspects of culture and using scholarly approaches to a wide range of subjects that greatly enrich the discourse.83 Others ‘officially’ working within the medi­ evalism discourse, like Elizabeth Emery and Richard Utz, have made considerable contributions to the understanding of the cathedral in the nineteenth century.84 Medi­evalism can be brought to bear on representations of the Gothic cathedral to varying degrees. While some are consciously medi­e valistic (Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris or Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Earth, 1989), some arise from 81 

For the similarities and differences between the English and German terms, see Richard Utz, ‘Resistance to (the New) Medi­e valism? Comparative Deliberations on (National) Philology, Mediävalismus, and Mittelalter-Rezeption in Germany and North America’, in The Future of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Problems, Trends, and Opportunities in Research, ed. by Roger Dahood, Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, 2 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998), pp. 151–70. 82  Notably ‘Medi­e vally Speaking’, [accessed April 2016], and ‘Medi­eval Studies’, formerly known as ‘The Virtual Society for the Study of Popular Culture and the Middle Ages on Screen’, [accessed April 2016]. 83  See for example the above-mentioned Bilder gedeuteter Geschichte, ed. by Oexle, Petneki, and Zygner, as well as Staffan Källström, Framtidens katedral: medeltidsdröm och utopisk modernism (Stockholm: Carlsson, 2000); Le Moyen Âge en 1900, ed. by Anne Ducrey, Ateliers, 26 (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses de l’Université Charles-de-Gaulle–Lille 3, 2000); Images du Moyen Âge, ed. by Isabelle-Durand-Le Guern (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2006). For France, see especially Janine R. Dakyns, The Middle Ages in French Literature, 1851–1900 (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 1973); Bales, Proust and the Middle Ages; Barbara G. Keller, The Middle Ages Reconsidered: Attitudes in France from the Eighteenth Century through the Romantic Movement (New York: Peter Lang, 1994). Recent works include Emery and Morowitz’s Consuming the Past; Medi­eval Saints in Late Nineteenth-Century French Culture, ed. by Elizabeth Emery and Laurie Postlewate ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004); Negotiating Heritage: Memories of the Middle Ages, ed. by Mette B. Bruun and Stephanie Glaser, Ritus et Artes: Transformations and Traditions (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008); and Stefan Morent, Das Mittelalter im 19. Jahrhundert: Ein Beitrag zur Kompositionsgeschichte in Frankreich (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2013). 84  Emery, Romancing the Cathedral; Richard Utz, ‘The Medi­eval Cathedral: From Spiritual Site to National Super-Signifier’, The Year’s Work in Medi­evalism, 15 (2001), 127–31. Another illuminating example is Michael Camille’s posthumous work, The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame: Medi­evalism and the Monsters of Modernity (Chicago: Uni­ver­sity of Chicago Press, 2009).

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a context in which medi­e valism was a strong cultural force, yet bear no outside medi­eval trappings (Constable’s paintings of Salisbury Cathedral, Monet’s Rouen Cathedral series of 1892–94). Others thematize medi­e val artefacts or motifs (Raymond Carver’s 1983 novella Cathedral); some buildings ‘quote’ the cathedral (Chicago Tribune Tower) or allude to the Middle Ages through forms or ideas (the Eiffel Tower or skyscrapers).85 Such differentiation helps to focus on the ways in which medi­e valism can be a useful critical tool within traditional disciplines: it may help to illuminate the origins of the Bauhaus and the development of German Expressionist painting;86 it might give added insight to Claude Debussy’s (1862–1918) Cathédrale engloutie (1910) or Robert Delaunay’s Tours de Laon (1912) and possibly open up heretofore unexplored layers in Carver’s Cathedral or the abstract paintings of Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) or Frantisek Kupka (1871–1957). As such, medi­evalism provides a useful starting point and a framework for investigating the meanings of the Gothic cathedral, not least in bringing various disciplinary methodologies to bear on the topic. The essays in this volume all contribute to the medi­evalism discourse in some way, even though this has not been their primary focus. Gothic Revival Linked to the medi­evalism discourse by its subject, though existing independently from it, the Gothic Revival discourse has given valuable insight into the history of Gothic architecture since the eighteenth century. Its primary focus has been architecture, and it has traditionally examined theoretical writings and literary texts as means to understanding architectural manifestations and developments. And though it includes the decorative arts, it has placed less emphasis on the visual arts, and it has seldom dealt with questions of intermedial or intersemiotic representation that the essays in this volume examine. 85 

I have delineated these attitudes as ‘consciously medi­e valistic’, ‘anti-medi­e valistic’, and ‘latently medi­e valistic’; see ‘The Gothic Cathedral and Medi­e valism’, in ‘Forum: Falling into Medi­e valism’, Universitas, 2.1 (2006), [accessed April 2016]. On the Eiffel Tower, see Glaser, ‘Tour de fer et tours de pierre’ and ‘Of Revolutions, Republics and Spires: Nineteenth-Century France and the Gothic Cathedral’ in Signs of Change: Transformations of Christian Traditions and their Representation in the Arts, 1000–2000, ed. by Nils Holger Petersen, Claus Clüver, and Nicolas Bell (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), pp. 453–73. 86  See Magdalena Bushart, Der Geist der Gotik und die expressionistische Kunst: Kunstgeschichte und Kunsttheorie, 1911–1935 (München: Verlag Silke Schreiber, 1990).

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Originating as a scholarly discourse with Charles Eastlake’s History of the Gothic Revival (1874) and Kenneth Clark’s 1928 The Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste, Gothic Revival has mainly designated the British interest in medi­e val architectural forms, ornament, and motifs as applied to architecture, the decorative arts, and handicrafts. Its subject ranges from neoGothic garden structures and Horace Walpole’s ‘Gothic castle’, Strawberry Hill, through the Victorian neo-Gothic architects.87 As such the term describes a typically British phenomenon, although repeated attempts have been made to extend its meaning to similar phenomena in different geographical areas and to raise awareness of the international import of the reawakening to the Gothic. The first to do so appears to have been Agnes Addison Gilchrist, who founded the Society of Architectural Historians in 1940. In her 1938 dissertation, Romanticism and the Gothic Revival, she meticulously investigated the connection between the Romantic interest in the Middle Ages and the Gothic Revival.88 Acknowledging the common interest that manifested itself so differently in England, France, Germany, and the United States, she sketched the broad geographical range of Gothic Revival and the nationalistic associations it took on, thus setting the stage for further studies of this nature. In the 1950s, after Clark had revised and republished his study, William Douglas Robson-Scott applied the term freely to German literary phenomena.89 His illuminating study of the literary and theoretical sources of the phenomenon in the German-speaking lands, The Literary Background of the Gothic Revival in Germany (1965), remains a valuable reference work for any study of the Gothic cathedral in the nineteenth century. In its forward, he pointed to the crux of the problem with the existing terminology: 87 

Charles Eastlake, A History of the Gothic Revival: An Attempt to Show How the Taste for Mediæval Architecture, which Lingered in England during the Two Last Centuries Has since Been Encouraged and Developed (London: Longmans, Green, 1872); Kenneth Clark, The Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste (1928; repr. New York: Harper and Row, 1974). Eastlake emphasizes the literary contributions of Walpole, Walter Scott (1771–1832), and Ruskin, and includes Viollet-le-Duc’s Dictionnaire. Clark set the standard for the chronological structure and content of the Gothic Revival discourse as a British phenomenon, beginning with Gothic survival, following it with literary influences, and then moving through the interest in ruins, archaeological studies to neo-Gothic building, and then from Pugin to George Gilbert Scott, to conclude with a discussion of Ruskin. 88  Agnes Addison, Romanticism and the Gothic Revival (1938; repr. New York: Gordian Press, 1967). 89  W. D. Robson-Scott, ‘Georg Forster and the Gothic Revival’, Modern Language Review, 51 (1956), 42–48, and Robson-Scott, ‘Goethe and the Gothic Revival’.

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Strangely enough no book exists, either in Germany or in any other language, on the Gothic Revival in Germany. The Germans do not even have a word for it. Neugotik is not the same thing. Die Wiedererweckung der Gotik is perhaps the nearest equivalent, but that is a paraphrase rather than a translation.90

Beginning as Clark did, Robson-Scott explained the eclipse and survival of Gothic architecture, pointed to English and French writings that influenced German writers and theorists, and then discussed at length German writings on the Gothic from the Sturm und Drang through Romanticism to the more scientific writings of German architects and archaeologists. In so doing he made three major contributions to the Gothic Revival discourse: he demonstrated that ‘History of Taste’ was not insular but international; he proved to the English-speaking world that a comparable, yet differently manifested fascination for and revival of Gothic architecture existed outside of Britain: and finally, he gave literary and theoretical texts primary importance. Shortly thereafter, the Swiss architectural historian Georg Germann published his indispensible study, Gothic Revival in Europe and Britain: Sources, Influences, and Ideas (1972). Showing Great Britain, the German-speaking lands, and France to be strongholds of the renewed interest in the Gothic, Germann clearly delineated the different motivations for and aims of the Gothic Revival in these areas. In so doing, he redefined the geographic centre of the revival and recontextualized it within the history of ideas. He opened his study by discussing three underlying concepts that were essential to the Gothic discourse everywhere: first, he fleshed out the different cultural connotations of the sticky term ‘style’, which was essential to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thinking about Gothic and neo-Gothic architecture; second, he brought up the importance of mimesis in connection with theories of Gothic origin; and, third, he explained how the idea of historical development had influenced the new understanding of medi­e val architecture. In the body of the work he explored four major aspects of the Gothic discourse: the theories of Gothic as they developed in the three geographic areas, the Gothic’s major proponents and their European networks, the distinct character of the Gothic movement within each nation, and the effects the Gothic Revival had on architectural practice and theory. He thereby underscored the international and intellectual import of the Gothic Revival. Since then, Michael J. Lewis has carried the Gothic Revival discourse further in two studies that focus on its international character. The Politics of the 90 

Robson-Scott, The Literary Background of the Gothic Revival in Germany, pp. vii–viii.

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German Gothic Revival: August Reichensperger (1993), is a comprehensive and detailed investigation of the political, religious, social, and aesthetic facets of the German movement. It proved that even if motivated by different circumstances, the phenomenon in the German-speaking lands was equal in importance to the English Gothic Revival. Lewis stressed how the historicopolitical situation of the German-speaking lands shaped their Gothic discourse, and he highlighted the centrality of Cologne Cathedral. His discussion of Reichensperger’s influence in the internal political, religious, and scholarly debates surrounding Gothic architecture at home and abroad allowed him to provide a detailed account of the stages of the revival in the German Empire and to contextualize it within the greater European framework. His more recent Gothic Revival (2002) broadened the Gothic Revival discourse beyond the three major traditions by drawing in examples from Scandinavia as well as southern and eastern Europe. He opened this work with an overview of the familiar literary and aesthetic background before considering the major themes and tenets of the revival (such as nationalism, truth, beauty, materials, and height) and their international developments. He showed the far-reaching effects of the Gothic Revival in geographical as well as in formal terms, rounding off his study by examining the American heritage of Gothic architecture, namely collegiate Gothic and the skyscraper. It is possible to see Lewis’s Gothic Revival as Thames and Hudson’s response to Chris Brooks’s Gothic Revival, published by Phaidon in 1999 and acclaimed as ‘the first book to deal comprehensively with the whole scope of the Gothic Revival’.91 A literary scholar and specialist of Victorian culture, Brooks proved the Gothic Revival to be an international phenomenon. Though architectural developments, particularly in Great Britain, are the mainstay of his study, he embedded these within a larger historical, cultural, and geographical context. More significantly, he took the discourse to another level by probing what he called ‘the gothic semantic’, the multiple connotations Gothic architecture took on for different political and religious bodies over the course of the centuries.92 He also demonstrated the ways in which ‘gothicism’ became a mobilizing cultural force, and he followed the meanings of Gothic in its various cultural manifestations, such as painting, popular entertainments (including twentieth-century popular culture), and also literary form (devoting an entire chap-

91  92 

Brooks, The Gothic Revival, back cover. Brooks, The Gothic Revival, p. 24.

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ter to the Gothic novel, later literary developments, and cinematic Gothic).93 Moreover, he explained the origins and development of the ‘gothic semantic’ not only in the three central countries, but also in Belgium, the Netherlands, and the British colonies. Contending — and demonstrating this by his choice of material — that the Gothic Revival had the greatest cultural impact in Britain, Brooks nonetheless moved towards a more balanced study of the revival, not only in geographical terms (which Lewis also accomplished) but primarily in giving more weight to literature, the visual arts, and other media than the traditional Gothic Revival discourse has done. In this, as well as his emphasis on meanings, his book comes closer to exploring the ‘Gothic discourse’, a scholarly study of which would ideally give equal weight to visual and verbal representations of the Gothic and in every aspect of cultural production. From this overview, we can observe that the Gothic Revival discourse has been hierarchical in placing architecture, architects, and propagandists in the forefront and literature and the visual arts in the background. Moreover, the term ‘Gothic Revival’ is used almost exclusively, if ever more effectively, in English-language scholarship and has little or no equivalent in either the German or French scholarly traditions. For example Germann’s Gothic Revival was published in German in 1974 as Neogotik: Geschichte ihrer Architekturtheorie.94 ‘Neogotik’ names the style, and the subtitle indicates his focus on theories (‘Architekturtheorie’) and their development or ‘history’ (‘Geschichte’), which we have already encountered as Robson-Scott’s ‘literary background’ and Lewis’s ‘politics’. Significantly, in his preface to that edition, Germann humbly acknowledged Nikolaus Pevsner’s Some Architectural Writers of the Nineteenth Century (Oxford Lectures, 1968–69) as being the most comprehensive work on the subject.95 Technically Pevsner included the typical ‘Gothic Revival’ proponents in his book and consciously followed Clark in their order, adding Goethe, Schlegel, Caumont, and Viollet-le-Duc, yet he 93 

See Brooks’s ‘Epilogue’ in The Gothic Revival, pp. 407–20. In a remarkable inversion of the traditional Gothic Revival discourse, Davenport-Hines emphasizes the consequences of the architectural revival by devoting over one third of his book to the Gothic craze in the cinema and contemporary art (Gothic, pp. 228–385). 94  Neogotik: Geschichte ihrer Architekturtheorie (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlangs-Anstalt, 1974) is Germann’s Habilitation, written in 1970 and first published in English translation in 1972; see p. 7 therein. 95  Germann, Neogotik, p. 7. The German edition differs from the English in several ways; one of them is the frequent use of Pevsner’s then newly published Some Architectural Writers of the Nineteenth Century in the footnotes.

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also brought in advocates of the Italianate style to give a balanced picture of the nineteenth-century architectural situation, as evoked by his neutral title.96 A further example affirms the currency of the term ‘Gothic Revival’ in the English-speaking world: the title of Jean-Paul Midant’s Au Moyen Âge avec Viollet-le-Duc (2001) was translated into English as Viollet-le-Duc: The French Gothic Revival (2002).97 The emphasis on the Middle Ages in the French original is lost in the translation, which follows the tendency to connect the revival with a person, a precedent set by Robson-Scott and followed up in the 1990s by Lewis in his book on Reichensperger, by J. Mordaunt Crook in John Carter and the Mind of the Gothic Revival, and by Paul Atterbury in A. W. N. Pugin: Master of Gothic Revival. Germann’s, Pevsner’s, and Midant’s titles clearly reflect the different focal points of the German, English, and French scholarly discourses on the Gothic. Nonetheless, the French did try to link up with the Gothic Revival discourse in the 1979 exhibition Le ‘Gothique’ retrouvé avant Viollet-le-Duc. Emphasizing the ‘gothique’ as ‘retrouvé’ appears to be an attempt to Frenchify ‘Gothic Revival’ by alluding to Le temps retrouvé, the final volume of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27). In the catalogue’s introduction, the curator Louis Grodecki used the expression ‘retour au gothique’ to designate the phenomenon before 1840 and emphasized the need to bring the French situation to the forefront of scholarship. He maintained that the renewed interest in the Gothic followed a similar evolution throughout Europe from ‘la continuité des constructions gothiques — le Survival, le Nachleben’ to ‘un renouveau des forms médiévales — Revival, Wiederleben’ (the more appropriate German word would be ‘Wiederaufleben’).98 Though it ultimately falls short, Grodecki’s search for a common nomenclature based on similar developments is revelatory, because it demonstrates the desire to name the impact of the Gothic in the modern period in order to effectively problematize, theorize, and constructively research it. To my knowledge, none of the terms used in the essays in this catalogue (‘retrouvé’, ‘renouveau’, ‘Gothic Revival’) has been retained in French scholarship.

96 

Pevsner, Some Architectural Writers of the Nineteenth Century, p. 7. Jean-Paul Midant, Au Moyen Âge avec Viollet-le-Duc (Paris: L’Aventurine, 2001) and Viollet-le-Duc: The French Gothic Revival, trans. by William Wheeler (Paris: L’Aventurine, 2002). 98  Louis Grodecki, ‘Introduction’, in Le ‘Gothique’ retrouvé avant Viollet-le Duc, pp. 7–15 (p. 7). 97 

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The closest attempt to bridge these national traditions was made a decade later at the International Congress of the History of Art, at which the French art historian Roland Recht organized a section dedicated to ‘Survivances et réveils de l’architecture gothique’, a title that succinctly brings out the fundamental ideas of the Gothic Revival discourse, survivals and awakenings, while avoiding the nationalistic undertone of ‘Gothic Revival’ (and of ‘gothique retrouvé’, for that matter). Because it was general in its terminology, the title invited fresh perspectives on the renewed interest of the Gothic and thereby encouraged scholarship that elaborated upon little-known aspects of the phenomenon. The geographical breadth of the subject matter (France and Germany, but also Spain, Italy, eastern Europe, and New Zealand) and the languages of publication (German, French, English, and Italian) bespeak the internationality both of the phenomenon and of scholarly interest in it, and its themes bring out the richness of the topic. Many of the essays deal with architecture, yet a number explore the Gothic’s ideological associations or its status in changing political situations, and others look at painting and sculpture or discuss canons and style. Most significantly, a good number treat Gothic cathedrals or the idea of the Gothic cathedral.99 Beyond Gothic Revival The lack of terminological equivalence in languages other than English points to the core of the problem with ‘Gothic Revival’ as an all-embracing term for the renewed interest in the Gothic and its multiple manifestations and deep ideological implications. Besides, the German and French scholarly traditions have their own discourses for analysing and exploring the post-medi­eval enthusiasm for the Gothic. As we have seen, German interest in the Gothic — and especially in the Gothic cathedral — has been strong since the nineteenth century and has continued well into the twentieth: from the overly nationalistic and thus necessarily ignored work of Gerstenberg to Alfred Kamphausen’s (1906–1982) politically responsible Gotik ohne Gott (1952), an attempt to understand neo-Gothic architecture in relation to questions of spirituality and crisis. Indeed, the post-war era seemed an appropriate time for discussing the Gothic and its meanings, as testified to by Hans Sedlmayer’s (1896–1984) 99 

L’Art et les révolutions, Section 6: Survivances et réveils de l’architecture gothique, ed. by Roland Recht, Actes du XXVIIIe congrès international d’histoire de l’art (Strasbourg: Société Alsacienne pour le Développement de l’Histoire de l’Art, 1992).

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Die Entstehung der Kathedrale (1950), Erwin Panofsky’s (1892–1968) Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (1951), and Otto von Simson’s (1912–1993) The Gothic Cathedral (1956).100 The driving force behind these studies comes straight out of the nineteenth-century desire to understand the intellectual and spiritual context in which the Gothic cathedral originated; moreover, these four works testify to the prevalence and power of the cathedral ‘idea’ born and nourished during the nineteenth century. In the 1960s German art historians began to focus on the cathedral paintings by Schinkel, Friedrich, and Hasenpflug, and in 1986 Nicola BorgerKeweloh published her study on restoration practices, Die mittelalterlichen Dome im 19. Jahrhundert.101 Other scholars have also researched aspects of Gotikrezeption. Studying the influence Worringer’s Formproblem der Gotik had before World War I, Magdalena Bushart delved into the relation between Gothic and Expressionism in Der Geist der Gotik und die expressionistische Kunst (1990). Klaus Niehr analysed the relations between texts and visual representations of Gothic architecture in Gotikbilder — Gotiktheorien (1999), which placed particular emphasis on the role of subjectivity in representation. In Poesie der Baukunst (2000) Jens Bisky acknowledged the narrowness of the Gothic Revival discourse (using Robson-Scott’s paraphrase ‘Wiedererweckung der Gotik’).102 Directing his inquiry to the philosophical issues and theoretical problems raised by the discovery of the Gothic, he investigated their function within Romantic architectural theory and the history of ideas. These studies clearly show that the study of the Gothic cathedral extends beyond the range of Gothic Revival. In France the Gothic cathedral belongs to the patrimony discourse, which was originally fashioned to uphold its status as national monument and still 100 

Alfred Kamphausen, Gotik ohne Gott: Ein Beitrag zur Deutung der Neugotik und des 19. Jahrhunderts (Tübingen: Matthiesen, 1952); Hans Sedlmayer, Die Entstehung der Kathedrale (1950; repr. Freiburg im Breisgau: Verlag Herder, 1993); Erwin Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism: An Inquiry into the Analogy of the Arts, Philosophy, and Religion in the Middle Ages (1951; repr. New York: Meridian, 1975); Otto von Simson, The Gothic Cathedral: Origins of Gothic Architecture and the Medi­eval Concept of Order, Bollingen Series (1956; repr. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni­ver­sity Press, 1989). 101  For example, Becksmann, ‘Schinkel und die Gotik’; Koch, ‘Schinkels architektonische Entwürfe im gotischen Stil’; Eimer, Caspar David Friedrich und die Gotik; Sumowski, ‘Gotische Dome bei Caspar David Friedrich’. The complete reference for Borger-Keweloh’s study is in note 10, above. 102  Jens Bisky, Poesie der Baukunst: Architekturästhetik von Winckelmann bis Boisserée (Weimar: Verlag Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 2000), p. 6.

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continues to do so.103 Recent scholarly interest in the nineteenth-century perspective on the Gothic was in part stimulated by a rehabilitation of Viollet-leDuc, long vilified for ‘destroying’ France’s architectural heritage, at the centenary of his death in 1979 through colloquia held in his honour and the exhibitions Viollet-le-Duc and Le ‘Gothique’ retrouvé.104 Besides situating the French phenomenon within the European (i.e. English and German) context, the exhibition broadened the Gothic discourse by bringing out aspects of it in France not common to the traditional British or German Gothic Revival discourses, namely the involvement of collectors, the creation of museums of medi­e val art, the use of the Gothic in public spectacles, and its unique influence in the decorative arts. It also reminded the public of the Voyages pittoresques and troubadour painting.105 Above all, it attested to the importance of the cathe103 

Three nineteenth-century currents coalesce within the patrimony discourse: the promotion of the Gothic by its proponents, such as Hugo; the restoration movement led by Viollet-le-Duc; and the fashioning of the idea of ‘national monument’ as begun by François Guizot (1787–1874) and Mérimée during the 1830s. See for example, Victor Hugo et le débat patrimonial, ed. by Roland Recht (Paris: Somogy editions de l’art/Institut national du patrimoine, 2003); Jean-Pierre Bady, Les Monuments historiques en France, 2nd edn (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998); Paul Léon, La Vie des Monuments Français (Paris: Picard, 1951); Françoise Choay, L’Allégorie du patrimoine (1992; repr. Paris: Seuil, 1999); André Chastel, ‘La Notion du patrimoine,’ in Nora, Les Lieux de mémoire, i, 1433–67; and the exhibition catalogue 20 siècles en cathédrales, ed. by Arminjon and Lavalle. 104  This had been attempted in 1965 by an exhibition dedicated to Viollet-le-Duc jointly organized by La Caisse Nationale des Monuments Historiques et des Sites and the Inspection des monuments Historiques et des Sites, as Jean-Pierre Bady points out in his forward to the Le ‘Gothique’ retrouvé avant Viollet-le Duc, p. 3. See the exhibition catalogue: Bruno Foucart, Viollet-le-Duc (Paris: Editions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1980), as well as Actes du Colloque international Viollet-le-Duc, ed. by Pierre-Marie Auzas (Paris: Nouvelles éditions latines, 1982), and Viollet-le-Duc: Centenaire de la mort à Lausanne, ed. by Jacques Gubler (Lausanne: Musée historique de l’Ancien Evêché, 1979). 105  This type of genre painting flourished during the Napoleonic and Restoration eras. Troubadour painters favoured medi­e val edifices and Gothic interiors as subjects, often placing genre scenes in the intimate space of a finely detailed medi­e valized interior. See MarieClaude Chaudonneret, ‘La Peinture troubadour’ in Le ‘Gothique’ retrouvé avant Viollet-le Duc, pp. 121–27. Beth Wright also discussed the anecdotal and history genres in Painting and History during the French Restoration: Abandoned by the Past (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ ver­sity Press, 1997). Despite this sporadic scholarly interest, the importance and richness of troubadour painting was brought to light in the spectacular exhibition held at the Royal Monastery of Brou in 2014. The exhibition catalogue, L’Invention du passé: Gothique mon amour, 1802–1830 (Paris: Hazan, 2014), makes a valuable contribution to scholarship by presenting a superb collection of paintings, some familiar and many lesser known. It includes a rich com-

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dral in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century French culture. Jean-Michel Leniaud’s monographs on Lassus and Viollet-le-Duc and his comprehensive study of the architects, organization, and policies of the nineteenth-century cathedral restorations in Les Cathedrales au xixe siècle have significantly furthered this understanding.106 This work underscored the unavoidable physical presence of cathedrals as they underwent restoration during the nineteenth century and explained their volatile political status, putting the cathedral in the forefront of the patrimony discourse. This growing interest in the French patrimony has stimulated many studies of France’s medi­e val architectural heritage, especially her cathedrals, and has also turned attention to the connotations carried by the Gothic cathedral (Brooks’s ‘gothic semantic’). 107 Alain Erlande-Brandenburg gave this interest a clear direction by discussing ‘le mythe gothique’ or ‘la mythification de la “cathédrale”’ during the nineteenth century in his introduction to La Cathédrale, a two-volume work on the edifice in the Middle Ages.108 He asserted that the cathedral, as a concept, was a nineteenth-century creation and that the word ‘cathedral’ designates more than a building erected to serve a particular religious purpose; it implies a Gothic edifice of vast proportions (which ignores or forgets the existence of Romanesque or classical cathedrals), whose modern glorification is rooted in the Hugolian interpretation of the cathedral and the religious and liberal perspectives attached to it by Lassus, Viollet-lementary on the works displayed and detailed notes on the artists as well as a selection of essays, some of which explore the origins of the genre, and others emphasize architectural aspects. 106  Jean-Michel Leniaud, Jean-Baptiste Lassus (1807–1857) ou le temps retrouvé des cathédrales, Bibliothèque de la société français d’archéologie (Geneva: Droz; Paris: Arts et Métiers graphiques, 1980) and Viollet-le-Duc ou les délires du système (Paris: Éditions Mengès, 1994); see also note 4, above. For Viollet-le-Duc’s bicentenary, Leniaud and the director of the Musée des monuments français, Laurence de Finance, edited the exhibition catalogue, Violletle-Duc: Les visions d’un architecte (Paris: Éditions Norma, 2014). On Viollet-le-Duc, see also ‘The Dictionnaire raisonné: Viollet-le-Duc’s Encyclopedic Structure for Architecture’, Barry Bergdoll’s introduction to Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, The Foundations of Architecture: Selections from the Dictionnaire raisonné, trans. by Kenneth D. Whitehead (New York: George Braziller, 1990); and especially in this context, Viollet-le-Duc et la cathédrale idéale, ed. by Françoise Michaud-Fréjaville, Art sacré, 23 (Châtillon-sur-Indre: Rencontre avec le patrimoine religieux, 2007). 107  For example, Michel Chevalier, La France des cathédrales du ive au xxe siècle (Rennes: Éditions Ouest-France, 1997) and Jean-Pierre Bayard, La Tradition cache des cathedrals: Du symbolisme medi­eval à la realisation architecturale (St-Jean-de-Braye: Editions Dangles, 1990). 108  Erlande-Brandenburg, La Cathédrale, pp. 13 and 18.

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Duc, and Vitet.109 Leniaud pushed this idea farther, contending that the nineteenth century had ‘invented’ the cathedral in terms of its ideological meanings and its status as historical monument.110 A decade later Jacques Le Goff revived the cathedral-myth in his introduction to the exhibition catalogue 20 Siècles en cathédrales, affirming ‘La cathédrale devint l’un des grands myths de l’époque’.111 As a whole, the exhibition celebrated the ‘phénomène cathédrale’, referring to the cultural, religious, and historical ‘life’ of the cathedral as centre and focal point of a community through the centuries.112 It highlighted the architectural prowess of France’s cathedrals and the richness of their furnishings, paintings, and treasures; it emphasized their local, civic roles as well as their sacred function as liturgical space, and it showed how historical events had left their mark on the edifices. Perpetuating the cathedral-myth, the 2014 exhibition Cathédrales 1789–1914: Un Mythe Moderne and its sister exhibition, Die Kathedrale: Romantik — Impressionismus — Moderne, revealed the intensity of the nineteenth century’s engagement with the cathedral.113 This Franco-German collaboration placed Goethe and Hugo at the head of the modern ‘myth’ of and enthusiasm for the Gothic cathedral. Although exhibiting many of the same works, the exhibitions (and their catalogues) differed slightly, reflecting the distinct, culturally impressed meanings and status of the cathedral in the two national discourses. The German catalogue sets up a straightforward chronological structure which emphasizes the richness of the German Romantic and Expressionist traditions and climaxes in a fantastic grouping of modern works, including Roy Lichtenstein’s (1923–1997) lithographs of Monet’s Rouen Cathedral paint109 

Erlande-Brandenburg, La Cathédrale, pp. 17–26. Leniaud, Les Cathédrales, p. 23: ‘En définitive, le xixe siècle a très largement contribué à inventer la cathédrale tant pour ce qui concerne son usage que l’approfondissement de sa valeur symbolique, religieuse, nationale et architecturale et à la transformer en object patrimonial, fait de respect du passé, de connaissances scientifiques et de modalities de conservation’ (italics in original). 111  Le Goff, ‘Les Cathedrales françaises’, p. 27. 112  In their forward to catalogue the editors write about the ‘phénomène cathédrale’: 20 Siècles en cathédrales, ed. by Arminjon and Lavalle p. 13. 113  The former was held in Rouen at the Musée des Beaux-Arts from 12 April to 31 August 2014, and the latter in Cologne at the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum from 26 September 2014 to 18 January 2015 (see notes 53 and 31, above, for the catalogue references). Another important document is by Janusz St. Pasierb, Katedra symbol Europy / Die Kathedrale als Symbol Europas, trans. by Winfried Lipscher (Pelplin: Bernardinum, 2004). 110 

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ing (1969) and Andy Warhol’s (1928–1987) prints of Cologne Cathedral (1980), evidence of the seemingly unlimited possibilities and contemporaneity of the cathedral theme. Importantly, a large number of French Impressionist cathedrals, some little known, found their way into the exhibition, while the extensive collection of prints, lithographs, paintings, and photos of Cologne Cathedral testified to the nineteenth-century enthusiasm for the cathedral and its place in the nation’s heart. The French exhibition had a different emphasis, due both to the aura of the cathedral in nineteenth-century France and to the extensive research done by its co-curator, Ségolène Le Men. It made tangible the ‘myth’ of the cathedral as it was perpetuated in all areas of society through various types of media, including illustrated books, posters, statuary, and especially the decorative arts, where the taste for le décor ‘à la cathédrale’ inspired innovative medi­e valizing designs and beautiful objects for the home (or castle) of Gothic enthusiasts. It also highlighted other typically French phenomena: the Stryge, the photographic testimony of the cathedral as historical monument, the plight of Reims during World War I and anti-German propaganda; and it dedicated sections to the great cathedral enthusiasts Hugo and Rodin. Despite the scarcity of the cathedral in canonical French Romantic art, especially as compared to German painting, the exhibition proved that the cathedral’s influence was strong in the arts, as the paintings of Royal ceremonies, scenes from Notre-Dame de Paris, and Hugo’s sketches showed. Nonetheless, the essays in the catalogue aim to achieve balance between the two traditions: one foregrounds the role of the edifice in both French and German national identities, the sections on German and English Romanticism establish the importance of the cathedral as a visual subject, and Rouen Cathedral is portrayed as the counterpart to Cologne in terms of its popularity as a painted subject. Through the extensive treatment of Monet, Impressionism, and the series paintings by Sisley, Pissarro, Luce, Marquet, Matisse, and Delaunay, and the presentation of a number of French symbolist works, the catalogue shows the richness and enduring vitality of the cathedral theme in the arts. While art and architectural historians have long recognized the importance of the cathedral, more recent historiography has recognized its crucial role in the formation of national identity and as a space of collective memory.114 Likewise, French scholars have also investigated the importance of the edifice, 114 

See for example, Alain Erlande-Brandenburg, ‘Notre-Dame de Paris’ and André Vauchez, ‘La Cathédrale’, in Nora, Lieux de mémoire, iii, 4177–4213 and 3109–40.

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as testified to by the conferences ‘La Cathédrale’ (1999), ‘L’Imaginaire moderne de la cathédrale’, and ‘Images de la cathédrale dans la littérature et dans l’art’ (both held in 2006).115 Demonstrating the continued interest and pride the French show for their cathedrals, this ensemble of exhibitions, catalogues, texts, artworks, scholarship, and theories creates what might appropriately be called a ‘cathedral discourse’. From this overview we can surmise that, whether in the discourses of medi­ evalism, Gothic Revival, and even patrimony, the cathedral has offered a compelling subject for scholarly inquiry that has grown in importance during the latter part of the twentieth century. While medi­e valism is familiar to many scholars in different cultures and languages, the study of the cathedral partakes in and often extends beyond it.116 The same might be said for Gothic Revival, which nonetheless must be credited with raising awareness of the importance of the Gothic cathedral during the nineteenth century, thanks especially to the work of scholars like Lewis, Bergdoll, and Niehr. As suggested above, Gothic Revival remains too limited to embrace the full cross-cultural and cross-medial phenomenon of the Gothic cathedral in the modern period. First, because the term has not transferred across cultures — and did not need to, given that German and French scholars were studying the same phenomena with their own particular emphases. Second, despite its broadening by Brooks and Lewis, the Gothic Revival discourse is still tied to a rigid chronological structure that focuses primarily on architecture and ornament. Third, representations and understandings of the Gothic cathedral go beyond the appropriation of forms typical of Gothic Revival, since the Gothic was sublimated as a ‘spirit’ or ‘feeling’ that infused both French and German art of the early twentieth century.117 Finally, though Romanesque architecture plays a part in the Gothic discourse, serving as the Gothic’s necessary Other, it nonetheless plays a subordinate role.118 Architectural history has embraced the Romanesque and Byzantine 115  La Cathédrale, ed. by Prungnaud; L’Imaginaire moderne de la cathédrale, ed. by Roque; Images de la cathédrale dans la littérature et dans l’art, ed. by Françoise Michaud-Fréjaville, Art sacré, 26 (Châtillon-sur-Indre: Rencontre avec le patrimoine religieux, 2008). 116  I emphasize this point in the opening paragraphs of my essay ‘The Gothic Cathedral and Medi­evalism’. 117  Viollet-le-Duc writes about the ‘esprit’ of a people and a country in his preface to the Dictionnaire raisonné and in his entry ‘Architecture’ (see, for example, Dictionnaire raisonné, i, pp. iii, xiv, and 160); Bushart focuses on ‘Gotik als überzeitliches Prinzip’: Der Geist der Gotik und die expressionistische Kunst, pp. 32–34. 118  See Williams, ‘The Perception of Romanesque Art in the Romantic Period’, pp. 303–04.

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revivals and architectural eclecticism, all of which are part of the history of the cathedral in the modern period, demonstrated most prominently by Marseilles Cathedral, Sainte-Marie-Majeure (1852–93), designed in a Romano-Byzantine style by Léon Vaudoyer (1803–1872), Westminster Cathedral (1895–1910), built by John Francis Bentley (1839–1902), and Louis-Auguste Boileau’s (1812–1896) innovative design for a ‘Cathédrale synthétique’ (1850).119 Thus a discourse dealing with the ‘phenomenon’ of the cathedral in all aspects of society from the Middle Ages through the twenty-first century or with the ‘concept cathedral’, a term put forward by Richard Utz to indicate the cultural impact of the edifice in the modern period,120 would cover the whole range of representations, meanings, and uses of the edifice, including restoration, government policies, and religious and political uses and understandings, and its influence on the decorative, visual, and plastic arts and literature. If the nineteenth century developed the myth of the cathedral that was built upon through the twentieth, then the twenty-first century is well fitted to flesh out a cathedral discourse. Towards a Cathedral Discourse If a metadiscourse about the Gothic cathedral and its meanings, semantics, or semiotics and the processes that contributed to its mythification or symbolization in the modern period were to be fashioned, it would inherently be international in scope, interdisciplinary in approach, and intermedial in its subject matter. Answering to these criteria, the present volume might be considered as laying the foundation for an international scholarly discourse on the Gothic cathedral. Its contributors represent various national traditions, and its languages reflect both the long-standing English-language interest in the subject 119 

Bergdoll writes about Marseilles Cathedral in ‘The Ideal of the Gothic Cathedral in 1852’, pp. 107–16 (especially pp. 115–16), and J. B. Bullen has included it in his study of the Byzantine Revival, Byzantium Rediscovered (London: Phaidon, 2003), pp. 66–75; he also discusses Westminster Cathedral, pp. 173–77. Bullen’s book is the major source for Byzantine Revival in the nineteenth century. In Europe and North America, Bruno Foucart has written about Boileau’s design in ‘La “Cathédrale synthétique” de Louis-Auguste Boileau’, Revue de l’art, 3 (1969), 49–66; and Lewis touches upon it in The Gothic Revival, pp. 137–38. See also Kathleen Curran, The Romanesque Revival: Religion, Politics, and Transnational Exchange (Uni­ver­sity Park: Pennsylvania State Uni­ver­sity Press, 2003). 120  Utz put forward this term in a workshop presentation at the Centre for the Study of the Cultural Heritage of Medi­eval Rituals, held at the Uni­ver­sity of Copenhagen in 2005: ‘The Medi­eval Unconscious 5: Concept Cathedral’.

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and the priority recent French scholarship has given to the cathedral. Moreover, pluridisiplinarity is its hallmark, for its authors come from art and architectural history as well as from literary and medi­eval studies, and while using methodologies, types of exegesis, and other analytic tools particular to their disciplines, they also draw from the fields of history, politics, or aesthetics in order to bring to the fore the complexity of the issues surrounding the ideological understandings of the Gothic cathedral and their various manifestations. In this, they not only illuminate sometimes little-known aspects of the Gothic discourse, but they show how these are embedded in larger national, historical, and intellectual contexts. Even with its multiple perspectives, the volume’s cohesion is assured not only by its topic and its recurring themes as they are worked out in the individual essays, but in the collective investigation of architectural representation in word (Murphy, Prungnaud, Bernier, Glaser), image (Lewis, Curie), or in both media (Mateo, Emery, Niehr, Leniaud). In this, the volume makes a significant contribution to the field of Intermedial Studies. It celebrates the great gains that come from international collaboration, interdisciplinary scholarship, and intermedial inquiry, and thereby reveals the rich possibilities and compelling dynamics that the cathedral discourse possesses. The volume delineates two major tendencies within the discourse: the political interpretations of the Gothic cathedral and its aesthetic importance. In reality, these categories are artificial, for in most cases, artistic and literary expression were intimately bound up with politics. The volume is organized into three parts, each of which concludes with an essay that elaborates upon the major themes brought out in the preceding essays. Part I, ‘The Cathedral and the Nation’, sets the stage for the rest of the volume in exploring the kinds of connections that were made between the Gothic cathedral and national identity. Matilde Mateo’s essay is a cross-cultural study of Gothic reception that discusses Spanish Gothic as seen through the eyes of British travellers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and demonstrates how theories of Gothic origin were bound up with national stereotypes and mobilized in political propaganda. Michael J. Lewis explains the paradoxical position of the Gothic cathedral in connection with German nationalism, clarifying, on one hand, why the emphases of the German Gothic discourse differed from those in France and in England and showing, on the other, in what ways historical events and differing religious stances shaped it. Elizabeth Emery reveals the extent to which Violletle-Duc’s republican leanings influenced his understanding of history and of the cathedral. Through an analysis of the text and images in his Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale, she shows how fiction, fact, and pedagogy blend to underscore his ideological conception of the Gothic edifice. Concluding this

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part by bringing contemporary methodologies of space to bear on the Gothic discourse, Kevin Murphy insists that, as much as the Gothic cathedral was part of ideological concepts of history, Europe, and the nineteenth-century nation, it was first and foremost a space that physically could not be overlooked, something which greatly influenced its reception in all areas of culture, from written accounts to monumental restoration. His essay carries the concepts of space, the Gothic, and the nation discussed in the preceding essays to a theoretical level that illuminates some of the driving forces of the nineteenth-century discourse. Welding the political and the artistic trajectories, Part II, ‘The Cathedral between Art and Politics’, focuses on personal appropriations of the cathedral in different political contexts and shows in what ways the edifice becomes a powerful literary or visual symbol at times of war and unrest. Maylis Curie discusses the appeal of anarchism to French artists and shows how anarchist principles came to be projected upon the Gothic cathedral. This allows her to elucidate the subtle anarchist themes in Pissarro’s and Luce’s cathedral paintings. Joëlle Prungnaud’s essay moves forward to World War I and the bombing of Reims Cathedral. She shows how patriotism and personal outrage were expressed through brutal verbal and anguished visual images of the cathedral that symbolized France’s humiliation, her rage at the enemy, and the inhumanity of war. Bringing together the themes of nation, war, and the artist’s vision of the cathedral discussed by Curie and Prungnaud, Roland R. Bernier engages in a close reading of Rodin’s Cathédrales de France. He focuses on the verbal transcription of the act of beholding architecture and underscores the immediacy with which first Ruskin and later Rodin portrayed their experiences of architecture to highlight the connections they drew between architecture and memory in both its personal and national dimensions. Together, these three essays point out how the private and the national coalesce in the perception and representation of architecture and take on great importance during periods of crisis and their aftermath. The essays in Part III, ‘The Cathedral in the Arts’, focus on artistic and literary representations of the cathedral in the broad context of aesthetics and particularly in relation to sensory perception. Klaus Niehr investigates the shift from Romantic subjectivity to scientific exactitude in the study and representation of Gothic architecture. He problematizes the concept of ‘objectivity’ by underlining the ongoing importance of visual perception in architectural writing and illustration and the continued emphasis placed on the viewer’s physical relation to the monument, even in ‘scientific’ or academic works. Dealing with synaesthesia, Stephanie A. Glaser analyses the types of analogies made

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between the Gothic cathedral and music and demonstrates how the changes in thinking about Gothic architecture influenced the musical aesthetic during the Enlightenment, which, in turn, filtered into nineteenth-century literary and ‘scientific’ views of the Gothic cathedral. Leaving conscious perception to focus on oneiric experience, Jean-Michel Leniaud treats a theme straight out of the Gothic novel, namely, the hallucinatory character of Gothic architecture in literature and the visual arts. His essay reminds us that besides being tied to ideological and national contexts, the cathedral has consistently been associated with the imagination and fantasy, an assertion that circles back to the themes of exoticism and fantastical exorbitance brought up by Mateo. In the final essay Richard Utz explores the role of subjective perception, emotions, sensations, and dreams brought up in the three previous essays to argue that in the nineteenth century the Gothic cathedral offered a space of refuge from and resistance to modern positivistic, scientific, and technological developments that threatened the loss of time-honoured values and generated instability and fear of dehumanization. Its power, he shows, lay in the fact that it could propel one into the past or even outside of time into the realm of the visionary. He demonstrates that the ‘idea of the cathedral’ constitutes a discourse that is composed of both ‘scientific’ analyses and subjective expressions, one at the heart of which, though masterfully underplayed by secular humanism, lie religious upbringings, individual anxieties, and personal longings. Connecting these issues to the wider context of contemporary revisions to long-standing academic interpretations of medi­evalism, historicism, and the nineteenth century, Utz underscores the importance of the volume’s essays to modern scholarship and demonstrates the relevance of the cathedral discourse to contemporary scholarly inquiry, stances, and issues. These essays thus highlight the cathedral’s powerful presence, from the broad national scale to little-known aspects, such as those presented by Prungnaud and Leniaud. They affirm that the multiple and sometimes contradictory meanings of the Gothic edifice were as much the result of personal projections as political vagaries, as Curie, Prungnaud, Bernier, Leniaud, and Murphy make clear. They also demonstrate the extent to which the representation of the cathedral depended on the intentional manipulation or the subjective tailoring of historical and architectural facts, as Mateo, Lewis, Emery, Niehr, Glaser, and Utz discuss. The cathedral is so central to modernity that we may postulate that modernity has been forged in great part through the Gothic cathedral, insofar as the idea of the Gothic cathedral lies at the root of modern architecture, academic disciplines, the nation-state, and aesthetics. It influenced the search for a national style and for an architecture appropriate to the nineteenth cen-

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tury (from Pugin through Butterfield); innovative architectural models were based on Gothic designs à la Viollet-le-Duc; it offered inspiration for building techniques and solutions (in theory and in practice), as well as the implementation of new materials, like iron, cement, and glass that became central to modern engineering. It contributed to the creation of the disciplines of history, art, and architectural and literary history, for example, in the writings of Alexander Pope (1688–1744) and August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767–1845).121 Its imposing presence revived associations with the medi­e val period: in support of ancient monarchical or imperial institutions, or heralding ‘rebirth’ of Germanic or Gallic liberties under modern democratic liberal governments, and as a sacred religious space; and it was seen as the cradle of nations, cultures, or peoples, all of which contributed to the cathedral’s symbolic force during the wars and conflicts of the twentieth century. New perceptions of the Gothic cathedral also motivated the break with classical conventions (Goethe, Hugo), and the edifice came to embody the Romantic ideal and become the standard by which art was judged. It has been celebrated in literary works from the German and French Romantics to contemporary authors, including Ken Follett and Ildefonso Falcones (La Catedral del mar, 2006), and it has been evoked in political manifestoes (Marx and Engels, Kropotkin, Gropius).122 Because of its polyvalence it possessed the potential for new vision, as explored by Schinkel, Friedrich, Ruskin, Morris, Pissarro, Monet, Luce, Delaunay, Rodin, Proust, Odilon Redon (1840–1916), Matisse, Kupka, Mondrian, Max 121  Pope in his Preface to Shakespeare (1725) and later Schlegel in his Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur  (1809–11) elaborated upon an existing paradigm that compared Shakespeare’s writings with Gothic architecture. These works contributed to establishing the field of literary study. On the literary analogy with the cathedral, see my article in this volume; Peter Collins, Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture, 1750–1950 (London: Faber and Faber, 1965), pp. 36–37; Robson-Scott, The Literary Background of the Gothic Revival in Germany, p. 61; and Glaser ‘Explorations of the Gothic Cathedral’, pp. 84 and 371–73, and ‘Construire comme une église: À la recherche du temps perdu et la tradition de l’analogie architecturale’, in Proust et les ‘Moyen Âge’, ed. by Sophie Duval and Miren Lacassagne (Paris: Hermann, 2015), pp. 177–93. 122  To name a few: Wilhelm Heinse (1749–1843), Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853), Clemens Brentano (1778–1842), Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850), Théophile Gautier (1811–1872), and the Belgian poet Émile Verhaeren (1855–1916). In 1909 Esther Singleton (1865–1930) published a collection of international writings on cathedrals: Famous Cathedrals as Seen and Described by Great Writers (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1909). Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) include Gothic Cathedrals in their list of humanity’s impressive achievements at the opening of their Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei (1848). On Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921), see Maylis Curie’s article in this volume.

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Ernst (1891–1976), Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), Warhol, and Lichtenstein.123 Its sacred character was brought to the fore in the study of iconography and symbolism (Didron, Ruskin, Huysmans, Mâle, Panofsky), and it played an important role in the revival of the Catholic liturgy and Gregorian chant, and was ultimately transfigured by Satie and Debussy.124 While the cathedral’s wide-reaching geographical and cultural impact in the modern period has been discussed in the scholarly discourses of medi­evalism and Gothic Revival, and its political, religious, and aesthetic connotations have been analysed within traditional academic disciplines, the vast implications of the subject constitute a vibrant and polyvalent discourse that illuminates all the others. Among its many possible facets, the cathedral discourse is the study of texts and images, political and theoretical stances, the champions and antagonists of Gothic architecture, and the ideologies that contributed to forming the multiple and contradictory interpretations of the Gothic edifice. Its subject matter is found in all literary genres from poetry to political manifestoes, in different visual media including copper plates, lithography, photography, and mixed genres, such as illustrated volumes and stage design. It also includes the various metaphorical uses of the word ‘cathedral’ from the late nineteenth through the twentieth centuries. The contemporary meanings of ‘cathedral’ alone make the edifice a worthy subject: as an exemplary cultural product, a national monument, an architectural masterwork, an architectonic space perfectly structured to highlight religious experience, one that is sacred in structure and in purpose, thoroughly symbolic in its form and iconography, and a house for artistic treasures of unsurpassed religious importance. Thus considered, the cathedral discourse is both the study of culture and an invitation to interdisciplinary research, theoretical reflections on architectural representation, and the relations between media. It is not only a compelling subject in academia, where the tendency to merge disciplines is becoming ever more pronounced, but it also reflects upon driving issues of the twenty-first century, such as the importance of visual culture, the formation of regional identities, the role of religion, the ideological use of artefacts, as well as cross-cultural histories, fragmentation and dissolution, globalization and multiculturalism, and postmodern processes. 123 

Georges Roque includes many of these twentieth-century painters in his article ‘La Façade comme surface, de Monet à l’art abstrait’, in L’Imaginaire moderne de la cathédrale, ed. by Roque, pp. 113–38. 124  See Katherine Bergeron, Decadent Enchantments: The Revival of Gregorian Chant at Solesmes (Berkeley: Uni­ver­sity of California Press, 1998). Erik Satie, Ogives (1886).

Part I The Cathedral and the Nation

The Moorish-Gothic Cathedral: Invention, Reality, or Weapon? Matilde Mateo The Gothic Cathedral as Christian and Western One of the most frequently visited cathedrals in the nineteenth century was Seville’s, in southern Spain (Figure 1.1). The popularity of Spain among European travellers and the reputation of Seville, traditionally labelled ‘the fair one’, made this fine late Gothic structure from the fifteenth century a mustsee sight. This cathedral also had many added attractions, from the tomb of Christopher Columbus and many works by Spanish masters to being the largest Gothic cathedral in the world — an arguable and disputed honour that gained it the nickname of ‘la grande’. It also became the object of attention of artists, writers, and scholars, who inevitably recreated it in innumerable images, descriptions, and even in literary fiction following in the steps of Victor Hugo (1802–1885).1 Such an assorted and abundant array of responses to Seville Cathedral provides a most fertile ground for testing the expectations about this Gothic cathedral in the nineteenth century, especially if we are looking for commonplaces, transcending nationalities, religious beliefs, and artistic sensibilities. In all accounts, it seems that the cathedral’s main appeal was its fabulous potential to furnish a profound Christian experience. Its vast and sub1 

Ramón López Soler (1806–1836), who was a proponent of Romanticism in Spain, authored La catedral de Sevilla, novela tomada de la que escribió el célebre Victor Hugo en francés con el título de Notre Dame de Paris (Madrid: Repullés, 1834). Matilde Mateo ([email protected]) is Associate Research Professor of Art History and Director of Undergraduate Studies of the programs in Art History and History of Architecture, Department of Art and Music Histories, Syracuse Uni­ver­sity, Syracuse, New York.

The Idea of the Gothic Cathedral: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Meanings of the Medieval Edifice in the Modern Period, ed. by Stephanie A. Glaser, RITUS 9 (Turn­hout: Brepols, 2018) pp. 47–80 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.RITUS-EB.5.115735

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Figure 1.1. Nathaniel Armstrong Wells, Interior of the Cathedral, Seville, print from N. A. Wells, The Picturesque Anti­ quities of Spain. 1846. Photo by the author.

lime interior space was praised as a potent inducer of a mystical state of mind, while the many religious functions that took place there could heighten the experience to new, extreme levels. Spanish rituals, especially those in Seville, were extraordinarily elaborate and had no parallel elsewhere in the Christian world. Authors often indulged in their descriptions, sometimes devoting entire chapters to the rituals and usually dwelling on the intense emotional impact they provoked. Illustrations also hardly ever failed to include some kind of ceremony, in some as the dominating theme, in others as an almost imperceptible action within the immensity of the cathedral. In any case, the association between the cathedral and its rituals was extremely powerful and influential,

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so much so that it practically transformed it into a free-entrance theatre, where one could not only contemplate the spectacle of Christian drama, but also enjoy a rare cathartic experience.2 This emphasis on the Christian character of Seville Cathedral does not seem to offer any new perspective on the idea of the Gothic cathedral, then or now. It is to be expected that a Gothic cathedral would elicit such a response, and perhaps even more so in the nineteenth century, given the extraordinary interdependence of the notions of Gothic and Christianity prevalent at that time.3 But if the edifice was expected to embody and promote Christian spirituality, it was not just because it was a cathedral, that is, a building for the practice of the Christian religion, or because it was located in Spain, whose nationals were derogatorily reputed by the British to be the biggest Catholic ‘bigots’ in Europe, but above all because it was in the Gothic style. This expectation has not changed much ever since, for our twenty-first-century understanding of the Gothic cathedral is still extremely dependent on nineteenthcentury views. We only need to remind ourselves of the present enthronement of the Gothic cathedral as the epitome of what we expect of the Gothic and of 2  The specific views about the Spanish Gothic cathedrals dealt with in this article are based mostly on British accounts and have been studied in more detail and depth in my unpublished doctoral dissertation, ‘La visión británica del arte medi­eval cristiano en España (siglos xvii– xix)’ (Uni­ver­sity of Santiago de Compostela, 1994); see pp. 1–73 for the popularity of Spain and Seville, and pp. 397–433 for the religious appreciation of cathedrals. For the popularity of Seville Cathedral, see also Ignacio González-Varas Ibáñez, ‘Catedral de Sevilla, monumento del romanticismo español’, in La catedral de Sevilla (1881–1900): el debate sobre la restauración monumental (Seville: Diputación Provincial de Sevilla, 1994), pp. 33–47. 3  The transformation of the Gothic style into a ‘Christian style’ in Great Britain as the nineteenth century progressed is a well-known phenomenon. The Gothic thus not only came to be seen as the best embodiment of the Christian faith and its dogmas, but also as the product of an idealized, medi­eval, Christian society, turned thereby into the perfect stage for Christian rituals that would effectively promote Christian spirituality. Among the main protagonists of this development in Great Britain one should cite A. W. N. Pugin (1812–1852), the Oxford Movement, the Ecclesiological Society, and John Ruskin (1819–1900). The literature on this topic is too large to give it proper justice here; nevertheless, those in search of an introduction may benefit from the studies by Kenneth Clark, The Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste (1928; repr. New York: Harper and Row, 1974) and Chris Brooks, The Gothic Revival (London: Phaidon, 1999). For the influence of this British view in the United States, see Phoebe B. Stanton, The Gothic Revival and American Church Architecture: An Episode in Taste, 1840–1856 (Baltimore: John Hopkins Uni­ver­sity Press, 1968) and Ryan K. Smith, Gothic Arches, Latin Crosses: Anti-Catholicism and American Church Designs in the Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill: Uni­ver­sity of North Carolina Press, 2006).

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religious architecture to make the point. Before the nineteenth century, cathedrals were regarded as religious buildings that could exhibit any style, while the Gothic was by no means thought of as restricted to the religious realm, but, on the contrary, it was considered fitting for secular purposes, for castles, houses, gardens, or colleges.4 As it turned out, the symbiosis of the notions of Gothic and cathedral became so powerful that it changed forever the perception of both the Gothic style and the cathedral building type. Nowadays, the standardized image of a cathedral demands that it be in Gothic, and the cathedral has become the flagship of the Gothic style. The identification of ‘Gothic’ and ‘cathedral’ is so great that sometimes people refer to anything that looks Gothic as a ‘cathedral’, even if it is a secular building. In addition, most people think of the defining elements of the Gothic style as those which are exemplified by cathedrals, such as flying buttresses or Gothic tracery. It is also important to stress that the nineteenth century taught us to celebrate the Gothic cathedral not only for its Christian character, but also because it was considered to be the product of the artistic genius of the European West. The nationalistic approach to the Gothic effectively made it out to be the greatest expression of the architectural capabilities of the Atlantic European nations that hitherto had been unable to compete with the achievements of the Ancient, Byzantine, or Renaissance architects. The well-known rivalry for the appropriation of the Gothic style by the English, the Germans, and the French generated a considerable amount of scholarship that, regardless of who prevailed or what arguments were put forward, stressed, above all, the Western character of the Gothic as a creation of Atlantic Europe. This is another view that also remains unchallenged.

The Moorish-Gothic Cathedral It is precisely against this well-established horizon of expectations about the Christian and Western nature of the Gothic cathedral that I want to consider an apparently contradictory, and for us even unimaginable, way of thinking about it: as Moorish, Islamic, and Eastern in character.5 In the specific case of 4 

For an introduction to the appreciation of the Gothic style as a secular style in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain, see Clark, The Gothic Revival and Brooks, The Gothic Revival, as well as Michael McCarthy, The Origins of the Gothic Revival (New Haven: Yale Uni­ver­sity Press, 1987) and Megan Aldrich, Gothic Revival (London: Phaidon, 1994). 5  My choice of the term ‘Moorish-Gothic’ requires a brief explanation. Although ‘Moorish’ is a specific term that refers to the Muslims of Spain and Morocco, in the period covered

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Seville, it was common to find the cathedral portrayed as Moorish rather than Christian. Late in the eighteenth century, for instance, the English traveller Henry Swinburne (1743–1803) expressed his opinion that ‘the ornamental parts [were] but clumsy imitation of the models left by the Moors’.6 A similar opinion, although more sympathetic, was still shared in the mid-nineteenth century by the British diplomat David Urquhart (1805–1877), for whom Seville Cathedral was ‘presided [over by] the spirit of the Moors’, adding that ‘within this living rock of Gothic grandeur, one feels the nearest approach to the sublimity of the conception of the mosk [sic]’.7 The image of the cathedral also appeared considerably transformed in some of the most popular prints, especially in those that depicted the bell tower, the Giralda, or one of the entrances to the cathedral known as Puerta del Perdón, the Door of Forgiveness. As seen in a print by the Scotsman David Roberts (1796–1864) (Figure 1.2), the familiar Gothic vocabulary of pointed arches and recessed doorways adorned with elaborate, figured sculpture is amiss. In its stead we find a doorway framed by a pointed horseshoe arch, Islamic crenellations, and a bell tower decorated with a sebka pattern and polylobed arches, all of them unmistakable elements of Islamic architecture. This is not the way one would expect a Gothic cathedral to look, nor is the ‘spirit of the Moors’ something that present scholarship would stress when dealing with Gothic cathedrals. Yet the cathedral’s Moorishness did not seem to cause any tension among the nineteenth-century visitors. Seville by this article the terminology was extremely ambiguous and lacking any rigour. At that time ‘Moorish’ was used synonymously with ‘Arab’ and ‘Saracen’, and all three could also be used to refer to anything Eastern or Islamic, including Byzantine, Persian, or Hindu. See, for instance, the entries in these very popular encyclopaedias: ‘Saracens’, in Louis Moreri, Jean Le Clerc, and Edmund Bohum, The Great Historical, Geographical, Genealogical and Poetical Dictionary, 6th edn, 2 vols (London: Rhodes [etc.], 1694), and ‘Arabe’, ‘Maures’, and ‘Sarrasins’, in Denis Diderot, Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, and Pierre Mouchon, Encyclopédie; ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, 17 vols (Paris: Briasson, 1751–65). A striking example of the confusion about these denominations is provided by William Hodges, who in the late eighteenth century referred to the buildings of India as Moorish. On Hodges, see John Sweetman, The Oriental Obsession: Islamic Inspiration in British and American Art and Architecture, 1500–1920 (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 1988), pp. 95–97. Following my sources, I will be using these terms in a similarly ambiguous way. With regard to my choice of ‘Moorish-Gothic’, it was prompted by my focusing on Spanish cathedrals, but I am also using the term to simultaneously convey the meaning of Eastern, Islamic, and Arabic. 6  Henry Swinburne, Travels through Spain, in the Years 1775 and 1776 (London: Emsly, 1779; repr. 1787 in 2 vols), ii, 35. 7  David Urquhart, The Pillars of Hercules: or a Narrative of Travels in Spain and Morocco in 1848, 2 vols (London: B. Bentley, 1850), ii, 216.

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Figure 1.2. David Roberts, Seville Cathedral, Entrance to the Court of the Orange Trees, print from Thomas Roscoe, The Tourist in Spain: Andalusia. 1836. Photo by Syracuse Uni­ver­sity Photo and Imaging Center.

Cathedral was recognized and cherished as Gothic despite its Moorish features, or perhaps, as we shall see, because of them. Moorish readings of Seville Cathedral may be justified by the reality of its fabric. The cathedral indeed is a mixture of Gothic and Islamic styles, having been built on the site of a mosque dating from the late twelfth century, when Seville became the capital of Al-Andalus, in 1163, under the dominion of the Almohad Empire. When the Gothic cathedral that supplanted the mosque was built in the fifteenth century (1401–1528), some parts of the mosque were incorporated into the new Christian structure, such as the Puerta del Perdón (former entrance to the sahn, or courtyard, of the mosque) and the Giralda (former minaret) (Figure 1.2). This stylistic juxtaposition turns Seville Cathedral into

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Figure 1.3. F. J. Parcerisa, Catedral de Cuenca (nave del crucero), print from Jose María Quadrado, Recuerdos y bellezas de España: Castilla la Nueva, vol. iii. 1853. Photo by Syracuse Uni­ver­sity Photo and Imaging Center.

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Figure 1.4. F. J. Parcerisa, Interior de la catedral de Avila, print from Jose María Quadrado, Recuerdos y bellezas de España: Salamanca, Avila y Segovia, vol. x. 1865. Photo by the author.

a truly Moorish-Gothic cathedral, and it also helps to explain the Orientalizing readings exemplified by Urquhart, Swinburne, and Roberts. However, it does so only up to a point. Moreover, it also casts doubts about the extent and validity of the idea of the Gothic cathedral as the epitome of Christianity and Westernness. On one hand, it shows that a Gothic cathedral can indeed incorporate Islamic elements; and on the other, the ease with which those elements were reconciled with the Gothicness of the fabric raises questions about the true expectations about Gothic cathedrals in the nineteenth century. Considerable light can be thrown on this issue by looking at the reactions to other cathedrals in Spain, which were located in areas of weaker Islamic influence, which contained no tangible Moorish remains, and which we consider today as more or less conventional examples of Gothic architecture. Interestingly enough, we find that they too were subjected to Orientalizing readings. This fact seems to indicate that in the nineteenth century the Moorish elements were nothing out of the ordinary, if not actually expected. For instance, some travellers argued, wrongly, that the cathedral at Cuenca (Figure 1.3)

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Figure 1.5. F. J. Parcerisa, Claustros de la catedral Figure 1.6. N.-M.-J. Chapuy, Galerie du Jardin de Segovia, print from Jose María Quadrado, de la Cathédrale de Barcelonne, print from Recuerdos y bellezas de España: Salamanca, Nicholas-Marie-Joseph Chapuy, Le Moyen âge Avila y Segovia, vol. x. 1865. monumental et archéologique, pt. 4. 1840–43. Photos by Syracuse Uni­ver­sity Photo and Imaging Center.

had semi-Moorish arches and Moorish ornamentation all over. Another traveller remarked that, inside the purely Gothic cathedral of Avila (Figure 1.4), ‘there [was] a Moorish sentiment which [could] be felt’.8 The beautiful Gothic cloisters of the cathedrals of Segovia (Figure 1.5) and Barcelona (Figure 1.6), with no Oriental influence of any sort, were also perceived by a popular architectural historian as exhibiting the fantastic character so typical of Arabian 8  About the Gothic cathedral at Cuenca, see the comment by Richard Ford (1796–1858), author of one of the most influential and authoritative travel guides in Spain, A Hand-Book for Travellers in Spain, and Readers at Home, ed. by Ian Robertson (London: John Murray, 1845; repr. London: Centaur Press, 1966), iii, 1285–86. Ford argued that the design of the arches was semi-Moorish. See also James Fergusson, author of the first and also extremely influential world survey of architecture, for whom the cathedral had a ‘certain amount of Moorish detail and feeling’: The Illustrated Handbook of Architecture: Being a Concise and Popular Account of the Different Styles of Architecture Prevailing in All Ages and Countries, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1855), ii, 832. For the Cathedral at Avila, see W. N. Lockington, ‘The Cathedral and Town of Avila, Spain’, The Builder, 2 January 1864, p. 7.

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Figure 1.7. Jenaro Perez Villaamil, View in the Choir of the Cathedral at Toledo, from James Fergusson, The Illustrated Handbook of Architecture, vol. ii. 1855. Photo by the author.

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Figure 1.8. David Roberts, West-Front of the Cathedral at Burgos, print from Thomas Roscoe, The Tourist in Spain: Biscay and the Castiles. 1837. Photo by Syracuse Uni­ver­sity Photo and Imaging Center.

work.9 And an even better-known architectural historian, James Fergusson (1808–1886), argued mid-century for an Oriental influence in two of the most prominent examples of what is regarded as the best ‘French Gothic’ in Spain. One was the cathedral of Toledo (Figure 1.7), about which he claimed that ‘a practised eye, [would] detect on every side, a tendency to depart from the sober constructive rules of the pure Gothic, and to give rein to an Oriental exuberance of fancy’ (my italics).10 The other was the west façade of the cathedral at 9 

Edward Augustus Freeman, A History of Architecture (London: J. Masters, 1849), p. 417. Fergusson, The Illustrated Handbook of Architecture, ii, 830. Toledo Cathedral actually exhibits a marked Islamic influence in the polylobed arches in the triforium of the deambula10 

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Burgos (Figure 1.8), which, in his view, displayed ‘a half Oriental exuberance of design’.11 As can be seen in the nineteenth-century illustrations provided here, the choice of decorative motifs, the way they were distributed and fused with the architectural elements, the shape of the arches, and the overall designs were nothing but canonical Gothic. To a modern viewer, nothing warrants the claims made by travellers and historians of their Oriental character. In showing a range of comments about Gothic Spanish buildings from different periods, size, location, and reputation, I hope to demonstrate how thoroughly pervasive the Orientalizing view was at the time. Even though I am discussing the reactions of British Victorian travellers, I suspect that an examination of other European sources would render similar results. The cultural imprint left in Spain by the eight centuries of Islamic domination during the Middle Ages, which had earned the country a reputation as being half Oriental, obviously contributed to the high susceptibility of Spanish cathedrals to Orientalizing readings. It does not, however, by any means, exhaust the explanations for the phenomenon, nor does it turn Spain into an exceptional case. The truth is that there was a widespread belief in the Eastern character of the Gothic, regardless of the national origin of the monuments.12 This also manifested itself in other ways. The conflation of Eastern tory, but that is an isolated case, and far from Fergusson’s claim of the Oriental influence being noticeable ‘on every side’. It must be noted that Fergusson never visited Spain, so he had no direct knowledge of the buildings. 11  Fergusson, The Illustrated Handbook of Architecture, ii, 828. 12  To my knowledge there are no monographic studies devoted to the theory of an Eastern origin for the Gothic. I have been doing research on this topic for several years, and this article offers an overview of some of the issues that will be dealt with in a larger study that I am preparing on the Orientalizing views of the Gothic. For more information on the topic and thorough bibliographical information, see my ‘La visión británica del arte medi­eval cristiano en España’, pp. 302–95, and my articles ‘The Making of the Saracen Style: The Crusades and Medi­ eval Architecture in the British Imagination of the 18th and 19th Centuries’, in The Crusades: Other Experiences, Alternate Perspectives, ed. by Khalil I. Semaan (Binghamton, NY: Global Academic Publishings, 2003), pp. 115–40; ‘En busca del origen del Gótico: El viaje de Thomas Pitt por España en 1760’, Goya: Revista de Arte, 292 (2003), 9–22. See Tonia Raquejo’s works for more examples of how the thesis of an Arabic origin of the Gothic affected the perception of the Islamic buildings, making them look rather Gothic: ‘The “Arab Cathedrals”: Moorish Architecture as Seen by British Travellers’, Burlington Magazine, 128.1001 (August 1986), 555–63, and El palacio encantado: La Alhambra en el arte británico (Madrid: Taurus, 1989), pp. 40–68. The most common source of information about the theory of the Arab origin of the Gothic is Paul Frankl, The Gothic: Literary Sources and Interpretations through Eight Centuries, trans. by Priscilla Silz (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni­ver­sity Press, 1960), pp. 363–66, 376–77, and 494.

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and Gothic styles into a unique Moorish-Gothic style also affected the perception of Eastern buildings, which were often labelled or portrayed as Gothic. Furthermore, the Moorish-Gothic style became a new tangible reality, brought to life by many garden pavilions and buildings designed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Those structures show an amazing and very significant ambivalence and confusion about the Gothic and Eastern styles.13 This notion of a Moorish-Gothic style is now forgotten, but it had a long tradition. It derived from the thesis that the Gothic style had been born as an imitation of Eastern architectural styles. Already formulated at the end of the seventeenth century, this thesis reached its height in popularity from the mideighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. It led to proposals to change the name of the Gothic style to Saracen, Moresque, or Arabesque. As anyone familIt must be cautioned, though, that Frankl’s account is constructed on a limited number of sources and on some erroneous datings. Other authors who deal with the theory in a more or less indirect way are Jurgis Baltrušaitis, ‘The Romance of Gothic Architecture’, in Aberrations: An Essay on the Legend of Formes, trans. by Richard Miller (Cam­bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), pp. 107–35 (pp. 126–35); Thomas Cocke, ‘The Wheel of Fortune: The Appreciation of Gothic since the Middle Ages’, in Age of Chivalry: Art in Plantagenet England, 1200–1400, ed. by Jonathan Alexander and Paul Binski (London: Royal Academy of Arts; Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987), pp. 183–91 (p. 184); Georg Germann, The Gothic Revival in Europe and Britain: Sources, Influences and Ideas, trans. by Gerald Onn, 1st paperback edn (Cam­bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978), p. 40; McCarthy, The Origins of the Gothic Revival, pp. 17–19; Maria João Baptisa Neto, ‘A arquitectura de Santa Maria de Alcobaça e a discussão em torno das orgiens do Gótico nos finais do século xviii: Uma descriçaõ inédita do mosteiro de 1760’, in Actas do coloquio cister, espaços, territorios, paisagens: Coloquio internaciona, 16 a 29 de Juhno de 1998, Mosteiro de Alcobaça (Lisboa: IPPAR-MC, 2000), pp. 271–82, and ‘Reflexões em torno das origins do estilo gótico’, in James Murphy e or restauro do Mosteiro de Santa Maria da Vitória no século xix (Lisboa: Estampa, 1997), pp. 23–47 (Neto later changed her view and incorporated my findings about this topic in her edition, Thomas Pitt: Observaçõ es de uma Viagem a Portugal e Espanha (1760). Observations in a Tour to Portugal and Spain (1760) (Lisbon: IPPAR, 2006), pp. 35–38); Arthur O. Lovejoy, ‘The First Gothic Revival and the Return to Nature’, in Essays in the History of Ideas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni­ver­sity Press, 1948), pp. 136–65 (pp. 137–42); Sweetman, The Oriental Obsession, pp. 53–59; Joseph Rykwert, The First Moderns: The Architects of the Eighteenth Century (Cam­bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983; repr. 1991), p. 222, n. 191. 13  For more examples of the shared visual image of Eastern and Gothic buildings, see Baltrušaitis, ‘The Romance of Gothic Architecture’, pp. 129–30; Mateo, ‘The Making of the Saracen Style’, p. 121 and figs. 5–10; Raquejo, ‘The “Arab Cathedrals”’; Raquejo, El palacio encantado, pp. 56–68. Another important symptom of the belief in the Eastern character of the Gothic is the phenomenon of the synagogues built in Gothic style during the nineteenth century in northern Europe, following the belief that the Gothic style could convey the Eastern sources of Judaism, as has been argued by Michael J. Lewis, The Gothic Revival (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002), p. 65.

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iar with the sources of the period will know, it was also extremely ubiquitous. It appeared in architectural treatises, encyclopaedias, dictionaries, travel books, personal letters, and scholarly papers and was supported by professional scholars and amateurs alike, by both well-known and now-forgotten figures. As far as I know, it has been recorded in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain, and I would not be surprised if the list were longer.14 It was a thesis that never went ignored in the heated debates about the origin of the Gothic that took place in the nineteenth century. Although it was more often attacked than defended, this fact illustrates, perhaps better than anything else, how wildly popular it must have been for it to demand such an intense effort to refute it. Despite the proof given in the 1840s of the French origin of the Gothic, the thesis lingered on until the end of the century and still found occasional supporters in the twentieth century.15 Although the idea of an Arabic cathedral may seem to us highly unusual, it was indeed extremely widespread in past centuries. The high susceptibility of Spanish cathedrals to Orientalizing readings makes them very suitable for exploring the idea of an Arabic cathedral. It is not my intention here, however, to deal with this issue in a comprehensive, indepth, or conclusive way, but rather to point out three different lines of inquiry that I hope will spur other scholars on to study the concept in depth. First is the issue of how the idea of a Moorish-Gothic cathedral came about and how its style was visualized in specific elements of architectural design. Secondly, I would like to address the imagined and real components in this understanding of the Gothic cathedral. And last, but not least, I would like to expose, if only superficially, how the notion of a Moorish-Gothic cathedral became another weapon in the European Orientalist discourse to present the Gothic — and the countries that produced an Orientalized Gothic — as inferior. 14  For a sample of authors who dealt with the theory of the Eastern origin of the Gothic, see Frankl, The Gothic, pp. 346, 364–70, 376–77, 385, 422n, 455–56, and 494. For instances in Spain, see Nieves Panadero Padre, ‘Teorías sobre el origen de la arquitectura gótica en la historiografía ilustrada y romántica española’, Anales de Historia del Arte, 4 (1994), 203–11 (pp. 203–05); Matilde Mateo, ‘Medi­e val Art in the Neoclassical Age of Spain: Sources and Ideas of Spanish Criticism of Medi­eval Art (1759–1808)’ (unpublished master’s thesis, Uni­ver­ sity of Essex, 1994), available at , pp. 49–51. 15  See Frankl, The Gothic, pp. 563–66, for basic information on the first studies in favour of a French birthplace for the Gothic. See also Stephanie A. Glaser, ‘The Search for Origins’, in ‘Explorations of the Gothic Cathedral in Nineteenth-Century France’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Indiana Uni­ver­sity, 2002), pp. 423–43. The Eastern origin of the Gothic was still defended by J. H. Harvey in the 1960s, ‘The Origins of Gothic Architecture: Some Further Thoughts’, Antiquaries Journal, 48 (1968), 87–99.

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Historiographical Invention The notion of a Moorish-Gothic cathedral came about as a true invention in the original sense of the Latin etymology of inventio: a creation and a discovery. On the one hand, it was indeed a creation of the European imagination. The idea was constructed upon perceived similarities between the Gothic and Eastern buildings, but the truth is that the latter were hardly familiar to Europeans. Most of the information came from highly inaccurate descriptions and illustrations. Furthermore, the gaps in knowledge were usually filled with false assumptions based on prejudiced notions and stereotypes about Eastern buildings and cultures.16 In other words, the foundation for the notion of a Moorish-Gothic cathedral rested on made-up similarities between Eastern and Gothic buildings. On the other hand, the understanding of the Gothic as an Eastern style was also welcomed as a great discovery, for it provided a much sought-after clue to unravel the peculiarities of the Gothic and its intriguing origin: the architecture of the Arabs. The oldest recorded instances of the thesis of an Arabic origin for the Gothic appear in France in the second half of the seventeenth century.17 At that time, it was argued that Gothic and Arabic buildings shared common principles of design which were expressed in rather vague terms: a taste for lavish ornamentation, intricacy, and delicacy; a display of boundless imagination and irrationality; and a lack of rules and moderation. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the thesis had been further developed with a few more details. First, the French Jesuit theologian and philosopher René-Joseph de Tournemine (1661–1739) put forward the view that the Gothic had been invented by the Christians of Spain, who were trying to emulate the architecture of their neighbours, the Moors.18 Shortly thereafter, the well-reputed British architect 16  For a discussion of the sources available in print to Europeans in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, see Mateo, ‘La visión británica del arte medi­eval cristiano en España’, pp. 323–40. 17  For a more detailed account of this process, see Mateo, ‘La visión británica del arte medi­eval cristiano en España’, pp. 303–15. 18  René-Joseph de Tournemine’s thesis appeared as most of the entry ‘Gothique’ in the dictionary of architectural terms that Jean-Louis de Cordemoy appended to his second edition of the Nouveau Traité de toute l’Architecture ou l’art de bastir; utile aux entrepreneurs et aux ouvriers […]; avec un dictionnaire des termes d’Architecture (Paris: J. B. Coignard, 1714), ‘Gothique’, pp. 241–43. For more information about Tournemine, see Pierre Larousse, Grand dictionnaire universel du xixe siècle, 17 vols (Paris: Administration du Grand dictionnaire universel, 1866–90), xv (1875), 365. For more information about the thesis of a Spanish-Moorish

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Christopher Wren (1632–1723) proposed an alternative version, arguing that the style should be renamed ‘Saracenick’, since it had been brought to Europe by the crusaders from, presumably, the Holy Land.19 We have thus two distinct versions of the theory of the Arabic origin of the Gothic, proposing not only two different birth places, Spain and the Holy Land, but also two different ways of understanding the style, depending on what elements were stressed in their commonality with the Arabic models. The first theory, advocated by Tournemine, presented the Gothic as Moorish, proposed that it had been invented in medi­e val Spain after Moorish models, and characterized the style by a great degree of irrationality, excess, and delicate ornamentation. The second theory, put forward by Wren, presented the Gothic as Saracenic, suggested the buildings of the Holy Land to have been its models, and linked its development to the crusaders. Wren also characterized the style in a very different way. Instead of resorting to the old French arguments about the Gothic’s irrationality, delicacy, and excessive ornamentation, the architect placed great emphasis on a single structural element common to both: the pointed arch. It is important to bear in mind this dual birth of the thesis of the Arabic origin of the Gothic, for both theories were equally influential in the perception of the Gothic as having an Oriental character of some sort. Although they were often blended in the most diverse ways, they had different realms of influence. Wren’s theory was more popular in the architectural and scholarly realms, while Tournemine’s spread well beyond such specialized circles. However, modern scholarship, at least in English, tends to focus almost solely on Wren’s thesis, ignoring Tournemine’s contribution. This view needs correction, for Tournemine’s contribution was extremely important and long-lasting. He was well known in his time, but his prestige did not endure as Wren’s did, so his name soon fell into oblivion. However, this did not put an end to his influence. On the contrary, his theory kept popping up anonymously all through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, be it in the labelling of the origin of the Gothic, see Mateo, ‘En busca del origen del gótico’, pp. 12–15; Mateo, ‘La visión británica del arte medi­eval cristiano en España’, pp. 307–15, 336–40, 350–53, 356–83. See also Neto, ‘A arquitectura de Santa Maria de Alcobaça’ and ‘Reflexões em torno das origins do estilo gótico’, and Raquejo, ‘The “Arab Cathedrals”’ and El palacio encantado. 19  Wren’s theory was first recorded in ‘Memorial to the Bishop of Rochester, in the Year 1713’, published in Parentalia: or Memoirs of the Family of the Wrens, comp. by his son, Christopher Wren, and ed. by Steven Wren (London: T. Osborne, 1750), pp. 297–98. There is much confusion about Wren’s ideas in the scholarly work on the topic, especially with regard to attribution and dating; for a discussion of this problem, see Mateo, ‘The Making of the Saracen Style’.

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Gothic as ‘Moresque’, or in allusions to the Spanish origin of the Gothic, or in the emphasis placed on the excesses, delicacy, and ornamental and irrational character of the Gothic style. Indeed, Tournemine’s thesis met with great success and was long-lived, something that should not surprise us. It was published almost forty years earlier than Wren’s, and it had an excellent platform for its debut, the 1714 edition of Jean-Louis de Cordemoy’s (1655–1714) Nouveau Traité de toute l’Architecture. The fact that it was a French treatise published at the time when the whole Western world looked to French architectural theory for guidance made it extremely influential. Moreover, Tournemine’s theory also found well-fertilized ground for its acceptance and expansion because it was, as we shall see, in perfect accord with the dominant stereotypes about Arabic culture, the Middle Ages, and the nature of architectural styles.20 The characterization of the Gothic as irrational, excessively ornamented, and lacking any rules already had a long tradition and was a by-product of the classicist ideals of the Italian humanists. In their zeal to exalt their own achievements, they ridiculed the Gothic as the child of the ‘barbarian’ Goths, because, among other things, it did not seem to follow the classicist ideals of moderation, reason, and rules.21 This anti-classical image of the Gothic grew stronger with the successive waves of classicism that dominated European taste during the following centuries and that had taken hold in France during the seventeenth century. In a parallel development, the ‘Arab peoples’ and their artistic manifestations were also victims of negative judgements based on classicist ideals with similar results: it was claimed that they had more imagination than reason, were prone to excesses, and were resistant to rules and order. This negative image, vigorously fed since ancient times, was greatly reinforced in the field of literary theory and criticism, where the ‘Asiatic style’ of rhetoric and ‘Arabic poetry’ were traditionally characterized by their sensualism, fanciness, and excesses.22 In conclusion, both Arabic culture and the Gothic style came to share the same image, one that was formulated in very similar terms by their common departure from classical ideals. It must be stressed, though, that no genetic connection was made between Arabs and the Gothic as long as the latter was considered to be an invention of the Goths. 20 

Tournemine’s thesis also became popular in England, where, for instance, it was supported by the Encyclopædia Britannica from 1778 until 1842. 21  For an overview of this issue, see Mateo, ‘La vision británica del arte medi­eval cristiano en España’, pp. 84–89, and Frankl, The Gothic, pp. 237–84. 22  See Mateo, ‘La visión británica del arte medi­eval cristiano en España’, pp. 315–18.

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This situation changed when sometime during the last quarter of the eighteenth century it was realized that what had until then been labelled as Gothic was in fact two distinct styles: ‘Ancient Gothic’ (what is today called Romanesque) and ‘Modern Gothic’ (what we call Gothic).23 As Tournemine argued, such different styles, one characterized by its solidity and stoutness, the other by its lightness and delicacy, could not have been invented by the same people. With this, he opened the door to fresh speculations about the respective paternity of the two Gothic styles. Basing his arguments on stereotypes about the character of the Goths and on chronological consistency, Tournemine attributed Ancient Gothic to the Goths. The need to find a different paternity for the Modern Gothic is what ultimately led him to the ‘discovery’ of its supposed Arabic roots. A careful examination of the first formulations of the Arabic origin of the Gothic in France exposes how the thesis relied more on preconceived ideas rather than on an empirical observation of both styles of building. As I have noted, this process began not in the realm of architectural theory, but in that of literary theory and criticism; moreover, it was at the hands of intellectuals with no expertise in the field of architecture and no direct knowledge of Eastern buildings. The oldest case I have found so far is the second dialogue from the Dialogues sur l’éloquence by François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon (1651–1715). This text is often wrongly dated 1714, but in fact it dates back to 1679.24 In it Fénelon argues that Cette Architecture qu’on appelle gothique, nous est venues des Arabes; ces sortes d’esprits étant fort vifs et n’ayant ni règle ni culture, ne pouvaient manquer de se jetter [sic] dans de fausses subtilités. De-là leur vint ce mauvais goût en toutes choses. Ils ont été sophistes en raisonnements, amateurs de colifichets en architecture, et inventeurs de pointes en poésie et en éloquence. Tout cela est du même génie. [The Gothic kind was invented by the Arabians; who, being a people of quick sprightly fancy, and having no rule, nor culture, could scarce avoid falling into these whimsical niceties. And this vivacity corrupted their taste in all other things. 23  The first recorded instance of a distinction between Romanesque and Gothic is made by Jean-François Félibien des Avaux (1658–1733), Recueil historique de la vie et des ouvrages des plus célèbres architectes, 2nd edn (Paris, 1696), preface; although the date could be earlier if it appeared in the first edition of 1687 (which I have not been able to consult). It is very likely that Félibien was not original in proposing such a distinction, but that he was rather reporting a view common in his day. 24  See Mateo, ‘En busca del origen del gótico’, for a more detailed discussion about the dating of this dialogue.

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For, they used sophisms in their logic: they loved little knacks in architecture; and invented witticisms in poetry and eloquence. All these are of the same kind.]25

Fénelon’s arguments depended on a stereotyped image of the Arab people as lacking culture and restraint, and as being ruled more by imagination than reason. They also rested on the belief that the intrinsic character of a people would permeate any of their artistic manifestations. Later on Tournemine resorted to similar reasonings in distinguishing between ‘Ancient’ and ‘Modern’ Gothic: Celle qu’on nomme moderne a une origine différente. Elle se distingue par sa légèreté, par l’excessive hardiesse de son élévation & de ses coupes, par la délicatesse, l’abondance & la bisarrerie [sic] de ses ornemens. Ses Colonnes sont aussi foibles que les Colonnes Gothiques sont massives. Reconnoît-on les Goths à des manières si éloignées de leur génie? Et d’ailleurs peut-on leur attribuer une Architecture qui n’a commencé au plutôt que dans le dixième siècle, plusieurs années après l’entière destruction de tous les Royaumes que les Goths avoient fondez sur les ruines de L’Empire Romain, & dans un tems où leur nom même étoit enseveli dans l’oubli. A tous les traits de cette nouvelle Architecture, on reconnoît les Mores, ou ce qui est la même chose, les Arabes, qui ont eu dans leur Architecture le même goût que dans leur Poésie. L’une & l’autre a été faussement délicate, chargée d’ornemens superflus, toujours éloignée du naturel. L’imagination, mais une imagination échauffée a dominé dans l’une & dans l’autre, & a rendu les édifices des Arabes aussi extraordinaires que leurs pensées. S’il restoit quelque doute, il ne faudroit que consulter ceux qui ont vu les Mosquées, les Palais de Fez, ou les Cathédrales d’Espagne bâties par les Mores ou de leur tems; celle de Burgos, par exemple. Ces édifices sont tous de l’Architecture qu’on veut appeller [sic] Gothique Moderne, & que j’ose me flater [sic] qu’on appellera [sic] désormais, Moresque. C’est par l’Espagne qu’elle passa dans l’Europe. Les Lettres fleurirent chez les Arabes dans le tems que leur Empire étoit le plus florissant. Ils cultivèrent la Philosophie, les Mathématiques, la Médecine, la Poésie, corrompant tout par leurs fausses subtilitez [sic]. Leur exemple ranima l’amour des Sciences dans les pays voisins de l’Espagne qu’ils avoient conquise. On lut leurs Auteurs, & les Auteurs Grecs qu’ils avoient traduits en leur Langue, & qu’on traduisit en Latin sur l’Arabe. La Philosophie & la Médecine Arabe se répandirent dans l’Europe, & l’Architecture Arabe avec elles. On bâtit beaucoup d’Eglises dans le goût Moresque, sans corriger

25  François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon, Dialogues sur l’éloquence en général et sur celle de la chaire en particulier [1679], in Fénelon, Oeuvres I, ed. by Jacques Le Brun (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), pp. 55–56. English: ‘Dialogue II’, in Dialogues Concerning Eloquence, for the pulpit: by the late Archbishop of Cambray, trans. by William Stevenson (Glasgow: Urie and A. Foulis, 1750), p. 130.

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même ce qui convenoit mieux à des pays trop chauds, qu’à des régions tempérées: je veux dire les jours pris de fort haut par des fenêtres partagées en petits carreaux. Ce n’a été que dans le quinzième siècle qu’on a commencé à revenir à la bonne Architecture. [That [Architecture] called Modern is of a different origin [than that called Ancient Gothic]. It is characterized by its lightness, the excessive audacity of its elevation and of its angles, by the delicacy, the abundance, and strangeness of its ornamentation. Its columns are as frail as the Gothic ones are solid. Do we recognize the Goths in these forms so alien to their genius? Moreover, can we attribute to the Goths an architecture which only originated, at the earliest, during the tenth century, several years after the entire destruction of all the kingdoms which the Goths had founded upon the ruins of the Roman Empire, and at a time by which their name had fallen into oblivion? In all the features of this new architecture we recognize the Moors, or, which amounts to the same thing, the Arabs, who exhibited the same taste in their architecture as in their poetry. Their architecture and poetry were both deceitfully delicate, loaded with superfluous ornaments, always far-removed from nature. The imagination, and a fired-up imagination at that, dominated both and made the edifices of the Arabs as extraordinary as their reflections. If any doubt remains, one only has to consult those who have seen the mosques, the palaces of Fez, or the cathedrals of Spain built by the Moors or during their age, for example, that of Burgos. These edifices are specimens of the architecture that some would call ‘Modern Gothic’, and which, I dare to claim, will from now on be called ‘Moorish’. The style was carried into Europe through Spain. Literature thrived with the Arabs during the time that their Empire was flourishing most. They cultivated philosophy, mathematics, medicine, poetry, corrupting everything with their misleading subtleties. Their example revived the love of the sciences in the countries they conquered around Spain. Their authors were read, as were the Greek authors that they had translated into their own language, and which were then translated into Latin from Arabic. Arabic philosophy and medicine spread through Europe, and Arab Architecture spread with them. Many churches were built according to the Moorish taste, without even changing that which was better suited to very hot countries and not to more temperate regions: by this I mean the daylight captured very high up by windows divided into small panes. The return to good architecture didn’t occur until the fifteenth century.]26

26 

‘Gothique’ (pp. 242–43), from Cordemoy’s Dictionnaire in Nouveau Traité de toute l’Architecture (pp. 223–90). The original French spelling has been retained, though the accents have been modernized; trans. by S. Glaser.

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Tournemine’s mention of Burgos cathedral (Figure 1.8) is puzzling and leaves a modern reader wondering what part or feature of its design could prove, to his mind, an Arabic origin of the Gothic. Modern scholarship generally considers Burgos Cathedral as a typical example of strong French influence, although some of its less-conspicuous decoration has been linked to Islamic taste.27 In any case, the information about this cathedral available to Tournemine in print was very minimal and consisted of vague descriptions and no illustrations. Perhaps he had visited Spain and North Africa, or he had good secondary sources of information about these buildings, but it is impossible to prove it one way or another. Nevertheless, it is my impression that he was most likely working on assumptions rather than on empirical observations about both styles of building. In fact, Tournemine seems to have been deliberately looking at current notions about the origin of the medi­eval romances to explain the origin of the Gothic. Since the sixteenth century, it had been argued that the medi­eval lyric had its origin in Arabic poetry, and that this intellectual exchange had taken place in Spain.28 According to eighteenth-century mentality and knowledge, Tournemine’s appropriation of this thesis for the Gothic style made perfect sense, for it was validated by three views entrenched in the mentality of the time. One was the aforementioned perceived similarity between Gothic and Arabic architecture as expressed in anti-classical terms. Another was the well-established reputation of Spain as the place where intellectual exchange from the East to the West had occurred. And the third was the renown enjoyed by Spanish architecture for displaying a strong Islamic look. In fact, other Europeans used to speak of a ‘Spanish way’ of building, by which they meant the noticeable Islamic influence in many of the late medi­e val and Renaissance palaces of Spain.29 This 27 

See Henrik Karge, La catedral de Burgos y la arquitectura del siglo xiii en Francia y España, trans. by Cristina Corredor (Valladolid: Junta de Castilla y León, 1995), pp. 176–77. Original: Die Kathedrale von Burgos und die spanische Architektur des 13. Jahrhunderts: Französische Hochgotik in Kastilien und Leon (Berlin: Mann, 1989). 28  See Giammaria Barbieri, ‘Propagazione della Rima degli Arabi agli Spagnoli e a’Provenzali’, in Dell’origine della poesia rimatta, ed. by Girolamo Tiraboschi (Modena: Societa Tipografica, 1790), pp. 44–49 (pp. 44–45). According to James T. Monroe’s Islam and the Arabs in Spanish Scholarship (Leiden: Brill, 1970), p. 39, the original manu­script is from 1581. For more information about the thesis of the Spanish origin of the medi­e val lyric, see Roger Boase, The Origin and Meaning of Courtly Love (Manchester: Manchester Uni­ver­sity Press; Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1977), and Rosa Maria Menocal, The Arabic Role in Medi­eval Literary History (Philadelphia: Uni­ver­sity of Pennsylvania Press, 1987). 29  The habit of adopting Moorish forms of luxury was common among the nobility and

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Figure 1.9. David Roberts, The Court of the Lions, print from Thomas Roscoe, The Tourist in Spain: Granada, vol. i. 1835. Courtesy, the Lilly Library, Indiana Uni­ver­sity, Bloomington, Indiana.

Figure 1.10. Girault de Prangey, Vue intérieure de la mosquée, Cordove, print from Girault de Prangey, Monuments Arabes et Moresques de Cordove, Séville et Grenade, pt. 1. 1836–39. Photo by Syracuse Uni­ver­sity Bird Library.

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Islamacizing view of Spanish architecture was also greatly reinforced by the immense popularity of the Alhambra (Figure 1.9) and the Great Mosque of Córdoba (Figures 1.10, 1.11, 1.12). Interest in medi­eval architecture in Spain focused almost exclusively upon these two buildings, both of which also contributed to creating the image of Spain as an Islamic country. Wren’s version of the theory, on the other hand, had as little factual support as Tournemine’s. As I have argued elsewhere, Wren’s thesis was in fact inspired by the legendary foundation of the Secret Society of Freemasons. Wren was in all likelihood a Freemason, and if not, he was quite close to Masonic circles and familiar with their legends and ideology. By claiming that the Society had originated in the building lodges of the great Gothic cathedrals, Masonic history had already fostered an association between Gothic and Freemasonry. In Wren’s times, however, a more glamorous and older origin of Freemasonry was proposed, dating it back to the construction of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem. According to Masonic views, the knowledge acquired by the Temple lodges was kept intact in the area until the arrival of the crusaders, who then brought it to Europe, thus giving rise to the Secret Society of Freemasons. It seems highly likely that if Wren assigned a Saracenic origin to the Gothic, it was because, for him, as a Freemason, the history of Gothic intertwined with that of Freemasonry. In other words, it was only logical for him that if the Masonic society had a Saracenic origin, the Gothic ought to have one as well.30

royalty of late medi­eval Spain and was widely practiced in the palace type of building. For the reception of such buildings in Europe during the sixteenth century, see Fernando Marías, El largo siglo xvi: los usos artístico del Renacimiento español (Madrid: Taurus, 1989), pp. 181–202; and Teresa Perez Higuera, ‘Arquitectura mudéjar en los antiguos reinos de Castilla, León y Toledo’, in El Arte Mudejar, ed. by Gonzaloz M. Borras Gualis (Zaragoza: Ibercaja-UNESCO, 1995), pp. 31–61 (p. 53 and p. 60). This notion of a ‘Spanish way of building’ was inspired by secular, rather than religious, architecture. It is also to be noted that Spain had many buildings in older styles that could also have been interpreted as looking Islamic, such as the Visigothic from the seventh century and the Mozarabic from the tenth. Both styles systematically employed horseshoe arches, which were traditionally interpreted as typically Islamic. Furthermore, the Mozarabic buildings often framed these arches with an alfiz, a frame that inscribed the arch into a square, and which was also present in the Islamic architecture of Spain. To the Visigothic and Mozarabic buildings, one could also add some prominent Romanesque churches, such as St Isidore, in León, which prominently displayed polylobed arches, as well as the Mudejar-Romanesque buildings, many of which were on the popular pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela. For more on the Múdejar style, see below, note 34. 30  For a more thorough discussion of Wren’s thesis and his association with Freemasonry, see Mateo, ‘The Making of the Saracen Style’, pp. 115–21.

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Figure 1.11. John Frederick Lewis, The Mosque at Córdoba (The Cathedral), print from J. F. Lewis, Sketches on Spain and Spanish Character. 1834. Courtesy, the Lilly Library, Indiana Uni­ver­sity, Bloomington, Indiana.

The inception of the thesis of an Arabic origin of the Gothic was thus an a priori deduction, and indeed an invention based on stereotypes rather than direct observation of Eastern architecture. It was more than a century later that the thesis began to be supported a posteriori with specific architectural arguments based on observations about the designs of both styles of building. This new development was fuelled by the heated debates about the origin of the Gothic that captured the attention of scholarly circles roughly from the 1780s through the 1840s. Despite the advances in the knowledge about Islamic and Gothic buildings, the proofs provided against and for the Arabic origin of the Gothic were still mistaken or impossibly anachronistic, although nobody was aware of it at the time.31 What is really interesting about these futile discussions is how they promoted a new image of the Gothic cathedral. The debates 31 

For more information about the debates surrounding the theory of an Arabic origin of the Gothic, see Mateo, ‘La visión británica del arte medi­eval cristiano en España’, pp. 353–84, and Mateo, ‘The Making of the Saracen Style’, pp. 122–24.

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Figure 1.12. Girault de Prangey, Mirah ou Sanctuaire de la mosquée, print from Girault de Prangey, Monuments Arabes et Moresques de Cordove, Séville et Grenade, pt. 1. 1836–39. Photo by Syracuse Uni­ver­sity Bird Library.

directed the attention of scholars towards the specific set of formal features that became critical for the validity of the Eastern origin of the Gothic. The result was an Orientalizing recreation, in which the elements that actually brought the edifice closer to its Eastern counterparts were openly emphasized. The pointed arch, so common in the Eastern buildings, assumed a major role, figuring prominently in the illustrations of Gothic cathedrals, either as a framing device or repeated as a ripple effect in multiple visual axes (Figures 1.1, 1.3, and 1.6). The height, slenderness, and verticality that characterized many Islamic constructions, such as the Alhambra (Figure 1.9), was exaggerated in the pictorial renditions of cathedrals by the low point of view and the inclusion of dwarfed human figures (Figure 1.1). Gothic spires and towers acquired a renewed interest because of their verticality, which was thought to be an echo of the minarets (Figures 1.8 and 1.13). Often, views of cathedrals focused on overly ornamented surfaces, literally covered with sculptured decoration (Figure 1.7), thus

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Figure 1.13. Jenaro Pérez Villaamil, Torre de Santa María de Illescas, print from La España Artística y Monumental, vol. ii. Paris, 1844. Photo by Syracuse Uni­ver­sity Photo and Imaging Center.

mirroring the effect of horror vacui that was thought to be the landmark of the arabesque and other decorations typical of Eastern buildings, such as in the Alhambra (Figure 1.9). Sometimes prints and descriptions tried to capture the unique effect of the light filtered through stained-glass windows (Figures 1.1, 1.3, and 1.4), a feature that was also thought to derive from Eastern practices. I am not arguing here, though, that the emphasis on pointed arches, verticality, slenderness, profuse decoration, and filtered, coloured light was due exclusively to the understanding of Gothic as Eastern. There were many other factors at work in the promotion of these characteristics, such as the aesthetics of the sublime, or some architectural theories that advocated the symbiosis of construction and decoration. What I am arguing is that these specific features were also quite indebted to, and promoted by, the Orientalizing readings of the Gothic, a factor that has hardly been recognized by scholars.

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Despite the widespread popularity of the Moorish-Gothic style, the historical veracity of the Oriental provenance of the Gothic came under many attacks, and rightly so, until it was finally discredited as false. It was a slow process, and it took until the end of the nineteenth century for it to have a significant impact on popular conceptions of the Gothic. The mortal blow was inflicted by the proof that the Gothic had originated in France and that any possible Eastern model that may have been borrowed had been so altered or improved by French genius that it could be claimed as their own.32 Since the very idea of an Eastern Gothic cathedral totally depended on the Eastern provenance of the style, once the latter was refuted, the whole idea of an Arabic cathedral was dismissed as a fantasy, a child of classicist prejudice and the Romantic imagination. The notion became a historiographical invention of the past, absurd and disposable, like the theories advocating the Gothic’s invention by the Goths or originating as an imitation of the forests.

Artistic Reality The understanding of the Gothic cathedral as Christian and Western at the expense of its understanding as Moorish has been regarded in art historiography as the logical triumph of truth and reality over merely ignorant invention. I would like to argue, though, that this view needs to be revised and problematized. I am not trying to argue here that the Gothic cathedral is Moorish in essence, or that it derives from Islamic architecture, but rather that the notion of a Moorish-Gothic cathedral is not entirely a fantasy. The conflict between the Moorish-Gothic and the Christian-Western-Gothic is not one between invention and reality. It is rather that both involve a manipulation of facts, while also being partially backed up by actual buildings. Besides, the rejection of an Arabic origin for the Gothic does not preclude the possibility of the Gothic cathedrals 32 

Some recent accounts of the French appropriation of the Gothic style include ‘The Middle Ages Belong to France: Nationalist Paradigms of the Medi­e val’, in Elizabeth Emery and Laura Morowitz, Consuming the Past: The Medi­eval Revival in Fin-de-Siècle France (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 13–35; Stephanie A. Glaser, ‘Of Revolutions, Republics and Spires: Nineteenth-Century France and the Gothic Cathedral’, in Signs of Change: Transformations of Christian Traditions and their Representation in the Arts, 1000–2000, ed. by Nils Holger Petersen, Claus Clüver, and Nicolas Bell (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), pp. 453–73; and Glaser, ‘“Deutsche Baukunst”, “Architecture Française”: The Use of the Gothic Cathedral in the Construction of National Memory in Nineteenth-Century Germany and France’, in Orientations: Space / Time / Image / Word, ed. by Claus Clüver, Leo Hoek, and Véronique Plesch (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), pp. 77–91.

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having, nevertheless, an Oriental character of some sort. Some churches from the Gothic period do incorporate Islamic forms: the Moorish or Arabic cathedral does exist to a certain extent. We have already seen a good example in the symbiosis of the Gothic and the Islamic in Seville Cathedral (Figure 1.2), and many more examples could be called upon. In fact, the combination of mosque and Christian church was not a rarity in the Middle Ages, either in Spain or in other places around the Mediterranean. In the areas that had experienced Christian and Islamic domination, it was relatively common that Christian churches were reused as mosques and vice versa.33 This was also true in Seville, where the mosque actually served as the cathedral for more than a century. Perhaps the most conspicuous example is the Great Mosque at Córdoba, consecrated as the cathedral of Santa Maria as soon as the city was seized by the Christians in 1236. Later on, Christian structures were built in the heart of the mosque: the Royal Chapel in the thirteenth century and a Gothic nave and choir in the fifteenth century. This latter addition resulted in one of the most striking juxtapositions of Islamic and Christian styles in one single building. The many prints that illustrate this very popular monument also reveal its religious and stylistic ambivalence. While the choice of architectural setting is generally Islamic, the edifice’s religious definition was manipulated in either direction by labelling it as a cathedral or a mosque, or by introducing human action. Sometimes the mosque was presented as such by populating it with Muslims immersed in deep prayer (Figure 1.10). Most commonly, however, the space was Christianized by the inclusion of Catholic rituals and religious objects. This resulted in striking images in which Christian symbols and processions were paraded in an otherwise perfectly Islamic structure (Figure 1.11). On some occasions, its hybridity was emphasized even more by impossible combinations, such as the depiction of the maqsura by Girault de Prangey (1804–1892), in which the modern celebration of the Mass is overshadowed by the presence of an anachronistic Moor in the foreground (Figure 1.12). Besides its mixtures of mosques and cathedrals, Spain offers an array of churches that display an even greater stylistic ambiguity. They are generally labelled as ‘Mudéjar’, a term that designated the Muslims living under Christian rule in medi­e val Spain and that became a stylistic label based on the wrong assumption that the style had been produced by Mudéjares. In modern histori33 

For the case of Spain, see Julie A. Harris, ‘Mosque to Church Conversions in the Spanish Reconquest’, Medi­eval Encounters, 3 (1997), 158–72. Recent scholarship has explored this issue, notably Tom Nickson, ‘Copying Córdoba? Toledo and Beyond’, Medi­eval History Journal, 15.2 (2012), 319–54. This work contains additional bibliography on the subject.

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ography, Mudéjar refers to any Christian or Jewish art work or building which reflects any sort of Islamic influence, be it a particular material or technique, an aesthetic preference, or a specific architectural element.34 The style of these Mudéjar buildings (Figure 1.13) fits so perfectly the mould of a MoorishGothic style that it is tempting to think that they may have actually fuelled the belief in an Arabic origin of the Gothic. Moreover, it would not be far-fetched to speculate that these hybrid fabrics could have been understood by the supporters of that theory as the missing link in the mutation from the Islamic style into what we now call High Gothic, especially if chronology and historical consistency were disregarded, as was often the case in the nineteenth-century discussions. However, it is extremely difficult to establish what role, if any, Mudéjar architecture may have played specifically in Tournemine’s theory, or in the general belief of an Arabic origin of the Gothic. The truth of the matter is that these Mudéjar buildings were not mentioned in the published discussions. Furthermore, no printed information was available about them until the middle of the nineteenth century, when the thesis of an Arabic origin of the Gothic 34  Many of the medi­e val styles in Spain have controversial and changing names, just like what happened with the Gothic in the nineteenth century. Today the most commonly used term for the Mudéjar buildings is indeed ‘Mudéjar’. Although alternatives have been offered, they have not been generally accepted. Some people deny that the Mudéjar is a style and prefer to see it as a phenomenon which they call ‘Mudéjarism’. There is not a single definition or characterization of the Mudéjar style, nor can we determine a clear geographical and temporal evolution. Since it involves the employment of Islamic ‘elements’ as defined above in nonIslamic building, be it Christian or Jewish, the advance of the Mudéjar is paralleled to that of the Reconquista; that is, the conquest of Islamic land by Christians in Spain. So the oldest Mudéjar buildings are found in the north of Spain and coincide with the Romanesque period. They are considered Mudéjar because they depart from the traditional use of stone as building material and employ instead brick, which was more typical of Islamic buildings; however, some scholars dispute their denomination as Mudéjar and advocate for labelling them Brick Romanesque. Castilian Mudéjar also departs from that of Aragón and Andalucía in features and materials, but their distinctions are too many to be explained here in detail. Some of them exhibit a preference for flat treatment of the exterior walls of the buildings, in which the doors are emphasized by an alfiz and surface decoration. In other cases, the artists resorted to ceramics to ornament the walls, sebka motifs, and Arabic script, and avoided monumental sculpture and reliefs. The literature on the Mudéjar is abundant, especially in Spanish. For those seeking a good introduction in English, see the special issue of Medi­eval Encounters, 12.3 (2006), ed. by C. Robinson, M. J. Feliciano, and Leyla Rouhi, which is based on the conference proceedings of the symposium ‘Interrogating Iberian Frontiers: A Cross-Disciplinary Research Symposium on Mudéjar History, Religion, Art and Literature’, held at Cornell Uni­ver­sity in November 2004; see also J. D. Dodds, M. R. Menocal, and A. K. Balbale, The Arts of Intimacy: Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Making of Castilian Culture (New Haven: Yale Uni­ver­sity Press, 2008).

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began to wane. This silence is somehow puzzling, especially if one takes into account the popularity of the Orientalizing perceptions of the Gothic — and of Spain — in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. One is left wondering if the Mudéjar constructions were unknown or, on the contrary, regarded as such a commonplace — another instance of the ‘Spanish way’ of building — that they did not need mentioning. Evidence of existing knowledge about them is provided by the frustrated Proposal for Publishing by Subscription a Course of Gothic Architecture by Johann Heinrich Müntz (1727–1798), dated 1760 and intended for publication in England. Surprisingly, it included the Mudéjar as one of the main steps in the evolution of the Gothic.35 It could also be argued that popular knowledge of the Mudéjar was to be expected, firstly because some of these buildings were located on the main travel routes and could hardly have been missed, and secondly because the first published illustrations of Mudéjar churches treated the edifices not as a revelation, but as a confirmation of the well-established belief that Spanish architecture was Moorish in character.36 In sum, although it is not possible to prove that the Mudéjar architecture was well known and that it fostered the belief in an Arabic origin of the Gothic, both possibilities cannot be totally disregarded. Whatever the case may have been, ignorance of the Mudéjar buildings could not be claimed after the 1840s, when La España Artística y Monumental, a series of three volumes of magnificent lithographs of Spanish monuments, appeared in 1842, 1844, and 1850. Most of the drawings were done by the Spanish painter Jenaro Perez Villaamil (1807–1854) and were accompanied by lengthy commentaries by Patricio de la Escosura (1807–1878). Although the authors and subject matter were Spanish, the work was published in Paris, with a bilingual text in French and Spanish — clearly targeting a French, and possibly a wider European, market. Out of a total of 145 lithographs, nineteen were devoted to Mudéjar monuments. Although this may seem like a small number, it was in fact a relatively large number given the slight attention the Mudéjar had hitherto received. These lithographs appeared at a time when the Arabic origin of the Gothic was in discredit, and the idea of a Moorish-Gothic cathe35 

Repr. in McCarthy, The Origins of the Gothic Revival, pp. 180–82. The stylistic term Mudéjar had not been coined in Müntz’s day, and he referred to them as ‘Moresque’. My assumption that he means Mudéjar buildings is supported by the geographical area where he locates them (Aragón), which is much more abundant in examples of this style than of Islamic buildings. 36  Fergusson, The Illustrated Handbook of Architecture, ii, 838–42; George Edmund Street, Some Account of Gothic Architecture in Spain (London: John Murray, 1865), p. 441.

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dral was under great strain due to the strong promotion of the Gothic cathedral as the epitome of Christianity and Westernness. One would imagine that these prints could have helped the cause of the Moorish cathedral, or at least have stirred things up a little bit. But they did not. Their impact on the views about the nature of the Gothic cathedral was simply non-existent, and one has to wonder why. It seems to be one of these cases in which silence speaks louder than words. In my view, it exposes, once again, how the idea of the Gothic cathedral was constructed by disposing of the architectural evidence; only this time the manipulation went in an opposite direction, towards the establishment of the Westernness and Christian character of the style. Any potential proof to the contrary, such as that offered by the Mudéjar buildings, was either ignored or spun in convenient ways that would not challenge that predominant and interest-vested view.

Ideological Weapon The attempts to turn the Gothic cathedral into the expression of the national identity of various European countries stands out as one of the most influential spins of the Gothic cathedral in the nineteenth century.37 From this perspective, the idea of a Moorish-Gothic cathedral offers present-day scholars an interesting case scenario about two of the most influential frames of reference for the European definition of national identity in the nineteenth century: the Middle Ages and the Orient. Both generated two popular discourses which are generally presented as parallel but independent: on the one hand, we find medi­evalism, an interest in the medi­eval past that was crucial for the identity of the individual European nations; on the other, we have Orientalism, a way of looking at the distant, geographically remote Orient, which was used by the Europeans to construct their identity as Western. The idea of a Moorish-Gothic cathedral challenges the artificial separation of medi­evalism and Orientalism so common in modern historiography. In the same way as the East and the West are not, or have not been, two independent extremes of a polarized reality, so medi­evalism and Orientalism are not, or have not been, the two independent discourses that scholarship has made us believe. They actually intersected in 37  For the French manipulation of the Gothic for nationalistic purposes, see sources listed in note 32. For the German discourse, see Michael J. Lewis, The Politics of the German Gothic Revival: August Reichensperger (Cam­bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993). There is no recent study for the nationalistic approach to the Gothic in Britain, although it was a widespread phenomenon. Chris Brooks offers an overview of the problem in The Gothic Revival.

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ways that have been little explored and that present us with new case scenarios of great interest and novelty.38 The phenomenon of the Moorish-Gothic cathedral is one. Another is, undoubtedly, Spain, a nation where the artificial separation between East and West made no sense, for both were essential parts of her historical legacy. I cannot present here an in-depth exploration of the processes and implications of the fascinating intersection of medi­evalism and Orientalism offered by the idea of the Moorish-Gothic cathedral since its inception in the seventeenth century. Nevertheless, I would like to present a few problems for consideration in the hope that further studies will follow. Of great interest is the question of what role, if any, the Moorish-Gothic cathedral played in the European Orientalist discourse. There is no doubt that the Moorish-Gothic style drew from, and at the same time helped to consolidate, the stereotyped image of an imaginary entity, the Orient, which was presented as irrational, prone to excess, and having a deep disregard for rules. The formulation of a Moorish-Gothic style also involved the usual hegemonic issues of the European superiority over the East. The style could be and was indeed used as a potent ideological weapon to denigrate either the Gothic or, later on, the Mudéjar as inferior to other Western creations. In fact, the very inception of the thesis of an Arabic origin of the Gothic in French literary circles was meant to belittle the Gothic style. It was not only prompted by contempt towards the Arabic peoples, Goths, and the Middle Ages in general, but it also amplified all the previous anti-classicist prejudices against the Gothic by transferring the blame for such an unworthy style from the ‘barbarian’ Goths — who, after all, were Europeans — to the ultimate Other, the East. This deprecatory understanding of the Moorish-Gothic style took a radical turn thanks to the Romantic fascination for the Middle Ages and the Orient, when the Oriental component of the style was no longer used to denigrate the Gothic, but became a source of praise and admiration of it. The fact that 38  One scholar who has shown a specific interest in the intersection of the medi­evalist and Orientalist discourses in architectural theory and criticism is John M. Ganim, ‘Native Studies: Orientalism and Medi­e valism’, in The Postcolonial Middle Ages, ed. by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000), pp. 123–34. Since then, more scholarship dealing with the connections between Orientalism and medi­evalism has appeared, and while it is not my intention to include a full bibliography here, I have noted a striking development in the research, namely an increasing interest in Spanish Orientalist painting, focusing on how the Spaniards dealt with their own Islamic past. The crossovers of Orientalist and medi­e valist discourses is a most interesting subject of research still awaiting a definitive study, which hopefully will be produced soon.

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the Gothic was thought to unite two of the greatest Romantic obsessions, the Orient and the Middle Ages, played a very important, albeit unacknowledged, role in the increasing popularity of the Gothic during Romanticism, and deserves more attention than I can give it here. This positive attitude also placed the Moorish-Gothic cathedral within the discourse of ‘Europeregenerated-by-Asia’.39 As such, it challenged the implications of an Orientalist hegemonic view of the West over the East, since in the eyes of the admirers and supporters of the Moorish-Gothic style, the East happened to be the cradle of the Gothic, a style that by then had been enthroned as the finest architectural expression of the West. It is also important to stress how the Romantic exaltation of the Gothic relied on the Orientalizing characterization of the style that had been circulating since the late seventeenth century. The Romantic admiration for the departure from classical ideals of beauty exhibited by the Gothic, its emphasis on the active imagination of its creators, and its appeal to the senses had already been an essential part of the anti-classicist charges against the style, which had been blamed on its supposedly Oriental roots. Likewise, Romantic characterizations of the Gothic cathedral as sublime and picturesque drew heavily from the stock of stereotyped features constructed by older Orientalizing views. The Gothic’s excessive verticality, exaggerated ornamentation, and lack of apparent solidity so heavily criticized by the classicists as responding to an irrational Oriental imagination thus became sources of sublime pleasure. The same happened with its irregularity and lack of symmetry, which suddenly became highly appreciated as picturesque qualities. Romantic aesthetics made it possible to admire the previously deprecated ‘Moorish’ component of the Gothic cathedral by turning its defects into virtues. For the first time, the Moorish elements could actually work to promote the Gothic, even if not for all the parties involved in the discussions, at least for a significant minority of enthusiastic scholarly supporters and for an uncritical mass of less-educated admirers. The sympathetic attitude towards the Moorish-Gothic cathedral however was fleeting and limited; it was no more than a hiatus, albeit an important one, in the general denigratory Orientalist discourse. As has been previously noted, by the mid-nineteenth century, the Gothic’s increasing popularity led to its appropriation as the most Western and Christian style of all and to the rejection of its hypothetical Oriental character. In the case of the Spanish MoorishGothic cathedrals, however, the traditional Orientalist views came back with a 39 

I am borrowing Edward W. Said’s expression, ‘Europe-regenerated-by-Asia’, in Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London: Penguin, 1985; repr. 1991), pp. 114–15.

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vengeance in the second half of the nineteenth century — in the form of a new discourse with a new victim. Instead of disparaging the Gothic style, which was by that time enjoying a formidable popularity, the Orientalist discourse was manipulated to demote Spain itself on the grounds of the Islamic influence displayed in the Mudéjar. The way these churches were treated in art historiography provides an excellent case of a little-studied aspect of the nationalistic approach to the Gothic: how nationalistic exaltation was construed by disparaging the medi­eval architecture of other nations. The international politics of the Gothic in the nineteenth century can perhaps best be tested in surveys of art and architecture. In these we find a clear picture of the roles played by the different countries and how these were understood to have influenced the progress of art. The traditional arrangement by countries helped to measure one country against another, while their internal hierarchy became explicit by their respective position in the table of contents, the number of chapters devoted to them, and of course, the role they were assigned in the development of a given style. In the case of the Gothic, it was, and still is, all about France, followed by Britain and Germany. There is, however, an inherent contradiction in this picture that cannot be stressed enough. While the Gothic was presented as a widespread European practice, its definition and canon were carefully drafted to fit and exalt the architectural production of a selected few, the three imperial powers mentioned above. This comes as no surprise since Britain, France, and Germany, fuelled by their rivalry for the paternity of the Gothic, had de facto become the leaders in the scholarship on the style. Not surprisingly, their respective definitions of the Gothic were tailored to their own architectural legacies and led to the exclusion of those that did not conform to them. After several struggles for supremacy in the style, the final canon enthroned French High Gothic as the standard of perfection, and the German and English Gothic as worthy variations for later periods. All the other European national productions paled in comparison and have been neglected ever since. As is to be expected, the idea of a Moorish-Gothic cathedral, as exemplified by the Mudéjar buildings of Spain, did not measure well against this canon either. The tensions generated by the confrontation were resolved in two ways. The Mudéjar buildings were denied the status of Gothic and were regarded as a completely different style or, if accepted as Gothic, they were berated as a corrupt and inferior variety of the style. The revision of the existing canon in order to accommodate the reality of the Mudéjar, as well as other national varieties, is still a battle to be fought.40 40 

The vast majority of recent scholarship in English on medi­e val art still adheres to the traditional canon. A noteworthy exception to this is Nicola Coldstream, Medi­eval Architecture

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According to nineteenth-century thought, nothing revealed the identity and character of a nation better than its architecture. Thus the impossibility of the Mudéjar to comply with the established Gothic standards was interpreted as a lack of architectural ingenuity among the Spaniards. It was even advocated that the style also confirmed a predominant Semitic element in the racial mix of the country, a comment which certainly was not meant as a compliment.41 At a time when national merit was measured by the quality of its Gothic, the Spanish ‘failure’ to produce a ‘decent’ Gothic was thus ultimately interpreted as a logical consequence of their inferior character as a nation. Just as the Orientalizing discourse of the eighteenth century had been used to malign the Gothic as anticlassical, it was being used now to denigrate Spain as half-Oriental, inferior, and therefore not a fully European country. The Spaniards tried to uphold the Mudéjar as a proof of the uniqueness and superiority of their dual heritage as Christian and Muslim. They also advocated the idea of ‘Europe-regenerated-byAsia’ through Spain. But all efforts were in vain, and mainstream Europe did not accept the Spanish view.42 The country’s reputation as backward and fanatic (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 2002). And in German, see Klaus Niehr, Die Kunst des Mittelalters (München: C. H. Beck, 2009). 41  The most authoritative and influential advocate of this view was James Fergusson, The Illustrated Handbook of Architecture, ii, 838. He further developed his arguments in his History of Architecture, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1865–67), ii (1867), 119–20 and 152–53. For his identification of the Spanish race as Semitic, see his History of Modern Styles of Architecture, Being a Sequel to the ‘Handbook of Architecture’ (London: John Murray, 1862), p. 132. For more information on Fergusson’s views, see Matilde Mateo, ‘La frontera del gótico: James Fergusson y la marginación del gótico español’, Quintana: revista del Departamento de Historia del Arte, 13 (2014), 79–99. 42  Until recently, the appropriation of the Mudéjar style for nationalistic purposes in nineteenth-century Spain was a little-studied phenomenon. The only published study was by Philippe Araguas, ‘Le Style mudéjar et l’architecture néo-mudejare comme composantes de l’idéologie nationaliste dans l’Espagne de la fin du xixe siècle et du début du xxe siècle’, in Nations en quête de passé: La Péninsule ibérique (xixe–xxe siècles), ed. by Carlos Serrano (Paris: Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 2000), pp. 73–92. My own investigations on this issue, however, disagree with Araguas’s general thesis. For some examples of the definition of the Spanish identity through Mudéjar revival pavilions at the International Exhibitions, see Maria José Bueno Fidel, Arquitectura y nacionalismo (Pabellones españoles en las exposiciones universales del siglo xix) (Málaga: Universidad de Malaga, Colegio de Arquitectos, 1987), pp. 57–62. Since 2010 more studies have been published by Spanish scholars; see, for example, Juan Calatrava, ‘El arte Hispanomusulmán y las exposiciones universales de Owen Jones a Leopoldo Torres Balbás’, AWRAQ: Estudios sobre el mundo árabe e islámico contemporáneo, 11 (2015), 7–31. This latter study, however, focuses more on Islamic models than on the Mudéjar paradigm.

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had already been in vogue for several centuries, and it pre-empted any positive proof of the contrary. This negative view of Spain, known in modern scholarship as ‘The Black Legend of Spain’, also claimed that the country had never made any contribution to the progress of architecture. For many, the Mudéjar became an updated and definite proof of that claim. Furthermore, the study of the Gothic in the nineteenth century — and especially the role attributed to each country — was meant to reflect, and even justify, the new configuration of the political map and hierarchy of the European nations. So the denigration of Spanish Gothic by means of an Orientalist discourse effectively underscored and justified the condition of Spain as a fallen imperial power struggling to keep its place among the leading European countries. * * * Even if this article seems to raise more questions than answers, it has been my intention to illustrate the complexity and interest of the Orientalizing interpretation of the Gothic cathedral. The web of intertwined realities, fantasies, and ideological manipulations that surrounds the construction of the idea of a Moorish-Gothic cathedral is fascinating in itself, but it also has deeper implications for our understanding of Gothic cathedrals, the role of architectural styles and monuments in the construction of national identities, and our present historiographical methodologies and practices. The idea of a MoorishGothic cathedral also throws light on the intricacies of the reception of art and reveals the need for a diachronic approach to art and architecture. The Gothic cathedrals have been, and still are, much more than an expression of medi­eval culture. They have also been potent bearers of meaning, cultural icons, and a prominent ideological force from the time of their creation up to the present day. The medi­eval reality of their fabrics is just one part of their story and true significance. The ideas forged around them and imposed upon them make up the rest.

Acting Medi­eval, Thinking Modern, Feeling German Michael J. Lewis

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he Gothic Revival in Germany begins and ends with an imaginary cathedral of the future. In 1814, Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781–1841) composed a sketch of a national cathedral, Gedenkdom für die Freiheitskriege (Memorial Cathedral to the Wars of Liberation), a rapturous précis of the whole history of Gothic architecture, serving as metaphor for the revived German nation (Figure 2.1). Just over a century later, Lyonel Feininger (1871–1956) created his own visionary Kathedrale, the woodcut of a radiant Cubist cathedral that adorned the cover of the 1919 Bauhaus manifesto, a symbol of the rebirth of German art (see Figure 2.9, below).1 As aesthetic objects, Schinkel’s studious pastiche and Feininger’s expressionist icon are worlds apart, and yet they share the same conviction that there is something peculiarly modern about the Gothic.2 The Gothic Revival was a bundle of ideas — artistic, religious, and political — but the relative proportion of those ideas differed in England, France, 1 

See Barry Bergdoll and Leah Dickerman, Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2009). 2  See, for example, Roland März, ‘The Cathedral of Romanticism. Gothic Visions of Architecture: Lyonel Feininger and Karl Friedrich Schinkel’, trans. by Michael Robinson, in The Romantic Spirit in German Art, 1790–1990, ed. by Keith Hartley and others (London: South Bank Center; Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland; München: Oktagon Verlag, 1994), pp. 164–70. Michael  J. Lewis ([email protected]) is Faison-Pierson-Stoddard Professor of Art at Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts.

The Idea of the Gothic Cathedral: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Meanings of the Medieval Edifice in the Modern Period, ed. by Stephanie A. Glaser, RITUS 9 (Turn­hout: Brepols, 2018) pp. 81–99 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.RITUS-EB.5.115736

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Figure 2.1. Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Gedenkdom für die Freiheitskriege (Dom der Freiheit) auf dem Potsdamer Platz, Berlin, side elevation, print on paper, 41.5 × 61.6 cm, Berlin, Architekturmuseum TU Berlin, Inv. Nr. 15421. 1814. Reproduced with permission of the Architekturmuseum TU Berlin.

and Germany.3 In England, the revival was centred in the Tractarian movement within the Anglican Church, and those non-Anglicans, A. W. N. Pugin (1812–1852) and John Ruskin (1819–1900), who took their bearings from it.4 They provided an ethical underpinning, took what had been a nostalgic fashion for the Middle Ages, and gave the revival its moral urgency. In France, where architecture was dominated by the patronage of the state, the revival coalesced around the state-supported restoration of French medi­e val monuments. Its leading figures were brilliant restoration architects, Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet3  Georg Germann, The Gothic Revival in Europe and Britain: Sources, Influences and Ideas (Cam­bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1973); Michael J. Lewis, The Gothic Revival (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002). See also Stephanie A. Glaser ‘“Deutsche Baukunst,” “Architecture Française”: The Use of the Gothic Cathedral in the Construction of National Memory in Nineteenth-Century Germany and France’, in Orientations: Space / Time / Image / Word, ed. by Claus Clüver, Leo Hoek, and Véronique Plesch (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), pp. 77–91. 4  See, for example, Nikolaus Pevsner, Some Architectural Writers of the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972).

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le-Duc (1814–1879) and Jean-Baptiste Lassus (1807–1857), who derived their notion of the Gothic as a rational system of construction from their forensic analysis of medi­eval buildings.5 Things took a different course in Germany. England and France were political entities whose form, frontiers, and structure of society were long-settled matters. Germany, on the other hand, was a fragmented archipelago of principalities and territories and would move slowly and fitfully towards nationhood before achieving it at last in 1871. Until this happened, any discussion of the German past sooner or later raised the question of the German future. And so the German revival took on a political dimension lacking in England or France. Its leaders were not, like Ruskin and Viollet-le-Duc, writers or architects but rather a remarkable pair of political thinkers, Joseph von Görres (1776–1848) and August Reichensperger (1808–1895). Görres was a Rhenish journalist, historian, and political philosopher who in 1814 proposed that Cologne Cathedral, which had been left unfinished at the close of the Middle Ages, be completed as a monument to the rebirth of Germany: ‘in seiner trümmerhaften Unvollendung, in seiner Verlassenheit ist es ein Bild gewesen von Teutschland seit der Sprach- und Gedankenverwirrung; so werde es denn auch ein Symbol des neuen Reiches, das wir bauen wollen’ (in its ruinous incompletion, it is an image of Germany; likewise it will be a symbol of the new empire that we want to build).6 And it was Reichensperger who realized that vision. As an influential political figure in the Prussian Rhineland and a founding member of the Catholic Zentrumspartei, he was able to navigate two conflicting visions of the cathedral, each with powerful constituencies: on the one hand, the vision of Cologne as an emblem of German nationhood, an ecumenical possession of Catholics and Protestants alike, and on the other, as a Catholic house of worship and a symbol of Rhenish tradition and Catholic identity. By assuaging both factions over the four decades of construction, from 1840 to 1880, he helped bring about the completion of the cathedral, the central achievement of the German Gothic Revival (Figure 2.2).7 5 

See Jean-Michel Leniaud, Les Cathédrales au xixe siècle (Paris: Economica, 1993), and his Jean-Baptiste Lassus (1807–1857) ou le temps retrouvé des cathédrals (Geneva: Droz; Paris: Arts et Métiers graphiques, 1980). 6  Joseph von Görres, ‘Der Dom in Köln’, Rheinischer Merkur (20 November 1814), repr. in Joseph von Görres’ Ausgewählte Werke und Briefe, ed. by Wilhelm Schellberg, 2 vols (Kempten: Verlag der Jospeh Kösel’schen Buchhandlung, 1911), i, 592–95 (p. 594). My translation. 7  Michael J. Lewis, The Politics of the German Gothic Revival: August Reichensperger (Cam­

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Michael J. Lewis Figure 2.2. [Kölner Dom. Aufriss der Südseite in antizipierter Vollendung], from Sulpiz Boisserée, Ansichten, Risse und ein­­zelne Theile des Domes von Köln, Weimar, Klassik Stiftung Weimar. © bpk / Klassik Stiftung Weimar / Mokansky, Olaf.

The notion of both Görres and Reichensperger that Cologne Cathedral might represent the future of a unified Germany went against the grain of medi­e valism, which was almost everywhere a movement of nostalgia. It was certainly so in England. Since the time of the Puritan Commonwealth and Protectorate (1649–59), disenfranchised aristocrats found solace in the pursuit of sentimental antiquarianism, which culminated in the production of William Dugdale’s (1605–1686) Monasticon Anglicanum (1655–73). With its sumptubridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993). Also see Thomas Nipperdey, ‘Der Kölner Dom als Nationaldenkmal’, Historische Zeitschrift, 233 (1981), 595–613, and Nipperdey, ‘Nationalidee und Nationaldenkmal in Deutschland im 19. Jahrhundert’, Historische Zeitschrift, 206 (1968), 529–85.

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ous illustrations by Wenzel Hollar (1607–1677), the Monasticon Anglicanum was a tribute to a vanished world and way of life and it documents a cultural landscape violently transformed by the social and economic forces of the modern world.8 The same dread of the modern world dominated much nineteenthcentury thought, and a violent hatred of the physical character of modern life provided the emotional energy for the most memorable writings of Pugin and Ruskin. One thinks of Pugin’s second edition of Contrasts (1841),9 with its illustrations showing how the Industrial Revolution had degraded England’s medi­eval cities, morally as well as visually. Much in the same vein are Ruskin’s furious tirades against that ‘temple of discomfort’, the railroad (‘Keep them out of the way, take them through the ugliest country you can find, confess them the miserable things they are’).10 French medi­e valism was similarly nostalgic, Viollet-le-Duc’s claim for Gothic rationality notwithstanding. Victor Hugo’s (1802–1885) immensely popular Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) helped to crystallize the idea that France’s medi­e val monuments were a fundamental part of its cultural patrimony and that the state was obligated to preserve them. This came at a time of maximum peril for those monuments, which had been methodically despoiled and secularized during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic code. Spurred on by Hugo’s book, which made the cathedral into an icon of Romanticism and unleashed a wave of enthusiasm for medi­eval art and culture, the French state created the post of Inspecteur général des monuments historiques in 1830, naming Ludovic Vitet (1802–1873) its first inspector. He was followed by Prosper Mérimée (1803–1870) from 1834 to 1860. Here began the great wave 8 

William Dugdale’s Monasticon Anglicanum was published in three volumes in Latin, with Roger Dodsworth as co-author of the first two (London: Richard Hogkinsonne, 1655–73). The first English translation was published in 1693, Monasticon Anglicanum or, The history of the ancient abbies, and other monasteries, hospitals, cathedral and collegiate churches in England and Wales. With divers French, Irish, and Scotch monasteries formerly relating to England, First English Edition, abridged translation by James Wright, 3 vols (London: S. Keble and H. Rhodes, 1693). 9  A. W. N. Pugin, Contrasts: Or, a Parallel between the Noble Edifices of the Middle Ages, and Corresponding Buildings of the Present Day; Shewing the Present Decay of Taste (London: Charles Dolman, 1841). The first edition was published in 1836 by Pugin himself and bore a slightly different title Contrasts; or, A parallel between the noble edifices of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and similar buildings of the present day. Shewing the present decay of taste. Accompanied by appropriate text (London, 1836). 10  John Ruskin, ‘The Lamp of Beauty,’ in The Seven Lamps of Architecture (New York: Wiley and Halstead, 1857), p. 100.

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of restorations, many by Viollet-le-Duc, that still largely determines how we view French medi­eval architecture today. But if one could look back upon historical England or historical France with fondness and without confusion of terms, such was not the case with Germany. Depending on one’s definition, Germany could mean very different things. If one meant the Holy Roman Empire, its boundaries would include much land where the German language was not spoken even as it excluded areas, such as Switzerland, where it was. If one meant the political boundaries of the large modern German states like Prussia or Austria, one would include a great many Poles, Hungarians, and other populations. Finally, if one meant those territories that were culturally Germanic, one might include Scandinavia, the Netherlands, and perhaps even those distant countries once settled by the Franks, the Angles, and the Saxons. In short, when one invoked Germany of the past, one was inevitably making a claim about the German future. For this reason, the Romantic phase of German nationalism, typified by Görres’s call for the completion of Cologne Cathedral, was not reactionary in the conventional meaning of the term. It did not, for example, look to bring about a restoration of the Holy Roman Empire. Rather, it sought to create a Germany that had never existed, or rather, one that already existed as a cultural and linguistic entity but had not yet achieved definitive political form. This explains why so much patriotic energy of this period that was denied political release was diverted into scientific and historical channels. Jacob Grimm’s (1785–1863) Deutsche Grammatik (1819–37) and Georg Moller’s (1784–1852) Denkmäler der deutschen Baukunst (1815–51) — those pioneering scholarly compendia in which the German language and its architectural patrimony were fastidiously documented — helped bring into being a cultural Germany, one that was complete in every respect except for its national boundaries and form of government.11 In a certain sense, modern Germany was invented in the classroom long before it achieved reality in the streets or on the battlefield. All this gave the German Gothic Revival a rather curious relationship to modernity. The Industrial Revolution was much further developed in England and France, where medi­e val nostalgia positioned itself against the ravages of modernization. This is the distress over the modern industrial landscape that links William Wordsworth’s poetry and Walter Scott’s novels to Pugin’s 11 

Jacob Grimm, Deutsche Grammatik (Göttingen: Diederische Buchhandlung 1819–37); Georg Moller, Denkmäler der Deutschen Baukunst, i (Darmstadt: Heyer und Leske, 1815–21), ii (Darmstadt: Leske, 1822–31), iii, continued by Ernst Gladbach (Darmstadt: Leske, 1844–51).

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Contrasts and the art of the Pre-Raphaelites.12 But modernization came late to Germany, which had been devastated by the depredations of the Thirty Years War (1618–48) and was still fragmented politically and religiously. Two centuries later it still lagged behind its neighbours, and up to the moment of unification in 1871 it was still overwhelmingly rural in character. But if Germany modernized late, it did so systematically. When the Industrial Revolution came, it did so as a matter of urgent state policy and not as an organic development arising out of inexorable economic and social forces. German architectural visionaries were more likely to be found within the establishment, as Schinkel was, rather than outside, and often in a position of privilege, as were David Gilly (1748–1808), Gottfried Semper (1803–1879), and Otto Wagner (1841–1918). And so it is no contradiction that a Gothic enthusiast like Schinkel, who made Germany’s most ravishing images of imaginary Gothic cathedrals, could at the same time be a leader in the belated industrialization of Prussia, personally investigating the factories of London during his 1827 study trip. On the contrary, the imperative to make an industrially modern German nation was in sympathy with the impulse to give that nation a robustly Germanic image. Görres was not the first to see the Gothic as a metaphor for the German folk spirit; Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s (1749–1832) ‘Von Deutscher Baukunst’ (1773) had, by 1800, made it a commonplace.13 And it was natural that during the humiliating years of French dominance this identification took on political overtones. If the Gothic was now depicted, it was as an abject and subjugated thing, as in Caspar David Friedrich’s (1774–1840) Abtei im Eichwald (1809–10) (Figure 2.3), where a forlorn Gothic ruin rises out of the snow, flanked by barren oak trees whose limbs seem to writhe in misery. The ruin is half in shadow, and one is left to wonder whether the sun is rising or setting. 12 

Michael Alexander, Medi­evalism: The Middle Ages in Modern England (New Haven: Yale Uni­ver­sity Press, 2007). 13  Goethe’s experience at Strasbourg Cathedral incited him to declare the cathedral to be the greatest example of German art and architecture. For more on this event, see Stephanie Glaser’s discussion of it in her essay in this volume. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, ‘Von Deutscher Baukunst: D. M. Ervini a Steinbach’ [1773], in Von Deutscher Art und Kunst: einige fliegende Blätter, ed. by Hans Dietrich Irmscher (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1995), pp. 93–104. See W. D. Robson-Scott, The Literary Background of the Gothic Revival in Germany: A Chapter in the History of Taste (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 92, and Stephanie A. Glaser, ‘“Ein, ganzer, großer Eindruck füllte meine Seele”: German Romanticism and the Gothic Facade’, in Changing Borders: Contemporary Positions in Intermediality, ed. by Jens Arvidson and others (Lund: Intermedia Studies Press, 2007), pp. 239–55.

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Figure 2.3. Caspar David Friedrich, Abtei im Eichwald (The Abbey in the Oakwood), oil on canvas, 110.4 × 171 cm, Berlin, Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. 1809/10. © bpk / Nationalgalerie, SMB / Andres Kilger.

To anyone viewing the painting in 1809 it was obvious that the same might be asked about Germany. With the defeat of Napoléon at Leipzig in 1813, the thought of building a Gothic monument to commemorate the rebirth of Germany was natural. The colossal magnitude of the event seemed to call for something more sublime than a monument of conventional form. Most tantalizing of all was the dream of a national cathedral, in which dynastic, patriotic, and historical associations culminated. Such a cathedral did not exist. Of course, there were German buildings of national significance. There were the buildings in which the Holy Roman Emperor had been crowned, the Palatine Chapel at Aachen (from 936 to 1531) and the Kaiserdom Sankt Bartholomäus in Frankfurt (from 1562 to 1792). But there was nothing like Westminster Abbey, where English kings had been crowned since 1066, or Reims, which since the tenth century had been the traditional site for the coronation of French kings. The dream of a German Westminster Abbey, where kings would be crowned and buried in centuries to come and which would be peculiarly expressive of the German spirit, was irresistibly attractive.

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Figure 2.4. August Wilhelm Julius Ahlborn, copy of Schinkel’s lost 1813 painting, Gotischer Dom am Wasser (Gothic Cathedral by the Water), oil on canvas, 80 × 106.5 cm, Berlin, Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. 1823. © bpk / Nationalgalerie, SMB / Jörg P. Anders.

It was also impossible. The reality of Germany’s divided political and religious life ensured that it could not be realized; but at the exhilarating moment of the end of the Napoleonic Wars, when Europe’s ancient borders had been swept away and all seemed open to reinvention, it seemed possible that there might be a pan-German union, into which the various German states might melt in an ecstatic unity. It was against this euphoric background that Schinkel prepared his audacious Gedenkdom für die Freiheitskriege, a patriotic vision of a national cathedral but also a specifically Prussian assertion that the hub of that new nation would be Berlin (Figure 2.1).14 It would have dominated the Leipziger Platz, the same site where Schinkel’s teacher, Friedrich Gilly (1772–1800), had once proposed a colossal monument to Frederick the Great. Schinkel’s cathedral was a brilliant performance in architectural stagecraft. Only the year before he had painted a Gothic cathedral on a river, Gotischer 14 

See O. F. Gruppe, Carl Friedrich Schinkel und der neue Berliner Dom (Berlin: Lüderitz, 1843).

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Dom am Wasser, known today only through its 1823 copy by August Wilhelm Ahlborn (1796–1857), in which the cathedral is cunningly placed against the sun so the traceried spires become transparent and seem to glow as if from an internal fire (Figure 2.4). The cathedral’s twin-towered façade, with its openwork spires and strongly pyramidal towers, reprised Cologne Cathedral, while its octagonal choir, crowned with a pointed dome, paraphrased the Pisa Baptistery. Between these parts was a flat-roofed nave, making the composition something of a seesaw with a tall rider at one end and a short plump one at the other. As archaeology it was spurious but as theatre it was splendid, reminding us that Schinkel was unable to build in cash-starved, French-occupied Prussia and had spent much of the previous decade designing theatrical backdrops and opera sets.15 Even the odd raised plinth upon which the cathedral is perched was a favourite device of his scene paintings. Schinkel, of course, realized that his cathedral was a pastiche, but he justified it by pointing out that the development of the Gothic style was cut short by the Renaissance. His objective, as he formulated it, was ein großes und heiliges Denkmal zu errichten, eine Kirche in dem ergreifenden Stil altdeutscher Bauart, eine Bauart, deren völlige Vollendung der kommenden Zeit aufgespart ist, nachdem ihre Entwicklung in der Blüte durch einen wunderbaren und wohltätigen Rückblick auf die Antike unterbrochen ward, wodurch, wie es scheint, die Welt geschickt werden sollte, ein dieser Kunst zur Vollendung noch fehlendes Element in ihr zu verschmelzen. [to erect a large sacred monument in the soul-stirring style of ancient German architecture, an architecture whose ultimate perfection is to be achieved in the immediate future, since its development was broken off in its prime by a marvellous and beneficial reversion to Antiquity, with the result that the world is apparently now destined to perfect this art form by introducing an element that has been missing so far.]16

15  For Schinkel’s theatrical tableaux, see Karl Friedrich Schinkel: The Drama of Architecture, ed. by John Zukowsky (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1994). 16  Quoted in Paul Ortwin Rave, Karl Friedrich Schinkel Lebenswerk, vol. i, Bauten für die Kunst Kirchen, Denkmalpflege (Berlin: Akademie des Bauwesens 1941), p. 196; English translation in Germann, The Gothic Revival in Europe and Britain, p. 91. The missing element for Schinkel seems to have been the horizontal discipline and order that classical architecture offered. See Barry Bergdoll, Karl Friedrich Schinkel: An Architecture for Prussia (New York: Rizzoli, 1994), p. 40.

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Here Schinkel, like Görres, drew a connection between the Gothic and Germany, each still in a process of growth and development, and each of whose ‘ultimate perfection’ lay in the future. Schinkel’s reverie is like Goethe’s daydream at Strasbourg Cathedral, in which the viewer is transported outside of himself in a vision. Goethe’s text united the sublime of late eighteenth-century aesthetic doctrine with Romantic nationalism, in which the aesthetic experience consisted of imagining German nationhood. That the Lutheran Prussian, Schinkel, and the Catholic Rhinelander, Görres, could each propose a national Gothic monument as an expression of pan-German identity, prospective rather than retrospective in character, was only possible in the patriotic euphoria of 1814. Only in that heady moment of national unity was it possible to forget the deep lines of division between Catholic and Protestant Germany, or that there was, technically speaking, no such thing as a German citizen but only Prussians, Bavarians, Saxons, and so forth. And as the nationalist rapture subsided, these lines of division would reassert themselves. Pan-national sentiment, let alone agitation, so useful in the run up to 1814, was now inconvenient, not to say treasonous. So Görres discovered when he was forced to flee Prussia in 1819 to avoid arrest for his efforts on behalf of constitutional reform. Agitation for nationhood was regarded with icy disfavour by the kings of the German Confederation, whose legitimacy had been confirmed by the Treaty of Vienna in 1815. As they grew more conservative, the monarchs moved decidedly away from the liberal and modern implications of the Gothic. As a result, rather than being permitted to design his Gothic cathedral, Schinkel was instead charged in 1817 with reshaping the late Baroque cathedral that flanked the Royal Palace and represented the Prussian state. Originally designed by Johann Bouman (1706–1776) in 1747, it was reshaped by Schinkel in cool neoclassical terms, using the architecture of the Greek city-states to convey a sense of order and enlightenment and not the turbulence of the unruly Gothic. Even when Schinkel was encouraged thereafter to build in the Gothic, it was a tame and earthbound version. His principal essay in the style, his Friedrichs­ werdersche Kirche (1824–30) in Berlin, was tightly constrained by its terminating lines, and no finial or pinnacle broke free of its compact mass to suggest an aspiration towards infinity (Figure 2.5).17 In the wake of the 1815 Congress of Vienna, architectural reveries of freedom were no more desirable than political ones. 17 

Only in his War of Liberation Monument in Kreuzberg, Berlin (1818–21), was Schinkel able to realize a miniature version of the daring openwork spire of his memorial cathedral.

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Figure 2.5. Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Berlin. Friedrichswerdersche Kirche. Ausgeführter Entwurf. Perspektivische Ansicht, Quill in black and grey over preparatory graphite drawing with compass on paper, 29.1 × 39.7 cm, Berlin: Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. 1828. © bpk / Kupferstichkabinett, SMB / Jörg P. Anders.

* * * Of course, in 1840, when construction began again in earnest on Cologne Cathedral, the edifice was no longer the pan-Germanic national monument that Görres had envisioned. Since the Rhineland had been absorbed into Prussia, the cathedral was now a fraught object: an active Catholic cathedral in a Protestant state, its completion jointly funded by the Prussian crown and Rhenish Catholics. Reichensperger now assumed Görres’s role as the principal champion for the completion of the cathedral, negotiating its different overlapping identities: Catholic, Rhenish, Prussian, and German. Inevitably, until its completion in 1880, the cathedral was at the focus of church/state tensions. Making matters worse, its completion was bracketed by the arrest of the Archbishop of Cologne in 1837, and again in 1874, for teaching Catholic doctrine that contradicted Prussian (and later German) law.18 Given its contested 18 

Lewis, The Politics of the German Gothic Revival, pp. 25–56, 255–61.

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nature, the cathedral’s meaning changed from patriotic object to artefact of culture. To be sure, Cologne Cathedral was enormously influential. Its immense prestige and its prolonged course of work ensured that it would be the model for innumerable neo-Gothic essays throughout Germany and Austria, many by Vincenz Statz (1819–1898) and Friedrich von Schmidt (1825–1891), who had learned their trade in the cathedral’s building lodge and knew its vaults, mouldings, and tracery intimately, as could only a craftsman who had carved them by hand.19 Protestant architects were slower to embrace the Gothic, not only because of its mystic associations, but because its pan-Germanic content had come to seem suspect in the post-1815 atmosphere of reaction. Not until after the revolutions of 1848, where agitation for German unity again became respectable, did Protestant architects once again use the Gothic freely. At first the movement was decentralized — Theodor Bülau (1800–1861) in Hamburg, Georg Gottlob Ungewitter (1820–1864) in Kassel, Conrad Wilhelm Hase (1818–1902) in Hannover — but it assumed critical mass over the course of the 1850s.20 What had been a matter of local taste and preference became official policy in 1861, with the formulation of the Eisenach Regulativ prescribing the Gothic style for Lutheran churches.21 Here was the ecumenical apogee of the German Gothic Revival. Not since 1815 were the conditions so propitious for the building of a national Gothic cathedral, even if only a national Prussian cathedral and not a German one. In 1865 a competition was announced for a Prussian cathedral in Berlin, which would replace the neoclassical makeshift that Schinkel had fashioned out of Bouman’s late Baroque building between 1816 and 1821. This was a stately domed affair, but its scale and modest character were soon outstripped by the burgeoning might of Prussia among the powers of Europe. By 1865 19 

See Hans Vogts, Vincenz Statz (1819–1898) (Mönchengladbach: B. Kühlen, 1960) and Ulrike Planner-Steiner, Friedrich von Schmidt (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1978). 20  For Hase, see Günther Kokkelink and Monika Lemke-Kokkelink, Baukunst in Norddeutschland: Architektur und Kunsthandwerk der Hannoverschen Schule 1850–1900 (Hannover: Schlütersche 1998); also see Karen David-Sirocko, Georg Gottlob Ungewitter und die malerische Neugotik: in Hessen, Hamburg, Hannover und Leipzig (Petersberg: Imhof Verlag 1997) and Anna-Kristin Maurer, ‘Theodor Bülau’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Universität Hamburg, 1987). 21  Lewis, The Politics of the German Gothic Revival, pp. 220–26; Eva-Maria Seng, Der evangelische Kirchenbau im 19. Jahrhundert: Die Eisenacher Bewegung und der Architekt Christian Friedrich von Leins (Tübingen: Ernst Wasmuth 1995).

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the symbolic need for a new cathedral was irresistible. In that year a competition was held for a new Berlin Cathedral, and it drew an enormous amount of attention from the profession, receiving projects from fifty-seven competitors, including some of the deans of the German architectural establishment, among them Martin Gropius (1824–1880), August Orth (1828–1901), and Robert Cremer (1826–1882).22 In the end, nothing was built, and a generation would pass before work began on the neo-Baroque cathedral that stands today.23 One might expect that, coming only four years after the Eisenach Regulativ, which had formerly pronounced that medi­e val architecture was the most appropriate model for Protestant churches, the competition should have brought forth a pageant of Gothic entries. In fact, only six architects submitted Gothic designs, a minority so small that it suggests there was a widespread and tacit understanding that one might build a Protestant parish church in the Gothic style, but not a cathedral, and certainly not in Berlin. It was not that Berlin, with its distinguished lineage of architectural classicists, from Georg von Knobelsdorff (1699–1753) to Friedrich Gilly to Schinkel, demanded a neoclassical or neo-Renaissance cathedral; the majority of the designs were Byzantine or eclectic essays of medi­e valizing character. Rather, it was that a serious and stylistically consistent Gothic cathedral brought with it associations that were inappropriate, or even alarming, for Germany’s most important Protestant capital. Two earlier proposals for a Berlin cathedral show how nervous and conscious was the Prussian minuet with the Gothic. In 1827 Wilhelm Stier (1799–1856), Schinkel’s colleague at the Berlin Bauakademie, made a remarkable design for a semicircular cathedral, prefaced by a loggia and terminating in a polygonal apse (Figure 2.6).24 His inspiration was Ludwig Catel’s (1776–1819) Über den Bau Protestantischer Kirchen (1815), which insisted that Protestant church design ought to be rigorously based on the internal requirements of sight and sound.25 Stier envisioned an unobstructed preaching space 120 feet across, without any internal supports to block the view, which required an exceptionally bold iron 22 

Although unbuilt, their designs remained in the public consciousness at least until 1886 when they were again exhibited at the Jubiläums-Ausstellung der kgl. Akademie der Künste (Berlin: Berliner Verlags-Comtoir, 1886). 23  Vogts, Vincenz Statz, pp. 51–54. 24  Kathleen Curran, The Romanesque Revival: Religion, Politics, and Transnational Exchange (Uni­ver­sity Park: Pennsylvania State Uni­ver­sity, 2003), pp. 108–13. 25  The principal source is K. E. O. Fritsch, Der Kirchenbau des Protestantismus von der Reformation bis zur Gegenwart (Berlin: Ernst Toeche, 1893).

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Figure 2.6. Wilhelm Stier, Berliner Dom: Perspektivische Ansicht Entwurf IV, coloured print on paper, 33.1 × 44.5 cm, Berlin, Architekturmuseum TU Berlin, Inv. Nr. 17018. Reproduced with permission of the Architekturmuseum TU Berlin.

truss. His exterior was vaguely Gothic, not because of its symbolic associations, but because of the compositional freedom it permitted. Likewise in 1840 Anton Hallmann (1812–1845) unveiled a project for a blazingly coloured cathedral along the Spree River, rising above the river and surmounted by a lofty cupola (Figure 2.7). This too was an eclectic synthesis, the walls Byzantine in character and the arrangement of campaniles and dome suggesting the Florentine Renaissance. But the overall character of the design, with its spirited outline, variety in massing, and richness in surface, was distinctly Gothic — Hallmann evidently struggling to achieve Gothic effects without using Gothic means. Like Stier’s project, it remained unbuilt, although it seems to have been widely circulated. Gottfried Semper, for one, seems to have drawn on it for his 1844 Nikolaikirche project for Hamburg. The competitors in the 1865 competition knew this tradition of cautiously medi­e valizing Berlin cathedral proposals and would have gauged their own designs accordingly. But even before the deadline arrived, Prussia defeated the Austrian Empire in the Battle of Königgrätz in July 1866. This victory made impossible any German unification that would include Austria, the ‘Großdeutschland’ (greater Germany) that Catholic political figures like Reichensperger had hoped for. It was now clear that any unification of Germany would occur under the aegis of Protestant Prussia, and so its cathedral, whatever its nominal status, would serve as a surrogate national cathedral. Under the circumstances, a neo-Gothic building, which could not help but compare unfavourably to Cologne, was out of the question.

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Figure 2.7. Anton Hallmann, Entwurf zu einem neuen Dom, Berlin. Perspektivishe Ansicht von der Spree aus, Sketch, pencil painted in watercolours on cardboard, 72.8 × 86.6 cm, Berlin, Architekturmuseum TU Berlin, Inv. Nr. 1710. 1840. Reproduced with permission of the Architekturmuseum TU Berlin.

This makes all the more remarkable the Gothic entry of Vincenz Statz, Reichens­p erger’s protégé and a veteran of the Cologne Cathedral building lodge. His design was the ‘corrected’ version neither of Schinkel’s, who subjected Gothic freedom to classical discipline, nor of such successors as Stier or Hallmann, whose medi­eval-classical hybrids were dead at birth. Instead, Statz made an imaginative essay in the spirit of the High Gothic, a twin-towered, five-aisled basilica with a prominent crossing tower and transepts (Figure 2.8). It was as if a thirteenth-century architect had been asked to design a church for Protestant worship in much the same way as he might apply Gothic principles to the design of a synagogue (as at the Old-New Synagogue in Prague, a thoroughly High Gothic design of 1270). Statz rethought the plan of Cologne Cathedral in Protestant terms, shortening its deep chancel into a shallow single bay and replacing the ambulatory — pointless in a Protestant cathedral — with a trio of polygonal apses. But he did not transform the Gothic beyond recognition, as Stier had done. He

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Figure 2.8. Vincent Statz, Berliner Dom. Ansicht, ink-wash drawing on paper, 110 × 79 cm, Berlin, Architekturmuseum TU Berlin, Inv. Nr. 16924. 1868. Reproduced with permission of the Architekturmuseum TU Berlin.

proposed deeply projecting transepts, thus giving the building the cruciform plan that Protestant critics often found intolerable. And he gave the façade a pair of lofty openwork spires, ‘dessen pyramidale Tendenz sich schon in den unteren Geschossen zu erkennen giebt [sic]’ (whose pyramidal tendency is already apparent in their lower stories), just as Reichensperger had mandated.26 In short, he sought to adjust the thirteenth-century Gothic of Cologne Cathedral to modern Protestant worship while retaining its essential stylistic features. It was a thrilling performance, and yet futile from the outset. It took 26 

August Reichensperger, Fingerzeige auf dem Gebiete der kirchlichen Kunst, 2nd edn (Leipzig: Weigel, 1855), p. 30; Lewis, The Politics of the German Gothic Revival, pp. 167–82.

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Figure 2.9. Lyonel Feininger, Kathedrale: Titelblatt für das Programm des Staatlichen Bauhauses in Weimar, woodcut on red paper, 31 × 19.1 cm, Chemnitz, Kunstsammlung Chemnitz. 1919. © bpk / Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz / László Tóth; © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016.

for granted that Prussian Protestants wished to worship beneath soaring High Gothic vaults, which was no longer the case, if it had ever been. Statz must have known it was a quixotic effort. He had watched his friend Friedrich von Schmidt win the 1857 competition for the Berlin Rathaus, only to see his Gothic project quietly set aside. Two subsequent competitions for the German Reichstag would similarly see the Gothic entries given short shrift. In all of this runs a current of poignant nostalgia as one architect after another sought to recapitulate the patriotic moment of 1815, when the Gothic seemed the quintessential poetic expression of German history and aspiration. But only as long as Germany remained in a state of gestation, open-ended in shape and form, could one dream of a national Gothic cathedral. But once it took

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definitive and concrete form, as a German empire ruled by the Hohenzollern dynasty, this was no longer possible. The completion of the Berlin Cathedral in 1905 was the physical expression of this fact. Instead of an upwardly yearning Gothic, Julius Raschdorff (1823–1914) realized the cathedral as a plump and swaggering Baroque, the religious counterpart of the neo-Baroque Reichstag, and it proclaimed that the architectural sensibility of Wilhelmine Germany would be that of the Age of Absolutism. In the end, the ideal of a national Gothic cathedral proved more enduring than Wilhelmine Germany. The instant that the form of Germany again became unsettled, as it was in 1918, the allure of a symbolic cathedral asserted itself once more. Feininger’s 1919 Kathedrale for the Bauhaus manifesto should be seen as another face of Germany’s Gothic national cathedral, a purely hypothetical building to serve as a surrogate for a purely hypothetical Germany (Figure 2.9).

L’Histoire d’une cathédrale: Viollet-le-Duc’s Nationalist Pedagogy Elizabeth Emery*

I

n 1878 the Hetzel publishing company advertised a new volume for the Christmas book market. Entitled Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale, the 274-page volume included seventy-one illustrations and told the story of the fictional French city of Clusy from the Germanic invasions of the fifth century through the French Revolution. As its title suggests, the fate of the town’s two major architectural structures, a town hall and a cathedral, lay at the heart of these events. The book mixed historical overview, political debate, and architectural analysis with animated fictional passages where violence, bloodshed, and revolt pitted the bravery of local heroes against the tyranny of the nobility. The author of this eclectic work was Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814–1879); Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale was the last book published in his lifetime (he died in September 1879). It thus contains his final word on the Gothic cathedral, its origins, its rational construction, and its social function, all presented in a form that appealed to adolescents and their parents.1  

* Research for this essay was made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Thanks to Martin Bressani, Ségolène Le Men, and Janet T. Marquardt for comments on an earlier version of this article. 1  Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale (Paris: J. Hetzel et Cie, 1878). Elizabeth Emery ([email protected]) is Professor of French and Graduate Program Coordinator, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, Montclair State Uni­ver­sity, Montclair, New Jersey.

The Idea of the Gothic Cathedral: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Meanings of the Medieval Edifice in the Modern Period, ed. by Stephanie A. Glaser, RITUS 9 (Turn­hout: Brepols, 2018) pp. 101–129 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.RITUS-EB.5.115737

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Figure 3.1. Advertisement for Hetzel’s various book collections, featuring Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale as a new publication for the Christmas season, L’Illustration, 14 December 1878, private collection.

This essay focuses on the problems engendered by Viollet-le-Duc’s decision to place the historical evolution of a cathedral at the centre of a fictional work intended for young readers. Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale has largely been dismissed by critics because of its awkward juxtapositions of history, architectural theory, and fiction and because of its popular audience. It is precisely Viollet-le-Duc’s popularization of architectural history, however, that makes the book valuable for understanding the image of the cathedral he wished to disseminate to the public in 1878. After providing an overview about Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale and Viollet-le-Duc’s decision to write for a younger generation, I will examine his representation of the cathedral, setting it against the social context of the 1870s which informed it. Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale was the fourth in a series of five books for adolescents — including Histoire d’une maison (1873), Histoire d’une forteresse (1874), Histoire de l’habitation humaine (1875), Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale (1878), and Histoire d’un dessinateur (published posthumously in 1879) — that Viollet-le-Duc conceived in concert with editor Pierre-Jules Hetzel (1814–1886) for the collection Bibliothèque d’éducation et de récréation.2 2 

The letters between Viollet-le-Duc and his editor conserved in the Archives Hetzel at

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Hetzel’s Bibliothèque was, as Jean-Paul Gourévitch has described it, the editor’s ‘collection phare’ (flagship collection); it consisted of nearly three hundred illustrated books (published from 1861 to 1914) featuring famous authors, scientists, and illustrators. As its name suggests, the Bibliothèque was an offshoot of the leading children’s periodical of the time, Magasin d’éducation et de récréation (Figure 3.1).3 In this periodical, Hetzel pre-published many volumes (including Viollet-le-Duc’s Histoire d’une maison)4 in serial form before issuing them as stand-alone volumes at lucrative times of the year: for school prizes, the Christmas season, first communions, and back-to-school. The periodical thus served as what Jean Glénisson has called the ‘vitrine’ (showcase) for Hetzel’s publishing empire, a point that is made clear in Figure 3.1, where references to the periodical and various book collections are intermingled.5 Founded in 1864 by Hetzel and Jean Macé (1815–1894), the Magasin is the publication that made Jules Verne (1828–1905) famous; it targeted bourgeois children and their parents and brought juvenile publications to a new level by serving as ‘la Revue des Deux Mondes des enfants’ (the Revue des Deux Mondes of children).6 Serious news outlets including Le Temps (in its first year, Hetzel offered the periodical on a complimentary basis to its subscribers), Le Monde, and L’Illustration, recognized the value of Hetzel’s offerings and promoted them: the Bibliothèque nationale (Manuscrits, NAF 17012, fols 193–269) allow one to follow the conception and development of the series. For detailed analysis of the series, its sister periodical, Magasin d’éducation et de récréation, and Hetzel’s other collections for children, see three articles in a special issue of Europe dedicated to Hetzel (November–December 1980): Roger Bellet, ‘De Hetzel éditeur à P.-J. Stahl journaliste’, pp. 13–31; Daniel Compère, ‘Hetzel et la littérature pour la jeunesse’, pp. 32–38; and Guy Gauthier, ‘Le Magasin d’éducation et de récréation en 1864’, pp. 105–16. Ségolène Le Men also describes its history in ‘Hetzel ou la science récréative’, Romantisme, 65 (1989), 69–79. 3  See the chapter of Gourévitch’s biography dedicated to this series: Jean-Paul Gourévitch, Hetzel: Le Bon Génie des livres (Paris: Le Serpent à Plumes, 2005), pp. 268–69. For a brief yet thorough history of children’s literature in France, see Jean Glénisson, ‘Le Livre pour la jeunesse’, in Histoire de l’édition française, 4 vols, ed. by Henri-Jean Martin and Roger Chartier (Paris: Promodis, 1983–86), iii (1986), 416–43. 4  This was the only Histoire to be serialized in the Magasin d’éducation et de récréation; it appeared alongside Jules Verne’s Île Mystérieuse in 1873–74. 5  See Glénisson, ‘Le Livre pour la jeunesse’. 6  Cited in Bellet, ‘De Hetzel éditeur à P.-J. Stahl journaliste’, p. 14. His article analyses the importance of the family for the Magasin’s publication and diffusion. Besides the abovementioned Île Mystérieuse, other works of Verne’s published in the periodical include Voyage au centre de la terre, Voyage dans la lune, Voyage autour du monde, and many others.

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Le Magasin et la Bibliothèque d’éducation et de récréation de la librairie Hetzel, riche aujourd’hui de 200 très-beaux et très-bons livres à l’usage du premier âge, du second âge et de la jeunesse, dûs aux efforts des esprits les plus distingués et les mieux instruits de notre temps, sont pour répondre victorieusement à tous les paradoxes, et les parents ne s’y trompent pas: ils puisent enfin avec sûreté parmi ces livres bien préparés et n’hésitent dans leur choix qu’entre le bon et le meilleur.7 [The Hetzel publishing company’s Magasin and the Bibliothèque d’éducation et de récréation, now endowed with 200 very beautiful and very good books for infants, children, and adolescents thanks to the efforts of the most distinguished and best educated minds of our time, exist against all odds, and make no mistake: parents can finally select with confidence from among these well-prepared books, hesitating only in the choice of good or better.]

Moreover, Hetzel’s publications were recommended by leading educational publications and institutions of the time including the Dictionnaire pédagogique, the Ligue Française de l’enseignement (headed by Hetzel’s business partner, Jean Macé), the Académie Française, and the Ministère de l’Instruction publique, which often chose books for school prizes from among the Bibliothèque’s publications.8 As Hetzel’s advertising literature was careful to point out by listing academic titles, contributors included famous biologists and physicists as well as members of the Institut de France, professors from the Sorbonne, and Viollet-le-Duc himself.9 7 

L’Illustration, 72 ( July–December 1878), 399. Le Monde, 43 ( July–December 1878), 414, described the publication in similar terms. See Bellet, ‘De Hetzel éditeur à P.-J. Stahl journaliste’, p. 14, for more such praise. Viollet-le-Duc’s market was not young children, but teenagers. See Charles Clément’s enthusiastic book review of Histoire d’une maison appearing in Le Journal des débats, 16 December 1873, p. 3. He identifies the target readership as young people from fourteen to twenty years old, as well as their elders needing additional education. Hetzel provided a variety of formats to appeal to a variety of publics, primarily bourgeois: newspaper advertisements show that copies of Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale ranged from seven to eleven francs in its initial year of publication. The book was later given as a prize for excellence in school. 8  See Le Men, ‘Hetzel ou la science récréative’, p. 78. For the role of Jean Macé and the Ligue, see Glénisson, ‘Le Livre pour la jeunesse’, p. 434, and for the Ministère de l’Instruction publique, De Balzac à Jules Verne: Un grand éditeur du xixe siècle, P.-J. Hetzel (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale, 1966), p. 58. 9  These included J. Bertrand, member of the Institut de France; Pierre Gratiolet, professor at the Sorbonne; F. Roulin, librarian at the Institut de France; and physicist/chemist Michael Faraday. As the title suggests, texts were both ‘educational’ (science, history, general information) and ‘recreational’ (literature, games, fantastical elements) with a strong leaning toward fictionalized science (as in the case of Verne), which covered both. See Bellet, ‘De Hetzel éditeur à P.-J. Stahl journaliste’ and Le Men, ‘Hetzel ou la science récréative’ for analyses of the ways in which the two concepts functioned in these publications.

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Figure 3.2. Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Cathédrale idéale, thirteenth-century cathedral based on the model used in Reims, Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française du xie au xvie siècle, vol. ii, fig. 18, p. 324, private collection.

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Figure 3.3. Viollet-le-Duc, Vue de la cathédrale de Clusy commencement du xiiie siècle, Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale, fig. 22, private collection.

Both books and periodicals were offered in a variety of formats (bound, unbound, large format) that made them affordable for a broad readership.10 Viollet-le-Duc’s book about the cathedral and the town hall thus took its place in a collection that, by 1878, was the premier outlet for publishing scientific educational material for young readers. Despite this primary audience, the content of Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale does not differ markedly in style from Viollet-le-Duc’s earlier publications for adults, notably the 10 

Histoire d’un dessinateur, for example, was advertised in 1879 as costing seven francs in paperback, ten francs in clothbound, and eleven francs in hardback; Magasin d’éducation et de récréation, 30 (1879), 347.

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Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française du xie au xvie siècle (1854–68) from which he copied nearly verbatim many ideas. His images were similarly inspired by these earlier works, as we can see in Figures 3.2 and 3.3 where his sketch of the thirteenth-century cathedral of Clusy conforms very closely to the ‘ideal’ cathedral of his Dictionnaire raisonné, also a thirteenth-century structure (modelled upon Notre-Dame de Reims).11 The major difference between the Dictionnaire and Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale lies in the fact that the latter is a fictional work: Viollet-leDuc used literary techniques such as character development, dialogue, foreshadowing, and creation of suspense to create this work for young readers. The book thus opens on a dark and stormy night in Gaul as the leaders of the fictional village of Clusiacum (later Clusy)12 devise a strategy for combatting oncoming Frankish troops. Putting their trust in the bishop, the town leader, everyone gathers in the Saint-Étienne basilica, a place of communal meeting and refuge, to hear the plan and to pray. The following day, it is the bishop who stands up to the Frankish leader and forbids him to pass. Fearful of this seemingly supernatural apparition, the Franks agree to accept a bribe in exchange for sparing the town and its people. This initial scene of collaboration between bishop and townspeople in the cathedral provides an idyllic paradigm from which Viollet11 

Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale is, in fact, a book-length fictional elaboration of the ‘story’ of the evolution of Gothic architecture told in the first pages of the ‘Cathédrale’ entry in Viollet-le-Duc’s Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française du xi e au xvie siècle, 10 vols (Paris: Librairies-Imprimeries Réunies, 1860), ii, 279–392. The story of the town hall is similarly derived from the ‘Hôtel-de-ville’ entry of the Dictionnaire raisonné, vi, 88–99. While it would be interesting to analyse the specific ways in which Viollet-le-Duc reused and elaborated on this material, that is not my objective here. 12  Though Clusy (Clusiacum) is presented as a fictional city and Viollet-le-Duc took care to derive its history from a variety of real French towns, readers would have noted its phonetic similarity with the real town of Cluny (Cluniacum), whose legendary abbey was largely destroyed during and after the French Revolution. I do not have space here to trace the many historical models invoked by Viollet-le-Duc. Martin Bressani has noted that Viollet-le-Duc used the Cluny house type in his depiction of Clusy’s architecture and that both Clusy and Cluny are affiliated with Burgundy and Champagne, the Romanesque and the Gothic, among other details pointing to Cluny as a model for Clusy (e-mail exchange of 30 July 2008). While it is tempting to read Clusy as Cluny, one might also read it as a reference to Coucy, whose castle Viollet-leDuc had recently fortified and about which he published a small illustrated book (Description du Chateau de Coucy (Paris: Morel, 1875)) just before composing Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale. He was also working on Pierrefonds (for which Coucy was a model) at the time. In discussing Clusy’s shield with me (Figure 3.4), Theo Margelony independently noted this possible reference to Coucy in Clusy’s shield (e-mail exchange of 28 March 2007).

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le-Duc measures the clerg y’s progressive degeneration. The extent to which Violletle-Duc creates Clusy from his extensive knowledge of French art and architectural history can be gauged by the frontispiece to the book (Figure 3.4), which features the town’s coat of arms. As he mentions in the text, the use of the ancient chief of France on Clusy’s shield — the azure strip with golden fleurde-lys running across the top — identifies it as a ‘bonne ville’, a royally connected town.13 This is consistent with real-life models including Reims, Laon, and Amiens, and especially, as Theo Margelony has noted, Paris. The arms of both Clusy and Paris feature the ancient chief, are silver on red (‘gueules à la porte d’argent’), 14 sport a Gothic canopy, and were linked to the Figure 3.4. Viollet-le-Duc, Armes de la ville de reign of Charles V.15 Viollet-leClusy, Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale, Duc similarly applies such techfrontispiece, private collection. niques of mixing and matching of historical material in the text. He takes a number of well-known episodes of French history occurring in different cities and makes an amalgam, applying events from different geographical 13 

Viollet-le-Duc, Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale, p. 178. Viollet-le-Duc, Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale, p. 178. 15  See Viollet-le-Duc’s description of the arms, Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale, p. 178. Warm thanks to Theo Margelony, Department of Medi­e val Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, for his generous e-mail correspondence about these arms. His observations have largely informed my own interpretation of them (correspondence of 28 March 2007). 14 

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areas to his fictional characters and places. He relies heavily, as Laurent Baridon has noted, on Augustin Thierry’s Lettres sur l’Histoire de France to do this.16 It is clear from the book’s subsequent republication and use as a prize for schoolchildren that readers delighted in the way Viollet-le-Duc made littleknown historical or architectural material — much of it based on primary sources listed in a four-page bibliography at the end of the text — accessible by using fictional vignettes. Indeed, such popularization of difficult material was the trademark of Hetzel’s series. Viollet-le-Duc kept this in mind while condensing his vast knowledge into Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale: ‘il faut être amusant’ (we must be entertaining), he wrote to Hetzel.17 Viollet-le-Duc thus adopted literary strategies to amuse his readers with what was, in essence, a lesson about history and architecture. These elements, however, served less to develop a coherent plot and characters than to transition from one era to the next. Unlike Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) by Victor Hugo (1802–1885), in which a specific group of characters move in and around the cathedral in a specific year (1482), Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale covers 1300 years of French history. This was surely Viollet-le-Duc’s greatest challenge in writing the book: there are so many characters and so many time periods that it is impossible to develop them well. Figures such as Charlemagne, Suger, and St Louis are evoked, but serve largely as ‘effets de réel’ (effects of reality), existing to create an impression of historicity as they rub shoulders with Viollet-le-Duc’s fictional characters.18 The plot is slight, held together primarily by the ebb and flow of history via invasions and oppression which constitute the major suspense. In a book review for the Revue des Deux Mondes Charles Buloz pointed this out, noting that the book — although ostensibly about a town hall and a cathedral — could just as easily have been called ‘l’histoire d’une ville’ (the history of a city).19 Viollet-le-Duc might have been able to circumvent this difficulty by transforming the cathedral into a character, as Hugo did in Notre-Dame de Paris. But Viollet-le-Duc did not. The subject of machinations among the clergy, nobles, and townspeople, his cathedral and town hall are largely objectified. Characters rarely use the cathedral; they discuss its ideal social role or detailed plans for 16 

Laurent Baridon, L’Imaginaire scientifique de Viollet-le-Duc (Paris: Éditions l’Har­ mattan, 1996), p. 14. 17  Letter of 22 January 1876, Archives Hetzel (fol. 254). 18  Roland Barthes, ‘L’Effet de réel’, in Le Bruissement de la langue: Essais critiques, iv (Paris: Seuil, 1984), pp. 179–80. 19  Charles Buloz, ‘Revue-Chronique’, Revue des Deux Mondes, 30 (November–December 1878), 957–59.

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its renovation, as in the words of a thirteenth-century architect, Hugues de Courtenay, who serves as Viollet-le-Duc’s spokesperson: Que vous faut-il? Une cathédrale… c’est-à-dire un édifice qui permette de réunir sous ses voûtes un grand nombre d’habitants, pouvant délibérer, voir, entendre, circuler, entrer et sortir facilement, qui, par conséquent, présente de vastes espaces dans sa partie centrale, des issues nombreuses, qui soit largement éclairé, d’une construction assez simple pour pouvoir être élevé rapidement, qui laisse aux clercs les espaces nécessaires pour le service religieux, qui, à l’extérieur, signale au loin l’importance de la ville de Clusy, le goût de ses habitants, leur piété et les efforts qu’ils ont faits de tous temps pour maintenir leurs franchises municipales sous la garantie du seigneur évêque… N’est-ce pas là ce que vous voulez?20 [What do you need? A cathedral… In other words an edifice whose vaults allow the assembly of a great number of inhabitants who can easily deliberate, see, listen, circulate, enter, and leave, and which, as a result, features vast spaces in its central section, with numerous exits, and which is well lit, of a sufficiently simple construction to be built quickly, which furnishes clerics with necessary space for religious services, and which, from the exterior, signals from a distance the importance of the city of Clusy, the taste of its inhabitants, their piety, and the efforts they have always made to maintain the municipal rules and regulations guaranteed by their lord bishop… Is this not what you want?]

The cathedral in Viollet-le-Duc’s book is thus presented as the ultimate symbolic representative of the people and its link to the administrative powers of the Church; it lies at the heart of town life, yet aside from the initial scene of prayer in the cathedral, the church is rarely depicted in a functional context. His illustrations reflect this tendency; they often depict edifices as nearly empty or as free-standing structures divorced from their urban context (see Figure 3.2).21 Despite Hetzel’s claim that Viollet-le-Duc ‘brings history to life’ like no one else can,22 this is really only true for the dramatically successful scenes of attack and defence, which Viollet-le-Duc illustrates copiously. Anthyme Saint-Paul, director of L’Année archéologique and always a critic of Viollet-le-Duc, noted 20 

Viollet-le-Duc, Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale, p. 108. This was a common trend from about 1840 onward: illustrators and photographers tended to divorce the monuments from their urban surroundings in depictions of them. See Kevin D. Murphy, ‘Restoring Rouen: The Politics of Preservation in July Monarchy France’, Word and Image, 11.2 (1995), 196–206. 22  Pierre-Jules Hetzel, Magasin d’éducation et récréation, 18 (1872–73), 81. 21 

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pointedly that narrative was not Viollet-le-Duc’s strong suit; as a popularizer he was ‘bien au-dessous d’Arcisse de Caumont’ (significantly inferior to Arcisse de Caumont). He also criticized Viollet-le-Duc for taking too many liberties in fictionalizing (and especially secularizing) history.23 Modern critics have been similarly harsh.24 Jean-Michel Leniaud, for example, while comparing Violletle-Duc to the fictional architect of Clusy,25 has also noted that Viollet-le-Duc was not a talented storybook writer. He has asked why the architect would have chosen to spend his last years writing for adolescents instead of fulfilling more important social, architectural, and political obligations. The question is legitimate: Viollet-le-Duc refused a nomination to the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres (1873), resigned as Inspecteur général des Édifices diocésains (1874), and stepped down from the organizing committee of the Exposition universelle (1878).26 Current Viollet-le-Duc scholarship suggests that he was reaching the end of his career (he was fifty-six in 1870), that he was tired from his truly Herculean efforts on behalf of restorations in France, and that he was not at ease politically in the Third Republic.27 As Leniaud puts it, ‘Mais, tandis que Renan appelait à la réforme intellectuelle et morale, Viollet-le-Duc prenait du champ, réservant progressivement son temps à l’étude, aux voyages et 23 

Anthyme Saint-Paul, Viollet-le-Duc: Ses travaux d’art et son système archéologique (Paris: Aux bureaux de l’Année archéologique, 1881), p. 64. Saint-Paul was notoriously critical of Viollet-le-Duc and lambasted his book for the liberties it took with history, misrepresenting Suger’s style, for example, instead of quoting from existing letters. 24  The notable exception is Klaus Niehr who presents the cathedral of Clusy as the perfect example of the ways in which nineteenth-century thinkers blended real historical information with fantasy: ‘Die perfekte Kathedrale: Imaginationen des monumentalen Mittelalters im französischen 19. Jahrhundert’, in Bilder gedeuteter Geschichte: Das Mittelalter in der Kunst und Architektur der Moderne, ed. by Otto Gerhard Oexle, Áron Petneki, and Leszek Zygner, 2 vols, Göttinger Gespräche zur Geschichtswissenschaft, 23 (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2004), i, 163–221. 25  Jean-Michel Leniaud, Viollet-le-Duc ou les délires du système (Paris: Éditions Mengès, 1994). 26  See Leniaud’s discussion of the perplexing nature of Viollet-le-Duc’s post-1870 activities in Viollet-le-Duc ou les délires du système, p. 109. Paul Goût suggests that the resignations stem from Viollet-le-Duc’s conflicts with the Académie des Beaux-Arts, his outspoken anticlericalism, which put him at odds with the clergy he served, and his disgust with the slow progress of committees: Viollet-le-Duc: Sa vie, son œuvre, sa doctrine (Paris: Édouard Champion, 1914), pp. 61–62. 27  For a comprehensive list of his activities in government, restoration, and journalism, see Pierre-Marie Auzas, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, 1814–1897 (Paris: Caisse Nationale des monuments historiques, 1979).

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aux courses en montagne’ (But, while Renan called for intellectual and moral reform, Viollet-le-Duc withdrew, progressively reserving his time for study, voyages, and mountain treks).28 Such characterizations of Viollet-le-Duc’s post-war activities are a bit misleading. At fifty-six, Viollet-le-Duc was still in the prime of life, physically and mentally active. It is true that he stepped down from a number of committees in the 1870s, but he also agreed to participate on the demanding Conseil Municipal de Paris (from 1873 until his death), led the concours for the new Paris hôtel de ville, and worked on the renovations of the cathedral of Lausanne. In addition, he continued to direct building projects, published a new book each year, and wrote weekly articles for the press. Far from slowing down, Viollet-le-Duc, as his family complained, was working even harder.29 Nor was he an unskilled writer. Many of his descriptive passages are quite successful at conveying atmosphere or setting tone, as in the opening pages of Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale, and his books are enjoyable to read. While Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale is not a masterpiece of French literature, much of its awkwardness can be attributed to the fact that Viollet-le-Duc was writing for a particular niche: Hetzel’s educational market. While Hugo expressly wrote a novel, Viollet-le-Duc did not. In fact, many Hetzel publications, including Jean Macé’s Histoire d’une bouchée de pain, can only tenuously be considered fiction at all.30 By using the word ‘histoire’ (story and history) in his title, Viollet-le-Duc clearly plays on the word’s ambiguity. And while the book is no longer considered a literary success by today’s standards, Viollet-le-Duc’s children’s books were well received in their time, on both sides of the Atlantic; they profoundly influenced a generation of children.31

28 

Leniaud, Viollet-le-Duc ou les délires du système, p. 109. See Goût, Viollet-le-Duc, and the preface to Lettres inédites de Viollet le Duc, recueillies et annotées par son fils Eugène-Louis Viollet-le-Duc (Paris: Librairies-imprimeries réunies, 1902), pp. i–xxviii. 30  For more about the tensions between science and fiction in such works, see Denise Dupont-Escarpit, ‘L’Information scientifique et technique à l’usage de la jeunesse dans le Magasin d’éducation et de récréation’, in P.-J. Hetzel, un éditeur et son siècle, ed. by Christian Robin (Paris: ACL Édition, 1988), pp. 237–47. 31  Martin Bressani traces the impact these books exerted on the imagination of a generation of readers in his preface to the 2008 edition of Histoire d’une maison (Lausanne: Infolio, 2008). 29 

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Literary quality aside, Leniaud’s question remains crucial: Why would Viollet-le-Duc give up important commissions in order to write for children? Viollet-le-Duc’s correspondence after the Franco-Prussian War suggests that he construed this activity as eminently patriotic, perhaps even more so than completing architectural commissions. He wanted to use popular literature to educate children and the lower classes, those citizens most likely to reform the country now that it had become a Republic. Always willing to take on a new battle when he felt it was important, he became a nationalist pedagogue in the years following the war. Letters reveal the disgust he increasingly felt for the gridlock of committee work and for his peers: Je crois que, ne tenant plus à une organisation ou à une désorganisation officielle, je puis encore employer utilement les quelques années de force qui me restent peutêtre, au lieu de m’user sans profit pour obtenir des résultats insignifiants. Si, dans cette administration, je pouvais être utile à quelques jeunes gens, et, cela, en luttant sans cesse, étant libre de mes mouvements et de mon temps, je crois que je puis rendre service à un plus grand nombre et beaucoup plus efficacement, et c’est à la jeunesse qu’il faut absolument s’adresser à cette heure.32 [Now that I no longer belong to an official organization or disorganization, I believe that I can capitalize on the years of strength that may lie before me instead of uselessly wearing myself out to obtain insignificant results. If, in this administration, I could be useful to some young people, fighting ceaselessly to do so since I am free in movement and time, I believe I can help a larger number much more efficiently, and it is to the youth of today that I must now address myself.]

Official duties, he states, hold little hope for changing the nation. Education, however, is another matter. In a letter to his wife he evokes his patriotic ‘duty’ to address French youth: ‘C’est ma seule préoccupation sérieuse et il m’importe guère que l’on me loue ou que l’on me blâme; je sais ce que je veux, et comme je sais que c’est le bien, on peut dire tout ce qu’on voudra’ (It is my only serious preoccupation and I care little whether I am praised or blamed; I know what I want, and since I know it is for the good, people can say what they want).33 No 32 

Later in the same letter he insisted that: ‘C’est donc aux petits qu’il faut s’adresser et aux petits de toutes les classes’ (We must thus address ourselves to little ones and to little ones of all classes) (Archives Hetzel, 20 July 1874, fols 225–26); reprinted in Viollet-le-Duc, Lettres inédites, p. 148). La France, the long history project he was working on when he died, continued in this vein: its goal was to educate children about French history. 33  Letter to Mme Viollet-le-Duc (13 June 1875); cited in its entirety in Goût, Viollet-le-

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matter what we think about Viollet-le-Duc’s intentions in writing his children’s books, it is clear that he saw them as vitally important. In order to understand why writing about cathedrals might be construed as a patriotic duty it is important to revisit the cultural context that prompted the composition of Histoire d’un hôtel et d’une cathédrale. Hetzel had assiduously courted Viollet-le-Duc to contribute to the Magasin d’éducation et de récréation in the 1860s, when he created the journal.34 Viollet-le-Duc agreed — the project was consistent with his long-term interest in practical education — and his name figured on the periodical’s editorial masthead from its inception in 1864. Histoire d’une maison, the first of the series, was advertised in the first bound volume of the Magasin d’éducation et de récréation (1864) as ‘en préparation’ (in preparation), though Viollet-le-Duc would not begin writing it until after the war, when the project became a priority for him.35 Blaming the inferiority of the French educational system — particularly its methods of teaching history — became widespread after the war, and children’s education began to be considered integral for rebuilding and strengthening the French nation.36 The illustrated Histoire de France racontée à mes petits-enfants (1872) by François Guizot (1787–1874), issued in numerous editions by Hachette, was a case in point. Written before the war as a series of private family lessons,37 postwar book reviews lauded it as key for French morale: Ce petit livre, ce guide initiateur, ce second catéchisme qui inculquerait à nos enfans [sic] la véritable histoire de France […,] je le tiens pour un puissant secours dans la douloureuse entreprise que nos malheurs nous imposent, la reconstitution, la rénovation de la France. C’est une sorte de machine à dissoudre les préjugés, à dissiper les haines et les antipathies, un instrument de réconciliation, d’ordre, de paix et de moeurs politiques.38 Duc, p. 139, and in part in Viollet-le-Duc, Lettres inédites, p. xxiii. 34  The first letter from Viollet-le-Duc to Hetzel in the Archives Hetzel dates from 24 February 1864 (fol. 193) and refers to verbal discussions about the project. Viollet-le-Duc would not write the book until 1872. The timing of Hetzel’s invitation corresponds with the educational reforms led by Jean Macé and Victor Duruy (1811–1894), among others. 35  Magasin d’éducation et de récréation, 1 (1864), 377. 36  See the first chapter of Mona Ozouf ’s L’École, l’Église et la République, 1871–1914 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1963), pp. 15–23. 37  François Guizot, L’Histoire de France expliquée à mes petits-enfants (Paris: Hachette, 1872), p. i. 38  ‘Une Nouvelle Histoire de France’, book review by Guizot’s old friend Ludovic Vitet in Revue des Deux Mondes, 99 (15 June 1872), 440–48 (pp. 440–42).

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[This little book, this initiatory guide, this second catechism that will instil in our children the true history of France […,] I consider it a powerful help in the distressing business that our misfortunes impose, the reconstitution, the renovation of France. It is a sort of machine for dissolving prejudices, for dissipating hatred and dislikes, an instrument of reconciliation, of order, of peace, and of political morals.]

After the war, Guizot’s glowing representations of French historical figures including the Gauls, Clovis, Charlemagne, Joan of Arc, and others were seen as positive examples proving that the French had always valiantly resisted their enemies; in this light French history appeared as an ongoing struggle for liberty and self-government.39 The analogy with catechism had special political resonance at the time. Indeed, before the Franco-Prussian War, education in France was largely religious, despite ongoing efforts to laicize it. As Mona Ozouf and Pierre Albertini have shown, it was after the war that the French government more actively sought to institute lay education, thus causing serious conflicts between Catholics and republicans. The republican textbook was often evoked in contrast to Catholic catechism: Christian Amalvi has called it a ‘bréviaire national et laïque’ (a national and secular breviary).40 Jean Macé, Hetzel’s partner in the creation of Le Magasin d’éducation et de récréation was at the forefront of republican educational reforms. From the 1850s onward he had fought valiantly for literacy through local initiatives to create libraries and to educate voters, but he would come to national prominence after the war as the founder of the Ligue Française de l’enseignement (1866).41 As he put it in the Ligue’s Bulletin, educating children was crucial for the future of France: ‘L’important, 39 

See Christian Amalvi, De l’art et de la manière d’accommoder les héros de l’histoire de France: Essais de mythologie nationale (Paris: Albin Michel, 1988), for more about this tendency to adopt historical figures for educational purposes in the late nineteenth century. Vitet’s review concludes: ‘Notre histoire bien comprise est la clé de tous nos problèmes, le principe régénérateur de tout ordre et de tout progrès’ (Understanding our history accurately is the key to all our problems, the regenerative principle of all order and progress) (‘Une Nouvelle Histoire de France’, p. 448). 40  See Ozouf, L’École, l’Église et la République, and Pierre Albertini, L’École en France e xix –xxe siècle: De la maternelle à l’université (Paris: Hachette, Carré Histoire, 1992). Christian Amalvi, ‘Les Manuels d’histoire et leur illustration’, in Histoire de l’édition française, ed. by Martin and Chartier, iii, 432–33. 41  For the relationship between Macé and Hetzel, see Gourévitch, Hetzel, pp. 194–97, and Arlette Boulogne, ‘L’Influence de Pierre-Jules Hetzel, éditeur, sur les institutions de lecture populaire’, in P.-J. Hetzel, un éditeur et son siècle, ed. by Robin, pp. 255–67.

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c’est de commencer tout de suite et de donner aux campagnes de France le spectacle de leurs enfants se préparant, dès l’École, à défendre le sol de la patrie, si jamais l’étranger essayait de revenir le fouler’ (The important thing is to begin right away and to give French countryfolk the spectacle of their children preparing, from School on, to defend the motherland, in case foreigners try to come back and crush it).42 This patriotic agenda, though less militant,43 can be seen at work in the Magasin’s emphasis on moral and civic education. It is no coincidence that Monseigneur Dupanloup, the Bishop of Orléans, a relatively liberal thinker, condemned the periodical.44 Histoire d’une maison, the book Viollet-le-Duc had promised Hetzel in 1864, was serialized and then published in 1873, thus becoming an early example of revanchard literature in France.45 With it, Viollet-le-Duc joined republican peers in the moral education of French children and the lower classes. Viollet-le-Duc’s sudden change of philosophy may seem hypocritical for a man so closely allied with the Second Empire, yet the architect’s unpublished correspondence reveals that he sometimes voiced beliefs with republican resonance.46 And whatever his previous political leanings, it is clear that the shock of the Franco-Prussian War served as a catalyst that pushed him toward working for social reform. This can be seen in an 1874 letter to Hetzel outlining his goals for an entire series of Histoire de… books: Dans notre pauvre société détraquée c’est dans les classes dites inférieures qu’on peut trouver les éléments propres à combattre les préjugés et la routine. […] La belle bourgeoisie française de 89 est tombée bien bas; tous les jours je le reconnais avec 42 

Article in Bulletin de la Ligue Française de l’Enseignement (1 August 1882); cited in Ozouf, L’École, l’Église et la République, pp. 126–27. 43  Macé assured Hetzel in a letter that his left-leaning politics would not jeopardize the success of the Magasin: ‘Je ne tiens pas à casser les carreaux du bourgeois’; cited in Boulogne, ‘L’Influence de Pierre-Jules Hetzel’, p. 263. 44  For an analysis of Hetzel’s own republican leanings, which prompted his exile during the Second Empire, and for a summary of this encounter, see Gourévitch, Hetzel, pp. 117–207. Guy Gauthier, ‘Une morale laïque sous le Second Empire: La Morale de Stahl dans le Magasin d’éducation et de récréation’, and Jacques Chupeau, ‘Le Moraliste des enfants: P.-J. Stahl’, trace Hetzel’s theories of education; both appear in P.-J. Hetzel, un éditeur et son siècle, ed. by Robin, pp. 189–204 and pp. 207–16, respectively. 45  See Martin Bressani’s preface for the Infolio reprint of Histoire d’une maison. 46  Paul Goût argues that Viollet-le-Duc’s letters show that his politics were always republican, despite the fact that he chose to accept commissions and to work within the powers of the Second Empire; see Viollet-le-Duc, pp. 135–39.

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regret. […] Je suis donc un peu effrayé de la tâche qui incombe à ceux d’entre nous qui voudraient relever tout ce monde de l’affaissement moral. Cependant il ne faut point se décourager et jeter le manche après la cognée. Ce qui nous sauve toujours en France c’est l’élasticité particulière de notre génie. Quelques exemples suffisent parfois pour convertir les esprits flottants, et l’héroïsme, l’abnégation, le sentiment du devoir, peuvent être de mode à un moment donné […]. Ne désespérons donc pas.47 [In our poor unsettled society it is in the classes said to be inferior that we can find the necessary elements to combat prejudice and routine. […] The lovely French bourgeoisie of 89 has fallen awfully low; I regretfully recognize it on a daily basis. […] I am thus a bit frightened by the work that falls to those of us who seek to lift these people out of moral collapse. Nonetheless, one must not be discouraged and give up in despair. What has always saved us in France is the particular elasticity of our genius. A few examples sometimes suffice to convert indecisive minds, and heroism, self-sacrifice, the sentiment of duty, can come into vogue at a given moment […]. Let us thus not despair.] (my emphasis)

Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale provides many such heroic examples, destined to ‘convert’ his readers to republicanism. Viollet-le-Duc’s disappointment with the bourgeoisie, his emphasis on the lower classes, republicanism, rationality, and the flexibility and adaptability of French genius in the face of adversity also closely imitate contemporaries’ calls for teaching reform. Over and over again, such letters stress the rational education of youth as the key to the future of France, a theme from his earlier years when he complained bitterly about the lack of practical information given to students, lobbying for a better balance between theory and hands-on training (the root of his vendetta against the Académie des Beaux-Arts).48 His books for young readers and his 47  This letter is contained in the Archives Hetzel (8 August 1874, fol. 229) and reprinted in Viollet-le-Duc, Lettres inédites, p. 159. 48  Jean-Michel Leniaud’s analysis of Viollet-le-Duc’s beliefs about education and his battles with the educational system contained in ‘Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814–1879): L’Invention d’une nouvelle profession’, in Les Bâtisseurs d’avenir, portraits d’architectes xixe–xxe siècle, ed. by Jean-Michel Leniaud (Paris: Fayard, 1998), pp. 101–68. See also the comments of Viollet-le-Duc’s son: ‘Parmi les reproches que Viollet-le-Duc faisait à l’enseignement de l’École des beaux-arts, le plus grave était celui de ne pas former des hommes pratiques et de ne pas armer ses élèves, comme il convient, pour le jour où ils seront en présence des difficultés de tout genre et des immenses responsabilités que comporte avec lui l’art de bâtir’ (Among Viollet-leDuc’s criticisms of École des beaux-arts teaching, the most serious was a failure to form practical men and to prepare students, as they should have, for the day they encounter all kinds of difficulties and the immense responsibilities inherent in the art of building); Viollet-le-Duc, Lettres inédites, pp. xiv–xv.

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weekly contributions to newspapers, in which he advocated on behalf of workers and called for free secular education for both girls and boys, were in his eyes as valuable as his scholarly work because they could influence a much larger readership.49 In the 1870s, Viollet-le-Duc thus used popular literature to circumvent official channels and to speak directly to the masses: in it, he promoted his own educational method of learning through doing. Histoire d’une maison, for example, follows a young boy interested in architecture as he questions friends and relatives in order to learn how to plan and build a house, which he does by the end of the book. Histoire d’une forteresse, which describes how to protect a city, and Histoire d’un dessinateur, which shows how education transforms a poor country boy into a successful Parisian, fulfilled a similar goal: ‘c’est tout un traité d’enseignement pratique, depuis le dessin qu’il faut apprendre en apprenant à écrire, et comme un langage nécessaire’ (it is a real treaty of practical teaching, from the drawings one must learn while learning to write, like a necessary language). Though Hetzel had originally requested an illustrated series about the great churches of France, Viollet-le-Duc found the project ‘terriblement exploité’ (terribly overdone) and sought to find a way to appeal to readers while making them think (‘réfléchir’).50 Above all, his letters return to the importance of reason and logic, particularly as antidotes to the dangers of religious superstition. It is not through prayer that France will be saved, he argues, in discussing the Histoire de… series, but through understanding history and the logical sequence of events that have led the country to its current state: Je crois qu’il est bon, aujourd’hui, de ne donner à notre jeunesse que des livres qui l’obligent à réfléchir […]. Il faut lutter enfin contre cette funeste tendance de l’esprit français à croire à l’intervention dans les choses humaines de la chance, de l’étoile, de la providence, de la Sainte Vierge ou du Sacré-Coeur. Tous, croyants et incroyants, en sont à cet égard au même niveau, ou peu s’en faut; et il est aussi niais de 49  Laurent Baridon labels this later Viollet-le-Duc as a ‘billettiste’ and ‘propagandiste’; see Baridon, L’Imaginaire scientifique de Viollet-le-Duc, p. 14. For an overview of the contents of the newspaper articles published in Le Centre gauche, Le Bien public, Le xixe siècle, and Le Peuple, see Auzas, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, p. 194. 50  On the other hand, he was extremely interested in what he called short educational ‘manuels’ on arts such as imagery, construction, stone cutting, carpentry, locks, cabinetry, ventilation, hydraulics, and gardening. This was a project he had long contemplated but had not had success in publishing. See the Archives Hetzel (17 and 20 July 1874, fols 223–26); reprinted in Viollet-le-Duc, Lettres inédites, pp. 146–49.

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croire à la fortune et à la destinée civilisatrice de la France, comme disent certains esprits libéraux, que de compter sur les pèlerinages pour faire remonter nos affaires. — Ces niaiseries plaisent chez nous parce qu’elles dispensent de réfléchir et de travailler. C’est plus commode de compter sur le génie de la France avec son flambeau, ou sur la Sainte Vierge, que de se lever matin et de se mettre à la besogne pour résoudre des difficultés.51 [I believe that today it is good to give our children only books that oblige them to think […]. We must fight against the dire French tendency to see human things as the result of luck, the stars, providence, the Virgin Mary, or the Sacred Heart. All, believers or non-believers, are the same in such practices; and it is as silly to believe in fortune and in the civilizing destiny of France, as some liberal minds put it, as it is to count on pilgrimages to improve our situation. — Such nonsense appeals to us because it obviates the need for thinking and work. It is more convenient to count on the figure of French genius with its torch, or on the Virgin Mary, than to get up early in the morning to work toward resolving problems.]

In Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale, as in his other books for young readers, Viollet-le-Duc does not dwell on God or prayer; instead, he praises the hard work and rebuilding that take place in Clusy after each setback. Such reactions were understandable in the 1870s, when the Assemblée Nationale was controlled by a conservative majority that believed that the Franco-Prussian War was divine justice, a result of Napoléon III’s sin of withdrawing troops supporting the Pope. Priests and politicians from all over France encouraged their parishioners to organize pilgrimages of reparation and to travel to cathedrals and shrines, following in the footsteps of their ancestors.52 As republican publications flourished in the Third Republic, Catholics set up competing books and magazines for children and the lower classes — such as Le Pèlerin and the Bulletin de la Société générale d’éducation et d’enseignement — to spread their ‘apostolat’ (preaching).53 Viollet-le-Duc thus threw himself into the popularization of history as an act of patriotism, an attempt to encourage children and lower classes to recog51 

Archives Hetzel (17 July 1874, fols 223–24); reprinted in Viollet-le-Duc, Lettres inédites, pp. 146–47. 52  See Raymond Jonas, France and the Cult of the Sacred Heart (Berkeley: Uni­ver­sity of California Press, 2000), p. 149. Jean-Emmanuel Drochon’s Histoire illustrée des pèlerinages (Paris: Plon, 1890) provides an excellent perspective on the popularity of pilgrimages in the fin de siècle. 53  See Ozouf, L’École, l’Église et la République and Albertini, L’École en France 19e–20e siècle. For more about the competition between republican and Catholic magazines directed to children, see Glénisson, ‘Le Livre pour la jeunesse’.

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nize the course of French history as the logical outcome of human actions. His conclusion to Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale confirms the importance he ascribed to history as a way of fostering patriotism: Mais ce que nous avons voulu faire ressortir dans cet ouvrage, c’est la persistance d’une cité à se constituer civilement; comme dans l’Histoire d’une forteresse, nous avons essayé de montrer la persistance d’une ville à se défendre contre les attaques à main armée. Les deux œuvres se complètent et donnent la mesure de l’énergie vitale des populations urbaines françaises. […] L’amour du pays est en raison de la connaissance de son histoire, et si l’on veut faire pénétrer cet amour dans les esprits, il faut que cette histoire devienne familière à tous.54 [But what we have sought to emphasize in this work is the persistence shown by a city in constituting itself civically; as in l’Histoire d’une forteresse we tried to show the persistence of a city in defending itself against armed attacks. The two works complement one another and give a sense of the vital energy of urban French populations. […] Love of one’s country is a function of the knowledge of its history, and if we wish to inculcate minds with such love, this history must become familiar to us all.] (my emphasis)

Viollet-le-Duc was not an escapist after the Franco-Prussian War, as some scholars have argued. Instead, he was an amateur pedagogue who renewed his efforts to influence contemporaries by appropriating a new and increasingly popular genre — children’s literature — and by using it to proselytize on behalf of his beloved France. This link between history and patriotism is particularly evident in Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale, which highlights the contested figure of the cathedral, claimed, in the nineteenth century, by Catholics as a house of worship and by republicans as an example of national genius.55 The same battles for the meaning of Gothic architecture were rife in children’s literature: Catholic publications insisted on the cathedral’s religious origins, while republican ones stressed its secular elements.56 Viollet-le-Duc was criticized by his 54 

Viollet-le-Duc, Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale, p. 274 and p. 277. A number of scholars have addressed such political appropriations. See, for example, Elizabeth Emery, Romancing the Cathedral: Gothic Architecture in Fin-de-Siècle French Culture (New York: SUNY Press, 2001) and Stephanie A. Glaser, ‘Explorations of the Gothic Cathedral in Nineteenth-Century France’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Indiana Uni­ver­sity, 2002). 56  See ‘Teaching the Cathedral’, a chapter of Maylis Curie’s unpublished doctoral thesis, ‘The Representation of the Cathedral in French Visual Culture, 1870–1914’ (Uni­ver­sity of Edinburgh, 2005). 55 

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contemporaries for downplaying the religious function of Gothic architecture in the Dictionnaire raisonné, yet he went much further in Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale, portraying it as a structure so secular, so political, and so key to republican values that religious function and aesthetics were little more than afterthoughts.57 Indeed, if the hôtel de ville precedes the cathédrale in the book’s title, it is because the two structures are often one and the same in Viollet-le-Duc’s text. I simplify the story of Clusy’s cathedral in the following paragraphs, but its development closely follows that of the town. We have already seen how the book opened with the dramatic invasion of Clusy by the Franks. As the town slowly constituted itself from the fifth to the eighth centuries, the cathedral continued to occupy an administrative function, welcoming town business meetings and serving as a court. Its rebuilding in the eighth century, which retained only the apse, lateral walls, and the baptistery of the original, was a major event. The nave was elongated and a transept built, while a cloister was erected along its southern flank, and two towers were constructed. As a series of greedy bishops gained power in the eleventh century, they increasingly alienated the population by overtaxing them. Several coincidences proved fortunate for the townspeople, however, and they were able to establish Clusy as an independently run town, a commune, with a town hall to house archives and to hold meetings. But nobles and clergy soon vied for the town’s riches, collaborating with the king to revoke the town’s independent status. In a dramatic and bloody passage with echoes of the French Revolution and the Commune de Paris, the townspeople revolt against the invading forces and slaughter nobles before being butchered themselves. The ultimate victims are the town hall and cathedral, which go up in flames. Undaunted, the medi­eval townspeople pay their debts and organize themselves once again. Under the supervision of a caring bishop, they regain faith in the clergy and work together through the twelfth century to erect a new cathedral, which is described to them by the bishop (a friend of Suger) as their own: J’entends que cette église soit vôtre, qu’elle soit non-seulement le temps consacré à Dieu et aux saints martyrs, mais l’asile inviolable de vos franchises, afin de cimenter

57 

Émile Mâle (1862–1954) in L’Art religieux du xiii e siècle en France (1898) and J.-K. Huysmans (1848–1907), La Cathédrale (1898), were similarly critical of Viollet-le-Duc, while Anthyme Saint-Paul targeted Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale in particular: Viollet-le-Duc, pp. 64–65, 87, 199.

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à jamais l’heureuse entente établie entre vos évêques et vous, en ce qui touche à l’administration de la cité.58 [I intend that this church be yours, that it be not just time dedicated to God and the martyr saints, but an inviolable shelter for your rules and regulations, in order to concretize forever the good relationship established between you and your bishops, in terms of the city’s administration.]

This commitment to the people inspires a flurry of activity — ‘C’était une fièvre’ (It was a fever) — in which everyone participates in the construction.59 This alleged commitment to the people on behalf of the bishop allows Violletle-Duc to conclude that the cathedral was the original town hall — a structure much more civil than religious: C’est pourquoi les cathédrales s’élevaient bien plus comme des édifices affectés à une destination civile qu’à un service religieux. La cathédrale devait devenir le monument de la cité, remplacer l’hôtel de ville; donc, le parloir aux bourgeois n’avait plus sa raison d’être, puisque les citoyens pouvaient à toute heure se réunir dans l’église mère, y discuter de leurs affaires; puisque les cloches des tours étaient mises en branle par leur ordre; puisque, dans ces vastes vaisseaux, ils pouvaient même se livrer à certains passe-temps, jeux et mystères, à l’occasion.60 [This is why cathedrals were built much more like edifices with civil rather than religious intent. The cathedral would become the city’s monument, replacing the town hall; the bourgeois visiting room was no longer necessary since citizens could meet at any time in the mother church to discuss their business; since they had the power to ring the tower bells; since, in these vast vessels they could, on occasion, even enjoy recreation, games, and mystery plays.]

It was the bishops’ political compromise that saved the structure: by keeping their cathedral seat in the house of the people, they were able to control them by maintaining a safe distance from the influence of the nobles and monasteries.61 For the bourgeoisie, the cathedral thus became a ‘symbole visible et réel de [leurs] libertés’ (visible and real symbol of their freedom).62 In his discussion of Clusy in the thirteenth century, Viollet-le-Duc showcases his own theories about the rational construction of Gothic architecture. 58 

Viollet-le-Duc, Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale, p. 76. Viollet-le-Duc, Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale, p. 85. 60  Viollet-le-Duc, Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale, p. 115. 61  Viollet-le-Duc, Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale, p. 115. 62  Viollet-le-Duc, Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale, p. 116. 59 

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Although the cathedral is nearly complete, a bishop proposes making the structure more functional for meetings. In one of the liveliest passages of the book, Viollet-le-Duc invents a concours among three architects with very different plans. As each justifies his vision, Viollet-le-Duc rehashes his own battles to convince classicists of the ‘rapports harmoniques’ (harmonious connections) among thirteenth-century building techniques. When the bishop protests that the flimsy ‘stilts’ of the Gothic model will be blown away by the first storm,63 architect Hugues de Courtenay patiently explains the logical yet graceful support system underpinning his Gothic design. He unrolls blueprints and lays out everything from structure to imagery (suggesting three portals featuring Christ and his apostles, the Last Judgement, and the life of the Virgin) and builds a model to convince the people of the logic and legitimacy of his project. With this chapter, Viollet-le-Duc validates his own architectural theories for the nineteenth-century public by putting them in the mouth of a seemingly objective thirteenth-century architect. Unfortunately, the ‘good’ bishop who proposed the renovations soon dies and is replaced by a colleague who wants to revive the cathedral’s religious function. As a result, he takes back his forebears’ promises of shared sovereignty, casting out non-religious activities such as markets and performances and closing the choir to the public by encasing it in stalls and a rood screen.64 As the people are pushed out, they build another town hall to replace the functions denied them in the cathedral. But a fourteenth-century revolt to protest unfair taxation results in the burning of the new town hall, and the townspeople return to the cathedral, under the auspices of a more liberal bishop, who encourages them to see the edifice as the ‘palladium’ of the city.65 The Clusianois reconstruct the town hall once again at the end of the fourteenth century before yet another civil uprising results in its abandonment. While the cathedral is partially rebuilt by a bishop at the beginning of the fourteenth century, it is not until the reign of François I that important renovations are undertaken. Viollet-le-Duc skips quickly over the ensuing years, stopping only in Chapter 14 to criticize at length the ‘vandalism’ of Louis XIV. Another set piece revisits his battles with classicists as Viollet-le-Duc pits a young ‘courtesan’ bishop against the most senior member of the clergy at Clusy. The bishop wants to follow the Parisian vogue of making classical ‘renovations’ that will ‘dignify’ a 63 

Viollet-le-Duc, Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale, p. 103. Viollet-le-Duc, Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale, pp. 126–28. 65  Viollet-le-Duc, Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale, p. 170. 64 

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Figure 3.5. Viollet-le-Duc, Le Maire empêche la destruction des statues de la cathédrale, Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale, fig. 48 bis, private collection.

structure whose accumulation of so many ‘asymmetrical’ monuments reflects a ‘goût barbare et dont l’aspect est indécent’ (barbarous taste and indecent appearance).66 His plan involves tearing down the uniquely carved thirteenthcentury oak choir stalls and rood screen to erect grill work and a new marble altar, to replace the dirty thirteenth-century stained glass with clear glass panes, 66 

Viollet-le-Duc, Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale, p. 247.

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and to rip out the original tombs and flagstones. The elderly priest is the only one to protest, in terms that represent medi­eval art as an integral part of French identity, a valuable lesson for the people of the future: ‘notre cathédrale […] nous rappelle l’histoire entière du diocèse et ses efforts pour élever un monument digne de la gloire de Dieu’ (our cathedral […] reminds us of the diocese’s entire history and its efforts to raise a monument worthy of the glory of God).67 The people agree and protest.68 Seeing the unpopularity of his decision, the bishop hires masons to begin the demolition under cover of night. The final chapter traces Clusy’s fate during the French Revolution. Held together by a wise mayor, the town is able to survive without much bloodshed, yet the cathedral itself comes under attack in 1793. Faced with the order to seize treasure and to destroy iconoclastic images of kings and saints, the mayor takes a strong stand to protect Clusy’s heritage, arguing that the cathedral’s images have come ‘from the hand of the people’ and they, like the cathedral itself, ‘belong to the people’.69 When the mayor’s arguments fail, he returns to the cathedral, festooning it with tricolour ribbons (Figure 3.5). He faces the menacing crowd, convincing them of the cathedral’s importance for their common heritage: ‘nous sommes ici pour vous dire que la mutilation des œuvres d’art, dues à nos pères, à des hommes du peuple, serait un acte de barbarie’ (we are here to tell you that the mutilation of works of art, created by our fathers, common men, would be a barbarous act).70 He evokes the cathedral as a product of their forefathers’ labour and rebellion against the established order, providing a republican reading of the secular images contained on the portals — the zodiac, workers in the fields, the sciences — while echoing Victor Hugo: ‘Ainsi ces artisans, sortis du peuple, auteurs de ces sculptures, avaient devancé les temps et exprimaient déjà, dans leur langage, le seul qui leur fût permis, leur haine contre les tyrans et les gens d’église’ (Thus, these artisans, the authors of these sculptures, men sprung up from the common people, were ahead of their time, already expressing, in their language, the only one allowed, their hatred of tyranny and of the clergy).71 As he warms up, he becomes ever more patriotic, ending with the following words that win over the crowd: ‘La cathédrale de Clusy, bâtie par le peuple de Clusy, est un monument national, il nous appar67 

Viollet-le-Duc, Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale, p. 245. Viollet-le-Duc, Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale, pp. 249–50. 69  Viollet-le-Duc, Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale, pp. 262–64. 70  Viollet-le-Duc, Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale, p. 266. 71  Viollet-le-Duc, Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale, p. 267. 68 

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tient; conservons-le intact, et qu’il serve dorénavant aux grandes réunions populaires, sous la garde du peuple, qui l’a élevé!’ (The cathedral of Clusy, built by the people of Clusy, is a national monument, it belongs to us; let us conserve it intact and let it henceforth serve great popular meetings, under the protection of the people, who built it!).72 If, as Viollet-le-Duc’s obituaries insisted, he was the greatest living French authority on Gothic architecture, what lessons did this ‘scientific’ story of the cathedral teach his adolescent readers?73 First, the elegiac final chapter and conclusion inspire a love of the French nation and her historical struggles for liberty in terms that echo other post-war republican writings. Though this is clear throughout the book, Viollet-le-Duc felt compelled to spell it out in the conclusion: Si cet ouvrage […] contribue, pour si peu que ce soit, à faire entrevoir et apprécier la partie la plus intéressante peut-être de notre histoire nationale, en ce qu’elle montre comment et au prix de quels sacrifices un pays conquiert et conserve ses libertés sans cesse contestées, nous croirons avoir rempli notre tâche’.74 [We will consider our mission successful if this work […] contributes, even a little, to the visibility and appreciation of what may be the most interesting part of our national history, in that it shows how and at the cost of what sacrifices a country wins and maintains its perpetually contested liberties.]

Second, his book gave the public access to specialized information about architectural history. In particular, he used his fame to reinforce, for a large public, many of the contested ideas about Gothic architecture that he had inherited from previous scholars and had presented in a variety of scholarly venues: speeches to the Académie des Beaux-Arts, articles in the Annales archéologiques, Entretiens sur l’architecture (1863–72), and the ten-volume Dictionnaire raisonné. Among them are the theory that the Gothic is not a ‘barbaric’ or ‘weak’ 72 

Viollet-le-Duc, Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale, p. 268. Hetzel presented Viollet-le-Duc to readers as a master scientist: ‘il était à l’architecture, à l’histoire et à l’archéologie, ce qu’avait été le grand Cuvier à l’histoire naturelle. Les œuvres savantes de Viollet-le-Duc resteront à jamais au-dessus de la discussion des partis. Nous adjurons les parents de nos lecteurs de les considérer comme nécessaires à toute éducation sérieuse’ (he was to architecture, to history, and to archaeology what the great Cuvier was to natural history. The scientific works of Viollet-le-Duc will always remain above the fray. We implore the parents of our readers to consider them necessary for serious education); Magasin d’éducation et de récréation, 30 (1879), 347. Hetzel had waxed similarly enthusiastic in volume 18 (1872–73), 81. 74  Viollet-le-Duc, Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale, pp. 276–77. 73 

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style, but rational, logical, and secular. Its origin lies not with the Goths, but with the development of the commune and its alliance with the bishops. Similarly, the rise of the cathedral in the twelfth century constituted a protest against nobles and formed the basis of French national unity. He also repeats his belief that architecture is a central element of civilization, the result of collective need at particular times and places.75 This was certainly the case of the cathedral of Clusy. Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale thus became a repository of those theories Viollet-le-Duc most wanted to encourage the public to retain, a kind of ‘greatest hits’ of his previous writings. The hybrid form of the children’s book — part text and part illustration — worked to his advantage, the images attracting the reader’s curiosity, the text giving him a pulpit from which to elaborate on them.76 Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale thus collected, summarized, and underlined — in an inexpensive illustrated format with a large print run — those ideas and concepts he considered most important. Third and perhaps most importantly, for this volume, Viollet-le-Duc focused on the Gothic cathedral as the ultimate symbol of social solidarity. As the Church sought to reinvest cathedrals with religious significance, particularly through appeals to children and the lower classes, Viollet-le-Duc attempted to wrest ‘his’ cathedral from such associations. Although the book is anticlerical, it is less so than originally intended. He had planned to write a stand-alone volume (Histoire d’une cathédrale) that would reveal that cathedrals were not religious, but secular: the early clergy’s nationalism had been perverted in the fourteenth century by despotic and greedy bishops.77 Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale, while not so harsh, still downplays the religious aspects of Gothic architecture, repeating over and over again, like a republican catechism, that its development was inextricably linked to the town’s evolution as a commune: 75 

He expresses this idea in the article ‘Architecture’, written for Dictionnaire de pédagogie et d’instruction primaire, ed. by Ferdinand Buisson, 2 vols (Paris: Hachette, 1887–88), i.1 (1887), 101–02, while his theories about the ‘evolution’ of Gothic architecture and their political origins, as well as the importance of the cathedral as a national symbol occur in the first pages of the ‘Cathédrale’ entry of the Dictionnaire raisonné, ii, 280–85. 76  He was delighted to create complementary text and image for the series. See Archives Hetzel (17 July 1874, fols 224–25); reprinted in Viollet-le-Duc, Lettres inédites, pp. 146–47. 77  Reprinted in Viollet-le-Duc, Lettres inédites, pp. 148–49. In the same letter, Viollet-leDuc describes the two volumes as follows: ‘La cathédrale qui représente son unité morale [de la cité] et une partie de son indépendance en face de la féodalité, l’hôtel de ville, qui représente ses luttes politiques et ses libertés municipales’.

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Ce que nous avons voulu montrer, c’est comment et pourquoi la cathédrale est, au même titre que la maison de ville, le monument de la cité, le signe visible des efforts, à un certain moment, pour se constituer en face du pouvoir féodal.78 [We have hoped to show how and why the cathedral is, like the town hall, a city’s monument, the visible sign of a certain period’s efforts to constitute itself against feudal power.]

In Viollet-le-Duc’s book the cathedral is more of a town hall than the town hall itself. While hôtels de ville were burnt or destroyed after every new political revolt, the cathedrals — ‘ces grands monuments des cités françaises par excellence et dûs au génie des populations urbaines’ (these great monuments par excellence of French cities, created by the genius of urban populations) — were spared because of their alliances to Church, people, and politics.79 Ironically, however, Viollet-le-Duc’s fiction denied the cathedral the importance he gave it in his scholarly works. By shifting emphasis from the cathedral as primary subject — of description, analysis, or restoration — and by transforming it into a by-product of French history, he elided, for readers, its aesthetic and religious originality. By presenting Clusy as a prototype for all French cities — ‘L’histoire de la ville de Clusy est l’histoire de la plupart de nos grandes communes’ (The story of the city of Clusy is the story of most of our great towns)80 — his ‘histoire d’une cathédrale’ (story of a cathedral) becomes the story of ‘la cathédrale’ (the cathedral), the archetypal cathedral. In Viollet-le-Duc’s children’s book, la cathédrale is a national monument, a concept evoked to testify to the struggles of French history. In the book, readers learn more about their duties as good patriots than about either the town hall or the cathedral. Physical descriptions are subordinated to fictionalized historical events and social forces to such an extent that the book might more appropriately have been entitled ‘l’histoire d’une ville’ (the story of a city), as Buloz had suggested. This is a variant of what Kevin Murphy has said about Violletle-Duc’s reconstruction of Vézelay where reconstruction ‘drained’ the edifice of its religious connotations in making it a reflection of the state.81 But unlike Vézelay, a real structure, there was no real cathedral of Clusy for people to visit. 78 

Viollet-le-Duc, Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale, p. 274. Viollet-le-Duc, Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale, p. 275. 80  Viollet-le-Duc, Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale, p. 272. 81  Kevin D. Murphy, Memory and Modernity: Viollet-le-Duc at Vézelay (Uni­ver­sity Park: Pennsylvania State Uni­ver­sity Press, 2000), pp. 5–7. 79 

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Figure 3.6. Viollet-le-Duc, title page of Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale, private collection.

Despite its shortcomings, Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale provides the modern reader with valuable information about those of Violletle-Duc’s theories which he most wanted the public to retain. While it can be dismissed as a mere children’s book, it is precisely its accessibility as a work of popular culture that makes it worthy of study. This new semi-fictional, semihistorical genre allowed Viollet-le-Duc to publicize and embellish his theories in ways that were not acceptable in more scholarly venues, thus giving him free reign to extrapolate. It is the enthusiasm of these extrapolations that is so interesting for understanding Viollet-le-Duc at the end of his career. Rewriting the history of the cathedral as he rewrote French history, the book became a work of republican propaganda, proposing an ideal and idealized cathedral that corresponded more to Viollet-le-Duc’s desires than to historical reality. Clusy is, as Klaus Niehr, has put it, his ‘perfect’ cathedral.

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The image of Viollet-le-Duc on the title page of Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale (Figure 3.6) epitomizes his role as visionary: surrounded by manu­scripts and deep in reflection behind a medi­e val lectern, the fuzzy forms of characters and the spires of a cathedral rise in a haze behind him as if emerging fully formed from his scholarly mind. The concentration on his face as he writes and the brambles forming a frame underneath seem to suggest the difficulties of his task. The motto on Clusy’s shield — ‘AVALSAE PLUMAE REVIVISCUNT’ (Figure 3.4) — is reproduced on the previous page of Viollet-le-Duc’s text. While ostensibly reflecting Clusy’s phoenix-like resurrection from flames, taken in conjunction with the title page it suggests the quill-wielding author’s power to resuscitate the past. As much as modern scholars may criticize Viollet-le-Duc for this seemingly fanciful work of popularization, his propaganda for the cathedral proved invaluable to its survival in an increasingly secular modern France.82 Like the fictional mayor of Clusy, who appealed to his contemporaries’ patriotism in convincing them not to destroy the cathedral of Clusy, Viollet-le-Duc, too, persuaded the generation that would be responsible for drafting the laws to separate church and state to consider cathedrals as national monuments.83 By furthering the notion that cathedral, town hall, and French nation were inseparable, he encouraged the French to see in the cathedral what they would: a house of worship, a meeting place, an artistic marvel, or a testament to French genius. In this manner, conflicting visions of the cathedral could be safely contained once the structure itself was labelled ‘national monument’, a figure vital to all of France. As a work of propaganda, Viollet-le-Duc’s Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale did exactly what its author had intended: it inspired in French readers a love of their nation while teaching them to appreciate Gothic architecture as an integral component of their shared history. 82 

Cathedrals became widely accepted as national monuments to the extent that, in the 1880s, the Ministry of Arts and the Ministry of Cults debated fiercely about which service should maintain them. After the separation of church and state in 1905, a number of cathedrals were spared as ‘historical monuments’ while many smaller churches were disaffected or vandalized because they enjoyed no such consideration under the law. See Jean-Michel Leniaud, Les Cathédrales au xixe siècle (Paris: Economica, 1993), pp. 72–76, and the final chapter of Elizabeth Emery’s Romancing the Cathedral. 83  Indeed, it is not surprising to find echoes of his thoughts in the arguments for conserving cathedrals that were presented to the government in the debates surrounding the separation of church and state. Marcel Proust’s ‘La Mort des cathédrales’, for example, was published in Le Figaro (16 August 1904) and used to influence deputies.

The Gothic Cathedral and Historiographies of Space Kevin D. Murphy Henri Lefebvre (1901–1999) writes in The Production of Space that no ‘reading of the space’ of Romanesque churches and their surroundings (towns or monasteries), for example, can in any way help us to predict the space of socalled Gothic churches or understand their preconditions and prerequisites: the growth of the towns, the revolutions of the communes, the activity of the guilds, and so on. This space was produced before being read; nor was it produced in order to be read and grasped, but rather to be lived by people with bodies and lives in their own particular urban context.1

Lefebvre’s scepticism regarding the use of the term ‘Gothic’ notwithstanding,2 he nevertheless points to a central, but sometimes overlooked, aspect of Gothic 1 

Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. by Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 143. Yi-Fu Tuan writes of cathedrals in similarly experiential terms: ‘In the Middle Ages a great cathedral instructs on several levels. There is the direct appeal to the senses, to feeling and the subconscious mind. The building’s centrality and commanding presence are immediately registered. Here is mass — the weight of stone and of authority — and yet the towers soar. These are not self-conscious and retrospective interpretations; they are the response of the body’. Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: Uni­ver­sity of Minnesota Press, 1977), p. 114. 2  For a critique of the term ‘Gothic’, see Marvin Trachtenberg, ‘Suger’s Miracles, Branner’s Bourges: Reflections on “Gothic Architecture” as Medi­e val Modernism’, Gesta, 39.2 (2000), 183–205. Kevin D. Murphy ([email protected]) is Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Humanities and Professor and Chair of the Department of History of Art at Vanderbilt Uni­ ver­sity, Nashville, Tennessee.

The Idea of the Gothic Cathedral: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Meanings of the Medieval Edifice in the Modern Period, ed. by Stephanie A. Glaser, RITUS 9 (Turn­hout: Brepols, 2018) pp. 131–146 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.RITUS-EB.5.115738

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architecture: its spatial character that is experienced by bodies rather than being read like a text. To suggest that the spatial qualities of medi­eval architecture have been under-studied might seem paradoxical: after all, commentators as far back as Abbot Suger discussed the interior effects of Gothic churches and cathedrals. And yet, as I will argue, both the nineteenth-century structural interpretations of the Gothic and twentieth-century studies of historical memory drew attention away from the cathedral as a space. While building upon recent scholarship on historicism, the three prior essays in this section can provide a point of departure for reimagining the critique of nineteenthcentury historicism, as embodied in the cathedral, which is what I propose to do here. This new conception will employ some of the key texts associated with the ‘spatial turn’ in the humanities in order to move beyond the textual interpretations of nineteenth-century historicism inspired principally by the foundational work of historian Pierre Nora. Using some theoretical conceptions of space in combination with the main points brought out by Matilde Mateo, Michael J. Lewis, and Elizabeth Emery, we can begin to formulate an interpretation of historicism as manifested in the nineteenth-century conception of the Gothic that goes beyond ‘reading’ its many manifestations to understanding how neo-Gothic, restored Gothic, or imagined Gothic spaces were produced and lived. For their potential to present history as a lived experience was the very thing, I would suggest, that made Gothic spaces so important to the nineteenth century. The essays in this section illustrate how the Gothic Revival, which began in the eighteenth century, had extended across Europe by the mid-nineteenth century and expanded in scope. The authors demonstrate that in Spain, Germany, and France, the concerns of the earlier Gothic Revival had grown enormously by the middle of the nineteenth century to encompass the material representation of a nation’s past as well as its future. In the previous century, as any number of authors have shown, a renewed interest in Gothic architecture had emerged simultaneously in buildings, literature, and material culture.3 Key examples of this phenomenon are Horace Walpole’s (1717–1797) Strawberry Hill, Twickenham (begun 1749), and William Beckford’s (1760–1844) Fonthill Abbey, Wiltshire (begun 1796, see Leniaud, Figure 10.9). In addition to having built fantastic houses, the two men were also the authors of Gothic 3 

Kenneth Clark, The Gothic Revival (1928; repr. London: Murray, 1996); Georg Germann, The Gothic Revival in Europe and Britain: Sources, Influences and Ideas (Cam­bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1973); Michael J. Lewis, The Gothic Revival (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002).

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novels, respectively The Castle of Otranto (1764) and Vathek (1786–87). With its soaring central hall and Gothic design elements, Fonthill was a sublime historicist space, as sensational as Beckford’s writing was. In fact, Beckford was so much more interested in the space of Fonthill that he paid relatively scant attention to the quality of its construction, and it consequently collapsed by the mid-1820s. Beckford’s is an extreme case of valuing Gothic space over Gothic structure, but eighteenth-century Romanticism also inspired other treatments of Gothic architecture that in similar ways emphasized the spatial effects of medi­ eval buildings. For example, the French neoclassical architect Jacques-Germain Soufflot (1713–1780), at a time when the Gothic was disparaged by some, wrote in explicit defence of it. He described the interior of Notre-Dame de Paris as offering shifting perspectives for the embodied viewer, as previous commentators have noted. Soufflot wrote, ‘the spectator, as he advances, and as he moves away, distinguishes in the distance a thousand objects, at one moment found, at another lost again, offering him delightful spectacles’.4 The British poet Thomas Gray (1716–1771) made a similar point while on the Grand Tour with Horace Walpole in 1739, finding that he preferred the cathedrals of Amiens and Reims to the Palace of Versailles on the basis of (as Barrett Kalter has pointed out) ‘the Gothic’s diverse features, its hidden or tangled forms and chiaroscuro, all of which could change dramatically according to changes in the viewer’s position’. The possibility of creating one’s own viewing experience was a freedom, argues Kalter, precluded by the formal buildings and gardens of Versailles which were visually restrictive in comparison: ‘Gothicism offered a space from the past that could be inhabited freely in the present’ (my emphasis).5 The implications of this eighteenth-century association of Gothic space with freedom for the subsequent century will be explored later. Soufflot’s analysis of the spatial and visual complexities of Gothic interiors was overshadowed by pervasive French theoretical debates that centred on issues of structure, with regard to both classical and Gothic architecture, 4  Jacques-Germain Soufflot, ‘Mémoire sur l’architecture gothique’ [1741], in Michael Petzet, Soufflots Sainte-Geneviève und der französische Kirchenbau des 18. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 1961), pp. 135–41 (p. 138); Peter Collins, Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture, 1750–1950, 2nd edn (Montréal: McGill-Queen’s Uni­ver­sity Press, 1998), pp. 26–28; Yve-Alain Bois, ‘A Picturesque Stroll around Clara-Clara’, trans. by John Shepley, October, 29 (1984), 32–62 (pp. 40–42). The translation of the passage from Soufflot is by Collins. 5  Barrett Kalter, ‘DIY Gothic: Thomas Gray and the Medi­e val Revival,’ English Literary History, 70.4 (2003), 989–1019 (pp. 996–97).

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through the Graeco-Gothic tradition. Among the architects and critics who spoke for this concept was Julien-David Leroy (1724–1803), who argued in the mid- to late eighteenth century that ‘a renewal of French architecture would result from the combination of Greek forms and Gothic structural techniques, describing Soufflot’s Church of Sainte-Geneviève and Pierre Contant d’Ivry’s Church of the Madeleine as products of such thinking’. This influential tradition had an impact in France through the nineteenth century when EugèneEmmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814–1879) focused attention on the vaulting in stone of large spaces as the principal problem underlying Gothic architecture.6 Viollet-le-Duc emphasized structural concerns in his well-known writings and drawings of Gothic churches and cathedrals, and in the actual restoration work he carried out on surviving medi­e val buildings with the patronage of the Commission des Monuments historiques. The Inspector General of Historic Monuments for whom he worked, Prosper Mérimée (1803–1870), shared with the architect a deep distrust of the Church as an institution which asserted its practical interests in religious buildings against the view of medi­ eval (especially Gothic) architecture held by many influential government architects and bureaucrats. These latter saw it as evidence of French national cultural attainment. Viollet-le-Duc reconceptualized the original functions of Gothic interiors as communal meeting places rather than as containers for particular liturgies or as embodiments of the heavenly Jerusalem, as they were sometimes conceived to be. As Elizabeth Emery points out in her essay in this section, Viollet-le-Duc’s functionalist view of Gothic space persisted even in the children’s book he wrote late in his life, Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale (1878), where he describes how the vaulted space of the cathedral allowed a large number of inhabitants to enter, circulate, deliberate, and leave efficiently. His emphasis was thus on the programmatic suitability of Gothic space rather than on its visual qualities. As much as Viollet-le-Duc was well known for having emphasized the ostensible rationalism of Gothic construction, he nonetheless participated in a countervailing consideration of the medi­eval mode as potentially destabilizing, threatening, and emotionally overwhelming. Indeed, the tone of earlier writing by Walpole and Beckford played up this potential. While Viollet-le-Duc called attention to what he saw as the rational structure of the Gothic, his entire intel6 

Christopher Drew Armstrong, Julien-David Leroy and the Making of Architectural History (London: Routledge, 2012), p. 14; Robin D. Middleton, ‘The Abbé de Cordemoy and the Graeco-Gothic Ideal: A Prelude to Romantic Classicism’, Part I, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 25 (1962), 278–320, and Part II, 26 (1963), 90–123.

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lectual undertaking, as Martin Bressani has recently shown, was animated by a ‘primal event’ at Notre-Dame de Paris where he was so emotionally overcome by the space that he had to be removed from the building by a servant who had accompanied him.7 Viollet-le-Duc’s generally clear-eyed perspective on the Gothic interior would be challenged by the influential author J.-K. Huysmans (1848–1907) in his book La Cathédrale (1898) and other works that followed his conversion to Catholicism in 1892. In sharp contrast to Viollet-le-Duc’s appreciation of the cathedral, for Huysmans its value was spiritual. In Romancing the Cathedral Elizabeth Emery comments that Huysmans considered cathedrals to be ‘the great spiritual arks of religious art and faith that have sustained Catholicism through the years’.8 Interestingly, Huysmans emphasizes the function of the cathedral, here Notre-Dame de Chartres, as container, that is, as a volume of space that is transformed by its decorative programme, including stained glass. The fin-de-siècle evocations of the almost hallucinatory effects of the Gothic interior stand in contrast, however, to the continuing emphasis on Gothic structure, especially in France. Certain important exceptions notwithstanding (such as Erwin Panofsky’s (1892–1968) Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (1951)),9 twentieth-century scholarship on Gothic architecture continued to emphasize structural concerns, in particular, the pursuit of ever more effective vaulting techniques that produced the soaring spaces of the ‘High Gothic’ monuments of the Île-de-France. In this view, Gothic architecture in countries other than France — for instance, England and Spain — was construed as peripheral to the central historiographical narrative at best, and as formally

7 

Martin Bressani, Architecture and the Historical Imagination: Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), p. 4. 8  Elizabeth Emery, Romancing the Cathedral: Gothic Architecture in Fin-de-Siècle French Culture (New York: SUNY Press, 2001), p. 110. J.-K. Huysmans, La Cathédrale (Monaco: Editions du Rocher, 1992). Writing about the smaller church of Saint-Séverin, on the Left Bank in Paris, Huysmans also emphasized spatial concerns: see La Bièvre et Saint-Séverin (Paris: Stock, 1898). In the early twentieth century, Huysmans’s writings would inspire the Cubist painter Robert Delaunay (1885–1941) who depicted the interior of Saint-Séverin in ways that emphasized the transformative effects of the stained-glass windows on the light that infiltrated the interior: see Kevin D. Murphy, ‘Cubism and the Gothic Tradition’, in Architecture and Cubism, ed. by Eve Blau and Nancy J. Troy (Montréal: Canadian Centre for Architecture; Cam­bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), pp. 59–76. 9  Erwin Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism: An Inquiry into the Analogy of the Arts, Philosophy, and Religion in the Middle Ages (Latrobe, PA: Archabbey Press, 1951).

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odd at worst.10 Not incidentally, some of the more historiographically marginal forms of the Gothic — for instance, the English late Gothic — offered the most complex vaulting and, hence, most varied viewing experiences of any medi­eval buildings. The force of much nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature on the Gothic was, returning to Lefebvre’s terms, to prompt later students of historicism to analyse how churches and cathedrals were read rather than lived in succeeding centuries. In part, the textual analysis of the nineteenth-century histories of Gothic buildings resulted from mid-twentieth-century interests in semiotics and structuralism which crossed many disciplinary boundaries. In Mythologies (1957) Roland Barthes (1915–1980), for example, unpacked the way that the ubiquitous Blue Guide flattened out the European landscape into something to be read about rather than experienced. Barthes pointed to the way that the written descriptions of the Christian monuments dominating the Blue Guide worked against an actual historical understanding of place: To select only monuments suppresses at one stroke the reality of the land and that of its people, it accounts for nothing of the present, that is, nothing historical, and as a consequence, the monuments themselves become undecipherable, therefore senseless.11

Barthes was critical of the way that the Blue Guide operated in concert with the development of modern high-speed travel to ensure that tourists never experienced a destination as a real place to be lived, but instead as a text to be read in accordance with the directives offered by the travel literature. Although Barthes criticized the propensity of modern tourists to read the landscape, nonetheless, his approach — and semiotics more generally — inspired others to read how history was constructed in many sorts of texts, guidebooks among them. From there it was possible to analyse how historical writing had shaped the ways that particular buildings were treated in the course of restoration, how historicist buildings were designed, and so on. Thus, the buildings (and other objects) themselves came to be subjected to semiotic analysis. Later poststructuralist authors (such as Michel Foucault (1926–1984)) would use architectural forms 10 

Lisa Reilly, ‘Beating their Swords into Set Squares’, in Perspectives for an Architecture of Solitude: Essays on Cistercians, Art and Architecture in Honour of Peter Fergusson, ed. by Terryl L. Kinder (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), pp. 369–76. See also Matilde Mateo’s essay in this volume. 11  Roland Barthes, Mythologies [1957], trans. by Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), pp. 74–77 (p. 76).

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as metaphors, but this also led to a dismantling of any distinctions between buildings and writings, as this way of thinking considered both as texts to be unravelled.12 Given that a piece of historical writing and a building could both participate in the constitution of a ‘discourse’, historicist architecture could be seen not simply as a reflection of historical concerns articulated elsewhere, in writing, but instead as themselves participants in the figurative construction of a particular, ideological view of the past. The critique of the ideology of such historic narratives — embodied in writings but also in places and objects — is, at least in part, what Pierre Nora brought about with his massive research and interpretive project, Les Lieux de Mémoire. Several volumes were published in France around the time of the bicentennial of the French Revolution in 1989, as is well known, and later selections were published in English translation.13 But perhaps the most influential of Nora’s texts in the English-speaking world was the introduction to the first volume of Les Lieux de Mémoire which was published in English translation in the journal Representations in 1989. There, Nora laid out the fundamental principles behind his project; the concept of space was never raised in that context. Instead, Nora contrasted ‘lieux de mémoire’ with ‘milieux de mémoire’: ‘There are lieux de mémoire, sites of memory, because there are no longer milieux de mémoire, real environments of memory’. For Nora, modernity brought with it the collapse of traditional memory which was hitherto replaced by history, the latter produced for and by institutions, especially the state in the industrialized West. Where milieux de mémoire are authentic and organic, lieux de mémoire are at best fake; at worst, they are cynically deployed by institutions to lend them a kind of ersatz legitimacy in the absence of real historical memory that would ground them in tradition.14 Whatever qualifications one might now make to Nora’s distinction between memory and history, what is notable in this context is his avoidance of the term ‘space’ (or its French equivalent), for in the years leading up to the appearance 12 

Paul Hirst, ‘Foucault and Architecture’, AA Files, no. 26 (1993), 52–60. Les Lieux de Mémoire, ed. by Pierre Nora, 3 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1984–92). Two English versions exist, both directed by Nora: an abridged one, Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, ed. by Lawrence D. Kritzman, trans. by Arthur Goldhammer, 3 vols (New York: Columbia Uni­ver­sity Press, 1996–98); and a four-volume translation, Rethinking France: Les Lieux de Mémoire (various translators), trans. directed by David P. Jordan (Chicago: Uni­ver­sity of Chicago Press, 2001–10). 14  Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, trans. by Marc Roudebush, Representations, 26 (1989), 7–25 (pp. 7–8). 13 

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of Les Lieux de Mémoire a ‘spatial turn’ had already emerged in the humanities, as has already been observed, and in France a virtual explosion of literature on space had just taken place. From the 1980s onward, the Cartesian concept of space as ‘absolute’ and ‘objective’, as an empty container that could be filled by objects, was replaced by a more dynamic conception whereby ‘any space is contingent upon the specific objects and processes through which it is constructed and observed. Questions of space become epistemological rather than ontological’. According to Denis Cosgrove, one implication of this new approach to space has been a turn away from ‘the structural explanations and grand narratives that dominated so much twentieth-century scholarship’ and a turn toward ‘more culturally and geographically nuanced work’.15 Decades earlier, Lefebvre had advanced his notion of the production of space, to which I will return below, but his was not the only important work on space to appear in the years leading up to Nora’s project. Among the more important was Gaston Bachelard’s (1884–1962) Poetics of Space which first appeared in French as La Poétique de l’espace in 1957.16 Although Bachelard’s focus on the oneiric house may make him less relevant in the context of monumental public buildings, he nonetheless emphasized the experience of architecture, an approach that contrasts quite strongly with the textual readings of historic monuments in which Nora and his followers engaged. The twentieth-century disinclination to think about cathedrals as space had emerged, at least in part, from the earlier historiography of Gothic architecture. Nineteenth-century European debates about architectural style, which regularly saw the Gothic as an expression of national identity, tended to draw attention away from space and instead direct it to form as a metaphor for historical development. This interpretive strategy began at least as early as the 1820s with the Romantic rationalist generation of French architects — Félix Duban (1798–1870), Léon Vaudoyer (1803–1872), Henri Labrouste (1801–1875), and Joseph-Louis Duc (1802–1879) — who challenged ‘academic orthodoxy and the influential Neoclassical doctrine’ of the Academy, and who

15 

Denis Cosgrove, ‘Landscape and Landschaft’, lecture delivered at the ‘Spatial Turn in History’ Symposium German Historical Institute, February 19, 2004, GHI Bulletin, no. 35 (2004), 57–71 (pp. 58, 57). See also Thomas F. Gieryn, ‘A Space for Place in Sociology’, Annual Review of Sociology, 26 (2000), 463–96. 16  Joan Ockman, Review of The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard, Harvard Design Magazine, no. 6 (1998), 1–4; Gaston Bachelard, La Poétique de l’espace (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1957).

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saw the history of France and its institutions worked out in the stylistic evolution of its great monuments, an insight into the very nature of history which they sought to make palpable for the general public through restoration of national monuments.17

For example, as Richard Wittman has shown, the Château of Blois in the Loire Valley, which was comprised of a heterodox group of buildings dating from the medi­eval period through the Renaissance, was restored by Duban starting in 1843 in a way that emphasized the succession of historical periods it represented.18 Also in the 1840s and with equal opposition to the classical leanings of the Academy, Viollet-le-Duc and his collaborator on the restoration of NotreDame de Paris, architect Jean-Baptiste Lassus (1807–1857), tried to demonstrate that the Gothic was a highly sophisticated system, based on the most rigorously logical and rational solutions to structural problems, and that it had achieved an unimpeachable clarity and perfection in the sophisticated and daring structures of the thirteenth century in the Île-de-France.19

The concerns of Viollet-le-Duc and many other nineteenth-century architects and historians were pre-eminently with Gothic structure, and Viollet’s famous writings, in particular his Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française du xie au xvie siècle (1854–68), even embodied, according to Hubert Damisch, a structuralist logic of organization.20 Since Bachelard opposed a phenomenological approach to space to a structuralist one, his treatment of memory and the way that it related to architectural space was correspondingly different. And whereas Nora was concerned with historical memory and the means by which it inhered in monuments, Bachelard treated memory from a personal perspective, and the spatial locus of it was the house. For Bachelard, in contrast to Nora, memory was hardly relegated to the past before the advent of modernity, but still clung to certain kinds of ‘environments’, to borrow Nora’s term.

17 

Barry Bergdoll, ‘The Ideal of the Gothic Cathedral in 1852’, in A. W. N. Pugin: Master of the Gothic Revival, ed. by Paul Atterbury (New Haven: Yale Uni­ver­sity Press, 1995), pp. 103–35 (p. 107). 18  Richard Wittman, ‘Félix Duban’s Didactic Restoration of the Château de Blois: A History of France in Stone’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 55.4 (1996), 412–34. 19  Bergdoll, ‘The Ideal of the Gothic Cathedral’, p. 109. 20  Hubert Damisch, ‘The Space Between: A Structuralist Approach to the Dictionary’, Architectural Design Profile, nos 3–4 (1980), 84–89.

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Because he considers such different spaces than does Nora, and given his dissimilar methodological perspective, Bachelard may offer relatively few insights into the lieux de mémoire. Lefebvre’s widely influential Production of Space, in contrast, provides a conceptual model that can extend Nora’s reading of historic monuments and build on the understandings offered by the essays in this section. Although a comprehensive review of Lefebvre’s text is beyond the scope of this essay, a brief consideration of some of his major points will open onto a new conception of the spatial aspects of the nineteenth-century cathedral. The three elements of Lefebvre’s discussion of ‘social space’ are key here. The first is ‘spatial practice’, which for him includes ‘the built environment, urban morphology and the creation of zones for specific purposes’. For Lefebvre, this is a ‘perceived space, which embodies the interrelations between institutional practices and daily experiences and routines’. Second, ‘representations of space are connected with the “dominant order” of any society and hence with its codes, signs and knowledge about space’. This is an abstracted space, ‘discursively constructed by professionals and technocrats — planners, developers, urbanists, social engineers and scientists […]. It is the dominant discourses of space in a given society’. Third, Spaces of representation embody complex symbolisms linked to the “clandestine or underground” side of social life […]. It is the lived space; the space of inhabitants and users as well as of some artists and writers, the space they incessantly seek to create through appropriation of the environment.

These appropriations can be part of comprehensive artistic projects, as well as ‘more modest everyday appropriations of space’.21 The Gothic cathedral played a role in all of these spaces in the nineteenth century. It was often, if not always, part of urban space; it was increasingly subject (as the discussion of Viollet-leDuc’s drawings has already suggested) to representations of space; and finally, it was a space of representation to the degree that it was subject to attempted appropriations by various constituencies. Notre-Dame de Paris again provides a useful example. Much of the existing scholarship on its restoration has aimed at untangling the choices made by Viollet-le-Duc and Lassus when faced with a building which had a long and complicated building history during the Middle Ages and which had been the subject of an equally prolonged and fraught restoration, starting around 1800.22 21  This summary is based on Kirsten Simonsen, ‘Bodies, Sensations, Space and Time: The Contribution from Henri Lefebvre’, Geografiska Annaler. Series B, Human Geography, 87.1 (2005), 1–14 (pp. 6–7). 22  I detail the history of the restoration in ch. 2 of my unpublished doctoral dissertation,

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Figure 4.1. Bisson Frères, NotreDame de Paris, façade, photograph, 48 × 31 cm, Paris, Musée d’Orsay. Second half of nineteenth century. © bpk / RMN — Grand Palais / Béatrice Hatala.

The restored building can be read as a ‘text’ on the Gothic that corresponds to other texts produced by Viollet-le-Duc, including his Dictionnaire. Both Viollet-le-Duc’s writings on the Gothic style and the well-known drawings he and Lassus prepared to accompany the restoration proposal for Notre-Dame produced representational spaces, in Lefebvre’s sense. Yet the restored NotreDame can also be thought of in terms of Lefebvre’s other categories: those of spatial practice and spaces of representation. Notre-Dame occupied an impor‘Memory and Modernity: Architectural Restoration in France, 1830–1848’ (Northwestern Uni­ver­sity, 1992).

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tant point in Paris, on the Île de la Cité, where it was visible from both the Right and Left Banks. Its island neighbourhood on the Seine was a congested one of medi­eval streets and narrow buildings in the early nineteenth century: it was impoverished and subject to a high incidence of cholera. The restoration of Notre-Dame occasioned the reconceptualization of the space of the Île de la Cité by architects and other agents of the national government. Continuing into the Second Empire (1852–70), the site work included the establishment of a small garden at the east end of the cathedral, a walk along the Seine at the south side, and the expansive parvis at the west. The opening up of the Île de la Cité was part of a reconceptualization of the cathedral’s site in the manner of an English monument, typically set in the midst of greenery.23 At the same time that Notre-Dame and its setting were subject to representations of space, they were also representational spaces. Throughout the nineteenth century, politicians and government agencies took steps to insure that the building and its surroundings were subject to what they saw as appropriate practices: they sought to preclude its use by lower-class residents of the neighbourhood, and they endorsed aspects of the restoration that erased evidence of political conflict, for example, by calling for the repair of the Gallery of Kings which had been battered during the revolution.24 Conceptually similar to Lefebvre’s notion of representational space is Yi-Fu Tuan’s concept of ‘space’ as opposed to ‘place’. This distinction has been further developed since it was originally advanced in the mid-1970s. Patricia Fumerton, for example, has built upon it in the course of analysing how the working poor in early modern England developed ‘unsettled subjectivities’ in the course of carrying out labour that was not, and could not, be done in a fixed location, such as seafaring. Reading Yi-Fu Tuan alongside Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau’s (1925–1986) Practice of Everyday Life (1980), Fumerton maintains that ‘together, these studies unmoor conventional place to make room for space: as a state of consciousness, as constructed, as mobile, and as free’. As a modern example of place Fumerton offers

23 

Jean-Michel Leniaud, ‘Vol d’oiseau sur la Cité’, in Autour de Notre-Dame, ed. by Alain Erlande-Bradenburg and others (Paris: Action Artistique de la Ville de Paris, 2003), pp. 209–24 (p. 216). 24  I discuss these issues in more detail in my article ‘The Historic Building in the Modernized City: The Cathedrals of Paris and Rouen in the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Urban History, 37.2 (2010), 278–96. The article was based on the talk I gave, at the kind invitation of Stephanie Glaser, for the conference she organized in 2005 at the Uni­ver­sity of Copenhagen.

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one’s home or workplace, where familiar and predictable activities occur. Space is more strange, shifting and malleable, more open to be differently inhabited or used, like an airport lounge area. Of course, these terms are not mutually exclusive: places can become spaces, and vice versa, depending on their use.25

The freedom of use and viewing that eighteenth-century observers associated with Gothic churches and cathedrals is echoed in this definition of space. Indeed, returning to the example of Notre-Dame de Paris, the distinction between space and place becomes a useful way to think about its nineteenthcentury transformation: when the cathedral was embedded in a dense, lowerclass neighbourhood, it was part of a space in which the residents related to it in a variety of ways; in contrast, when opened up in the course of its restoration, the area in and around Notre-Dame was to be used in ‘predictable’ and respectful ways that were consistent with how officials believed the public should interact with monuments of national significance. Indeed, Notre-Dame was considered central to the space of Paris and to the space of the nation: its importance was seen to be national. While it has often been acknowledged that support for the restoration of medi­eval churches and cathedrals grew out of nationalist sentiments and contributed to the creation of national cultural identity throughout Europe, these motivations can and should be thought of in spatial terms. The nation was a spatial concept, at least in part, and Gothic buildings presented the nation in three-dimensional space, as the essays in this section demonstrate.26 Viollet-le-Duc’s Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale, already referred to, presented the fictitious cathedral of ‘Clusy’ as the product of the national history of France, implicitly endorsing the republican cause by showing the building project to have been generated by the people and to have represented their epic struggles for liberty, as Elizabeth Emery demonstrates. Emery suggests that so closely did Viollet-le-Duc identify the cathedral with local, communal identity and with the nation that the building itself was elided in 25  Patricia Fumerton, Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England (Chicago: Uni­ver­sity of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 53–54. The Practice of Everyday Life is the translation of Michel de Certeau’s L’Invention du quotidien, vol. i, Arts de faire (Paris: Gallimard, 1980). 26  In Les Lieux de Mémoire Nora emphasizes the concept of the nation as a space, considering the implications of the establishment of France’s borders, as well as the relationship between provinces and regions on the one hand, and the national state on the other. See especially his ‘General Introduction’, trans. by Richard C. Holbrook, in Rethinking France, dir. by Jordan, pp. vii–xxii.

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his text. Nonetheless, even in the book where extra-architectural concerns take prominence, the cathedral remains the central point in a series of spaces that move outward from the building’s interior to the commune and, finally, to the nation itself. These spaces are both physically and conceptually connected: the cathedral (in Viollet-le-Duc’s account) represents the commune’s struggle for liberty which in turn mirrors the larger movement of French history towards the establishment of the Republic. Much as a composite image of a Gothic cathedral occupies a pivotal place in Viollet-le-Duc’s book so, as Michael Lewis observes in his essay, ‘The Gothic Revival in Germany begins and ends with an imaginary cathedral of the future’. He refers here to two well-known works, Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s (1781–1841) 1814 Memorial Cathedral to the Wars of Liberation and Lyonel Feininger’s (1871–1956) expressionist image of a cathedral on the cover of the 1919 Bauhaus manifesto. Chronologically situated between these two imaginary cathedrals was one actual cathedral, completed from 1840 onward: Cologne Cathedral. The project was significant for the construction of German national identity, as Michael Lewis shows here, and throughout Europe where it catalyzed the movement to restore medi­eval buildings. In France, for example, Mérimée used the completion of Cologne Cathedral in the early 1840s to galvanize support for the restoration of the Church of the Madeleine at Vézelay, the first restoration undertaken by Viollet-le-Duc.27 The ambition of the Cologne project was perhaps due to the relative fragility of the concept of the German nation which would only be given physical existence with unification in 1871. An understanding of the dramatic force of the Cologne Cathedral project is facilitated by seeing it in spatial terms, again with recourse to Lefebvre. In The Production of Space he considers two conceptions of the nation, one that sees political borders as more or less ‘natural’ and the other that considers the entire concept of the nation as ideological, ‘as scarcely more than a fiction projected by the bourgeoisie onto its own historical conditions and origins’. As Lefebvre observes, ‘Both of these approaches to the question of the nation […] leave space out of the picture’. From Lefebvre’s Marxist perspective, the nationstate comprises two ‘moments’: the existence of a market and the violence that is used by a political power ‘controlling and exploiting the resources of the market[,] or the growth of the productive forces in order to maintain and further its rule’. The two ‘moments’ then ‘combine forces and produce a space: the space 27 

Kevin D. Murphy, Memory and Modernity: Viollet-le-Duc at Vézelay (Uni­ver­sity Park: Pennsylvania State Uni­ver­sity Press, 2000), p. 131.

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of the nation-state’.28 In this view, the construction of the nation-state, in which the Gothic Revival was implicated, was determined in the last instance by the extension of markets and the establishment of states to protect them. Given the spatial aspect of the nation-state and the political difficulties that attended the establishment of a unified Germany, it is all the more significant that the completion of Cologne Cathedral was so closely connected with the political formation of a German state. As Michael Lewis suggests, the boundaries of a potential unified German state were not self-evident; any number of German-speaking or culturally Germanic areas could have been included. Germany was an abstraction conceived of in a variety of ways in response to diverse political goals. In Lefebvre’s terms, the various ideas of ‘Germany’ were representations of space. Before unification, the states that would make up Germany were perhaps also part of a ‘space’ in Yi-Fu Tuan’s sense, that would only cohere as a ‘place’ — a modern state — when they were brought together politically. If the German nation-state was thus spatially informe and in need of aggressive historical justification, it is important that these objectives were carried out through the creation of a new spatial projection of the nation’s identity — in the form of the completed Cologne Cathedral. The international attention garnered by the project confirms that from a political perspective it ‘worked’: its very scale demanded attention from other nations who correspondingly bolstered their own spatial representations through accelerated programmes of historic preservation. As historians have shown, identification with the nation replaced local and regional affiliations, at least to some degree, over the long period in which state-building took place.29 The spatial radicality of the reconceptualization of the Gothic in the nineteenth century, in response to the establishment of new nation-states, is starkly illustrated in Matilde Mateo’s essay. She brings back into view the nearly forgotten perspective on the Gothic that saw it as having originated through contact between the Arab and Western worlds. As Mateo demonstrates, the ostensibly ‘Moorish’ character of the Gothic was explained by the proximity of Spain to the Moors, and alternatively, by the contact of crusaders with the architectural culture of the Holy Land. While she rejects the earlier formulations of the relationship between Eastern and Western architecture in the Middle Ages, she does suggest that cathedrals such as Seville’s 28 

Lefebvre, The Production of Space, pp. 111–12. See, for instance, Eugen Joseph Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford, CA: Stanford Uni­ver­sity Press, 1976). 29 

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may have been ‘hybrid’, comprising both Christian and Islamic elements. The very hybridity of Spanish Gothic architecture, Mateo argues, contributed to its marginalization in medi­eval architectural history. Where Germany and France claimed cultural superiority on the bases of their canonical Gothic architecture, Spain was denigrated, as a nation, for its supposed failure to produce a correspondingly pure expression. The newly configured space of the European continent overrode earlier conceptual maps that linked the Holy Land with the West; the ‘Moorish-Gothic’ cathedral could no longer be accommodated within the larger spatial conception. Although modern Europe was constructed in political, architectural, and many other kinds of texts, it was also inscribed in space in the nineteenth century. The continent was remapped and its new political entities were tentatively grounded in reworked national histories. Much that was said and written about history at this decisive juncture, as Nora argues, derived from an anxiety that modernization had eradicated traditional ways of knowing about the past, and it had a significant impact on architecture and other aspects of material culture. As much as the analysis of historical texts, and of buildings as historical texts, have contributed to our understanding of historicism, the cathedral was a different sort of text. Spatially, its scale was less than that of the city and the state, but at the same time, its spatial impact on both was profound. And as much as certain nineteenth-century interpretations of the Gothic worked against its appreciation as space, the scale and spatial impact of the Gothic cathedral could not be denied. It is for that reason that the preservation, restoration, and recapitulation (in new works) of the Gothic cathedral in the nineteenth century became such an important national cause throughout Europe.

Part II The Cathedral between Art and Politics

The Anarchist Cathedral Maylis Curie Je crois fermement que nos idées imprégnées de philosophie anarchique se déteignent sur nos œuvres. [I firmly believe that something of our ideas, born as they are of the anarchist philosophy, passes into our works.]1

T

he Third Republic (1870–1940) was a period of intense antagonism between church and state. In a context of widespread anticlericalism on one hand and strong Catholicism on the other, with many different positions in between, Gothic cathedrals were held up as symbols of the various ideals circulating at the time, manifesting the opinions and ideologies of those who promoted them politically or artistically. While writers such as J.-K. Huysmans (1848–1907) (La Cathédrale, 1898) and Émile Mâle (1862–1954) (L’Art religieux du xiiie siècle en France, 1898) praised the religious character of Gothic cathedrals,2 regional artists along with more well-known painters like Claude Monet (1840–1926) with his famous Rouen Cathedral series 1 

Camille Pissarro to his son Lucien, April 1891, quoted in Ralph E. Shikes and Paula Harper, Pissarro, trans. by Marie-Chantal Lévêque (Paris: Flammarion, 1981), p. 268. This is a translation of Shikes and Harper’s original study, Pissarro: His Life and Work (New York: Horizon Press, 1980), from which, unless specified, the English translations are taken; here, p. 226. 2  For more examples, see Elizabeth Emery, Romancing the Cathedral: Gothic Architecture in Fin-de-Siècle French Culture (New York: SUNY Press, 2001) and Joëlle Prungnaud, Figures littéraires de la cathédrale, 1880–1918 (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses du Septentrion, 2008). Maylis Curie ([email protected]) completed her doctoral dissertation in Art History at the Uni­ver­sity of Edinburgh.

The Idea of the Gothic Cathedral: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Meanings of the Medieval Edifice in the Modern Period, ed. by Stephanie A. Glaser, RITUS 9 (Turn­hout: Brepols, 2018) pp. 149–170 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.RITUS-EB.5.115739

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(1892–94) generally turned away from their religious associations.3 As EugèneEmmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814–1879) was leading his nationalist programme of restoration, illustrators of children’s schoolbooks or the many editions of Victor Hugo’s (1802–1885) Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) promoted the cathedral as a national monument or an artistic achievement.4 While republicans appropriated Gothic cathedrals for a national agenda and Catholics praised them for housing the encyclopaedic and symbolic knowledge of the Middle Ages, anarchists, whose ideology presented itself as an alternative to conservatism in government and religion and a solution to what many people felt to be oppression and exploitation in modern society, looked to Gothic cathedrals as products of an anti-hierarchical society, which prized individual freedom and collective labour toward a common good. In fact, around 1898, the year Huysmans published La Cathédrale and Mâle wrote his Art religieux and the time when the conservative, pro-Catholic, and anti-democratic Action Française was founded, Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) and Maximilien Luce (1858–1941), who had both openly declared themselves anarchists, were painting cathedrals: Pissarro in his Rouen series and Luce in his Paris series. Their paintings offer an alternative view of Gothic cathedrals — neither as republican nor as Catholic, but as embodying anarchist ideals of social harmony, non-compulsory labour, and personal liberty. After an overview of anarchism’s appeal to French artists and a brief summary of the meaning of the cathedral within anarchist thought, I will explore the anarchist dimensions of Pissarro’s and Luce’s cathedral paintings.

Anarchism, Aesthetics, and Gothic Cathedrals Anarchism was in part utopian and in part a reaction to the miserable working and living conditions of the labouring class which had been brought about by inequality in social and economic spheres. Anarchism opposed all authoritarian structures, whether societal, political, or religious, as these were seen to 3 

While many artists painted Rouen Cathedral and Notre-Dame de Paris, a great number painted other regional cathedrals; see Maylis Curie, ‘The Representation of the Cathedral in French Visual Culture, 1870–1914’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Uni­ver­sity of Edinburgh, 2005); On Monet, see for example Roland R. Bernier, Monument, Moment, and Memory: Monet’s Cathedral in Fin-de-Siècle France (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell Uni­ver­sity Press, 2007). 4  On Viollet-le-Duc’s nationalist agenda, see for example Kevin  D. Murphy, Memory and Modernity: Viollet-le-Duc at Vézelay (Uni­ver­sity Park: Pennsylvania State Uni­ver­sity Press, 2000). For schoolbooks, see ‘Teaching the Cathedral’, ch. 2 of my ‘The Representation of the Cathedral in French Visual Culture’; on illustrating Notre-Dame de Paris, see Ségolène Le Men, La Cathédrale illustrée de Hugo à Monet: Regard romantique et modernité (Paris: CNRS, 1998).

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limit the liberty of individuals. It thus endorsed personal freedom and supported the organization of society on a voluntary basis without recourse to force or compulsion. Anarchists felt that a radical change would be needed to reach a state of anarchy, and they proposed to abolish the system they lived in through various means: civil disobedience, strikes, passive or active resistance, and especially by diffusing their ideals through verbal and visual propaganda. Their utopian aim was to create a non-hierarchical society in which all authoritarian structures would be abolished through an autonomous collective of selfdetermined individuals. In the late nineteenth century, a number of French artists found anarchist ideals thoroughly compatible with their desires for artistic freedom and especially with their revolt against the imposed taste of the Salon.5 Working in their individual styles, Paul Signac (1863–1935), Pissarro, and Luce felt solidarity with those artists who had been rejected by the Salon. They envisioned themselves as victims of the social order and saw little possibility of earning adequately from their art. In a statement that appears to be a direct attack against the Salon painters, Pissarro wrote: ‘Tous les arts sont anarchistes! Quand c’est beau et bien! Voilà ce que j’en pense’ (‘All the arts are anarchist! When it is beautiful and good! That’s what I think of it’),6 implying that if a work of art can be admired for its beauty and its execution, then it can be considered to be in line with anarchist ideals. Yet these painters not only were concerned with aesthetics, but believed in the social purposes of art. Anarchists wanted to use art to spread their ideas and educate the masses in order to ‘prepare them for the richer existence promised by an anarchist future’.7 Pissarro and Luce supported the cause by contributing drawings and lithographs to many French anarchist publications.8 5 

As explained by Shikes and Harper: ‘Protective of their independence, many artists were attracted to anarchism’s stress on the rejection of authority and the exaltation of the individual. Theorists emphasized that under anarchism, the artist would be free to express his own concept of the beautiful’ (Pissarro: His Life and Work, p. 226). 6  Quoted in Shikes and Harper, Pissarro (1981), p. 283; Shikes and Harper, Pissarro: His Life and Work, p. 237. 7  Robert  L. Herbert and Eugenia  W. Herbert, ‘Artists and Anarchism: Unpublished Letters of Pissarro, Signac and Others-1’, Burlington Magazine, 102.692 (November 1960), 473–82 (p. 478). 8  They contributed chiefly to Le Père Peinard, Le Revolté, and La Sociale. For more on their anarchist associations, see Anne Thorold, Artists, Writers, Politics: Camille Pissarro and his Friends (Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 1980).

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One may find a large number of anarchist-inspired works in their paintings and drawings as well as in those by Pissarro’s eldest son, Lucien (1863–1944), Signac, or Henri-Edmond Cross (1856–1910). On the one hand, these painters represented the harshness of the lives of the working class, as in Pissarro’s 1898 lithograph Les Sans-gîtes, which portrays a homeless family wandering along a country road, or in Luce’s 1883 painting Le Cordonnier, mansard à la glacière (The Cobbler), which depicts a shoemaker working by the light of a tiny window in the humble conditions of an old attic, which served as the family’s living quarters. On the other, they depicted scenes presenting the ideal world resulting from the anarchist revolution.9 Their agrarian subjects, representing an idyllic country life, may also be seen as anarchist in essence, for they glorified the healthy life of the peasant, as opposed to harsh industrial work forced upon the labourer by the economic and capitalistic ambitions the anarchists wished to annihilate. The representation of such scenes typifies the liberty anarchism gave artists to act in a revolutionary manner while retaining their individuality.10 Anarchist thought connected these ideas of personal freedom, collective labour, and anti-authoritarianism with Gothic cathedrals. In 1902 Peter Alekseyevich Kropotkin (1842–1921), anarchism’s most important theorist at the time, summed up anarchist views on the cathedral. Likening a socialist system without a government to the medi­e val guilds who constructed the cathedrals, he wrote: So […] when a number of craftsmen — masons, carpenters, stone-cutters, etc. — came together for building, say, a cathedral, they all belonged to a city which had its political organization, and each of them belonged moreover to his own craft; but they were united besides by their common enterprise, which they knew better than any one [sic] else, and they joined into a body united by closer, although temporary, bonds: they founded a guild for the building of a cathedral.11

9 

Compare Herbert and Herbert, ‘Artists and Anarchism’, p.  480: ‘Signac specifically related his painting Au temps d’harmonie to his anarchist faith’; ‘The seascapes and port scenes of Signac and the Provençal shore and dancing nymphs of Cross are also assimilated into […] hopes for a utopian society’. 10  Alexander Varias, Paris and the Anarchists: Aesthetes and Subversives at the Fin-de-Siècle (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1996), p. 135. 11  Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A  Factor of Evolution [1902] (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2006), p. 141. Kropotkin acknowledged German research as his source for information on the cathedral, citing Leonard Ennen’s historical introduction (‘Historische Einleitung’) to Franz Schmitz’s Der Dom zur Köln, seine Construktion und Ausstattung (Köln: Schwann’sche, 1871).

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Here the familiar anarchist ideas emerge in a peaceful, almost utopian context: the independence of the individual, the value of each different trade, the harmony of a people working together, and the sovereignty of a populace who directs its own labours and works without drudgery for a common cause.12 From this perspective, the medi­eval cathedral stands out as the unifying element of a society, and thus can be seen as a symbol of social solidarity. Indeed, anarchists envisioned cathedrals as the highly visible and enduring monuments that testified to collective labour and shared aspiration. Richard Thomson has affirmed that cathedrals provided appropriate ‘anarchist metaphors for social harmony’. Their representation was a discreet way for anarchists to portray their vision of future utopia.13

Camille Pissarro, Anarchist Painter Pissarro’s aesthetic and political ideas come through in his art, sometimes blatantly, as in the twenty-eight-drawing series known as Turpitudes sociales, a private work made from 1889 to 1890 for family members living in England.14 These overtly anarchist drawings showed that the reality of the life of the work12  One may note here that the connection between Gothic architecture and the people, social uprising, and thirst for freedom promoted by such liberal thinkers as Victor Hugo and Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc was firmly established by the time Kropotkin was writing. In a sense, Kropotkin re-envisioned these driving nineteenth-century ideals from an anarchist perspective. See, for example, Stephanie A. Glaser, ‘Of Revolutions, Republics and Spires: Nineteenth-Century France and the Gothic Cathedral’, in Signs of Change: Transformations of Christian Traditions and their Representation in the Arts, 1000–2000, ed. by Nils Holger Petersen, Claus Clüver, and Nicolas Bell (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), pp. 453–73. 13  Richard Thomson, ‘Signac, anarchisme, et l’image du bâtiment: Détruire ou contruire?’ (unpublished lecture given on 4 April 2001 at the Grand Palais for the Paul Signac retrospective, March–May 2001). ‘Le gothique était un type de construction que les anarchistes étaient en mesure d’approuver. […] Le passé médiéval, avec ses grandes églises gothiques — NotreDame ou le Mont-Saint-Michel — monuments à la fois superbes et durables au travail de la communauté, servirent admirablement de métaphore anarchiste à l’harmonie sociale’ (The Gothic was a type of building that anarchists approved of. […] Medi­eval times and their large Gothic churches — Notre-Dame or the Mont-Saint-Michel — which are superb and durable monuments to the labour of the community, were admirable anarchist metaphors for social harmony). All translations of this text are mine. 14  See Henri Mitterand, Camille Pissarro: Turpitudes sociales (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2009). About the genesis of and ideas contained in the Turpitudes sociales, see Richard Thomson, Camille Pissarro: Impressionism, Landscape and Rural Labour (London: Herbert Press, 1990).

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Figure 5.1. Camille Pissarro, title page of Turpitudes sociales, pen and brown ink over graphite drawings on paper pasted in an album, 31 × 24 cm, private collection, Switzerland. 1889–90. Reproduced with permission.

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ers in a capitalist economy was difficult and unforgiving. Using pen and ink over graphite, where clear lines and shadowy surfaces underscore the despair Pissarro sought to represent, he depicted the terrible conditions people had to endure in Paris, the poverty and misery of the working class: hungry families, marital violence, crime, drunkenness, and exploitation of workers, as well as the evils of religious and capitalist values and their consequences, which were suicide or surrender to those values. The final image is one of civil uprising, with the dead piled in the foreground. Together, the drawings make a powerful statement about how modern society denigrated human life. Yet Pissarro introduced a note of hope on the title page, where an old man (perhaps Pissarro himself, perhaps an ‘ironic’ philosopher) looks over Paris towards the Eiffel Tower in the distance, as the sun rises with the word ‘ANARCHIE’ emanating from its rays (Figure 5.1).15 Representing the dawn of a new era in the face of the corrupt capitalist world symbolized by the Eiffel Tower, an engineering feat made possible by industry and capitalist financing,16 this image articulates the hopes Pissarro placed in anarchism for civic and artistic freedom and as a sure way of escaping social injustice and disgrace. In contrast to the clear anarchist ideas portrayed in the private drawings of the Turpitudes sociales, Pissarro’s public paintings display anarchist ideas only discreetly. For example, his quasi-utopian scenes of the countryside represent peasant men and women at work or enjoying their leisure time, usually in the radiant sun shining on a beautiful field or garden, as in his Glaneuses (The Gleaners or Women Gleaning, 1887–89). By the 1880s such scenes became noticeably idealized, showing the idyllic life led away from the city. In these, the people appear happy, working together, providing for their community, and always seeming 15  Thomson, ‘Signac, anarchisme, et l’image du bâtiment’: ‘Lorsque Pissarro se projeta sur la couverture des Turpitudes Sociales comme le philosophe ironique, et lorsque Signac fit de son Démolisseur (1897) un autoportrait clandestin, les deux artistes condamnaient les bâtiments représentant l’état capitaliste, lui-même un édifice dangereux et corrompu qu’il fallait détruire. Il serait remplacé par leur vision d’un futur anarchiste. Cette vision pouvait aussi prendre forme dans des représentations de bâtiments’ (When Pissarro projected himself on the cover of the Turpitudes Sociales as the ironic philosopher, and when Signac painted himself in the guise of the Démolisseur (1897), both artists rejected buildings representing the capitalist state, as the state was itself a building, both dangerous and corrupted, targeted for demolition. It would be replaced by their vision of an anarchist future. This vision could also take the shape of representations of buildings). 16  Thomson, Camille Pissarro, p. 103. See also Stephanie A. Glaser, ‘Tour de fer et tours de pierre: La Tour Eiffel et la cathédrale gothique dans l’imaginaire au tournant du xxe siècle’, in L’Imaginaire moderne de la cathédrale, ed. by Georges Roque (Paris: Librairie d’Amérique et d’orient, Jean Maisonrouge, 2012), pp. 41–69.

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Figure 5.2. Camille Pissarro, Vue de Rouen, cours la Reine, print, 14.8 × 19.9 cm, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Estampes et de la photographie. 1884. Source: Bibliothèque nationale de France.

to be contented with their fate. As Richard Thomson has remarked, in such paintings Pissarro proffered ‘an ideal of a classless community which accorded with his anarchist ideology’.17 These idealized scenes in the fields are much like Kropotkin’s description of the harmonious work of the populace on the medi­ eval cathedral. Thus it can be no coincidence that in the midst of his two Rouen series, Pissarro depicted the cathedral as a central motif in several canvases.

Pissarro’s Rouen Cathedral Paintings Already in 1883 Pissarro had sketched and painted views of Rouen. Claude Monet was also in Rouen at that time, and works of his such as Vue de Rouen of 1883 would have been known to Pissarro.18 Pissarro’s views differ from Monet’s 17  18 

Thomson, Camille Pissarro, p. 65. Bernier, Monument, Moment, and Memory, p. 32.

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Figure 5.3. Camille Pissarro, La Rue Malpalue, à Rouen, print, 19.8 × 15 cm, Paris, Biblio­thèque nationale de France, Département des Estampes et de la photo­ graphie. c. 1883–85. Source: Bibliothèque nationale de France.

insofar as they highlight the modernization of society and contrast the activity of modern life with the staid past of medi­e val architecture. For example, in his Japonism-inspired print Vue de Rouen (cours la Reine) of 1884 (Figure 5.2), the cathedral provides the central point, rising as a shadow between water and sky, surrounded on both sides by much lower modern buildings. The town and the boats on the water seem to enclose the cathedral at their centre, while the cathedral and the three trees on the right, which respond to its towers and spire, offer a tranquil backdrop to the activity at the waterfront. The solitary figure in the foreground creates a horizontal line with the long, blurry shadows of the cathedral and the trees on the water and provides balance with the cathedral in the middle and the trees at the right of the print. In contrast, the city scene of La Rue Malpalue, à Rouen (c. 1883–85) creates a different ambiance (Figure 5.3). The Gothic spire appears to rise upward from the buildings, as if demonstrating the unity of the city’s architecture. The street is quiet, with a few people going about their business in the narrow road. The three-tiered

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structure of the print — the human activity in the road, the steep house fronts, and the spire soaring above — heightens the sense of connection between all parts of the image and accentuates the feeling of height. Pissarro’s later cathedral paintings rework these connections between the cathedral, the city, and its inhabitants to underscore his anarchist ideas. Pissarro returned to Rouen for three campaigns, two in 1896 and one in 1898. During his spring and fall campaigns in 1896 he produced twenty-eight paintings of Rouen. After completing his first two substantial Paris series (1896–98), which notably include the boulevard scenes representing views of the busy streets of the capital, he returned to Rouen and from summer to fall in 1898 painted another nineteen canvases of the city.19 The vast majority of these forty-seven paintings deals with modernization and depicts the intense activity of the quays, with their crowds of people either at work or passing by on a bridge, steam cranes and ships sending smoke into the sky, boats being loaded or unloaded, merchandise being stacked, and factory chimneys rising in the background. With this active port bringing in and sending goods, smoke billowing, machines operating, and a myriad of busy people working, these scenes convey a certain glorification of labour that is in line with anarchist thought about work and the common good of society. According to Varias, Pissarro viewed labour and commerce as positive, and these paintings express this feeling. Unlike the dark scenes of Turpitudes sociales, these are bright: the sky is luminous under a shining sun, which could be interpreted to indicate Pissarro’s optimism towards the future in a type of anarchist utopia. Pissarro returned to Rouen in the 1890s for two reasons. He had seen Monet’s series La Cathédrale de Rouen (1892–94), which had been exhibited at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in 1895, and like many artists, he was drawn to these paintings. Monet’s cathedral series achieved great commercial success, and spurred on by it, other painters painted series of single monuments, hoping for the same kind of success.20 Pissarro, however, was less interested in profit than in the ‘“unity” in the works, of a kind for which he himself had been searching for some time’.21 In 1895 he expressed his admiration for the series: ‘C’est surtout dans son ensemble qu’il faut que ce soit vu’ (It is as a whole, above all,

19 

Bernier, Monument, Moment, and Memory, p. 32. Thomson, Camille Pissarro, p. 164. 21  Richard Brettell and Joachim Pissarro, The Impressionist and the City: Pissarro’s Series Paintings (New Haven: Yale Uni­ver­sity Press, 1992), p. 3. 20 

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that the series should be seen).22 The following year he referred to his earlier paintings of Rouen as ‘la série de Rouen de 1883’, and it seems that he wanted to develop the theme further.23 Perhaps more than either of these reasons, Pissarro’s admiration for the beauty of Gothic architecture played an important role. As he wrote in 1896: Si je devais subir une influence, j’aimerais mieux subir celle des vrais gothiques français que j’ai à chaque instant sous les yeux ici, c’est épatant comme ils sont nature, tout en étant très décoratifs, sans la mièvrerie et la sentimentalité de ceux des modernes qui se disent leurs élèves. [If I had to be under an influence, I would rather be under that of the true French Gothic artists, whom I can see at every instant here; it is amazing how natural they are, while being very decorative, without the vapidity and sentimentality of those modern artists who pretend to be their students.]24

Pissarro’s responses to Gothic architecture were aesthetic and cultural. He considered it genuine, honest, natural, yet decorative, and thereby expresses his solidarity with the French Gothic artists. What he saw as the vitality, frankness, and beauty of the Gothic most certainly appealed to his sense of artistic freedom and integrity as well as to his artistic ideal. Thus the French Gothic artists stand out as the antithesis of the Salon painters. And considering the Eiffel Tower as the symbol of the modern industrial, capitalist state that degraded the people and caused suffering, Gothic architecture become associated with a better, even ideal, society, where human work and craft are honest, unaffected, beautiful, appreciated, and accepted as worthy contributions. For Pissarro the 22 

Letter to Lucien Pissarro, Paris, 26 May 1895, in Correspondance de Camille Pissarro, ed. by Janine Bailly-Herzberg, 5 vols (Paris: Presse Universitaires de France, 1981; Cergy: Editions du Valhermeil, 1986–99), iv (1995), 75–76; translation S. Glaser. 23  Letter to Lucien Pissarro, Rouen, 24 March 1896, in Pissarro, Correspondance, ed. by Bailly-Herzberg, iv, 178. 24  Letter to Lucien Pissarro, Rouen, 20 October 1896, in Pissarro, Correspondance, ed. by Bailly-Herzberg, iv, 282; translation S. Glaser. This is not Pissarro’s only reference to the Gothic, as Thomson pointed out in ‘Signac, anarchisme, et l’image du bâtiment’: ‘Pissarro espérait que “enfin, la nature, la bonne nature des gothiques français, prend[rait] le dessus”. Pour lui, le gothique avait cette “sensation vitale” que tout art digne de ce nom se doit de posséder. Il se référa régulièrement, et en l’approuvant, à “la tradition gothique française”, non pas dans un sens chauviniste mais comme un art honnête et naturel’ (Pissarro hoped that ‘at last, the good nature of the French gothic artists would take over’. For him, Gothic art had this ‘vital sensation’ that all good art worthy of its name has to have. He regularly referred to, and approved of, ‘the French Gothic tradition’, not in a chauvinistic way, but as an honest, natural art).

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Figure 5.4. Camille Pissarro, Les Toits du vieux Rouen, temps gris (la cathédrale) / The Roofs of Old Rouen, Gray Weather, oil on canvas, 72.3 × 91.4 cm, Toledo Museum of Art, Purchased with funds from the Libbey Endowment, Gift of Edward Drummond Libbey, 1951.361. 1896. Photo Credit: Photography Incorporated, Toledo. Courtesy of the Toledo Museum of Art.

Gothic, whether Rouen Cathedral or the church Saint-Jacques de Dieppe, represented more than the communal achievement of the good Gothic builders who worked together for a common good and whose accomplishments endure through the ages, it also embodied his convictions about artistic freedom, cooperative labour, the value of work, and peace and concord in society. Of course, his ideals were inseparable from his anarchism, and his cathedral paintings offer a particularly vibrant vision of anarchism’s future utopia. Les Toits du vieux Rouen, temps gris (la cathédrale) of 1896 (Figure 5.4) is the first of the Rouen-campaign paintings to represent the cathedral and the one which Pissarro considered ‘l’œuvre capitale’.25 His use of meteorological 25 

Stated in a letter to Lucien Pissarro, Paris, 16 April 1896, in Pissarro, Correspondance, ed. by Bailly-Herzberg, iv, 189. In several letters to his family Pissarro commented that he did not want to sell this canvas cheaply (he wanted 5000 francs for it), and he refused an offer from

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indications is reminiscent of both Monet’s Rouen Cathedral paintings and his own sustained study of the effects of light. The cathedral is the focal point of the painting, and Pissarro emphasized its imposing presence: Mon vieux Rouen avec sa cathédrale au fond est fait par temps gris et assez ferme sur le ciel. J’en étais assez satisfait; cela me plaisait de la voir se profiler grise et ferme sur un ciel uniforme de temps humide. [My good old Rouen, with its cathedral in the background, was painted in grey weather with a rather muted sky. I was rather pleased with it. I liked to see its grey and solid profile against a flat, rainy sky.]26

Occupying about two thirds of the upper part of the canvas, the cathedral dominates the scene as it rises against a grey sky behind a sea of rooftops. From this perspective the viewer is removed from the activity of modern life, its only sign being the smoke wafting out of some of the chimneys on the left-hand side. This perspective, the focus, and the absence of human figures make this painting strikingly different from Pissarro’s other Rouen paintings, with their views of the goings-on of the quays. His own comments show how impressive he thought this view was: ‘Figure-toi tout le vieux Rouen vu par-dessus les toits, avec la cathédrale, l’église Saint-Ouen, et des fantaisies de toitures, de tourelles, vraiment étonnantes, vois-tu une toile de trente remplie de toitures grises, vermoulues, vieilles, c’est extraordinaire!’ (Imagine the whole of the old district of Rouen seen from above the rooftops, with the cathedral, the Saint-Ouen Church, and all sorts of really astonishing roofs and towers; imagine a large canvas filled with old grey, cankered roofs, and how extraordinary that is!).27 At first glance, the cathedral and houses seem to be suspended in a timeless environment. The vertical rise of the cathedral, echoed by the many chimneys, François Depeaux (a collector from Rouen) because the price was too low; Pissarro knew that Depeaux had paid 15,000 francs to Monet for one of his cathedral paintings (François Lespinasse, Rouen: Paradis des peintres (Rouen: Leprette, 2003), p. 44). At least three times (twice to Lucien, on 17 and on 24 March 1896, and once to his second son, Georges (1871–1961), on 27 March 1896), Pissarro expressed his desire to keep the painting in the family. Pissarro, Correspondance, ed. by Bailly-Herzberg, iv, 173, 177, 179. Indeed, when the painting was exhibited at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in April and March 1896, Pissarro made it clear that he did not want to sell it. 26  Letter to Lucien Pissarro, 24 March 1896, in Pissarro, Correspondance, ed. by BaillyHerzberg, iv, 177; my translation. 27  Letter to Lucien Pissarro, Rouen, 26 February 1896, in Pissarro, Correspondance, ed. by Bailly-Herzberg, iv, 168; my translation.

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Figure 5.5. Camille Pissarro, Rue de l’Épicerie, Rouen, oil on canvas, 81.3  × 6.1 cm, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 1898. © bpk / The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

is accentuated by the regularity of the tracery along its west side. Its beauty and the frankness of its representation recall Pissarro’s comments about the work of the French Gothic artists. Honesty is reflected in the tremendous size of the building as well as in the variety of shapes in the maze of densely arrayed rooftops. This disorder contrasts with the regular and even succession of the tracery, but rather than splitting the two worlds, this juxtaposition emphasizes the organic connection between the rooftops and the cathedral. The colour palette binds the two worlds through the overall grey tones of the painting, which bring all the elements (roofs, turrets, chimneys, cathedral, sky) together, whilst the chimneys and towers echo the verticality of the cathedral. The composition also emphasizes their connection, not only in the cathedral practically growing out of the city’s architecture, but in its horizontality: the horizontal lines at the peak of each rooftop, the long body of the cathedral in the background, and most prominently, the spire, cut by the canvas edge and therefore not finish-

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ing its stretch into the sky — together these details seem to imply a focus on earthly, civic matters rather than religious ones. Most subtly, anarchist ideology binds the two worlds. Although the people are absent from the painted surface, their presence is suggested by the housetops of their living quarters; their activity by the ascending smoke; their community by the closeness of the buildings. The rooftops, each one different, form an ensemble which seems to symbolize many individuals coming together and participating collectively in the communal life of the city. The towering cathedral stands as an overarching symbol for social solidarity, cooperation, and civic harmony. This strong but discreet message would have resonated with engaged anarchists; nonetheless, it would have been lost on most viewers, who would have admired the composition of rooftops and a Norman cathedral in grey weather. Pissarro’s 1898 views of the cathedral are very different from Les Toits du vieux Rouen. In Rue de l’Épicerie, Rouen, he depicted the cathedral from a lower perspective, from the narrow medi­eval street, and focused on the human activity in it (Figure 5.5).28 This angle accentuates both the depth of the street and the height of the buildings, especially of the cathedral. Although the painting’s three-tiered structure resembles that of La Rue Malpalue, à Rouen, it is very different: it is bright, the street is crowded, the architecture more massive and extensive, dwarfing the figures and spanning the width of the canvas. The massive buildings enclose the crowd, seemingly channelling their movement towards the cathedral, whilst the cathedral’s towers extend upward like the arms of a benevolent sentinel. More than a backdrop to the city, as it was in Vue de Rouen, the cathedral rises up from the city, its towers widening the view from the congested street, not exactly framing the scene, but crowning it. The blue sky looks inviting. The soft light illuminates the cathedral’s towers, and the recesses of the tracery gain depth. This play of light and shadow brings out the complexity and the monumentality of the architecture. This same light brightens the street below and creates an atmosphere of lightness and joy that recalls Pissarro’s peasant and country scenes. This is not the city of the Turpitudes sociales, but a ‘softened’ view of it.29 The shops are open, attracting crowds, and passersby seem to be walking leisurely. The populace seems to 28 

Monet had painted La Rue de l’Épicerie à Rouen from this perspective in 1892. Thomson expresses this idea in ‘Signac, anarchisme, et l’image du bâtiment’: ‘Les images de la cité moderne présentées par Luce et Pissarro ont tendance à simplement représenter la ville, ou à la lénifier, plutôt que de l’imaginer’ (The images of a modern city presented by Luce and Pissarro tend to only represent the town, or to soften it, rather than imagine it). 29 

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be one body, filling the constricted street, yet they are individualized through dashes of colour added to the light produced by the sun, which turn the street into a place of happy gathering: red clothes worn by women, red strokes in the foreground to the left- and right-hand sides, red advertisement on the wall near the middle of the picture, orange-coloured roofs, a green canopy over a shop in the foreground, bright white dashes on people’s clothing. In fact, the accumulation of red hues in this picture may even be seen as a reminder of the red flag associated with the Commune and with anarchy. The painting presents the city as a space of harmonious collective activity. While it may be considered as an example of the numerous market or boulevard scenes painted by Pissarro, it is very much in line with anarchism’s praise of labour and its endorsement of individual businesses as a key to escaping oppression from large companies. Centred on the commercial street for which it is named, it seems to pay tribute to the freedom to build up businesses, to engage in commerce, and to enjoy leisure. This painting of a city thriving from productive labour, civic independence, and autonomy, with the cathedral’s towers raising almost in a gesture of protection and affirmation above it, offers a powerful vision of anarchist utopia, with the cathedral as its herald.

Maximilien Luce as Anarchist Painter Maximilien Luce’s anarchist opinions are well documented, and his art, which carried strong social views, was undoubtedly his messenger.30 He was especially close to Pissarro, who acted as his mentor. Like Pissarro, Luce envisioned anarchism as a means for both the working class and artists to better their positions.31 Yet his subjects differed from Pissarro’s, for Luce remained very much a city painter. Having grown up in a working-class family, he was acutely attuned to the needs and difficulties of his fellow men, and he devoted most of his artistic career to the depiction of the working class. He also painted cityscapes without any figures, which allowed him to emphasize the place taken by large smoking factories in various towns, such as Bords de Sambre (The Banks of the Sambre) of 1896. In 1899 the Belgian poet and fellow anarchist Émile Verhaeren (1855–1916) expressed his admiration for Luce’s work when it 30 

Fellow Anarchist Adolphe Tabarant (1863–1950) wrote a monography on Luce: Maximilien Luce (Paris: G. Crès, 1928). See also Varias, Paris and the Anarchists. 31  Varias, Paris and the Anarchists, p. 130, writes: ‘Luce was convinced that under anarchism the artist’s position would be enhanced, since it was an especially vocal social movement seeking to correct abuses from which artists also suffered’.

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was exhibited in Brussels: ‘L’art de Luce, c’est Luce lui-même. Un faubourien, aimant Paris, sa banlieue, ses quartiers qu’on démolit, son peuple d’ouvriers, et l’âme de ce peuple, ardente et révolutionnaire’ (The art of Luce is Luce himself. A man of the working-class areas, a man who likes Paris and its suburbs, its neighbourhoods in the process of being demolished, its working-class inhabitants, as well as the soul of this people, a burning, revolutionary soul).32 He considered Luce’s works as exemplary of ‘social, revolutionary art’.33 Indeed, Luce primarily used his drawings as a weapon to support anarchism and contributed to many anarchist publications the 1890s and after the turn of the century.34 During this period he was also painting Notre-Dame de Paris, the subject of ten paintings executed between 1898 and 1904.35

Luce and Notre-Dame de Paris Luce’s first painting of Notre-Dame was a panoramic view in 1890. Four years later he produced a small study, and after 1898 he painted the cathedral on large or medium-sized canvases (up to 116 × 80 cm) in the divisionist style dear to him. His cathedral paintings demonstrate a mastery of this technique, especially in representing various effects of light. Luce painted seven canvases with this motif, generally portraying the cathedral from an angle, as seen from a window at number 19 Quai Saint-Michel, opposite the cathedral, where his friend Albert Dubois-Pillet (1846–1890) had his studio. In the early twentieth century both Henri Matisse (1869–1954) and Albert Marquet (1875–1947) produced their own versions of Notre-Dame seen from this spot. This angle was particularly advantageous because it enabled the painter to portray the cathedral in all its majesty and grandeur, soaring up out of the city centre, immense and unmistakable in its silhouette. It also presented a view from which an artist could clearly observe and paint the towers, the west façade, and part of the 32  Émile Verhaeren, in La Revue Blanche, 20 (1899), quoted in Maximilien Luce: Peindre la Condition Humaine (Paris: Somogy; Mantes-la-jolie: Musée de l’Hôtel-Dieu, 2000), p. 10; my translation. 33  Varias, Paris and the Anarchists, p. 128. 34  In addition to those publications listed in note 8, above, Luce contributed to La Feuille (in 1898), Le Libertaire (1899), L’Anarchie (1905–06), La Voix du Peuple (1901), and L’Almanach de la Révolution (1902–05). 35  The catalogue raisonné of Luce’s works lists ten paintings representing the façade of Notre-Dame: Jean Bouin-Luce and others, Maximilien Luce: Catalogue raisonné de l’œuvre peint (Paris: Editions JBL, 1986).

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Figure 5.6. Maximilien Luce, Le Quai Saint-Michel et Notre-Dame, oil on canvas, 73 × 60 cm, Paris, Musée d’Orsay. 1901. © bpk / RMN — Grand Palais / Hervé Lewandowski.

south side, whilst also including the surroundings: the parvis at the front, the bridge, and the Seine. Like Monet, Luce painted the cathedral at various times of day, under different weather conditions, and in different lights. Yet the effect of the city lights, which add their glow amidst the natural shadows of the evening, gives Luce’s paintings a different aura than either Monet’s or Pissarro’s. In his choice of Notre-Dame, he seems consciously to have separated himself from Monet, hoping that the status of the Parisian cathedral might give his paintings the same kind of success that Monet’s cathedrals had.36 In his Notre-Dame paintings, the people and activity of Paris are clearly as much Luce’s subjects as the cathe36 

Richard Thomson, ‘Monet’s Rouen Cathedrals: Anarchism, Gothic Architecture and Instantaneous Photography’, in Soil and Stone: Impressionism Urbanism Environment, ed. by Francis Fowle and Richard Thomson (London: Ashgate 2003), pp. 153–69 (p. 164).

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Figure 5.7. Maximilen Luce, Notre-Dame, oil on canvas, 81.28 × 60.64 cm, San Diego Museum of Art, 1985.77, Gift of Ambassador and Mrs Maxwell Gluck. c. 1900. Courtesy of the San Diego Museum of Art.

dral itself. But the two subjects are not at odds, though they occupy different picture planes. Through light as well as ideology, as Thomson has explained, Luce harmoniously integrated human activity and the vast monument into one pleasing view.37 Le Quai Saint-Michel et Notre-Dame (1901) is painted from a lower angle than some of Luce’s other canvases, suggesting that he was situated only slightly above street level when he worked on it (Figure 5.6). The particular light of the late afternoon separates the two picture planes: the upper stories of NotreDame are bathed in the warm tones of sunset, whilst the people on the quay and the bridge are in the shadows, painted in cool tones. The cathedral seems to be benevolently watching over the buzzing life of the city and the people, who, rather than congregating at the edifice, are busily engaged in their individual 37 

Thomson, ‘Monet’s Rouen Cathedrals’, p. 164.

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and different activities: a woman leading a child by the hand; another carrying a basket and linens may be a laundress; the man in the foreground may be a glazier transporting his load of glass on his back; another draws a heavy cart; another attends to his horse (he appears to be a carriage driver waiting for customers); whilst the man with the hat has a parcel, which may well be a canvas, tucked under his arm. Work is also indicated through details such as the busy carriages on the bridge, as well as in the smoke rising from the chimneys in the background. Different from Pissarro’s paintings, which emphasize the organic connection between the buildings of the city and its cathedral, in Luce’s paintings the cathedral stands apart from the activity along the Seine and in the city streets. Yet its size and placement and the use of light make it the focal point of the composition. Even as the diverse movements, positions, and shapes of the people in the foreground might seem to create a disjunction with the monumental cathedral with its clear lines, regularity, and symmetry, the painting is structured so as to bring out a thematic unity between city, work, and the monument. The group of three in the foreground, consisting of the women with basket, the woman and child, and the man with the heavy load on his back, seems to echo the three portals of the façade in a layout that creates a visual unity between the people and the cathedral, indicating a symbiosis of the architectural structure and the city’s inhabitants. Notre-Dame appears as the guardian of this harmonious society of autonomous individuals and, in this ‘softened’ view of the city, stands as a sign of the future society longed for by anarchists, where work is for the common good, where the individual is valued, and where each is free to choose his own destiny. The angle in Notre-Dame (c. 1900) is slightly different from the previous painting (he must have been looking from a higher window), and the cathedral is closer (Figure 5.7, p. 167). Luce omitted most of the quay to focus on the Seine, the wide bridge, and the façade. This is an unusually striking image of the cathedral, whose silhouette stands out in relief against the evening sky. The shadows in the recesses of the façade are deepening, and the cathedral’s details are becoming lost in the darkness. This darkness is not menacing, but bestows a sense of peace on the city. Street lights illuminating the parvis and especially the bridge serve to draw the focus from the cathedral to the human activity, which has not ceased with the falling of night. People are milling about, several horse-drawn carriages are crossing the bridge, and a barge sails up the river with smoke bellowing from its chimney. These details signify both labour and pleasure, the components of a healthy society. Although the people are not shown here as individuals, they contribute to the collective flurry of city life. The con-

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nection between the people and their cathedral is strengthened by the colour palette, for every part of the painting, except the lighted street, shares the same blue and purple tones of nightfall. As in Le Quai Saint-Michel et Notre-Dame the cathedral seems to watch over this scene of human concord which also answers to the anarchist utopian ideal. The connection between work and leisure is thematized in another painting which has a different character than those canvases of the Paris series. NotreDame (c. 1901–04) portrays the cathedral from an oblique angle, focusing on its south side and its towers rising in monumental size at the right-hand side of the composition. The cathedral is seen at a distance, from a point across the Seine, where everything is much calmer than the busy Quai Saint-Michel. The palette of browns and yellows conveys serenity. Human activity is also peaceful: a man is looking over the bridge; another, with a sack swung over his shoulder may be a tramp, walking with his dog. The only busy element of the scene is the woman hurrying past with a very large yellowish basket. Even if ‘work’ is suggested, the scene offers a respite from the busy world of the capital city, depicting a pleasant and tranquil view of life, perhaps in the aftermath of the anarchist revolution, when the people do not have to bear the weight of exploitation any longer, but may have an independent life which involves leisure and rest. In such a society it is possible for people to go about their work or activities in pleasant surroundings. The painting seems to suggest that life may certainly be agreeable in an anarchist city, and the presence of the cathedral affirms this anarchist longing. * * * Pissarro and Luce both portrayed cathedrals in connection with a harmonious, busy, and peaceful society where individuals retain their dignity in their occupations and profit from their leisure. It may be said that in Luce’s cathedral paintings the busy figures all have their individual purposes in life, and that together they form a society made up of citizens whose private lives (work and relaxation) are valued and respected, as opposed to the exploitation of the workers under capitalism. Pissarro’s Rouen paintings emphasize communal harmony, labour, and the collective good. The two painters’ expressions of social concord and the worth of individuals clearly correspond to their anarchist convictions. Whilst Pissarro wrote about anarchism in his private correspondence, Luce appears to have written little, but he wove his reflections into his art, sometimes obviously, sometimes discreetly. Both wanted their art to convey their social and revolutionary message, and both relied on Gothic buildings to signal their anarchist fervour and hopes. Pissarro emphasized the

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organic structure of a city’s architecture, evoking the cathedral as a metaphor for the ideal society as he imagined it and making it the beacon of his anarchist ideals. Luce depicted Notre-Dame de Paris as immense and staged it as a monument to industrious labour and self-determined individuality, turning it into the symbol of his anarchist desires and dreams. With the cathedral motif both painters placed themselves in a direct line of artistic heritage from Monet and asserted themselves as heirs to the French Gothic artists. For them Gothic architecture was emblematic of their personal convictions about artistic freedom and their defiance of established authority, a stance that went hand in hand with their anarchist beliefs. The message carried by the cathedrals in their paintings was one of optimism and anticipation of the realization of a peaceful utopian dream. In connecting Rouen Cathedral and Notre-Dame de Paris with their anti-authoritarian and anarchist ideas, they attributed a powerful symbolism to them that adds another dimension to the interpretations of the Gothic cathedral in nineteenth-century France.

L’Imaginaire de la cathédrale à l’épreuve de la Grande Guerre Joëlle Prungnaud

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élébrée au début du xixe siècle par les poètes et les romanciers, la cathédrale demeure une figure littéraire récurrente bien au-delà du Romantisme. Aux côtés d’œuvres unanimement reconnues par la postérité comme Le Rêve (1888) d’Émile Zola (1840–1902) ou La Cathédrale (1898) de J.-K. Huysmans (1848–1907), pour s’en tenir à la littérature française, elle persiste à apparaître dans une profusion d’œuvres oubliées ou négligées par la critique et donne lieu à de belles pages d’écriture, dans les genres les plus divers : le roman ( Jean de la Hire (1878–1956), La Torera, 1902), la nouvelle (Claude Farrère (1876–1957), Fumée d’opium, 1904), le théâtre (Les Cathédrales d’Eugène Morand (1853–1930), 1915) ou la poésie (Edmond Gojon (1886–1935), Le Visage penché, 1910) sans compter les essais ou récits de voyage1. La présence insistante de l’édifice perdure dans l’imaginaire collectif de cette époque charnière de l’«  entre-deux siècles  » (1880–1918) pour prendre des formes parfois inattendues dans des registres fortement contrastés. Le lieu de la rêverie poétique, de l’exaltation mystique peut s’inverser en lieu mortifère, investi par l’angoisse et la nuit. La mise à distance du gothique érigé en modèle par les générations antérieures conduit à un renouvellement de la représentation et s’accompagne d’une resymbolisation de l’édifice. C’est à ce contexte qu’appartiennent les auteurs des deux œuvres dont il sera question dans la présente étude et qui, par leur parcours artistique, sont 1 

Voir Joëlle Prungnaud, Figures littéraires de la cathédrale, 1880–1918 (Villeneuve d’Ascq : Presses du Septentrion, 2008). Joëlle Prungnaud ([email protected]) is Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature at the Uni­ver­sity of Lille.

The Idea of the Gothic Cathedral: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Meanings of the Medieval Edifice in the Modern Period, ed. by Stephanie A. Glaser, RITUS 9 (Turn­hout: Brepols, 2018) pp. 171–229 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.RITUS-EB.5.115740

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représentatifs d’une période qui tend à s’affirmer par la réappropriation et la réécriture, dans un mouvement apparent de régression mais qui pourtant s’ouvre sur la modernité. L’histoire littéraire n’a guère retenu leur nom : Mérovak2, surnommé « l’Homme des Cathédrales », parce qu’il a peu écrit, et Maurice Magre (1877–1941), poète reconnu en son temps, parce qu’il est (injustement) marginalisé dans la catégorie des minores. La Cathédrale des morts, brochure illustrée exposant un rêve architectural et « La Cathédrale furieuse », long poème extrait du recueil La Montée aux enfers, s’ils paraissent fortement dissemblables par leur forme et leur destination, ont en commun une thématique (la cathédrale) et une tonalité (la rage, la violence) qui invitent à les rapprocher3. Mais c’est surtout leur date simultanée de publication – 1918 – qui donne à cette lecture croisée toute sa pertinence. Non pas pour les soumettre à une lecture sociologique ou pour leur reconnaître un intérêt purement documentaire, mais parce que, au contraire, la figure de la cathédrale qui les habite leur donne une dimension littéraire significative : forgée par les courants qui ont traversé le siècle (du symbolisme à la décadence), elle est porteuse d’un idéal esthétique – le médiévalisme – transmis par le Romantisme et brutalement confronté à l’événement qui le prive tout à coup de sens : le conflit de 1914–18, qui déchire l’entité européenne en nations ennemies s’accusant mutuellement de barbarie. C’est la destinée de cet héritage collectif, mis à l’épreuve de la Grande Guerre, qu’il nous faudra interroger. Dans cette perspective, que représente la cathédrale ? Pourquoi est-elle sollicitée, de préférence à tout autre monument architectural ou à tout autre symbole pour signifier cette rupture historique qui marque tragiquement l’entrée de l’Europe dans un autre temps, un autre monde ? Cependant, on pourra s’interroger sur la validité d’un rapprochement de textes aussi disparates. L’un est le commentaire d’une image, l’autre est une pièce extraite d’un recueil poétique, leur seul point de convergence étant le traitement de la cathédrale. N’y a-t-il pas quelque artifice à confisquer ces productions à leurs auteurs respectifs pour les étudier à la seule lumière de la 2  Pour plus d’informations sur ce curieux personnage, Gabriel-François-Léopold Robuchon pour l’état-civil (1874–1955), lire Maurice Hamel, «  Mérovak, l’Homme des cathédrales », La Gazette des Beaux-Arts, janvier 1962, pp. 53–60. Voir également les commentaires d’Elizabeth Emery dans Romancing the Cathedral: Gothic Architecture in Fin-de-Siècle French Culture (New York: SUNY Press, 2001), pp. 52–53. 3  [Mérovak], La Cathédrale des morts (Aix-les-Bains, [1918]). La date de publication de La Cathédrale des morts ne figure pas sur l’achevé d’imprimer ni en couverture. Elle apparaît en p. 3 (date de l’introduction) et en p. 27 (dans l’encart de conclusion). Maurice Magre, La Montée aux enfers (Paris: Fasquelle, 1918).

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thématique traitée ? Pour donner une légitimité à cette approche, il est donc nécessaire de replacer ce corpus dans son milieu d’origine : dans un parcours pour Mérovak, dans une carrière littéraire pour Maurice Magre. En outre, il faut bien reconnaître que cette prose hyperbolique et cette poésie trop ouvertement blasphématoire ne mériteraient guère de figurer dans une anthologie de la littérature, n’était leur intérêt thématique. Alors, pourquoi s’attarder à commenter des œuvres de second plan, que leur extravagance peut même faire apparaître comme le fruit d’un délire individuel ? Se pose ici le problème de la hiérarchie des auteurs qui nous amène à plaider, aux côtés de Luc Fraisse, pour « une esthétique de la littérature mineure »4. Nous ne considérerons pas ces textes comme des objets rares, extraits d’un cabinet de curiosités, qui n’auraient d’intérêt que pour le seul collectionneur. Le traitement de la cathédrale qu’ils attestent n’est pas non plus un hapax, attestation isolée d’une forme, qui plus est aberrante. Ces textes sont, au contraire, symptomatiques d’un dérèglement qui affecte la création littéraire et artistique de leur époque. Plus que d’autres, ils portent témoignage de ce moment de déroute qui permettra l’émergence de nouveaux modèles, de cette faillite que l’histoire littéraire ne retiendra pas. C’est peut-être justement parce qu’ils se situent en marge de la littérature dite majeure qu’ils portent en eux cette radicalité et cette force qui s’expriment sans réserve. * * * Mérovak est né en 1874, Maurice Magre en 1877. Ils ont donc eu vingt ans au cours de la décennie 1890, époque de crise et d’effervescence créatrice dans le monde des lettres, après la remise en cause du naturalisme. Écoles et mouvements rivalisent par manifestes interposés, chacun étant bien convaincu de représenter l’avenir de l’art ou de la littérature, comme le montre si bien l’enquête de Jules Huret sur L’Évolution littéraire (1891)5. Mérovak et Magre viennent tous deux de province, l’un de Vendée, l’autre du midi toulousain, et « montent » à Paris pour tenter de pénétrer dans le même microcosme intellectuel. Maurice Magre appartient au groupe dit « l’école de Toulouse », groupe qui a fondé la revue L’Effort6. Il commence sa carrière de 4 

Luc Fraisse, Pour une esthétique de la littérature mineure (Paris : Honoré Champion, 2000). Le journaliste Jules Huret (1863–1915) réalisa une série d’entrevues avec soixantequatre écrivains qu’il fit paraître en feuilleton dans le quotidien L’Écho de Paris, en 1891. Voir l’édition en volume de Daniel Grojnowski (Vanves : Éditions Thot, 1982). 6  Michel Décaudin, La Crise des valeurs symbolistes : Vingt ans de poésie française (1895–1914) (Toulouse : Privat Éditeur, 1960), pp. 34–35. 5 

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poète en publiant La Chanson des hommes (1898), dans les fameux livres à couverture jaune de la Bibliothèque-Charpentier, chez Eugène Fasquelle7. En réaction contre le symbolisme, il s’inspire de la poésie sociale d’Émile Verhaeren (1855–1916) et rêve « d’amour libre et d’existence naturelle », sous l’influence des naturistes  : Saint-Georges de Bouhélier (1876–1947), Adolphe Retté (1863–1930)8. Ce sont ces mêmes naturistes qui animent la critique littéraire de La Plume, revue d’avant-garde qui revendique l’éclectisme. Léon Deschamps (1864–1899), son directeur et fondateur, a pour objectif de « faire connaître les hommes nouveaux »9. Voilà sans doute pourquoi un provincial inconnu (Mérovak) tente sa chance auprès de l’un des collaborateurs de la revue, sur ce ton de bateleur : « De la tour Nord de Notre-Dame de Paris, Mérovak a l’honneur de présenter à Léon Riotor ses sentiments les plus chevaleresques […]. Il le prie de prendre sa nouvelle chronique couronnée du titre Les Échos des cathédrales ». Le journaliste, versé dans les arts et les lettres, répond à cet appel car il se dit intéressé par « l’ingénu vendéen qui s’imagine conquérir Paris sous le nom de Mérovak ». Il lui consacre un article intitulé « L’Homme des cathédrales » (1er septembre 1898), qui sera suivi d’un autre, l’année suivante (15 mai 1899), signé de son confrère Félix Hautfort10. On est en droit de se demander, comme l’ont fait les contemporains, si cet original n’était pas un « charlatan »11. Jean Lorrain (1855–1906) le traite d’usurpateur en le qualifiant de « faux Sâr Péladan » dans sa chronique du 3 avril 189712. Le jeune homme, installé dans la tour nord de Notre-Dame, reçoit 7 

Maurice Magre, La Chanson des hommes (Paris: Bibliothèque-Charpentier, Eugène Fasquelle, 1898). En devenant « l’éditeur des Naturalistes », Georges Charpentier fit le succès de cette collection créée par son père Gervais en 1838, qui perdura après l’association avec E. Fasquelle, en 1890. 8  Magre, La Chanson des hommes, préface, p. ii : « À vingt ans, j’ai voulu dire mon rêve d’amour libre et d’existence naturelle ». 9  Cité dans La Belle Époque des revues (1880–1914), sous la dir. de Jacqueline Pluet-Despatin, Michel Leymarie, et Jean-Yves Molié (Paris : Éditions de l’IMEC-Institut mémoires de l’édition contemporaine, 2002), p. 123. 10  Léon Riotor, « L’Homme des cathédrales », La Plume, no 225 (1er septembre 1898), 526–31 (voir p. 526 pour les citations). Félix Hautfort, « L’Homme des cathédrales : Mérovak évoquera l’Âme gothique », La Plume, no 242 (15 mai 1899), 328–35. 11  Riotor, « L’Homme des cathédrales », p. 526. 12  Jean Lorrain, La Ville empoisonnée : Pall Mall Paris (Paris : Jean Crès, 1936), pp. 143–44 : « Samedi 3 avril. Deux heures du matin, dans les Catacombes […]. Un faux Sâr Péladan barbu et échevelé, mac-farlane en ailes de chauve-souris et physionomie assyrienne, promène un pauvre crâne dans lequel il a introduit une bougie allumée ; plaisanterie d’un goût déplorable et

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dans sa logette de sonneur le Paris mondain et obtient un succès de curiosité. Il se dit poète (mais n’a rien publié), artiste (mais sans formation) et musicien (il joue de l’orgue et du clavecin). Il se croit investi d’une mission, « réveiller l’âme gothique de nos ancêtres »13, et décide de mettre ses talents au service de cette noble cause. Ses dessins, « touffus de gothicité, fleuris de monstres », d’après Léon Riotor (1865–1946), ne représentent que des cathédrales (ou des villes gothiques)14. Il ne se conforme à aucune règle établie, puisqu’il commence par dessiner les toits, peu soucieux des contraintes techniques et des réalités architecturales. Il part en croisade dans les provinces françaises pour « rappeler l’attention sur ces colosses lapidaires »15. Il faut dire qu’il ne devait pas passer inaperçu : vêtu en « escholier » du Moyen Âge (costume en étoffe rouge foncé, tunique à parements, culotte en peau, béret flottant), il était juché sur un âne (lui-même costumé), offert par la province du Poitou16. Ce curieux équipage traînait une « charrette-cathédrale » : énorme jouet confectionné par ses soins, orné de vitraux, décoré de rosaces17. Le soir, il s’arrêtait pour donner des conférences sur l’art gothique et faire entendre le son des cloches sur son phono­ graphe. Il avait aussi une lanterne magique qui projetait des cathédrales sur un écran, car il pratiquait « l’enseignement par l’image »18. Pourquoi s’attarder sur cet excentrique ? Parce qu’il a été remarqué par les critiques qui faisaient l’actualité littéraire et artistique de l’époque, saisissant ainsi l’occasion d’écrire une belle page de prose sur l’architecture gothique ; parce que ses dessins ont été publiés par une revue d’avant-garde et surtout parce qu’il se pose en héritier du Romantisme : avec ses cheveux longs et ses gilets dorés, il rappelle à Léon Riotor la bohème de sa propre jeunesse. Sa passion pour le Moyen Âge et son extravagance évoquent les bousingots des années 1830. On croirait reconnaître « l’homme moyen âge » de Théophile Gautier (1811–1872), immortalisé par un conte des Annales romantiques de 183319. bien digne d’un mage, car cet allumeur de réverbère funèbre se nomme Mérovack [sic] et se dit musicien par ondulations ». On se souvient que Joséphin Péladan (1858–1918) se faisait appeler le « Sâr Mérodak », transcription hébraïque du dieu de Babylone, Mardouk. 13  Hautfort, « L’Homme des cathédrales », p. 334. 14  Riotor, « L’Homme des cathédrales », p. 528. 15  Riotor, « L’Homme des cathédrales », p. 528. 16  Riotor, « L’Homme des cathédrales », p. 528. 17  Hautfort, « L’Homme des cathédrales », p. 334. 18  [Mérovak], La Cathédrale des morts, p. 22. 19  Théophile Gautier, « Elias Wildmanstadius ou l’homme Moyen-Âge », dans Annales

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Joëlle Prungnaud Figure 6.1. Dessin inédit de Mérovak, « L’Homme des cathédrales », dans Léon Riotor, « L’Homme des cathédrales », La Plume, no 225, 1er sept 1898, p. 527, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France. Source : Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Ce personnage, sculpteur de cathédrales en liège et peintre de miniatures gothiques, aurait eu pour modèle Célestin Nanteuil (1813–1873)20. Mérovak incarne la figure des héros délibérément anachroniques qui peuplent les récits fin-de-siècle : Caïn Marchenoir dans Le Désespéré (1886) de Léon Bloy (1846–1917), Carhaix, le sonneur de Saint-Sulpice, dans Là-bas de Huysmans (1891), Joris Borluut, le carillonneur de Georges Rodenbach (1855–1898), Romantiques (Genève : Slatkine Reprints, 1971, d’après l’édition originale, Paris : Louis Jamet, 1823–36), v. 9–10 (1833), 88–100. 20  Célestin Nanteuil fut l’un des illustrateurs de Notre-Dame de Paris. Voir Ségolène Le Men, La Cathédrale illustrée de Hugo à Monet: Regard romantique et modernité (Paris: CNRS, 1998), pp. 68–69.

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Figure 6.2. Dessin inédit de M ­ érovak, « L’Homme des cathé­ drales », dans Léon Riotor, « L’Homme des cathédrales », La Plume, no 225, 1er sept 1898, p. 529, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France. Source : Bibliothèque nationale de France.

dans le roman du même nom (1897). Figure de légende, il réveille la nostalgie du glorieux passé romantique et c’est sans doute ce qui lui vaut son succès. Quant à Maurice Magre, ce n’est plus tout à fait un inconnu aujourd’hui puisque, à l’occasion du cinquantenaire de sa mort, en 1991, sa ville natale de Toulouse lui a rendu hommage, par des expositions, des colloques, des publications21. En 1918, quand paraît La Montée aux enfers, il a quarante-et-un ans et jouit d’une indéniable notoriété : il en est à son cinquième volume de vers, ses pièces de théâtre sont régulièrement jouées sur les scènes françaises (La 21 

La bibliothèque municipale a entrepris de réunir un fonds Maurice Magre en rachetant les manuscrits autographes en circulation et en recueillant les papiers inédits légués par son petit-fils.

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Mort enchaînée (1920) et Comediante (1912) à la Comédie-française, Velleda (1908) à l’Odéon). Il est bien intégré au milieu littéraire de l’époque, comme en témoignent ses relations très fin-de-siècle : Catulle Mendès (1841–1909), Henry Bataille (1872–1922)22. Il rencontre Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) en 1907, dirige la revue La Rose rouge, en collaboration avec Blaise Cendrars (1887–1961), en 1919. Sa carrière se poursuivra jusqu’en 1940 (date de son dernier recueil de poèmes Le Parc des rossignols) ; il meurt en 1941. Il s’est essayé dans d’autres genres littéraires : le roman historique (Le Sang de Toulouse : histoire albigeoise du xiiie siècle, 1931), le roman ésotérique (Lucifer, 1929). La dernière phase de sa carrière est dominée par sa conversion au bouddhisme, son retrait de la vie mondaine et son culte de la sagesse orientale. Pour s’en tenir à un rapide aperçu de son œuvre de poète, notons qu’après Le Poème de la jeunesse (1901), écrit dans la même veine que son premier recueil poétique, il change d’inspiration avec Les Lèvres et le secret (1906) et Les Belles de nuit (1913), placés sous influence baudelairienne : mélancolie, volupté, érotisme, paradis artificiels imprègnent la section intitulée « Les Soirs d’opium »23. Cette orientation se confirme avec La Montée aux enfers (1918), qui provoque un scandale et recueille peu de critiques favorables, si ce n’est de Francis Carco (1886–1958) et de Joseph Henry Rosny (1856–1940, dit J.-H. Rosny aîné)24. Pourtant la maison l’Édition prépare une publication illustrée du recueil, à paraître l’année suivante. Magre rompt son engagement avec l’artiste chargé du projet par l’éditeur après sa rencontre avec Édouard Chimot (1880–1959), jeune dessinateur lillois (nous verrons plus tard pourquoi). L’ouvrage paraît en novembre 1919, avec douze eaux-fortes et vingt-trois dessins. Si le poème qui nous intéresse, « La Cathédrale furieuse », ne fait pas l’objet d’une illustration, il reçoit néanmoins une consécration posthume en étant sélectionné dans le volume intitulé Choix de poésies (1946)25. Ce poème se situe dans la première section intitulée « L’Âne à cornes », après un prologue qui s’ouvre par « Le Jardin maudit ». L’épilogue qui clôt le volume s’intitule « La Descente au paradis », ce qui produit un effet de chiasme avec le titre général. Cette structure en symétrie inversée place le recueil tout entier sous le signe de l’inversion satanique. 22  Robert Aribaut, Maurice Magre : Un méridional universel (Toulouse : Éd. Midia, 1987), p. 115. 23  Aribaut, Maurice Magre, p. 18. 24  Jean-Jacques Bedu, Maurice Magre : Le Lotus perdu (Cahors : Dire Éditions, 1999), p. 185. 25  Voir l’annexe pour le texte intégral du poème « La Cathédrale furieuse ».

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La présence de la guerre, induite par la date de publication, est confirmée par les images des trois premières strophes (ville fumante, feu, coups de la tourmente, bronze des canons, viol et destruction). Je reviendrai sur ce motif – fondamental pour l’interprétation du poème et la confrontation avec l’autre texte. Il importe auparavant de faire la part du convenu et de l’inattendu pour évaluer l’originalité du traitement de la cathédrale par Maurice Magre. Les trois premières strophes introduisent la métaphore du corps féminin, image devenue fort commune au terme d’une longue évolution : la conception anthropomorphique de l’architecture est très ancienne (elle remonte à Vitruve). Quant à la basilique chrétienne construite selon la forme d’une croix, on sait qu’elle était censée laisser deviner la forme du crucifié lui-même d’après les exégètes de l’ère gothique. Au corps christique se substitue le corps marial avec la dévotion à la Vierge Marie26. L’imaginaire littéraire fin-de-siècle s’approprie la rhétorique médiévale pour projeter une féminité toute profane sur le lieu saint : « Notre-Dame de Chartres était une blonde aux yeux bleus », déclare Huysmans27. Inversement, la beauté des lignes corporelles est célébrée en termes d’architecture religieuse par les symbolistes : Rodenbach évoque « la grâce ogivale » de Godelieve dans Le Carillonneur28. L’image s’érotise avec ces analogies plus audacieuses relevées chez André Suarès (1868–1948) : « le parvis du ventre », « la ravissante ogive du sexe »29. Mais il est clair que, dans le poème de Maurice Magre, l’intention pornographique prime sur l’érotisme : la suggestion n’est pas de mise, tout est nommé, crûment, dans des équivalences d’une platitude délibérée, exprimées dans une série de syntagmes répétitifs (« croupe de l’abside », v. 4, « jambes de […] moellons », v. 6, « sexe […du] portail », v. 7, etc.). Le blason du corps féminin qui se met en place dans la première partie (strophes 1, 2 et 3) est 26 

Le xiiie siècle découvre la fin’amor en même temps que l’amour de Marie. Voir Georges Duby, Le Temps des cathédrales (Paris : Gallimard, 1976), p. 150. La tradition rhétorique médiévale établit une analogie entre l’édifice architectural (château) et le corps féminin dans la représentation de l’amour courtois. Voir David Cowling, Building the Text : Architecture as Metaphor in Late Medi­eval and Early Modern France (Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1998). 27  J.-K. Huysmans, La Cathédrale (Paris : Librairie Plon, 1908), p. 131. On pourra consulter à ce sujet mon ouvrage, Gothique et Décadence : Recherches sur la continuité d’un mythe et d’un genre au xixe siècle en Grande-Bretagne et en France (Paris : Honoré Champion, 1997 ; réimpr. 2015), livre second, chap. III : « Le mythe de la cathédrale », pp. 275–302. 28  Georges Rodenbach, Le Carillonneur (Bruxelles : Les Éperonniers, 1987), p. 61. 29  André Suarès, « Vers Venise » [1910], dans Le Voyage du condottière (Paris : Émile-Paul Frères, 1954), p. 183.

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dévoyé par l’obscénité des postures. Nous sommes loin des poses hiératiques des héroïnes symbolistes. Cette indécente nudité inspire de surcroît la répulsion, par la mention des humeurs et des fonctions organiques les plus répugnantes : sueur, vomissement, crachat, hoquet (strophes 4–6). La métaphore végétale de la « sève » nutritive introduit un élément positif aussitôt anéanti : « Ma sève au fond des bénitiers est épuisée » (v. 11). A ce dérèglement corporel, à ces blessures physiques (« orgue percé », « cloches fêlées », v. 25) s’ajoute la pathologie mentale (« mes échos déments », v. 28). L’hystérie féminine, cliché de cette fin de siècle misogyne, est associée dans le titre au furor des grandes figures de la tragédie antique. La violence des hurlements, la démence du rire, la gesticulation induite par une longue série de verbes : « secouer », « arracher », « précipiter », « briser », « agiter », « lancer » (v. 16, 17, 21, 29, 30, 32), etc., évoquent la Médée de Sénèque. Allégorie provocatrice, la femme-cathédrale dirige sa fureur iconoclaste contre les emblèmes de la foi chrétienne et plus particulièrement contre l’Église catholique : le haut clergé, les objets liturgiques, le culte des saints, les sacrements (la confession, l’eucharistie). La désacralisation dégénère en profanation. La cathédrale se rallie aux forces du mal : elle devient celle qui maudit (alors qu’elle devrait bénir), elle saccage la ville (alors qu’elle devrait la protéger), elle s’autodétruit (en transgressant l’interdit du suicide). La double métamorphose de la cathédrale en « église crapaud » (v. 40) et en « cathédrale hystérique » (v. 45) inspire les deux images finales qui encadrent la figure de l’Antéchrist : « Un grand christ chassieux, mi-homme, mi-serpent » (v. 42). C’est la Bête de l’Apocalypse de Jean, qui a autorité sur « toute tribu, tout peuple, toute langue et toute nation »30 : « Et les hommes viendront l’adorer en rampant » (v. 44). Cette rapide analyse met en évidence un effet de saturation et d’outrance. La métaphore corporelle est filée jusqu’à satiété, dans un parti pris de trivialité qui relève de l’esprit décadent, bien représenté par la poésie de Maurice Rollinat (1846–1903)31. Le mauvais goût des images rappelle Les Chants de Maldoror 30  Allusion à l’Adversaire du Christ qui, dans la pensée chrétienne, doit diriger les puissances mauvaises contre les forces divines avant le triomphe définitif du Christ dans l’éternelle paix de la Jérusalem céleste, dans l’Apocalypse de Jean, 13. 31  Le recueil publié en 1883 par Maurice Rollinat, Névroses (Paris : Charpentier, 1883), est symptomatique du traitement impudique réservé à la figure féminine, notamment aux prises avec la mort. Voir mon article « La Mort au féminin », dans Anamorphoses décadentes : L’art de la défiguration 1880–1914. Études offertes à Jean de Palacio, sous la dir. d’Isabelle Krzywkowski et de Sylvie Thorel-Cailleteau (Paris  : Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 2002), pp. 151–70 (p. 162).

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(1868–69) de Lautréamont, poète redécouvert dans les années 189032. Enfin, Maurice Magre souscrit de toute évidence à l’esthétique de la malséance empruntée aux références baudelairiennes les plus sombres 33. Cette veine d’inspiration que l’on aurait pu croire tarie retrouve ici une efficacité dans le registre de la provocation. Le parti pris de « dépoétisation » laisse soupçonner une intention parodique et même auto-parodique puisque l’esthétique tournée ici en dérision est celle de la maturité poétique de Belles de nuit, datant de 1913, c’est-à-dire d’avant la guerre. Il est donc nécessaire de procéder à une relecture du poème à la lumière d’une expérience qui devait bouleverser la vie de son auteur comme celle de nombre de ses contemporains. Après la déclaration de guerre, en août 1914, Maurice Magre vit dans l’attente d’une mobilisation. Il quitte Paris pour se rendre dans sa région natale où doit se tenir le conseil de révision qui décidera de son sort. Une lettre datée du 1er novembre indique assez son état d’esprit : « J’estime la fin de la guerre en janvier. C’est bien loin »34. Il a trente-sept ans, sa santé est mise en péril par la consommation d’opium et il redoute d’être incorporé dans le service actif, c’est-à-dire d’être envoyé au front. « On vit dans une attente perpétuelle, écrit-il encore, on cherche les noms des amis sur les listes de morts et il est presque impossible d’avoir le calme pour travailler »35. Le 16 décembre 1914, il est affecté au service auxiliaire des armées, comme infir­ mier dans les hôpitaux parisiens où sont soignés les soldats blessés. En 1915, il découvre un Paris transformé où la vie culturelle semble s’être arrêtée (salles de spectacle fermées, couvre-feu). Le monde littéraire ne tarde pas à compter ses premières victimes : Charles Péguy, tué lors de la bataille de la Marne, le 5 septembre 1914 ; Henri Alain-Fournier disparu le 22 septembre de la même année (ses restes ont été découverts en 1991 dans une forêt de l’est de la France)36. Blaise Cendrars a l’avant-bras arraché le 28 septembre 1915 et sera amputé. Apollinaire, blessé à la tempe par un éclat d’obus, le 17 mars 1916, arbore sa tête bandée à Montparnasse et incarne « le poète assassiné ». Si les théâtres rouvrent peu à peu leurs portes à Paris, la production littéraire ne se détourne 32 

Isidore Lucien Ducasse (dit comte de Lautréamont), né en 1846, est mort en 1870 à l’âge de 24 ans. 33  Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du mal, pièce XXIX, « Une Charogne », v. 5 : « Les jambes en l’air, comme une femme lubrique », dans Œuvres complètes, éd. Claude Pichois, 2 vols (Paris : Gallimard, coll. « Bibliothèque de la Pléiade », 1975–76), i (1975), 31. 34  Bedu, Maurice Magre, p. 173. 35  Bedu, Maurice Magre, p. 175. 36  Péguy est né en 1873, Henri Alain-Fournier en 1886.

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pas du conflit : Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) écrit, à l’hôpital, Le Feu. Journal d’une escouade, en 1916, couronné par le prix Goncourt. Maurice Magre publie, l’année suivante, Les Colombes poignardées, roman qui relate les effets du conflit à l’arrière (essentiellement parmi les habitués d’une fumerie d’opium, rue Caulaincourt)37. D’autres poèmes de La Montée aux enfers se réfèrent explicitement à la guerre, comme « La Complainte de l’hôpital »38 : […] Ceux qui n’auront plus jamais avec eux (v. 36) Le bonheur d’avoir une forme humaine, L’homme sans mâchoire et l’homme sans yeux, La jambe fendue et le cœur boiteux, Corps mangé de plaie et pauvre âme en peine… Fais-leur bon accueil, ô vieil hôpital ! (v. 41) Incline tes tours, ouvre-leur ton porche ! […] Ouvre comme un ciel ton dôme ogival ! (v. 45)

À l’hôpital de la Meuse, boulevard Montparnasse, où est affecté le poète, un soldat meurt avec les Fleurs du mal et Belles de nuit dans ses poches. Et si Maurice Magre choisit Édouard Chimot pour illustrer son édition de 1919, c’est parce que le dessinateur avait vécu les derniers mois au front, où il avait emporté le volume récemment paru, et qu’il avait rempli les marges du livre de ses croquis. Le recueil ne peut donc se lire indépendamment de la guerre qui constitue un tournant dans la carrière du poète. Dans un témoignage qu’il publiera dix ans plus tard, en 1928, Maurice Magre explique sa conversion au bouddhisme par l’état de « profonde mélancolie » où la guerre l’a conduit39. Il avoue avoir ressenti plus violemment qu’un autre « la descente de cette sorte de crépuscule qui glissa sur l’humanité »40. « Je pensai alors, écrit-il, qu’on était arrivé au règne de la Bête annoncé par les prophètes. Celui qui devait faire revenir l’homme en arrière, tuer l’esprit, l’Antéchrist, était venu »41. C’est bien cet avènement qu’il proclame dans les strophes que nous avons lues. Mais alors, pourquoi ce choix de la cathédrale pour l’annoncer ? 37 

Maurice Magre, Les Colombes poignardées (Paris : l’Édition, 1917). Magre, La Montée aux enfers, pp. 126–28. 39  Maurice Magre, Pourquoi je suis bouddhiste [1928] (Cahors : Dire Éditions, 2000), p. 53. 40  Magre, Pourquoi je suis bouddhiste, p. 53. 41  Magre, Pourquoi je suis bouddhiste, p. 57. 38 

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Dans cette image d’une église prise sous le feu de la bataille, on devine une référence à la cathédrale de Reims, soumise au tir ennemi dès le 19 septembre 1914 : ce jour-là, la tour nord brûle tandis que le parvis est encore relativement épargné. Au printemps 1917, les dégâts sont plus importants et il faudra évacuer la ville fin mars 1918. À la fin de la guerre, les abords immédiats de la cathédrale ne sont plus qu’un immense champ de ruines. Plus de trois-cent-cinquante obus allemands ont crevé les voûtes et mutilé environ soixante-dix statues dont l’Ange au Sourire. L’incendie de septembre 1914 n’a pas manqué d’être exploité par la propagande française, prompte à dénoncer le « vandalisme allemand »42. Émile Mâle (1862–1954) alarme l’opinion dès octobre 1914 : La cathédrale de Reims est fumante, croulante, noircie : ses voûtes tiennent encore, mais qu’un hiver passe, et ce sera une grande ruine désolée, où l’on n’entendra d’autre bruit que celui des pierres qui, les unes après les autres, se détachent et tombent43.

En 1917, il découvre « un fantôme d’église au milieu d’un fantôme de ville » : « La cathédrale ressemblait à un martyr qui venait d’endurer les supplices et que ses bourreaux n’avaient pu achever. Elle avait eu, elle aussi, sa Passion : à sa beauté s’ajoutait désormais sa sainteté »44. La « Grande Martyre » avait déjà été évoquée au théâtre, en pleine guerre, dans le poème dialogué d’Eugène Morand Les Cathédrales, créé en 1915 par Sarah Bernhardt (1844–1923)45. La comédienne prêtait sa voix à la « cathédrale exilée »46, Notre-Dame de Strasbourg, devenue allemande après la défaite de 1870, qui, dialoguant avec ses sœurs de la grande famille gothique, exaltait la muette souffrance de «  Reims, Cathédrale, Reine entre les Cathédrales,  /

42 

Yann Harlaut, « L’incendie de la cathédrale de Reims, 19 septembre 1914 : Fait imagé… Fait imaginaire… », dans Mythes et réalités de la cathédrale de Reims de 1825 à 1975, sous la dir. de David Liot et Delphine Quéreux-Sbaï (Paris : Somogy éditions d’art ; Reims : Ville de Reims, 2001), pp. 71–79 (p. 73). Voir l’abondante bibliographie sur ce sujet qui prouve la mobilisation des autorités ecclésiastiques (l’évêque Mgr Ginisty) et des spécialistes de l’architecture médiévale pour dénoncer le « vandalisme allemand ». 43  Émile Mâle, L’Art allemand et l’art français du Moyen Âge (Paris : Armand Colin, 1918), p. 222. 44  Émile Mâle, cité par Louis Réau, Histoire du vandalisme : Les Monuments détruits de l’art français (Paris : Robert Laffont, 1994), p. 844. 45  Eugène Morand, Les Cathédrales : poème dramatique créé par Mme Sarah Bernhardt (Paris : Librairie théâtrale, artistique et littéraire, 1915). 46  Morand, Les Cathédrales, p. 21.

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Cherchant le ciel des yeux crevés de ses vitraux »47. Maurice Magre a pu s’inspirer de cette prosopopée en alexandrins, mais sa « cathédrale furieuse » n’a ni la résignation de l’église martyrisée, ni l’ardeur patriotique de l’héroïne alsacienne dressée contre l’aigle prussien, à qui Eugène Morand prêtait cette réplique : « Je m’arc-boute / Sur mes piliers, ces reins de ma crypte », geste destiné à tendre « l’arc immense, effrayant » de sa voûte, pour décocher sa flèche meurtrière48. La cathédrale de Maurice Magre ne se déchaîne pas contre l’ennemi, ici indistinct, désigné par le on collectif des premières strophes « On m’a trop violée, on m’a cassé le dos » (v. 12). Elle tourne sa rage destructrice contre la ville, contre le culte qu’elle abrite et finalement contre elle-même. À qui adresse-t-elle sa haineuse diatribe sinon au genre humain tout entier ? Elle dénonce « la pourriture du vieux monde » (v.43), la corruption des hommes et de Dieu. Toutes les valeurs incarnées jusqu’alors par la cathédrale sont anéanties dans ces douze strophes : la verticalité de l’édifice, symbole de spiritualité, est réduite à un amas de décombres (« mes débris immondes », v. 41), la pureté est convertie en souillure, la sainte devient pécheresse, rejetant les vertus théologales (foi, espérance, charité) pour incarner les péchés capitaux : luxure, orgueil, colère… D’autres poètes, avant Maurice Magre, avaient pris la cathédrale pour cible de leur farouche anticléricalisme : dans ses Poèmes aristophanesques (1904) Laurent Tailhade (1854–1919) fait rimer « cathédrales » avec « uréthrales » et, avant lui, le poète belge Iwan Gilkin (1858–1924) avait bafoué l’Eucharistie, en faisant de la grande église le théâtre d’un sanglant sacrifice, assimilé à un étal de boucherie : « L’église est toute en viande et saigne à larges gouttes »49. Mais on voit bien que l’enjeu est autre dans le cas étudié : l’ironie de Tailhade, le fantasme grandguignolesque de Gilkin font place à la rage et au désespoir. Car c’est à la fois une poétique qui est caricaturée et un idéal esthétique qui est foulé aux pieds. Ce double reniement marque une rupture définitive avec ce qui jadis avait été révéré. La guerre entre la France et l’Allemagne, devenue mondiale, est, pour Maurice Magre, le signe d’une faillite « de la pensée occidentale » tout entière50. 47 

Morand, Les Cathédrales, p. 26. Morand, Les Cathédrales, p. 42. 49  Laurent Tailhade, « Le petit épicier fait ses Pâques », dans Poèmes aristophanesques (Paris : Mercure de France, 1904), pp. 82–83 : « Les ostensoirs, les Sacrés-Cœurs aux airs dévots, / Les cloches et tout le fourbi des cathédrales / Inspirent à mon cœur des sentiments nouveaux / Qui consolent mes défaillances uréthrales » (v. 1–4). Iwan Gilkin, « L’Église », dans La Nuit (Paris : Fischbacher, 1892), pp. 180–81. 50  Magre, Pourquoi je suis bouddhiste, p. 57 : « J’estimai que l’orientation de la pensée occidentale s’était tournée vers l’erreur ». 48 

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Figure 6.3. [Mérovak], première de couverture, La Cathédrale des morts, Aix-les-Bains, imprimerie P. A. Gerente [1918], Paris, Biblio­ thèque nationale de France. © Bibliothèque nationale de France.

* * * C’est aussi la figure de la cathédrale qui est sollicitée par Mérovak en 1918, dans une plaquette artisanale de trente pages, éditée par une imprimerie de province et inti­ tulée La Cathédrale des morts. Financée par souscription et tirée à cent exemplaires, elle est signée non pas du pseudonyme de l’auteur mais du surnom qui lui avait valu une éphémère notoriété, vingt ans auparavant : « l’Homme des Cathédrales ». En réalité, il s’agit d’une véritable brochure de propagande, comme l’indique la « Notice en Anglais et en Italien », qui n’est autre qu’un tract appelant les alliés à souscrire au projet de construction51. On notera les deux encarts : l’un 51 

La version anglaise figure, dans une langue très approximative, à l’ouverture, tandis que la version italienne est placée en fin de brochure.

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conférant au texte un statut de témoignage, l’autre donnant quelques informations sur le monument (matériau, localisation). Le ton haineux et vengeur s’affiche sans détour : les Allemands sont qualifiés de « Barbares », puis de criminels52. Nous retrouvons ici l’esprit nationaliste et revanchard des défenseurs de la cathédrale de Reims. À gauche du titre en caractères gothiques, figure une brève notation descriptive disposée selon une typographie verticale, à la manière d’un poème, qui fait de l’édifice un irréel sanctuaire des âmes : « une forme gigantesque transportée par les nuages au soir de la plus sanglante de toutes les batailles et emportant dans ses flancs les âmes de nos glorieux vengeurs »53. Cette phrase, ainsi placée en exergue sur la page de couverture, figure de nouveau, entre guillemets, dans la notice biographique de sept pages inti­ tulée « Mérovak », où l’auteur, parlant de lui-même à la troisième personne, révèle la source de son inspiration54. Mérovak cède sans scrupules, on le voit, à la pratique de l’autocitation. Alors qu’il était prisonnier dans le camp de Holzminden, dans le nord de l’Allemagne, il rêvait chaque nuit de la cathédrale de Metz, lieu de son mariage en janvier 1912, jusqu’à cette vision nocturne : Le rêve, le grand rêve impérissable, l’avait côtoyé sur sa litière de paille. Les cloisons en planches s’écartèrent, comme bousculées par le vent glacial qui soufflait sur les baraques enveloppées dans un silence de nécropole. À peine la trompette allemande avait-elle lancé dans la nuit noire sa dernière mélopée, qu’aussitôt « une forme gigantesque transportée par les nuages, au soir de la plus sanglante de toutes les batailles et emportant dans ses flancs les âmes de nos glorieux vengeurs » surgissait à ses yeux55.

Hanté par cette vision, il décide de la fixer par la peinture et obtient de l’ennemi toile, couleurs et pinceaux. Dans la nuit de la Toussaint 1916, à la lueur d’une veilleuse, il transcrit ce que lui dicte la cathédrale car l’hallucination d’abord silencieuse se met à lui parler. Une fois libéré, ne pouvant transporter le tableau trop encombrant — 215 × 380 cm — il en prend quarante clichés photographiques et emporte son précieux manuscrit. En 1917, installé à Montreux avec

52  [Mérovak], La Cathédrale des morts, page de titre : ‘Ce qu’un Français a vu chez les Barbares’. On peut également lire dans l’appel rédigé en anglais, en quatrième de couverture: ‘[…] the barbarous Huns’. 53  [Mérovak], La Cathédrale des morts, p. 21. 54  [Mérovak], La Cathédrale des morts, pp. 21–27. Voir la citation complète ci-dessous. 55  [Mérovak], La Cathédrale des morts, p. 21.

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Figure 6.4. [Mérovak], La Cathédrale des morts, Aix-les-Bains, imprimerie P. A. Gerente [1918] [entre les pages 8 et 9], Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France. Source : Bibliothèque nationale de France.

sa femme et sa fille, « le peintre recommen[ce] son œuvre », celle qui est reproduite en hors-texte au cœur de la plaquette56. Après les architectures légères et ajourées, presque aériennes, des dessins, la matière semble ici reprendre ses droits avec cette masse noire, monolithique, qui fait corps avec le rocher. Plus proche du château que de la cathédrale gothique, le monument frappe par sa pesanteur et par son caractère inaccessible : il n’y a pas d’escaliers pour parvenir jusqu’au portail ou aux grandes arcades qui paraissent pourtant ouvertes. Les éléments gothiques des dessins se répètent sans grande variation : arcades, rosaces, colonnades… mais les tours sont compactes, la ligne fait place au volume, le plein l’emporte sur le vide. Quant au manuscrit, il commence par ces mots : « La cathédrale des morts dresse sur un socle trapu les beautés des édifices célèbres que j’ai admirés depuis

56 

[Mérovak], La Cathédrale des morts, p. 26.

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vingt ans »57. Mérovak la présente comme une synthèse de l’art gothique du xiie au xvie siècle. Il lui attribue des proportions gigantesques : la longueur intérieure de la nef est fixée à 280 mètres (sachant que cette longueur varie habituellement entre 120 et 150 mètres), la hauteur de la voûte à 58 mètres58. Il évalue la durée de construction à dix ou quinze ans. Mérovak fournit un descriptif détaillé de l’architecture extérieure (tours de la façade occidentale, portique Nord, arcs-boutants, tours octogonales de l’abside, cloître encerclant l’édifice) et de l’ornementation intérieure (statuaire, sculpture ornementale, rosaces, vitraux). Il apporte des précisions sur les cloches et les grandes orgues. Enfin, il prévoit une église souterraine de 250 mètres de long pour abriter un immense ossuaire. Quelle lecture faut-il faire de ce projet délirant ? On observe tout d’abord un détournement de l’architecture religieuse vers une architecture commémo­ rative, comprenant monuments et tombeaux. L’histoire militaire de l’Europe comptait déjà des monuments funèbres élevés sur les champs de bataille, comme le tumulus d’Azincourt. Pierre Larousse (1817–1875) note à leur sujet dans le Grand Dictionnaire universel qu’ils n’étaient encore que les « préludes à ces immenses ossuaires contemporains sous lesquels gisent des armées entières » : il cite Waterloo59. Mais il ne se doutait pas (il est mort en 1875) que la bataille de Verdun compterait 270 000 morts uniquement du côté français60. Cette bataille a été perçue par les contemporains immédiats comme un résumé de la Grande Guerre à elle seule, par sa durée sans précédent – neuf mois de combats acharnés – et par la violence du feu – vingt-et-un millions d’obus ont été tirés par l’armée allemande entre avril et juillet 1916. C’est face au lieu du sacrifice que Mérovak veut ériger son monument comme un grand 57 

[Mérovak], La Cathédrale des morts, p. 7. On sait que la plus élevée des cathédrales gothiques, Beauvais, s’est effondrée deux fois avec une voûte de 48,20 m. Indications fournies par Michel Hérubel, La Peinture gothique. I. Le Monde nouveau, dans Histoire générale de la peinture, sous la dir. de Claude Schaeffner, 28 vols (Lausanne : Éditions Rencontre, 1965–67), vii (1965), 156. 59  Pierre Larousse, Grand dictionnaire universel du xixe siècle, 17 tomes (Paris : Administration du Grand dictionnaire universel, 1866–90), xi (1874), entrée «  Monument  », pp. 531–32 (p. 533b). 60  Cette hécatombe s’explique en partie par la stratégie adoptée : la relève des troupes était constante sur un front d’une trentaine de kilomètres, si bien que les soldats, rendus vulnérables par leur méconnaissance du terrain, furent décimés par l’ennemi. Ces précisions sont apportées par Antoine Prost, « Verdun », dans Lieux de mémoire, sous la dir. de Pierre Nora, 3 tomes (Paris : Gallimard, 1997), ii, 1755–80. Voir également du même auteur « Les monuments aux morts », i, 199–223. 58 

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catafalque noir. La fonction funéraire de la cathédrale, qui abrite gisants et tombeaux, est ici réactivée. Ce projet a, sans conteste, une dimension prophétique et visionnaire car il anticipe la première initiative de commémoration : le conseil municipal de Verdun réfugié à Paris prend la décision d’ériger un monument commémoratif en juillet 1917 ; le concours est ouvert en août 1919. Encore ne s’agit-il que d’un monument à la victoire limité à l’échelle de la ville. Il sera inauguré en 1929. Or, dès la Toussaint 1916 (si l’on en croit sa chronologie), alors que l’issue de la bataille est encore incertaine, Mérovak prend conscience de la démesure de l’événement. Il pressent que seule une architecture d’exception sera digne de le commémorer. Que pouvait-on en effet imaginer pour fixer le souvenir d’une telle hécatombe ? La bibliothèque de Verdun conserve un projet de « Mausolée National » (conçu dès 1916) mais ce type d’édifice funéraire ne convenait pas à la situation, car il fallait assurer une sépulture collective aux milliers de cadavres anonymes (alliés et ennemis confondus) qui jonchaient les trous d’obus. C’est pourquoi l’idée d’un ossuaire sera finalement retenue. Mérovak avait envisagé cette solution bien avant qu’elle ne soit rendue publique, en février 1919. L’ossuaire de Douaumont, conçu par Léon Azema dans le respect de la laïcité, sera inauguré en 1932. En faisant de son mémorial un édifice religieux, de culte catholique, Mérovak montre qu’il raisonne en homme du xixe siècle, comme avant le régime de la séparation des églises et de l’État, instauré en 1905. La perfection de l’art gothique est clairement utilisée pour proclamer la supériorité française, la cathédrale se faisant l’allégorie d’une France vengeresse et se mettant au service de l’ardeur patriotique. Deux modèles se superposent : Notre-Dame de Reims, lieu du sacre des rois de France, emblème de la nation et, en arrièreplan, la cathédrale de Metz, qui portait encore les traces des canons prussiens de 1870. La symbolique religieuse sert à exalter la patrie : la crypte, caveau souterrain qui servait souvent de sépulcre dans les églises, abrite les dépouilles des glorieux défenseurs de la France (poilus et alliés)61. Il fallait trouver un édifice mythique à la mesure de ce premier conflit mondial, cette guerre universelle que Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949) devait nommer « le gigantesque événement »62. La cathédrale de Mérovak répond 61  ‘Les profondeurs glacées des cryptes […] immense souterrain, refuge des fantômes’, [Mérovak], La Cathédrale des morts, p. 14. 62  Maurice Maeterlinck, « Les prophéties », Le Figaro, 1er avril 1916, dans Les Débris de la guerre (Paris : Eugène Fasquelle, Bibliothèque-Charpentier, 1916), pp. 227–38 (p. 235).

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à cette exigence : vaste synthèse susceptible d’embrasser une totalité (tous les siècles gothiques, tous les édifices), elle est à la fois reliquaire et catacombe. Cette haine revancharde est, au contraire, totalement absente de la poésie de Maurice Magre, on s’en souvient. Ajoutons qu’un poème autographe, « Aux morts Allemands », resté inédit pour cause de censure, a été retrouvé dans les manuscrits du poète63. La compassion et la fraternité qui s’expriment dans ces pièces, très émouvantes, datées de 1919, sont tout à fait exceptionnelles à une époque où même des intellectuels réputés pour leur cosmopolitisme, comme Maeterlinck, et leur ouverture culturelle, comme Émile Mâle, dénonçaient « la barbarie prussienne »64. Cependant, les deux auteurs se rejoignent par le fond commun de désespoir qui anime leurs textes. Les accents vindicatifs du discours de Mérovak ne sauraient dissimuler la profonde détresse qui émane de sa vision, dans l’image comme dans le commentaire. La photographie publiée dans la brochure fait de la cathédrale une sinistre silhouette noire qui semble habitée par le néant et abandonnée de Dieu, avec les trouées des fenêtres hautes qui percent les murailles. L’image souligne le non-sens d’une cathédrale nécropole, exaltée dans sa fonction mortuaire, devenue la « tombe de l’humanité »65. Alors qu’il a consacré sa jeunesse à tenter de rendre vie à l’édifice médiéval, Mérovak en fait ici un lieu miné par la mort : entre les lourds piliers de la crypte, écrit-il, « surgissent des monceaux de crânes d’où, comme une vague, déborde un grouillement informe de tibias »66. Le charnier qui abrite cette scène de Jugement dernier semble répandre la mort dans la partie supérieure de l’église : les sta­ tues du transept nord sont « blanches comme des fantômes », ce sont « des

63 

Ce long poème de sept strophes de six vers est intégralement cité par Bedu, Maurice Magre, pp. 183–84. Extrait des vers 5–12 : « Vous ne reverrez plus la terre d’Allemagne / où monte un sapin noir à travers un ciel gris. / Sous les chênes français qu’étiez-vous venus faire ? / À présent vous voilà couchés dans nos sillons / nos morts à vos côtés mâchent la même terre / où, les yeux grands ouverts et vides de rayons / ils s’en vont, avec vous, au fil de nos rivières / Ô mon Dieu ! J’ai pitié d’une telle misère ». L’auteur cite un autre poème, de même inspiration intitulé « Aux morts ennemis », publié en octobre 1919. 64  Maeterlinck, Les Débris de la guerre, p. 229. Dans L’Art allemand et l’art français du Moyen Âge, Mâle « récuse les vertus des Barbares » (p. 8) et présente les Allemands comme des envahisseurs, dépourvus de génie créateur, ce qui expliquerait leur rage de destruction. La violence du ton et l’aspect caricatural de l’argumentaire, de la part d’un historien de l’art aussi érudit, a de quoi surprendre le lecteur d’aujourd’hui. 65  [Mérovak], La Cathédrale des morts, p. 5. 66  [Mérovak], La Cathédrale des morts, p. 15.

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êtres à l’apparence de mort […], débris d’un délire sanguinaire »67. La mise en scène est macabre : l’espace résonne de gémissements, traversé par « le sanglot des litanies », les cloches hurlent « les lamentations éperdues du Dies Irae », les orgues rugissent68… C’est « cette musique de pierre, cette architecture de sons » que l’artiste tente de faire entendre69. Dès que la chape de l’emprise idéologique est fragilisée par la montée du désespoir, son imagination, hantée depuis toujours par les cathédrales, imprégnée de médiévisme romantique, revêt une dimension poétique et donne à son texte l’ampleur d’une tragique épopée. La traditionnelle expression de « vaisseau gothique », souvent répétée, fait image : dressée sur son socle de roc, l’immense construction semble un navire échoué sur un îlot rocheux, qui ­paraît battu par les vagues, hors de l’espace-temps. Le « vaisseau-cathédrale »70 à la puissante mâture « vogue sur l’immense océan de la guerre », à la manière d’un vaisseau fantôme71. Le discours se construit dans un style hyperbolique, dans le trop, dans l’excès, à l’imitation des formes monumentales. Il se déploie dans une rhétorique ampoulée, saturée de superlatifs, d’intensifs, parcourue d’émerveillements aux accents parfois enfantins : « La grande roue brille de mille feux »72. La grandiose vision réparatrice surgie du passé demeurera sans effet : restée à l’état de rêve improbable en dépit de la campagne de publicité menée par l’auteur, elle ne parviendra pas à effacer le deuil de celui-ci qui perd sa femme à son retour de captivité. La glorieuse cathédrale, idéal perdu puis retrouvé pour servir la patrie, n’est jamais que « le monument de son calvaire et celui de tant d’autres »73. * * * Pour dire l’horreur de la Grande Guerre, Maurice Magre et Mérovak convoquent l’édifice architectural unanimement célébré au xixe siècle en tant que chef-d’œuvre de l’art médiéval, emblème de la nation et symbole du sacré. Il 67 

[Mérovak], La Cathédrale des morts, p. 11. [Mérovak], La Cathédrale des morts, pp. 11, 12. 69  [Mérovak], La Cathédrale des morts, p. 5. Alors qu’il vient d’achever son tableau, l’auteur projette de le rendre par l’écriture : ‘Il ne restait plus qu’à écrire le manuscrit, à l’imprégner de cette musique de pierre, de cette architecture de sons’. 70  [Mérovak], La Cathédrale des morts, p. 17 : ‘le vaisseau-cathédrale en marche sur les brumes’. 71  [Mérovak], La Cathédrale des morts, p. 13. 72  [Mérovak], La Cathédrale des morts, p. 9. 73  [Mérovak], La Cathédrale des morts, p. 27. 68 

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est significatif que tous deux aient fait appel à une architecture porteuse de l’héritage esthétique, culturel et religieux transmis aux sociétés européennes par le Moyen Âge. Les grandes cathédrales (sur le sol germanique ou en Îlede-France) appartiennent à l’art gothique qui ne s’arrêtait pas aux frontières et constituent l’un des modes d’expression les plus aboutis de la culture européenne. Magre se sert de cette image de la cathédrale comme figure séculaire, garante de la civilisation chrétienne occidentale, pour dénoncer l’horreur d’une guerre fratricide. Il la fait hystérique pour proclamer la folie du vieux monde. Cette autodestruction pourrait être interprétée comme le consentement du siècle à sa propre mise à mort, car c’est ce siècle qui avait réhabilité l’architecture médiévale, qui avait fait du gothique un idéal. Quant à Mérovak, il utilise la même figure pour commémorer la guerre et exalter la victoire des Alliés, c’est pourquoi il lui donne une dimension natio­ nale. Elle est censée incarner la supériorité de la nation française, elle permet de visualiser le concept de nation. Mais, nous l’avons vu, cette image d’héroïne guerrière s’efface derrière l’image de la mort. Lui qui avait voulu réveiller « les rêves enclos dans ces monuments aux nefs flamboyantes »74, faire revivre la foi naïve du Moyen Âge, finit par transformer le vivant sanctuaire en tombeau. Dans les deux cas, le vaisseau gothique est convoqué pour consacrer le naufrage du xixe siècle et c’est sans doute ce qui réunit ces deux textes et leur donne un accent pathétique. Un autre poète, originaire de Chicago, Carl Sandburg (1878–1967), combattant des troupes alliées sur le front belge, avait, lui aussi, fait référence à l’idéal gothique pour dire la déchirure provoquée par le conflit. L’un de ses poèmes de guerre, « Salvage » est dédié à William Morris (1834–1896), grand artiste, écrivain victorien et partisan du Gothic Revival, qui avait écrit de belles pages sur les cathédrales du nord de la France75 : Salvage Guns on the battle lines have pounded now a year between Brussels and Paris. And, William Morris, when I read your old chapter on the great arches and naves and little whimsical corners of the Churches of Northern France — Brr-rr  ! I’m glad you’re a dead man, William Morris, I’m glad you’re down in the damp and mouldy, only a memory instead of a living man — I’m glad you’re gone.

74 

Riotor, « L’Homme des cathédrales », p. 528. William Morris, ‘Shadows of Amiens’ [1856], dans Prose and Poetry (1856–1870) by William Morris (London : Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 1913), pp. 617–31. 75 

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[Les canons du front pilonnent depuis un an les lignes entre Bruxelles et Paris. Et, William Morris, quand je lis ton vieux chapitre sur les grandes voûtes et les nefs des cathédrales du nord de la France, sur leurs petits recoins fantasques, Brr ! Je suis heureux que tu sois mort, William Morris, je suis heureux que tu sois enfoui dans la terre humide et moisie, que tu ne sois plus qu’un souvenir au lieu d’être en vie – je me réjouis que tu ne sois plus de ce monde.]76 Lui aussi témoin de cette monstrueuse mécanique de destruction, le poète américain est habité par un sentiment de honte au souvenir de lectures qui parlent d’un autre monde. En convoquant la mémoire de William Morris, il cède à la nostalgie de l’utopie médiévaliste, comme si le deuil de ce rêve de beauté et de fraternité pouvait permettre de mesurer la tragique absurdité de la Grande Guerre.

76 

Carl Sandburg, « Salvage », dans War Poems (1914–1915), dans The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg (New York : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1970), p. 41. Traduction de l’auteur.

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Annexe Maurice Magre, La Cathédrale furieuse Ma chair s’est trop roussie à la ville fumante, J’ai trop reçu de feu dans mes yeux en vitraux, Je suis lasse d’offrir aux coups de la tourmente La croupe de l’abside et les seins ogivaux. Je ne veux plus lever vers les cieux fantastiques Mes deux jambes de séculaires moellons. Dans le sexe géant de mon portail gothique On a trop fait passer le bronze des canons. Les dalles de mes reins sont lasses et brisées Et le creux de ma nef craque sous le fardeau. Ma sève au fond des bénitiers est épuisée, On m’a trop violée, on m’a cassé le dos. Je ne verrai plus la sueur des gargouilles, Je n’entr’ouvrirai plus les lèvres des autels, Je purgerai mon corps de tout ce qui le fouille, Je secouerai mes sanctuaires rituels… J’arracherai les oriflammes qui m’affublent Et je ferai sortir des tombeaux souterrains Les archevêques morts en mitres, en chasubles, Avec des sacrements fantômes dans leurs mains. Je précipiterai hors de mes sacristies, Comme un vomissement, les cierges, les lutrins, Les anneaux pastoraux, les châsses, les hosties, Crachant dans un hoquet mes reliques de saints. De mon orgue percé, de mes cloches fêlées, Je chanterai des chants grotesques et puissants Et dans le chœur des monacales assemblées Retentira l’appel de mes échos déments.

L’Imaginaire de la cathédrale à l’épreuve de la Grande Guerre

Et puis, je briserai moi-même mes colonnes, J’agiterai les hémicycles de mes reins Et faisant un bouquet de cloches et d’icônes, Je lancerai ces fleurs de peinture et d’airain. Et je lapiderai la ville de mes pierres. Je lancerai la porte et les morceaux de tours, Les confessionnaux, les grilles et les chaires, Je me ravagerai le corps avec amour. Et quand sous le ciel lourd et sous la lune basse De la voûte où s’ouvrait jadis le paradis, Il ne restera plus qu’une affreuse carcasse, Une église crapaud qui bave, hurle et maudit, Alors, il jaillira de mes débris immondes Un grand christ chassieux, mi-homme, mi-serpent, Dieu pervers de la pourriture du vieux monde Et les hommes viendront l’adorer en rampant. Et je rirai, moi la cathédrale hystérique, Au milieu des chardons et des louches odeurs, En les voyant fouler l’hostie eucharistique Et le sang de celui qui fut notre seigneur…

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Church, Nation, and the ‘Stones of France’ Ronald R. Bernier Les cathédrales, c’est la France. Tandis que je les contemple, je sens nos ascendants qui montent et qui descendent en moi, comme sur une autre échelle de Jacob. [The Cathedrals are France. As I contemplate them I feel our ancestry mounting and descending in me as if by another Jacob’s ladder.]1

N

ineteenth-century attitudes to Gothic architecture were many, and the expressive and signifying potential of the image of a medi­eval cathedral was wide open to artists: Romantic and escapist nostalgia, picturesque disorder, and sublime irrationality, and — as the two previous essays in this section argue — political agency and nationalistic pride.2 Yet, as Janine Dakyns has argued in her seminal study of the various permutations that ‘rediscoveries’ of the Middle Ages took on in French literature during the second half of the nineteenth century, those views had ‘little to do with the 1 

Auguste Rodin, Les Cathédrales de France [1914] (Paris: Editions Denoël, 1983), p. 180; Auguste Rodin, Cathedrals of France, trans. by Elizabeth Chase Geissbuhler (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965; repr. Redding Ridge, CT: Black Swan Press, 1981), p. 75. All further quotations and translations are from these editions. 2  The central argument here is a distilled and revised version of ‘Writing the Gothic’, ch. 4 of my Monument, Moment, and Memory: Monet’s Cathedral in Fin-de-Siècle France (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell Uni­ver­sity Press, 2007). Ronald  R. Bernier ([email protected]) is Professor and Chair of the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston, Massachusetts.

The Idea of the Gothic Cathedral: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Meanings of the Medieval Edifice in the Modern Period, ed. by Stephanie A. Glaser, RITUS 9 (Turn­hout: Brepols, 2018) pp. 197–229 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.RITUS-EB.5.115741

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Middle Ages themselves, and everything to do with the preoccupations of the nineteenth century’. Each artist for whom the Gothic cathedral became a fascination, she writes, ‘fashioned out of their hopes and fears for the modern world, a private vision of the medi­eval past’.3 Before Dakyns, Richard Griffiths traced the ‘spiritualist turn’ in the creative writers from the 1880s up to World War I, documenting it as a revival of Catholicism among the literary elite who became attached to a strongly anti-intellectual protest against society. These writers, he argues, not only reacted violently against the materialism of the age, but returned to what they conceived to be a medi­eval form of Christianity.4 This medi­evalism is the subject of a more recent study by Laura Morowitz and Elizabeth Emery, Consuming the Past: The Medi­eval Revival in Fin-de-Siècle France, which explores the complex and manifold discourses about the Middle Ages circulating from the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 to the Law of the Separation of Church and State in 1905.5 In elucidating both the elite interest in and public demand for things medi­eval, Morowitz and Emery contend that it was an attempt to ‘regain the past’, wherein the Middle Ages were perceived as a lost Golden Age, which prompted the efforts of artists, writers, and churchmen to ‘sell’ the Middle Ages as a time of French greatness. The idea of a medi­eval Golden Age surfaced frequently as a response to contemporary fears about a seemingly fragmented modern social structure, a modernity that had uprooted individuals from community and tradition. Narratives of the medi­eval were thus constructed to serve contemporary political and artistic needs and purposes. The Gothic cathedral played a central role in these, as Elizabeth Emery argues in Romancing the Cathedral: Gothic Architecture in Fin-de-Siècle French Culture: The cathedral appealed to contemporaries precisely because of its status as a unifying concept. It provided a comforting response to fears about the fragmentation and dispersion of society and the loss of tradition; it was a stable, still-functioning system of belief that organized and gave meaning to all of the disparate elements in and around it. […] 3 

Janine R. Dakyns, The Middle Ages in French Literature, 1851–1900 (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 1973), p. 291. For many this was a response to the state of contemporary society, a distaste for an overly optimistic confidence in scientific progress, utilitarianism, and materialism from which redemption might be sought through an inward turn toward spirituality (however variously that might have been conceived). 4  Richard Griffiths, The Reactionary Revolution (London: Constable, 1966). 5  Elizabeth Emery and Laura Morowitz, Consuming the Past: The Medi­eval Revival in Fin-de-Siècle France (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003).

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The sheer variety of artwork and theology contained in the cathedral offered something for everyone; it provided a figure of social stability and community spirit that could simultaneously represent conflicting values: medi­eval Catholic spirituality and symbolism, secular artistic masterpieces, or the historical longevity of the French nation itself.6

In this sense, then, the Gothic cathedral became a talisman to be appropriated, one that even while engendering a deeply felt connection with the past, served as a projection of contemporary anxieties and fantasies, as exemplified by the subjects treated in Maylis Curie’s and Joëlle Prungnaud’s essays. Morowitz and Emery’s joint study carries forward the work of Dakyns and Griffiths to brilliantly illuminate the multivalent impact of medi­e valism in France at the end of the century and the mutability of medi­eval imagery, both visual and literary. So it is within this prevailing discourse on the Gothic as a system of meaning and multifaceted symbol of the French spirit and identity that I want to address my remarks here, prompted by the preceding essays in this section; in doing so, I wish to engage in conversation with them and other essayists in this volume about the transcendentalizing of national and Christian character in the Gothic church. And I want to do this by introducing another, often overlooked, contributor to the fin-de-siècle discourse on the Gothic, the sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840–1917).

Auguste Rodin and the ‘Stones of France’ In 1914 an important collection of Rodin’s drawings, watercolours, and written reflections on medi­eval French architecture was assembled and published in book form as Les Cathédrales de France together with a lengthy introduction by the symbolist writer and poet Charles Morice (1860–1919), tracing the evolution of medi­eval thought and its symbolic resonance for the sculptor.7 From Rodin’s own accounts we know that he conducted an extensive and deeply personal study of medi­e val French building and design, in both written and 6  Elizabeth Emery, Romancing the Cathedral: Gothic Architecture in Fin-de-Siècle French Culture (New York: SUNY Press, 2001), p. 163. 7  Charles Morice, ‘Introduction’, in Rodin, Les Cathédrales de France, pp. 7–134. I have presented some of this material in a paper entitled ‘Rodin, Ruskin and the Gothic,’ at the symposium New Studies on Rodin at the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford Uni­ver­sity, in October 2002, a revised version of which, ‘Les Cathédrales de France: Rodin, Ruskin, and the Gothic’, appears in the Journal of the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford Uni­ver­sity, 3 (2002–03 [2005]), 141–50.

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graphic notes, begun as early as 1865.8 In an article entitled ‘The Gothic in the Cathedrals and Churches of France’ published (in English) in North American Review in February 1905, Rodin recalls the awareness of Gothic architecture he gained in early adulthood and his growing enthusiasm for it: I cannot say that, as a boy, though born in Paris, I paid much attention to the architecture of Notre Dame. […] Only when I was in full possession of myself, at the age of about twenty-five, did I begin to make a special study of its beauty, which was generally decried. […] As  I grew older and rid myself of the prejudices of my environment, I  acquired more assurance and dared to see for myself. Whenever I travelled, I made it a rule to visit all the cathedrals I could.9

Les Cathédrales de France is the trace of that pilgrimage.10 While Rodin’s written accounts are largely about his experiences of the great Gothic structures of Chartres, Amiens, and Reims, his drawings and sketches in pen-and-ink and watercolour — scattered randomly throughout the pages of the published text and rarely corresponding to a particular descriptive passage — capture, in quiet detail, the smaller, more intimate churches of Dijon, Toulouse (Figure 7.1), Avallon, Houdan, Montjavoult, Auxerre, Sens, and Champeux, among others. And the surviving sketches are considerable in number, evidence of the thoroughness of Rodin’s visual pilgrimage.11 While I shall not be addressing Rodin’s drawings in any specific detail here, it is worth noting — as seen in the two examples provided — that the transparent washes 8 

With Morice’s help, Rodin began in earnest assembling his notes for publication in 1910, the year after the exhibition of his sculpture La Cathédrale at the 1909 Paris Exposition. 9  Auguste Rodin, ‘The Gothic in the Cathedrals and Churches of France’, dictated by Rodin to a stenographic reporter and trans. by Frederick Lawton, North American Review, 180.579 (February 1905), 219–29 (p. 220). See also Elizabeth Chase Geissbuhler, ‘Preliminary Notes on Rodin’s Architectural Drawings’, in The Drawings of Rodin, ed. by Albert E. Elsen and J. Kirk T. Varnedoe (New York: Elek Books, 1972), pp. 141–48. 10  Rodin himself speaks of his pilgrimages through France, for example ‘dans mes pèlerinages’, Les Cathédrales de France, p. 147. 11  Geissbuhler, translator of Rodin’s Cathedrals of France, has undertaken a thorough critical examination of these drawings, now split between the collections of the Rodin Museums in Paris and Philadelphia. She notes that in 1921 the first curator of the Musée Rodin in Paris estimated the architectural drawings in the collection to total eight hundred, and at least another 338 in Philadelphia add to this extraordinary number.

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Figure 7.1. Auguste Rodin, Les Cathédrales de France, lithographic proofs of drawings, retouched in graphite, 12 7/8" × 9 7/16", Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art, bequest of Jules E. Mastbaum, F1929-7-211 (pp. 15 and 82). c. 1910–14. Photo by Lynn Rosenthal, 2002. Reproduced with kind permission of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

and atmospheric veils in which the artist bathes his architectural fragments are reminiscent of Ruskin’s drawings and sketches that accompany his own writing, particularly in the 1840s.12 Yet, despite their intimate scale and relative obscurity, we should not assume that these drawings were closed up inside the covers of an artist’s private sketchbook. It seems certain that they, as well as the written notes, were well known within the sculptor’s circle of colleagues, critics, and admirers. In fact, on the occasion of Rodin’s 1889 retrospective with 12 

See, for instance, Ruskin’s watercolour Corner of St Mark’s after Rain (1846), at the Ash­ molean Museum in Oxford, among others. It should also be noted here that part of the title of this essay, ‘the Stones of France’, refers to a remark made by Marcel Proust in his translation of Ruskin’s Bible of Amiens, where he states, ‘Does not this unity of Christian art of the Middle Ages constantly appear in the viewpoint of those pages where [Ruskin’s] imagination illuminates here and there the stones of France’. See Marcel Proust, On Reading Ruskin, trans. and ed. by Jean Autret, William Burford, and Phillip J. Wolfe (New Haven: Yale Uni­ver­sity Press, 1987), p. 38.

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Claude Monet (1840–1926) at the Galerie Georges Petit, the critic Gustave Geffroy (1855–1926) described Rodin as ‘the respectful brother’ of the great architects of the Middle Ages.13 My focus here is on the distinctive quality of Rodin’s written reflections on ‘the Gothic’ — a category itself rather broadly understood by the artist — which rely on the evocative power of poetic language to describe the sorts of emotional, psychological, and imaginative associations its architecture conjured for him. It is an affective language, one which aims to capture something of the experience of viewing architecture, as spontaneous, personal, and intense, that self-consciously invokes the critic-essayist-aesthete John Ruskin’s (1819–1900) own writing on the subject. Rodin, in fact, acknowledged Ruskin in his 1905 essay as ‘One of the first among foreigners to understand the ancient cathedrals and churches of France’.14 Ruskin’s thoughts on art and architecture were known in France from around mid-century, much of his work having been translated, commented on, and paraphrased in journals and critical studies well before Marcel Proust’s (1871–1922) various ‘Ruskinian pilgrimages’ to the cathedral cities of France and his 1904 translation of The Bible of Amiens (1884).15 Besides The Bible of 13  Gustave Geffroy, ‘Auguste Rodin’, in Exposition Claude Monet–Auguste Rodin: Galerie Georges Petit 1889, repr. in Miscellaneous Group Exhibitions, 1885–1900: Impressionism, vol. xxiv of Modern Art in Paris: Two Hundred Catalogues of the Major Exhibitions Reproduced in Facsimile in Forty-Seven Volumes, ed. by Theodore Reff (New York: Garland, 1981), pp. 82–83. 14  Rodin, ‘The Gothic in the Cathedrals and Churches of France’, p. 219. 15  The first article in French on Ruskin’s aesthetics, ‘Les Doctrines de M. Ruskin’, appeared in 1856 in the Revue Britannique (8th ser., vol. 4), pp. 445–68. Beginning in 1892, the Bulletin de l’Union pour l’Action Morale began publishing simple translations from the broad range of Ruskin’s writings, including, between November 1893 and March 1903, short translated excerpts from The Stones of Venice and The Seven Lamps of Architecture, among other works. Moreover, an entire chapter (‘The Lamp of Memory’) from The Seven Lamps appeared in the Revue générale in October 1895. And, in 1864, a study on Ruskin by J. Milsand, L’Esthétique anglaise: Étude sur M. John Ruskin (Paris: Germer Baillière), presented to a French audience Ruskin’s overall aesthetic preoccupations about the moral and intellectual significance of architecture and, more specifically, the superiority of the Gothic spirit and style over the tyrannies of Renaissance and modern science and philosophy. See Jean Autret’s Ruskin and the French before Marcel Proust (Geneva: Droz, 1965). Proust’s ‘Pèlerinages ruskiniens en France’ appeared in Le Figaro on 13 February 1900. Later he wrote ‘Journées de Pèlerinage: Ruskin à Notre-Dame d’Amiens, à Rouen, etc.’, published as the second chapter of ‘En mémoire des églises assassinées’, in Marcel Proust, Contre Saint-Beuve: précédé de ‘Pastiches et mélanges’ et suivi de ‘Essais et articles’, ed. by Pierre Clarac and Yves Sandre (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), pp. 63–141 (pp. 69–104). John Ruskin, La Bible d’Amiens, trans. by Marcel Proust (Paris: Mércure de France, 1904).

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Amiens, Ruskin’s most important works on the Gothic are The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) and The Stones of Venice (1851–53).16 His primary purpose in writing about Gothic architecture was less an objectively descriptive account of the structural features of Gothic style (à la Viollet-le-Duc) than a visual evocation of architecture for the reader — a concentration on the expressive and affective qualities inherent in the Gothic’s external form which are in themselves not strictly architectonic. Proust himself acknowledged, in a footnote to his Bible d’Amiens, ‘The beauties of the cathedral of Amiens and of Ruskin’s book do not require the shadow of a notion of architecture in order to be felt’.17 And a French publication of 1897 by Robert de la Sizeranne, entitled Ruskin et la religion de la beauté, emphasized precisely this aspect of Ruskin’s antirational aesthetics in quoting from Stones of Venice: ‘what we want art to do for us, says Ruskin, is to stay what is fleeting, and to enlighten what is incomprehensible, to incorporate the things that have no measure, and immortalize the things which have no duration’.18 For Ruskin, architecture was more about ornament than design. He celebrated the Gothic’s opulent carving in profuse decoration that took its inspiration from a divinely wrought multiformity and diversity — the ‘perpetual variety’ — of nature.19 This is his primary theme in the chapter ‘The Nature of Gothic’ from The Stones of Venice. In The Seven Lamps of Architecture, the themes of temporality in perception and the historicality of Gothic architecture — in both cases, the inheritance of the past in the experience of the present — preoccupy him. In ‘The Lamp of Memory’, the sixth of the seven lamps, Ruskin emphasizes the historical aspect of architecture: ‘it is in becoming memorial or monumental that a true perfection is attained by civil and domestic buildings’.20 ‘For, indeed, the greatest glory of a building is […] in its Age’.21 This tempo-historical character of architecture is grounded in memory, 16 

John Ruskin, The Bible of Amiens, in The Works of John Ruskin, ed. by E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols (London: George Allen, 1903–12), xxxiii (1908); The Seven Lamps of Architecture, in Works, ed. by Cook and Wedderburn, viii (1903); The Stones of Venice, 3 vols, in Works, ed. by Cook and Wedderburn, vols ix–xi (1903–04). 17  Proust, On Reading Ruskin, trans. and ed. by Autret, Burford, and Wolfe, p. 65, n. 6. 18  Robert de la Sizeranne, as quoted in Proust, On Reading Ruskin, trans. and ed. by Autret, Burford, and Wolfe, pp. 34–35. 19  John Ruskin, ‘The Nature of Gothic’, in The Stones of Venice, vol. ii, The Sea-Stories, in Works, ed. by Cook and Wedderburn, x, 180–269 (p. 204 (§ 26)). 20  Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, p. 225 (ch. 6, § 3). 21  Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, pp. 233–34 (ch. 6, § 10).

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as Ruskin clearly stated: ‘We may live without her [architecture], and worship without her, but we cannot remember without her’.22 These three themes — the Gothic as nature, as memory, and as history — permeate Rodin’s account as well, as we shall see. They are part of the discourse that Prungnaud’s and Curie’s essays, and others in this volume, seek to illuminate.

Gothic as Nature In ‘The Nature of Gothic’, the sixth chapter of the second volume of The Stones of Venice, Ruskin explored the relationship between the climate and landscape of northern Europe, the character or disposition of the northern peoples, and their architecture, seeking to bring out not only the ‘character’ of Gothic architecture, but its connection to the natural environment of the North. He did so by discussing the Gothic’s ‘characteristic or moral elements’,23 three of which illuminate specifically the connection between Gothic and nature: its rough or ‘savage’ character, which gives it power, like that of the Alps;24 its ‘love of nature’25 or ‘naturalism’, the Gothic workmen’s ‘love of natural objects for their own sake’,26 which they rendered in ‘their peculiar fondness for the forms of Vegetation’;27 and ‘rigidity’, ‘the particular energy which gives tension to movement’,28 a necessary key to survival in the harsh northern climate, where the people, quickened by the cold, are naturally independent, resolute, and strong-willed, qualities which manifest themselves in ‘the rigid lines, vigorous and various masses, and daringly independent structure of the Northern Gothic ornament’.29 Rodin’s two introductory chapters in Les Cathédrales de France, ‘Initiation à l’art du Moyen Âge’ and ‘La Nature française’, describe the formal principles of ecclesiastical sculptural programmes common to the building of all Gothic churches and how they are to be read within their natural context, the unique French countryside: ‘L’art du Moyen Âge, dans son ornamentation comme 22 

Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, p. 224 (ch. 6, § 2). Ruskin, ‘The Nature of Gothic’, p. 184 (§ 6). 24  Ruskin, ‘The Nature of Gothic’, p. 188 (§ 8). 25  Ruskin, ‘The Nature of Gothic’, p. 184 (§ 6). 26  Ruskin, ‘The Nature of Gothic’, p. 215 (§ 41). 27  Ruskin, ‘The Nature of Gothic’, p. 235 (§ 68). 28  Ruskin, ‘The Nature of Gothic’, p. 239 (§ 73). 29  Ruskin, ‘The Nature of Gothic’, pp. 241–42 (§ 76). 23 

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dans ses constructions, procède de la nature. C’est donc toujours à la nature aussi qu’il fait recourir pour le comprendre’ (‘The Art of the Middle Ages, in its ornamentation as well as in its constructions, derives from nature. It is therefore always to nature that one must go for an understanding of that art’).30 Where in ‘The Nature of Gothic’ Ruskin had seen the Gothic’s imposing character, ornament, and architectural forms as a direct outgrowth of its natural environment, Rodin’s writings brought out the intimate relation between French Gothic and the simple, gentle beauty and tranquillity of France’s landscape and vegetation. Rodin understood the significance of the landscape to the construction of the cathedral in, for example, a plain near the Loire River or in rows of Linden trees: ‘Plaine si belle, d’ordre si simple, si grand! […] Trois allées de vieux tilleuls. C’est absolument la triple nef de la cathédrale’ (‘Plain of such beauty, of an order so simple, so noble! […] Three rows of linden trees. This is absolutely the triple nave of a Cathedral’).31 In perceiving the natural world in terms of Gothic forms, Rodin exhibits a common fin-de-siècle attitude, which coincides with Joëlle Prungnaud’s observations in Gothique et Décadence: A l’inverse des Romantiques qui s’émerveillaient de retrouver les éléments naturels dans les édifices gothiques, les auteurs de la fin du siècle reconnaissent dans le paysage les créations de l’homme. Ainsi lit-on dans un roman de Camille Lemonnier, à propos d’un bois: ‘les avenues en étaient profondes comme les nefs des basiliques’. [Contrary to the Romantics, who were filled with wonder to find natural elements in Gothic edifices, fin-de-siècle authors recognized human creations in the landscape. For example we read about a forest in a novel by Camille Lemonnier: ‘the lanes were deep like the naves of churches’.]32

Yet Rodin remains a Romantic at heart. Elsewhere he praised Gothic forms which resembled those of nature, such as in the Gothic church Notre-Dame de Cérans, whose ribbed ceiling seemed like tree branches: ‘Les nervures au plafond sont comme les ramures des arbres’ (‘The ribs of the ceiling are like the branches

30 

Rodin, Les Cathédrales de France, p. 272; Rodin, Cathedrals of France, trans. by Geissbuhler, p. 230. 31  Rodin, Les Cathédrales de France, p. 158; Rodin, Cathedrals of France, trans. by Geissbuhler, p. 34. 32  Joëlle Prungnaud, Gothique et Décadence: Recherches sur la continuité d’un mythe et d’un genre au xixe siècle en Grand-Bretagne et en France (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1997), p. 293. Prungnaud quotes from Camille Lemonnier’s L’Homme en amour [1897] (Paris: Albin Michel, 1925), p. 237; translation S. Glaser.

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of trees’).33 And he praised the Romanesque cathedral of Beaugency as ‘une œuvre d’art dérivée de la nature, accessible par là aux esprits simples et vrais’ (‘a work of art derived from nature […] accessible to the simple and true mind’).34 This is the stuff of François-René de Chateaubriand’s (1768–1848) meditation on Gothic architecture in Genie du Christianisme, which had fuelled a sentimental French obsession for the cathedral through an analogy with nature and its artistic and spiritual purity. The origin of Gothic architecture in the forests in which the Gauls, ‘nos pères’, had worshipped, according to Chateaubriand,35 became a Romantic topos, after having been seriously considered as one of the possible origins of Gothic architecture in the eighteenth century.36 In The Seven Lamps of Architecture Ruskin had firmly established the theme of naturalism in Gothic form: ‘all most lovely forms and thoughts are directly taken from natural objects’, he wrote in ‘The Lamp of Beauty’.37 Developing this idea in ‘The Nature of Gothic’, as indicated above, Ruskin relates floral and vegetal Gothic forms to the medi­e val craftsman’s ‘love of natural objects for their own sake and [his] effort to represent them frankly, unconstrained by artistic laws’.38 His ideas here accord with the Romantic theory of beauty in nature as a manifestation of divine order, as the revealed presence of an immanent God. For him, deeply felt experiences of nature, like deeply felt experiences of beauty in art, were essential to the spiritual life of man: ‘on the shapes which in the every-day world are familiar to the eyes of men, God has stamped those characters of beauty which He has made it man’s nature to love’.39 In Les Cathédrales de France Rodin developed this theme, emphasizing a reverential and devotional attention to floral form, by which one could as well understand the medi­eval craftsmen:

33 

Rodin, Les Cathédrales de France, p. 161; Rodin, Cathedrals of France, trans. by Geissbuhler, p. 48. 34  Rodin, Les Cathédrales de France, p. 163; Rodin, Cathedrals of France, trans. by Geissbuhler, p. 50. 35  François-René de Chateaubriand, ‘Les Églises gothiques’, in Génie du Christianisme [1802], 2 vols (Paris: G. F. Flammarion, 1966), i, 399–401 (p. 401). 36  For more on this theory, see Stephanie A. Glaser, ‘Explorations of the Gothic Cathedral in Nineteenth-Century France’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Indiana Uni­ver­sity, 2002), pp. 24–26. 37  Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, p. 141 (§ 3). 38  Ruskin, ‘The Nature of Gothic’, p. 215 (§ 41). 39  Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, p. 142 (§ 3).

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Donnons-nous donc la joie d’étudier ces fleurs dans la nature, pour nous faire une juste idée des ressources que leur a demandées le décorateur des pierres vives. Il a pénétré dans la vie des fleurs en considérant leurs formes, en analysant leurs joies et leurs douleurs, leurs vertus et leurs faiblesses: ce sont nos douleurs et nos vertus. [Then let us give ourselves the joy of studying these flowers in nature, that we may have a just notion of the resources which the decorator of living stones required of them. He penetrated the life of flowers by contemplating their forms, by analyzing their joys and their sorrows, their virtues and their weaknesses. These are our sorrows and our virtues.]40

Evoking the medi­e val artist’s joy and intimate familiarity with floral forms and existence, Rodin reflects that in them the French can recognize their own strengths and sorrows. Very different than Ruskin’s view of the harsh climate and the strength and rigidity of the Gothic, Rodin showed that the flowers of France reflect the life and experience of the French in a very intimate and personal way. Rodin further emphasized the vital connection between architecture and the vegetation of France: Les fleurs ont donné la cathédrale. Il suffit d’aller à la campagne et d’ouvrir les yeux pour s’en convaincre. Vous recevrez à chaque pas une leçon d’architecture. Les hommes de jadis ont regardé avant nous, et compris. Ils ont cherché la plante dans la pierre, et maintenant nous retrouvons leurs pierres immortelles dans les plantes éternelles. [The flowers have given the Cathedral. To be convinced go into the country and open your eyes. At each step you will have a lesson in architecture. Men of yore looked before us and understood. They sought the plant in the stone and now we find their immortal stones in the eternal flowers.]41

According to him, the medi­eval artists understood so intimately the plants they sculpted into the stones of the churches and cathedrals of France that in the Gothic’s ‘living’ modern man can recognize the plants and flowers that flourished in the Middle Ages and were still thriving in his day. He thus exhorted his contemporaries to reflect upon and study the natural world, where they would find multiformity, variety, and imprecision: ‘Que d’expressions curieuses, dif40  Rodin, Les Cathédrales de France, p. 272; Rodin, Cathedrals of France, trans. by Geissbuhler, pp. 230–31. 41  Rodin, Les Cathédrales de France, p. 272; Rodin, Cathedrals of France, trans. by Geissbuhler, p. 231.

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férentes, innombrables à la disposition de l’artiste!’ (‘What curious, varied, and innumerable expressions are available to an artist!’).42 In a strikingly similar vein and not incidental in this context, the painter Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) called for a ‘Société des Irrégularistes’, a collaborative fraternity of free and anonymous artisans and craftsmen whose members would revive the lost spirit of medi­eval workmanship, for whom nature was the ultimate source of inspiration for design and decoration, and who would cultivate an aesthetic of irregularity.43 In his proposal of 1844 he hailed the Gothic as exemplary, placing an almost Ruskinian emphasis on its variety and irregularity: Les œuvres de la nature sont variées à l’infini, des plus importantes aux moindres, à quelque type ou famille qu’elles appartiennent. Les […] feuilles d’un arbre, les pétales d’une fleur ne sont jamais identiques; il semble même que les beautés de tout ordre tirent leur charme de cette diversité. […] On constate même que des œuvres basées sur des principes géométriques comme Saint-Marc [à Venise], […] ainsi que toutes les églises dites gothiques […] ne présentent aucune ligne d’une rectitude parfaite et que les figures rondes, carrées ou ovales qui s’y trouvent, et qu’il eût été bien facile d’obtenir exactes, ne le sont jamais On peut ainsi […] affirmer que toute production véritablement artistique a été conçue et exécutée d’après le principe d’irrégularité, en un mot, pour nos server d’un néologisme qui exprime plus complètement notre pensée, qu’elle est toujours l’œuvre d’un irrégulariste. [The works of nature are infinitely varied, from the most important to the least, no matter what their species or family. The […] leaves of a tree, the petals of a flower are never identical; it thus seems that every kind of beauty draws its charm from this diversity. […] One realizes that even works based on geometric principles, like St Mark’s […], as well as all the so-called Gothic churches […] have not a single perfectly straight line, and that the round, square, or oval forms which are found there and which it would have been extremely easy to make exact, never are exact. One can thus state […] that every truly artistic production has been conceived and executed according 42  Rodin, Les Cathédrales de France, p. 273; Rodin, Cathedrals of France, trans. by Geissbuhler, p. 232. 43  Renoir’s letter to Durand-Ruel, ‘La “Société des Irrégularistes”’ (May 1884), is reprinted in Auguste Renoir, Renoir contre son temps: Morceaux choisis des écrits d’Auguste Renoir (Paris: Editions Le Manuscrit, 2009), pp. 38–42. See also Robert L. Herbert’s essay, ‘The Decorative and the Natural in Monet’s Cathedrals’, in Aspects of Monet: A Symposium on the Artist’s Life and Times, ed. by John Rewald and Frances Weitzenhoffer (New York: Harry Abrams, 1984), pp. 162–79 (pp. 172–73).

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to the principle of irregularity; in short, to use a neologism which expresses our thought more completely, it is always the work of an irregularist.]44

Renoir prized the Gothic for its sensitivity to nature in its asymmetry and its opposition to the rigid lines, stubborn geometry, and stark rationality of contemporary neoclassical art and architecture. His proposal continues in a vein that may perhaps lend context to Maylis Curie’s reading of anarchist sympathies for the Gothic: A une époque où notre art français, si plein jusqu’au commencement de ce siècle encore, de charme pénétrant et d’exquise fantaisie, va périr sous la régularité, la sécheresse, la manie de fausse perfection qui fait qu’en ce moment l’épure de l’ingénieur tend à devenir l’idéal, nous pensons qu’il est utile de réagir promptement contre les doctrines mortelles qui menacent de l’anéantir, et que le devoir de tous les délicats, de tous les hommes de goût, est de se grouper sans retard, quelle que soit d’ailleurs leur répugnance pour la lutte et les protestations. Une association est donc nécessaire. [At a time when our French art, until the beginning this century still so full of penetrating charm and exquisite imagination, is about to perish of regularity and dryness, when the mania for false perfection makes engineers diagram the ideal, we think that it is useful to react against the fatal doctrines which threaten to annihilate it, and that it is the duty of all men of sensitivity and taste to gather together without delay, no matter how repugnant they may otherwise find combat and protest. An association is therefore necessary.]45

In line with Ruskin’s and William Morris’s (1834–1896) ideals of social-aesthetic reform, and sharing ideas which, as Curie outlined in her essay, were also being expressed by anarchist painters, Renoir urged his fellow artists to liberate themselves from the restraints of Academic conventions, of regularity, dryness, and false perfection, lobbying for a ‘natural’ art in the spirit of the Gothic’s imitation of nature. This idea resonates with his friend Camille Pissarro’s (1830–1903) desire to undergo no influence but that of the French Gothic artists, which he expressed to Lucien in 1896, as quoted by Curie in her essay: 44 

Renoir, Renoir contre son temps, pp. 38–39. An English translation of Renoir’s letter appears in Leonello Venturi, Les Archives de l’impressionnisme, 2 vols (Paris: Durand-Ruel, 1939), i, 127–29, which Linda Nochlin has reprinted in Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, 1874–1904: Sources and Documents (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966), pp. 45–47 (p. 46). 45  Renoir, Renoir contre son temps, pp. 39–40; Nochlin, Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, p. 46.

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Si je devais subir une influence, j’aimerais mieux subir celle des vrais gothiques français que j’ai à chaque instant sous les yeux ici, c’est épatant comme ils sont nature, tout en étant très décoratifs, sans la mièvrerie et la sentimentalité de ceux des modernes qui se disent leurs élèves. [If I had to be under an influence, I would rather be under that of the true French Gothic artists, whom I can see at every instant here, it is amazing how natural they are, while being very decorative, without the vapidity and sentimentality of those modern artists who pretend to be their students.]46

Renoir shared with Rodin, Ruskin, Morris, and perhaps, following Curie, Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921), an admiration for what he regarded as the honesty and dignity in the manual labour of craft, which he opposed to the corruption and deceit of modern manufacture. According to him, the inspiration for craft had been and should be derived exclusively from nature. As far as architecture was concerned, Renoir stipulated precisely that the society only allowed handcrafted work following the strictest attentiveness to natural form: ‘tous les ornements devront être faits d’après nature sans qu’aucun motif, fleur, feuille, figure, etc., etc., puisse être répété exactement; que les moindres profils devront être exécutés à la main sans le secours d’instruments de précision’ (‘All ornaments must be derived from nature, with no motif — flower, leaf, figure, etc., etc., — being exactly repeated; even the least important outlines must be executed by hand without the aid of precision instruments’).47 This passage rings of Ruskin, who in ‘The Lamp of Truth’ had first rejected the modern tendency to substitute cast or machine work for that of the hand: ‘For it is not the material, but the absence of the human labour, which makes the things worthless’.48 Like Renoir and Ruskin before him, Rodin, too, praised the medi­eval craftsmen as ‘pilgrims of Work’, who, in the physical manipulations of their material, were ‘consumed by the passion to create’.49 He impressed upon his reader their simple honesty, deep wisdom, and energy: 46 

Letter to Lucien Pissarro, Rouen, 20 October 1896, in Correspondance de Camille Pissarro, ed. by Janine Bailly-Herzberg, 5 vols (Paris: Presse Universitaires de France, 1981; Cergy: Editions du Valhermeil, 1986–99), iv (1995), 282; translation S. Glaser. 47  Renoir, Renoir contre son temps, p. 40; Nochlin, Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, pp. 46–47. 48  Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, p. 84 (§ 20). 49  Rodin, Cathedrals of France, trans. by Geissbuhler, p. 55; Rodin, Les Cathédrales de France, p. 166: ‘ces pélerins de l’Œvure, en mal ardent de création’.

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Ces artisans, ces ouvriers: […] c’étaient des enfants à l’École de Vérité […]. Ô ces ouvriers! Ne pouvoir connaître leurs noms pour les prononcer, ces humbles noms sublimes d’hommes qui savaient quelque chose! […] Ils ont la sobriété, la vertu, l’énergie des grands animaux nobles qui se maintiennent aptes à leurs fonctions naturelles. [Those artisans and workmen: […] they were children in the School of Truth […]. Ah, those workmen! That we should not even know how to pronounce the names of those humble and sublime men who had such knowledge! […] They have the sobriety, constancy, and energy of great noble animals who keep their natural functions in working order.]50

Similar sentiments had been expressed by J.-K. Huysmans (1848–1907) in his novel of 1898, La Cathédrale. Marvelling at the workmanship of Chartres Cathedral, the novel’s protagonist, Durtal, praises the medi­e val artisans: ‘Et quelles âmes ils avaient, ces artistes! Car nous le savons, ils ne besognaient que lorsqu’ils étaient en état de grâce. Pour élever cette splendide basilique, la pureté fut requise, même des manœuvres’ (‘And what souls these artists had! For this we know: they laboured only in a state of grace. To raise this glorious temple, purity was required even of the workmen’).51 The overtly religious emphasis on grace and the purity of the craftsmen reflects Huysmans’s Catholic stance, yet it reverberates with Rodin’s subtle metaphor of the artist as a pilgrim of work, emphasizing the honesty and virtue of labour and the magnificent creation that comes from it. Another important aspect of the relation between nature and medi­e val architecture brought out by Ruskin and explored by Rodin was the sculptural use of light and shadow. In ‘The Lamp of Power’, a sense of the real and imagined properties of the cadence of light and shadow in architecture and its manipulation by the craftsman had been addressed by Ruskin: Light, with the architect, is nearly always liable to become full and untempered sunshine seen upon solid surface, his only rests, and his chief means of sublimity, are definite shades. So that, after size and weight, the Power of architecture may be said to depend on the quantity (whether measured in space or intenseness) of its shadow.52 50 

Rodin, Les Cathédrales de France, pp. 166–67; Rodin, Cathedrals of France, trans. by Geissbuhler, pp. 55–56. 51  J.-K. Huysmans, La Cathédrale (Monaco: Editions du Rocher, 1992), pp. 257–58; J.-K. Huysmans, The Cathedral, trans. by Clara Bell (Sawtry: Dedalus, 189), p. 177. 52  Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, p. 116 (§ 13).

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Similarly, Rodin perceived the Gothic craftsman’s ‘language of stones’ and declared that understanding the cathedrals required sensitivity to ‘the moving language of their lines, amplified by shadows’.53 For Rodin this worked materiality of carved stone, of the ‘living stones’ (‘pierres vives’),54 and its articulation of planes, shapes, masses, and voids, were inextricably bound up with our perpetually varied perception of them through what he called the ‘declension’ of light and shadow: ‘L’âme de l’art gothique est dans cette déclinaison volupteuse des ombres et des lumières, qui donne le rhythme à l’édifice tout entier et le contraint à vivre’ (‘The soul of Gothic art is in this voluptuous declension of light and shadow which gives rhythm to the entire structure and makes it live’).55 Observing the graceful movements of light and shadow on and within Gothic forms, he wrote: ‘La lumière et l’ombre jouent librement, fortement, dans ces arcs aux courbes si nobles, si légères!’(‘Light and shadow play freely and strongly in these arches whose curves are so noble and so delicate!’).56 He was acutely aware of how light and shadow accentuated the beauty of the medi­eval workmanship. The distribution and movement of natural light and shade across the irregularities of handcrafted stone affects the appearance of the object, which in turn affects the experience of the perceiving subject: Ces chapiteaux en jet de force, brutalisés par la lumière et par l’ombre, c’est le génie du vieux sculpteur, du voyant de jadis, qui a obtenu ce résultat miraculeux. L’habitude de travailler en plein air, dans le soir et le matin, la longue patience, l’immense amour, l’ont fait tout-puissant. [These capitals that burst with power, brutalized by light and shadow: only the genius of an old sculptor, a seer of yore, could bring about this miraculous result. The habit of working in the open air, at evening and at morning, with long patience and an immense love, made him all powerful.]57 53 

Rodin, Cathedrals of France, trans. by Geissbuhler, p.  37 and p.  17; Rodin, Les Cathédrales de France, p. 159: ‘Le monde périra-t-il comme ont péri ces grands artistes qui ne nous parlent maintenant que par le langage des pierres?’, and p. 146: ‘Pour comprendre les cathédrales il suffit d’être sensible au langage pathétique de ces lignes gonflées d’ombre et renforcées par la forme dégradée des contreforts unis ou ornés’. 54  Rodin, Les Cathédrales de France, p. 146. 55  Rodin, Les Cathédrales de France, p. 148; Rodin, Cathedrals of France, trans. by Geissbuhler, pp. 19–20. 56  Rodin, Les Cathédrales de France, p. 225; Rodin, Cathedrals of France, trans. by Geissbuhler, p. 151. 57  Rodin, Les Cathédrales de France, p. 227; Rodin, Cathedrals of France, trans. by Geissbuhler, p. 154.

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The love and patience the medi­eval artist had for his work here evoked by Rodin rings of Ruskin. In its origins and setting in nature architecture participates in the natural world, worked upon by natural phenomena, something Monet, as well as Pissarro and Maximilien Luce (1858–1941), who also worked ‘en plein air’, studied and rendered in their paintings. Rodin saw the qualitative experience of the natural phenomenon of light as part of the working repertoire of the Gothic builder-painter with its own set of expressive possibilities. In writing about Soissons Cathedral, Rodin verbalized temporality, movement, and the effects of light and shade on the edifice to the viewer: Tous les rois de France sont dans cette ombre, dans cette tour majestueuse qui surplomb. … Le jour point. La lumière se ramasse: elle atteint l’église par de larges touches, éclabousse les colonnes maîtresses, les colonnettes ajourées, les boudins clairs en profils perdus, tandis que des ombres glissent d’en dessous. … Brève demi heur de délices. [All the kings of France are in this shadow, in this majestic tower that overhangs. … Day breaks. Light foregathers; it reaches the Cathedral by wide strokes, splatters the master columns, the small openwork columns, the lost profiles of the light, torus moldings. … Brief half hour of delights.]58

The brightening and widening light acts as painter, and this shifting from obscurity to illumination defines the individual elements of the edifice, making them stand out dramatically in the short length of a sunrise.

Gothic as Memory For Rodin, this ‘declension’ of shadow and light had to do with the variability of perception: first, a matter of shifting perceptions and alterations of focus elicited by the subject; and, second, an accumulation and slow accretion of multiple sensations becoming available only through extended visual experience. In this sense, perception is all about capturing moments and is intimately connected with memory. At Meudon, for example, the sculptor remarked on how his perception changed with the increased luminosity and changing position of light at daybreak: ‘Le jour se développe, les aspects changent. Ma contempla58 

Rodin, Les Cathédrales de France, pp. 230–31; Rodin, Cathedrals of France, trans. by Geiss­­buhler, p. 159.

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tion n’a été qu’à peine interrompue, je la reprends; ce n’est plus le spectacle que j’avais sous les yeux tout à l’heure, je ne le reconnais plus’ (‘As the day develops, the aspects change. My meditation, but slightly interrupted, is resumed. I am faced by a scene which is not the one I had before me awhile ago and which I no longer recognize’).59 The fleeting moments change the subject’s perception of the object, and they also reveal different aspects of its beauty, such as the sculptor expressed at the church in Melun: Étudiez ces magnifiques débris. Si vous voulez les comprendre, allez les voir à des heures différentes. Ces œuvres, accomplies en plein air, changent de beauté selon que le temps change, et ces beautés varient sur un thème constant. Le soir vous révélera ce que le matin ne vous a pas laissé voir. [Study these magnificent fragments and, if you wish to understand, go to see them at different hours of the day. These works made in the open air change their beauty as the hours change, and their variation is upon a constant theme. Evening will reveal to you what morning did not allow you to see.]60

Understanding comes through the accumulated impressions which are remembered by the subject. And once vision, understanding, and sensation coalesce, intense emotion results: ‘Innombrables sensations simultanées! Et, cette impression une fois acquise, je la garde: enthousiasme pour demain, pour toujours; miracle permanent’ (‘Countless simultaneous sensations! And this impression once acquired, I shall retain; source of enthusiasm for tomorrow, for always; a permanent miracle’).61 These passages describe the process of viewing itself, the gradual or emergent appearance of features initially absent from the ‘moment’ of perception, but always available within the background of the present in our transitory view. This state of being momentarily unobserved is part of the perceiving subject’s experience and part of the object’s appearing. The experience is about the temporality of perception; and perception is a matter of adjusting, shifting attention, calling into focus, into memory, recalling and forgetting — never being in possession of the object of experience in its entirety. William Morris evoked a similar experience of his memories of Amiens Cathedral, in the essay ‘Shadows 59 

Rodin, Les Cathédrales de France, p. 154; Rodin, Cathedrals of France, trans. by Geissbuhler, p. 29. 60  Rodin, Les Cathédrales de France, p. 178; Rodin, Cathedrals of France, trans. by Geissbuhler, p. 72. 61  Rodin, Les Cathédrales de France, p. 225; Rodin, Cathedrals of France, trans. by Geissbuhler, p. 151.

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of Amiens’ (1856), evoked by Joëlle Prungnaud.62 For Morris and for Rodin, the inner, personal experience of Gothic architecture and the impressions left upon the subject become almost meditative. At Chartres, for example, Rodin observes that there are many ways to view a beautiful object:63 Comme des profils nouveaux apparaissent quand on se déplace, ainsi le chefd’œuvre se transforme, en nous, selon le mouvement qu’il a provoqué dans notre esprit; ce mouvement, qui ne s’isole pas dans notre activité, rejoint à tous nos sentiments l’impression que nous gardons du chef-d’œuvre, et cette impression vit de notre vie, se colore selon les autres impressions que la vie nous apporte et grâce auxquelles nous découvrons, entre deux termes très éloignés l’un de l’autre, de secrètes, mais de réelles analogies. [As new profiles appear when one moves, so a masterpiece is transformed in us according to the movement it has provoked in our mind; this movement, which is not isolated in our life, adds to all our feelings the impression of the masterpiece we keep, and this impression lives by our life, is colored according to other impressions that life brings us, and thanks to which we discover, between two expressions very distant from one another, secret but real analogies.]64

Rodin’s experience of the past living on in the present of perception is articulated in an analogy. Just as the subject’s physical movement results in new perspectives on the object, so the physical object is transformed as the subject perceives it, according to the ‘movement’ it makes in the subject’s mind, and the ‘impression’ lives on and is altered by the subject’s other collected impressions. This demonstrates the power of memory — in a Proustian psychophysical dimension of the history of time past — to resurrect what is physically absent and keep it alive within us.

Gothic as History Rodin also invokes temporality in a related sense; in terms of the real historical character of the subject itself. This had been earlier expressed by Victor Hugo (1802–1885) in Notre-Dame de Paris: ‘Le temps a rendu à l’église plus peut62 

William Morris, ‘Shadows of Amiens’ [1856], in Prose and Poetry (1856–1870) by William Morris (London: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 1913), pp. 617–31. 63  Rodin, Les Cathédrales de France, p. 266: ‘C’est qu’il y a bien des manières de voir une belle chose’. 64  Rodin, Les Cathédrales de France, p. 266; Rodin, Cathedrals of France, trans. by Geissbuhler, p. 224.

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être qu’il ne lui a ôté, car c’est le temps qui a répandu sur la façade cette sombre couleur des siècles qui fait de la vieillesse des monuments l’âge de leur beauté’ (‘Time has perhaps given the church more than it has taken away, for it is time which has spread over the façade that sombre colouring of centuries which makes the old age of monuments the age of their beauty’).65 Hugo saw time’s effects on the cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris as destructive and enhancing; the passing of centuries lends beauty and dignity to the edifice. Time, he writes, is the architect, but the society is the mason:66 L’architecture est […] le depot que laisse une nation; les entassements que font les siècles; le résidu des évaporations successives de la société humaine; en un mot, des espèces de formations. Chaque flot due temps superpose son alluvion, chaque race dépose sa couche sur le monument, chaque individu apporte sa pierre. [Architecture is […] the deposit left by a nation; the accumulation of centuries; the residue from successive evaporations of human society; in a word, types of formation. Each wave of time lays its alluvium on top, each race lays down its stratum, each individual brings his stone.]67

For Hugo, the natural effects of time in combination with the willed changes made by the generations work upon the edifice as water upon stones, a geologic metaphor that again emphasizes the connection between the Gothic and the natural world. Perhaps nowhere, however, is the theme of Gothic architecture as historical testimony more emphatic than in Ruskin’s ‘Lamp of Memory,’ where he draws an analogy between our real phenomenological experience of the building and its auratic historical significance, allowing the sensory experience of it to stand in for its more evocative referent: It is one of the advantages of Gothic architecture […] that it admits of a richness of record altogether unlimited. Its minute and multitudinous sculptural decorations afford means of expressing, either symbolically or literally, all that need be known of national feeling or achievement.68

In this lies, even more than in its beauty, its nobility: 65  Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris: 1482 [1831] (Paris: Gallimard, 2002), p. 157; Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris, trans. by Alban Krailsheimer (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 1999), p. 120. 66  Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris, p. 163: ‘Le temps est l’architecte, le people est le maçon’. 67  Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris, p. 162; Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris, trans. by Krailsheimer, p. 125. 68  Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, pp. 229–30 (§ 7).

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It is an exponent of age, of that in which […] the greatest glory of the building consists; and, therefore, the external signs of this glory, having power and purpose greater than any belonging to their mere sensible beauty, may be considered as taking rank among pure and essential characters.69

The enduring vitality of Gothic architecture as a symbol of moral excellence and national character could awaken sensibilities to the significance of history, as Ruskin clearly described: For indeed, the greatest glory of a building is not in its stones, nor in its gold. Its glory is in its Age, […] which we feel in walls that have long been washed by the passing waves of humanity. It is in their lasting witness against men, in their quiet contrast with the transitional character of all things, in the strength which, through the lapse of seasons and times, and the decline and birth of dynasties, and the changing of the face of the earth, […] maintains its sculptured shapeliness for a time insuperable, connects forgotten and following ages with each other, and half constitutes the identity, as it concentrates the sympathy, of nations: it is in that golden stain of time, that we are to look for the real light, and colour, and preciousness of architecture.70

Ruskin’s ‘golden stain of time’ here resonates with Hugo’s ‘sombre colouring of centuries’, in which lies the true worth of architecture. Indeed, Ruskin’s ‘Lamp of Memory’ is motivated by the notion that in architecture there obtains an essential relation between the past and the present that hinges on an appropriate perception of that past. Ruskin urged his contemporaries to actively cultivate this sense of interconnectedness between past and present: And if indeed there be any profit in our knowledge of the past, or any joy in the thought of being remembered hereafter, […] there are two duties respecting national architecture whose importance it is impossible to overrate: the first, to render the architecture of the day, historical; and, the second, to preserve, as the most precious of inheritances, that of past ages.71

According to Ruskin the duty of the living generation is to build ‘historical’ buildings, structures that exhibit the morals and national character of the time, and equally important, to preserve (not restore — a topic to which we will return shortly) the architecture of the past for future generations. Rodin’s reflections in Les Cathédrales de France seem to revolve around this same idea: ‘Relier le présent au passé, c’est l’action nécessaire’ (‘To bind 69 

Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, p. 241 (§ 16). Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, p. 234 (§ 10). 71  Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, pp. 224–25 (§ 2). 70 

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the present with the past is the necessary action’).72 Indeed the theme of the persistence of historical memory in Gothic building — particularly the medi­ eval heritage of la France — runs throughout the whole of Rodin’s text. He saw Gothic architecture as the ultimate symbol of the French spirit: ‘L’art gothique, c’est l’âme sensible, tangible, de la France; c’est la religion de l’atmosphère française! — On n’est pas incrédule, on n’est qu’infidèle’ (‘Gothic art is the conscious, tangible soul of France; it is the religion of the French atmosphere! We are not unbelieving; we are only unfaithful’).73 The cathedral’s stones physically make manifest the soul of France, which the French have not recognized, and they preach the ‘religion’ of the French ‘atmosphere’, to which the French have been unfaithful. For Rodin the cathedral is the ultimate symbol of the nation — ‘Les cathédrales devraient nous donner tant d’orgueil! Elles ont engendré la force dont les derniers restes nous aiment encore’ (‘The Cathedrals ought to give us so much pride! They have engendered the force whose last manifestations still enlivens us’)74 — and of the people: ‘Le gothique, c’est l’histoire de la France, c’est l’arbre de toutes nos généalogies. Il préside à notre formation, comme il vit de nos transformations’ (‘Gothic style is the history of France. It is the tree of all our genealogies. It presides over our formation as it lives in our transformations’).75 The sculptor beautifully sums up the intimate connection between the generations in his admiration of the Romanesque Cathédrale Saint-Cyr-et-Sainte-Julitte de Nevers. Recognizing in its masses of light and shadow the primal forms that the Gothic would later so marvellously shape, he feels the energy that shaped them running through his veins: ‘Et je sens la sève gothique passer dans mes veines comme les sucs de la terre passent dans les plantes. C’est le sang de nos pères, qui furent de si grands artistes!’ (‘And in my veins I feel the Gothic sap moving like the earth’s juices flowing through the plants. This is the blood of our fathers, who were such great artists!’).76

72 

Rodin, Les Cathédrales de France, p. 186; Rodin, Cathedrals of France, trans. by Geissbuhler, p. 92. 73  Rodin, Les Cathédrales de France, p. 171; Rodin, Cathedrals of France, trans. by Geissbuhler, p. 61. 74  Rodin, Les Cathédrales de France, p. 180; Rodin, Cathedrals of France, trans. by Geissbuhler, p. 75. 75  Rodin, Les Cathédrales de France, p. 191; Rodin, Cathedrals of France, trans. by Geissbuhler, p. 100. 76  Rodin, Les Cathédrales de France, p. 213; Rodin, Cathedrals of France, trans. by Geissbuhler, p. 137.

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Charles Morice also underscored the Frenchness of the cathedral, in its origins and the source of its uniqueness: ‘Bien entendu, quand nous disons: la cathédrale, c’est de la cathédrale française uniquement que nous parlons. Par son origine comme par son originalité, la cathédrale est française’ (Let it be understood that when we say ‘the cathedral’ it is the French cathedral only with which we are concerned. In its origin and in its originality, the cathedral is French).77 In a later chapter of his introduction, Morice affirmed even more stridently: ‘La Cathédrale, [… c]’est la France. Les formes de la cathédrale sont nées de la flore du pays, sa méthode et sa pensée du génie de la race’ (The Cathedral is France. The forms of the cathedral were engendered by the flora of the country, its method and its thought from the genius of the race).78 Their contemporary, Marcel Proust, shared these sentiments, uttered by the narrator of À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27) who, commenting on the church Saint-André-desChamps, calls the thirteenth-century sculpted faces of the French statues on the porches the true ‘opus francigenum’.79 These remarks testify to the weighty symbol of French national pride that the Gothic cathedral had become by the early twentieth century. As such, they provide context for Maurice Magre’s and Mérovak’s manipulations of the Gothic edifice in reaction to World War I, which, as Joëlle Prungnaud makes clear, extend the meaning of the Gothic from a symbol of France and her people bearing the wounds of war to representing humanity gone awry. War threatened the loss of life, nation, spirit, and historical memory, all of which was embodied in the Gothic cathedral. There was a mode of interpretive retrieval of the Middle Ages in the fourth quarter of the nineteenth century in France that had much to do with the turbulent and disastrous political events around 1870 and its aftermath. Humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, followed by the Paris Commune and the Prussian occupation — all still very much alive in the minds of patriotic Frenchmen toward the close of the century — delivered a crushing blow to national pride and forced a new focus on the Middle Ages, the anarchist aspect of which has been clearly laid out in Maylis Curie’s essay. In fact, many thought that a sense of reassurance and stability could be found in the ancient monuments that epitomized national tradition, pride, and obligation.80 At that time 77 

Morice, ‘Introduction’, p. 14; my translation. Morice, ‘Introduction’, pp. 84–85; my translation. 79  Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu [1913–27, 7 vols], ed. by Philippe MichelThiriet, 3 vols (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1987), ii, Le Côté de Guermantes, p. 339. 80  See Emery, Romancing the Cathedral; Emery and Morowitz, Consuming the Past; and Griffiths, The Reactionary Revolution for more on this topic. 78 

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the Gothic cathedral, perhaps more than ever, stood out as the appropriate symbol for French history and identity. And for Rodin, who saw art as historical testimony — ‘L’historien n’a rien vu: il faut que l’artiste témoigne’ (‘What the historian has not seen, the artist must be witness to’)81 — history was more than events which affected society; it was characterized by the soul of a nation, the spirit that endures through the generations. And thus the cathedral stood as the appropriate symbol for French history and identity. Rodin’s reverence and respect for medi­eval architecture precipitated a call to his fellow artists to venerate France’s cathedrals and to learn from the work of the masters so as to preserve French art and the soul of the artist: Hâtons-nous de sauver en nous-mêmes leur âme! Artistes, n’est-ce pas notre devoir? N’est-ce pas notre intérêt, et le seul moyen de nous défendre contre la barbarie? Aimons, admirons! Faisons qu’autour de nous on aime et on admire. Si l’œuvre des géants qui ont élevé ces édifices vénérables doit disparaître, hâtons-nous d’écouter la leçon de ces grands maîtres, de la lire dans cette œuvre, et tâchons de comprendre: afin de n’être pas réduits au désespoir — nous, ou ceux-là que nous aimons mieux que nous: nos enfants — quand cette œuvre, en effet, ne sera plus. La divine nature lui survivra, et elle continuera à parler le grand langage que ces maîtres ont entendu, et qu’ils ont traduit, ici, pour nous, magnifiquement. Épargnons-nous la douleur et la honte de penser, trop tard, que nous L’entendrions, à notre tour, si nous LES avions écoutés. [Let us make haste to save their souls within ourselves. Artists, is this not our duty? Is it not in our own interest and the only means of defending ourselves against barbarism? Let us love, let us admire! Let us make sure that those about us love and admire. If the work of the giants who constructed these venerable buildings must disappear, let us make haste to hear the lesson of those great masters. Let us read it in this work and strive to understand so that neither we, nor those whom we love better than ourselves, our children, may be reduced to despair when this work shall indeed be lost. Divine nature will outlive that destruction and continue to speak the great language these masters heard which they have magnificently translated for us here. Spare us the sorrow and the shame of realizing too late that we in our time might have understood Them had we listened to THEM.]82

Rodin’s reflections are in part a coming to terms with the certainty that the monuments will disappear. He attributed one of the causes of medi­eval archi81  Rodin, Les Cathédrales de France, p. 160; Rodin, Cathedrals of France, trans. by Geissbuhler, p. 37. 82  Rodin, Les Cathédrales de France, p. 255; Rodin, Cathedrals of France, trans. by Geissbuhler, p. 202.

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tecture’s demise to industrialization and contemporary pride: ‘la science et l’industrie ont vidé, déchiré Paris’ (‘science and industry have emptied and torn Paris’).83 Industry also changed how architecture was perceived in the present: ‘Cette fumée d’usines ne noircit pas le ciel. Mais, au premier plan, ces haleines de l’industrie accablent l’étendue de voiles imperméables, pesants, qui détruisent la perspective et attristent nos regards’ (‘The factory smoke does not blacken the sky. But in the foreground, the breath of industry overwhelms the view with an impenetrable, heavy fog that develops perspectives and saddens our outlook’).84 For Rodin industry was destructive. Not only did it eradicate the vestiges of the past and thus altered historical memory, but its smoke was obscuring the city, such that the beautiful monuments could not be seen clearly. Like the anarchists, he was also critical of the motivations behind it. Looking back at the architectural products of the ages, the sculptor avowed that from Egypt through the Middle Ages, art had served divinity and edifices had been erected to God, but since the Renaissance, when art began to serve the rules of proportion and perfection, artists and architects had constructed ‘temples to human vanity’,85 for which he censured them: ‘Et pour ce nouveau temple [l’artiste] veut des matières plus précieuses, prodiguées en plus d’ornements qu’on n’en vit jamais. Mais la vanité avoue la pauvreté spirituelle du vaniteux’ (‘And for this new temple [artists] want more precious materials, lavished with more ornaments than were ever seen before. But vanity confesses the spiritual poverty of the vain’).86 For Rodin art was not about religion per se, but about the energy and labour that had once been consecrated to a higher purpose and had grown naturally out of a love of beauty and of nature. Indeed the French spirit that had infused and forged medi­e val art had been lost in modern society and ignored by industry, where the creative powers were channelled to serve vanity and greed. This lack of moral or spiritual foundation had also angered Ruskin, who was one of the main antagonists of industrialization and its ‘progress’:

83 

Rodin, Les Cathédrales de France, p. 149; Rodin, Cathedrals of France, trans. by Geissbuhler, p. 21. 84  Rodin, Les Cathédrales de France, p. 150; Rodin, Cathedrals of France, trans. by Geissbuhler, p. 23. 85  Rodin, Cathedrals of France, trans. by Geissbuhler, p. 76; Rodin, Les Cathédrales de France, p. 180. 86  Rodin, Les Cathédrales de France, pp. 180–81; Rodin, Cathedrals of France, trans. by Geissbuhler, pp. 76–77.

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The portion of the national income sacrificed in mere bad building, in the perpetual repairs, and swift condemnation and pulling down of ill-built shells of houses, passes all calculation. And the weight of the penalty is not yet felt; it will tell upon our children some fifty years hence, when the cheap work, and contract work, and stucco and plaster work, and bad iron work, and all the other expedients of modern rivalry, vanity, and dishonesty, begin to show themselves for what they are.87

As Maylis Curie points out in her essay in this volume, similar sentiments were held by Pissarro, who lamented the rapid transformations and booming industrial market that were drastically changing the beautiful, old, artistic city.88 This feeling incited Pissarro to action against the municipal destruction of historical identity and prompted the organized preservation of its ancient buildings.89 Implicit in his response, as indicated by Curie, is an impassioned nostalgia for things medi­eval, the last vestiges of which he saw disappearing in Rouen. As early as 1883, Pissarro had expressed a sensibility towards and admiration for the sculptural embellishment that decorated the exteriors of the houses on those streets he would later come to defend, the meticulous decoration typical of Gothic craftsmanship.90 Visible traces of his admiration can be found in many of the painter’s sketchbook studies made during his initial investigation of the city in 1883, and later revisited in his canvases of the 1890s, which sustained a vivid sense of the past, and a particularly Gothic past, at the time of modernization, as Curie’s examples clearly bring out. Besides modernization, another threat to medi­eval architecture and historical memory was architectural restoration. In England Ruskin had inveighed at length against the false work of restoration which he saw as the worst conceivable manner of historical annihilation. In the ‘Lamp of Memory’ he wrote: Neither by the public, nor by those who have the care of public monuments, is the true meaning of the word restoration understood. It means the most total destruction which a building can suffer: a destruction of which no remnants can be gathered: a destruction accompanied with false description of the thing destroyed.91 87 

Ruskin, ‘Gothic Palaces’ (Chapter 7), in The Stones of Venice, ii, 307 (§ 47). See Pissarro’s letter to Lucien from 19 August 1892, in Camille Pissarro: Letters to his Son Lucien, ed. by John Rewald and Lucien Pissarro, 2nd edn (New York: Pantheon Books, 1943), p. 202. 89  Janine Bailey-Herzberg, ‘Camille Pissarro et Rouen’, L’Oeil, July–August 1981, p. 7. 90  See Pissarro’s letter of 20 November 1883, in Camille Pissarro: Letters, ed. by Rewald and Pissarro, p. 46. 91  Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, p. 242 (§ 18). 88 

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For Ruskin restoration was dishonest because it wiped away the craft, love, and labour of the medi­eval architect. Like Ruskin, Rodin was suspicious of architectural restoration. Many of his contemporaries who took this view considered Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-leDuc (1814–1879) to be the disrespectful enemy of the Middle Ages for his desire to restore medi­e val monuments beyond all trace of their history. In what seems to be an outright attack on Viollet-le-Duc and his methods, Rodin wrote: ‘Les vrais ennemis de l’architecture et de la sculpture, ce sont les mauvais architectes et sculpteurs, — les grands chirurgiens à la mode, qui prétendent “refaire”, artificiellement, au malade les membres qu’il a perdus’ (‘The true enemies of architecture and sculpture are the bad architects and sculptors, the great, fashionable surgeons who claim to “remake”, artificially, the limbs that the patient has lost’).92 Rodin believed evil times had come with the restoration architects, whom he accused of making a travesty out of architecture and violating its immortal character: ‘Les restaurateurs, qui la travestissent, lui volent son immortalité’.93 He lamented what he saw as the neglect and mishandling of medi­eval edifices: ‘Personne ne defend nos cathedrals. Le poids de la vieillesse les accable, et sous prétexte de les guérir, de “restaurer” ce qu’il ne devrait que soutenir, l’architecte leur change la face’ (‘No one defends our Cathedrals. The burden of old age crushes them, and under the pretext of curing them, of “restoring” them, what he should only uphold, the architect changes their features’).94 Of the two evils, time and restoration, the latter was worse, because it willingly changed the artefact. This is a view about historical fidelity; it is also a protest against a modern sensibility which was threatening the destruction of the nation’s ancient heritage and the disappearance of France’s history, art, and faith that was felt to inhere in its architecture. A final threat to historical memory and national identity embodied in the cathedrals of France and the history and spirituality of the Middle Ages in general — beyond the ‘vandalism’ of restoration, beyond the depravities of industry and modern architecture and the wounds of war — was the rising tide of anticlericalism, a political and social trend that, at its conclusion, resulted in the separation of church and state, and the nationalization of all ecclesiasti92 

Rodin, Les Cathédrales de France, p. 189; Rodin, Cathedrals of France, trans. by Geissbuhler, p. 97. 93  Rodin, Les Cathédrales de France, p. 145; Rodin, Cathedrals of France, trans. by Geissbuhler, p. 15: ‘restorers, by making a mockery of it, plunder its immortality’. 94  Rodin, Les Cathédrales de France, p. 144; Rodin, Cathedrals of France, trans. by Geissbuhler, p. 13.

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cal property. Proust’s essay ‘Mort des cathédrales’, first published in Le Figaro on 16 August 1904, was a manifesto against the loss of the symbolic liturgical significance of the Gothic cathedral as a result of the state’s secularization of religious edifices.95 Declaring cathedrals to be ‘la plus haute et la plus originale expression du genie die la France’ (the highest and the most original expression of the French genius), he declared that the edifices would become lifeless museums without the liturgical ceremonies for which they were constructed.96 And without the ‘forêt de symbols’ of the Gothic cathedral, the manifest form of the French heritage — of the past living on in the present — would be rendered meaningless.97 On peut dire que grâce à la persistence dans l’Église catholique, des memes rites et, d’autre part, de la croyance catholique dans le cœur des Français, les cathédrales ne sont pas seulement les plus beaux monuments de notre art, mais les seuls qui vivent encore leur vie intégrale, qui soient restés en rapport avec le but pour lequel ils furent construits. […] La liturgie catholique ne fait qu’un avec l’architecture et la sculpture de nos cathédrales, car les unes comme l’autre dérivent d’un même symbolisme. [One can say that thanks to the continued existence of rituals in the Catholic Church as well as of the Catholic faith in the very heart of the French people, the cathedrals are not only the most beautiful monuments of our art, but the only works that still live and breathe the life for which they were created. […] The Catholic liturgy creates a wholeness with the architecture and the sculpture of our cathedrals, for both the latter as the former were engendered by the same symbolism.]98

At a time of increased secularization and a weakening of Church power, a time of diminishing faith and vanishing traditions, the cathedral was an ancient structure still engaged in a struggle to function according to the beliefs in the 95  Marcel Proust, ‘La Mort des cathédrales’, in Contre Sainte-Beuve, ed. by Clarac and Sandre, pp. 141–49. 96  Proust, ‘La Mort des cathédrales’ p. 149; translation S. Glaser; see also George Heard Hamilton, Claude Monet’s Paintings of Rouen Cathedral (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 1960), p. 24. 97  Proust, ‘La Mort des cathédrales’, p. 147, quotes from Charles Baudelaire’s (1821–1867) ‘Correspondances’: ‘La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers | Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles; | L’homme y passé à travers des forêts de symbols | Qui l’observent avec des regards familiers’. Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal [1857] (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), p. 38. 98  Proust, ‘La Mort des cathédrales’, pp. 143, 144; my translation.

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service of which it was created, which included a commitment to the superiority of the French nation as consecrated with a divine mission that was the bedrock of Catholic thought. These were the years in fin-de-siècle France that saw, as George Heard Hamilton claimed, ‘a revival of mystical speculation and a renewed interest in the significance of the Church both as a system of thought and as a social institution’.99 Thus, in the Gothic cathedral spiritualism and nationalism were inscribed and intimately linked with the Church as the guardian of order, tradition, and the spirit of France, and Catholicism as the religion of national ancestral tradition. In fact, many symbolist and avant-garde writers now sided against an anticlerical government and rejected the contemporary world in favour of Catholic mysticism and faith in a medi­eval past. Mérovak, an object of fascination in his day as Prungnaud’s essay shows, offers an extreme example of this tendency. For many, this rejection of the present involved more of a reappropriation of tradition; it was finding sustenance in that tradition and applying it creatively to present realities. For example, the novels of J.-K. Huysmans — from À Rebours (1884) and Là-bas (1891) through the trilogy consisting of En route (1895), La Cathédrale (1898), and L’Oblat (1903) — follow the spiritual odyssey of their protagonists, who ultimately seek a form of pleasure far from contemporary society and its ordinary interests in the world, putting in its place the activities of the imagination, a reverie concentrated on the ecclesiastical forms and rituals of a visionary medi­eval past, and on the symbolism of Catholic liturgy and art. La Cathédrale, published in the same year as Emile Mâle’s (1862–1954) extensive study of the symbolism of medi­e val sculpture, L’Art religieux du xiiie siècle en France (1898), is a sprawling narrative of the vast encyclopaedia of Christian faith Huysmans found in the iconography of Chartres. The novel is saturated with its protagonist’s sustained meditations on the cathedral, on the mystical intensity of its complex network of symbols that establishes, in the vision of the mind, the essential link between ‘past’ and ‘present’. For Huysmans, the ‘soul’ of the medi­eval church constituted the spiritual history of the French nation that transcended contemporary social and political reality. And it seems to be this very experience that Rodin himself wants to describe: Accumulations de pensées sur cette façade, sur ce bas-relief, dont je ne vois de ma fenêtre qu’une partie. Quelle race a fait cela? Des milliers d’années, de siècles ont ici leur portrait. C’est un visage de l’infini humain. 99 

Hamilton, Claude Monet’s Paintings of Rouen Cathedral, p. 24.

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[Accumulation of thoughts over this facade, this bas-relief of which from my window I see but one part. What race of men made this? Thousands of years, centuries have their portrait here. This is a visage of human infinity.]100

In the final chapter of Les Cathédrales de France, where Rodin resigns himself to his own death and the eventual disappearance of the cathedrals of France, he leaves his final testament.101 Reflecting in brief on the beauty of the grand cathedrals of Beauvais, Chartres, and Reims, he observes: ‘Le sublime est devant ma fenêtre: indéchiffrable’ (‘The sublime is at my window, indecipherable’).102 It is with this idea of the sublime — that heady attitude wherein the imagination is launched into an effort to comprehend the manifold in a way that leads to the intimation of the indefinite — that Rodin acknowledges a shared mission with Ruskin: Pour mes contemporains, je suis en pont, unissant les deux rives, le passé au present. J’ai vu souvent la foule hésiter devnt ces masses énormes de l’architecture gothique, se demandant si elles sont vraiment belles. Qu’elle daigne m’agréer pour garant, avec Ruskin et tant d’autres maîtres, quand nous affirmons que cette architecture est d’une beauté sublime. [For my contemporaries I am a bridge connecting two banks, the past to the present. Often I have seen crowds hesitate before enormous Gothic piles, asking themselves if they are truly beautiful. May they deign to accept me as guarantee, with Ruskin and so many other masters, when we affirm that this architecture is of sublime beauty.]103

Seeing himself literally as bridging past and present in his affirmation of the Gothic’s sublime beauty, Rodin holds up Gothic architecture as that which inherently links past with future generations. There is much that is Proustian in this assertion, much that resonates with Pissarro’s cathedral paintings, and much which war will eventually call into question and necessarily cause to be 100 

Rodin, Les Cathédrales de France, pp. 245–46; Rodin, Cathedrals of France, trans. by Geissbuhler, p. 187. 101  Rodin, Les Cathédrales de France, p. 281: ‘Je me résigne à la mort de ces édifices comme à la mienne. Je fais ici mon testament’; Rodin, Cathedrals of France, trans. by Geissbuhler, p. 243: ‘I resign myself to the death of these buildings as to my own death. Here I make my last testament’. 102  Rodin, Les Cathédrales de France, p. 289; Rodin, Cathedrals of France, trans. by Geissbuhler, p. 254. 103  Rodin, Les Cathédrales de France, p. 188; Rodin, Cathedrals of France, trans. by Geissbuhler, p. 96.

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re-evaluated, as demonstrated by Joëlle Prungnaud. Each of the artists and writers whose works have been discussed in this section used the cathedral as a symbol of the past and as a space onto which contemporary fears, unease, and utopian fantasies could be projected. These aspects are present in the anarchist appropriation of the edifice as a symbol of both a past Golden Age and a future utopia held up in response to, or even in defiance of, the injustices and deprivation resulting from capitalism and industrialization. They also surface dramatically, as Prungnaud’s essay demonstrates, during World War I, where the cathedral came to signify a people, nation, and continent that had been irreversibly altered by war and whose dignity had been profaned by the inhumanity of warfare. Mérovak’s architectural reverie, La Cathédrale des morts (1918), connects with the long-standing tradition to which Rodin belongs, in portraying the cathedral as a symbol of France, in his day a people devastated by war, while Maurice Magre portrays the cathedral as a symbol of humanity, victim of the hellish present, violated by the inhumanity and cruelty of war. * * * Near the end of World War I, in November 1917 — the month and year of Rodin’s death — the French government commissioned France’s native son, the painter Claude Monet, whose Rouen Cathedral series, as Curie remarked in her essay, had met with tremendous popular and critical success in 1895, to paint — at an astonishing fee of 10,000 francs — Reims Cathedral, for which official authorization had to be secured for the painter to make the journey to that ravaged city during travel-restricted wartime.104 As Prungnaud’s essay reminds us, from September 1914 to October 1918, the cathedral at Reims suffered brutal and devastating bombardment from German artillery. Numerous publications, accompanied by photographs of the wreckage, influenced emotion and nationalist public opinion on this subject, and a general exhortation to ‘never forget’. Emile Mâle, describing his country’s mourning in 1917, wrote: ‘When France learned that the cathedral of Reims was in flames, every heart was stricken. Those who cried for a son found fresh tears for the saintly church’.105 And in 1921 echoing these sentiments in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, he wrote again:

104 

Grace Seiberling, Monet’s Series (New York: Garland, 1981), p. 329, n. 78. Emery (Romancing the Cathedral, p.  168) quotes from ‘Le Vandalisme allemand’, reprinted in L’Art allemand et l’art français du Moyen Âge (Paris: Armand Colin, 1918) and cited in Louis Réau, Histoire du vandalisme (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1994), p. 844. 105 

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J’ai revu la cathédrale de Reims après ses dernières blessures: fantôme d’église au milieu d’un fantôme de ville. […] La cathédrale calcinée, couverte de plaies profondes, […] épouvantait d’abord. […] La cathédrale ressemblait à un martyr qui venait de traverser les supplices et que ses bourreaux n’avaient pu achever. [I have seen the cathedral of Reims after its most recent injuries: a phantom church in the middle of a phantom city. […] At first, the charred cathedral, covered with deep wounds, […] was horrifying. […] The cathedral resembled a martyr who had just endured agonies that his torturers had not been able to complete.]106

Moreover, Proust, in 1919, in a reprint of ‘La Mort des Cathédrales’ now mourned its physical destruction in World War I: Quand je parlai de la mort des Cathédrales, je craignis que la France fût transformée en une grève où de géantes conques ciselées sembleraient échouées, vidées de la vie qui les habita et n’apportant même plus à l’oreille qui se pencherait sur elles la vague rumeur d’autrefois, simples pièces de musée, glacées elles-mêmes. Dix ans ont passé, ‘la mort des Cathédrales’, c’est la destruction de leurs pierres par les armées allemandes, non de leur esprit par une Chambre anticléricale qui ne fait plus qu’un avec nos évêques patriots. [When  I discussed the death of cathedrals, I  feared that France would be transformed into a shore where giant chisled conches seemed to have run aground, emptied of the life that inhabited them and no longer bringing to an attentive ear the distant murmur of the past, simply museum objects, themselves frozen. Ten years have passed, ‘the death of cathedrals’ is the destruction of their stones by the German armies, not that of their spirit by an anticlerical Chamber that is now united as one with our patriotic bishops.]107

And not insignificantly, in his preface to the English edition of Rodin’s Cathédrales de France, Herbert Read remarks that even before the advent of World War I, Rodin bemoaned the insensitivity of the modern world toward the monuments of its historical past: What would [Rodin] have said if he had known that within the next thirty years some of his most beloved edifices would twice fall within the range of a devastat-

106 

Émile Mâle, ‘La Cathédrale de Reims (à propos d’un livre récent) [Paul Vitry, La Cathédrale de Reims]’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, February 1921, 73–88 (p. 73); translation in Emery, Romancing the Cathedral, p. 168. Prungnaud also quotes this (Gothique et Décadence, n. 43). 107  Proust, ‘La Mort des Cathédrales’, n. 1, pp. 141–42; my translation.

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ing war? In a few hours the guns and bombs of the opposed armies had done more damage to Amiens, Soissons, and Reims than five centuries of neglect.108

The threads of nationalism, spiritualism, and remembrance, it seems, are deeply woven into the very fabric of the Gothic cathedral. Monet’s Reims, unfortunately, was never painted. Such a noteworthy official commission for a painting to be undertaken by one of France’s most renowned living artists and depicting a monument that, as Prungnaud indicates, had been the ancient seat of coronation (a tradition which had been revived by Charles X in 1825) and that had come to be considered as one of the finest examples of French Gothic construction, was surely a strategic appeal by the state to public sentiment and patriotism. By invoking the past, such a picture would be emblematic for the resuscitation of national spirit. As the essays in this section demonstrate, during times of political turbulence, public upheaval, and national crisis, whether in the post-1871 period, the period of the separation of church and state early in the twentieth century, or World War I, the Gothic cathedral was invoked as a symbol of stability and tradition, the ultimate symbol of both nation and faith, a living symbol of France and her people. At a moment when history — the actuality of war — besieges memory and threatens to erase it, commemorative vigilance is paramount. And standing vigil is the Gothic image.

108 

Herbert Read, ‘Preface’, in Rodin, The Cathedrals of France, trans. by Geissbuhler, p. vii.

Part III The Cathedral in the Arts

Figure 8.1. Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc / E. Guillaumot, Gothic Window, wood engraving, from Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française du xie au xvie siècle, 10 vols (Paris: Librairies-Imprimeries Réunis, [n.d.]), v, 385, private collection.

Patterns of Behaviour: Architectural Representation in the Romantic Period Klaus Niehr

T

he first steps taken towards a critical history of art in the 1820s have been called ‘modern’ because they were thought to demonstrate scientific progress by implementing new methods of comparing forms and features and by using history as a basis for analysing them.1 The aim of this approach was to provide a solid foundation from which facts, dates, and figures could be deduced and, at the same time, to override Romantic appropriations of the arts, which primarily involved feelings, visions, and the imagination. The work of Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814–1879) exemplifies the achievement of the ‘scientific’ approach, as illustrated in his drawing of a high Gothic window (Figure 8.1). Reducing an architectural member to its mechanics, this type of illustration gives important insights into the structure of a building and its elements which would be difficult, if not impossible, to obtain in reality. Further, separating an element from an architectural whole forces the viewer to concentrate on its technical features and functions. Thus it was common to portray buildings in isolation from their urban environments, as if they were set on a base, and to describe them as though they could be easily circumnavigated, as if no 1 

See for instance Gabriele Bickendorf, Der Beginn der Kunstgeschichtsschreibung unter dem Paradigma ‘Geschichte’: Gustav Friedrich Waagens Frühschrift ‘Ueber Hubert und Jan van Eyck’, Heidelberger kunstgeschichtliche Abhandlungen, Neue Folge, 19 (Worms: Wernersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1985). Klaus Niehr ([email protected]) is Professor at the Institute of Art History at Osnabrück Uni­ver­sity and Full Member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

The Idea of the Gothic Cathedral: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Meanings of the Medieval Edifice in the Modern Period, ed. by Stephanie A. Glaser, RITUS 9 (Turn­hout: Brepols, 2018) pp. 232–261 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.RITUS-EB.5.115742

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obstacle could prevent the visitor’s movement around or within an architectural structure or impede his view of any part of it. Sections and ground plans showing the distinctive characteristics of a building without encumbering walls were presented as ‘normal pictures’. Elements of upper stories were described as if they could actually be seen close up, without aid of any kind. In short, the object under analysis was set in an ideal location and presented with omniscient authority: it was fully accessible and ready to be analysed.2 While this newly found exactitude in writing about and illustrating art and architecture increased the understanding of medi­e val artefacts, it came in exchange for heavy losses involving the viewer’s subjective experience, for it disregarded the specific conditions of perception: it restricted movement and emotion, omitted events that occurred while visiting a monument (such as bad weather or traffic jams), and ignored the effects which artefacts of all kinds had on the spectator. Indeed, it rejected subjectivity in three characteristic ways: (1) leaving out all indications about the physical setting of an object and the relationship between the viewer and the artwork, (2) describing facts and phenomena without referring to the position of the viewer or the object viewed, and (3) ignoring temporal and natural conditions on the one hand and the spatial relation between the object and the spectator on the other. Neglecting these fundamental characteristics of perception, which are also necessary for an adequate understanding of complex structures, especially architecture, such depictions obscured an author’s or artist’s attitude towards his experience of an edifice, a sculpture, or a painting. Yet even as this scientific approach to the visual arts and architecture encroached more and more on the subjectivity characteristic of the Romantic vision, many aspects of the subjective approach were retained, because, I will argue, they too offered important means of understanding medi­eval architecture. Focusing on the period when scientific methods and Romantic ideologies were competing and even coalescing and harmonizing within a single work, I will begin by exploring Romantic views of architecture, both subjective and scientific, and then discuss examples of multifocal perspectives in illustration by calling attention to new kinds of illustrations that developed in the 1820s using French, German, and English examples. 2  Interestingly, both texts and visual representations from this period share in the fundamental underlying idea of the panoramas and dioramas, which was to produce a total illusion by offering an ideal view of an object from an ideal position in order to eliminate any possibility of comparison which would destroy the illusion. Compare Eric de Kuyper and Emile Poppe, ‘Voir et regarder’, Communications, 34 (1981), 85–96.

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Representation and Subjectivity: Thomas Dibdin’s Tour in France and Germany Prior to the 1820s the subjective experience of architecture had served to embed buildings, sculptures, and paintings in their physical environments as well as in histories: histories of individual visits and of individual eyes, whose specific perception was translated into words and fixed in a text. Such descriptions were intended to help the reader imagine the actual state of a building or work of art and to place him there, in the object’s actual surroundings. They also served to make him share the author’s feelings and to vicariously relive his visit.3 To more fully explore this subjective description of architecture before it disappeared in scientific writing during the first half of the nineteenth century,4 I will look at a now little-known but representative text, Thomas Frognall Dibdin’s (1776–1847) Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, which contains George Lewis’s illustrations and was published in 1821.5 In 1818 Dibdin, an English bibliographer and cleric, was commissioned by George John Spencer, 2nd Earl Spencer (1758–1834), to purchase books for him on the European continent, a task for which he travelled through the famous libraries in France and Germany, visiting many medi­eval buildings on his journey. His account continues the long-standing tradition of the travelogue6 and offers instructive examples about the relationship between the spectator and an architectural structure. Although Dibdin probably stylized his own behaviour when he transcribed his experience, his writings are nonethe3  This abridged history of the appropriation of facts corresponds to Jonathan Crary’s observations about nineteenth-century vision in Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cam­bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), pp. 23–24. 4  On the Romantic view in literature and illustrations, see Ségolène Le Men, La Cathédrale illustrée de Hugo à Monet: Regard romantique et modernité (Paris: CNRS, 1998). 5  Thomas Frognall Dibdin, A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, 3 vols (London: Shakespeare Press, 1821). For Dibdin’s biography and his works, see Dictionary of National Biography, 2nd edn, ed. by Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee, 22 vols (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 1921–22), v, 911–13; Edward John O’Dwyer, Thomas Frognall Dibdin: Bibliographer & Bibliomaniac Extraordinary, 1776–1847 (Pinner: Private Libraries Association, 1967); and Michaela Braesel, Buchmalerei in der Kunstgeschichte: Zur Rezeption in England, Frankreich und Italien, Studien zur Kunst, 14 (Köln: Böhlau, 2009), pp. 414–24. 6  On this tradition, see the helpful survey Auch ich in Arcadien: Kunstreisen nach Italien 1600–1900, exhibition catalogue (Schiller-Nationalmuseum: Marbach am Neckar, 1966).

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less useful for providing information about his attitudes and behaviour towards works of art and architecture as well as his manner of perceiving and analysing them. In this vein, the relation between Dibidn’s text and Lewis’s drawings is especially instructive. Exhibiting many elements that are characteristic of representations of architecture at the time, the Tour differs markedly from works in which the scientific approach to architectural monuments was already gaining ground even while Romantic subjectivity lingered on. In the first and third volumes, which are devoted to his tour through Normandy, upper Germany, and Austria, Dibdin demonstrates his ‘love of ecclesiastical architecture’.7 It is important to note that his understanding of monuments has at least four essential aspects: 1. Architecture is a living being, so it needs space to exist as well as to be seen. Thus, space plays an important role in the text. Dibdin describes the conditions in which an architectural structure is to be found, evoking, for example, the different places that permit or hinder particular views of a church, a house, or a castle. In the case of Rouen Cathedral, he calls attention to the ‘small open space’ and ‘some little breathing room’ in front of the edifice, which, he remarks, is too narrow to allow the viewer to see the edifice as a whole.8 2. The most important features of architecture are the audacity of the construction, the technical achievement, and the aesthetic standards of a building. These features might be considered as generating architecture’s primary effects because they emerge from the work itself. The effects change depending on the spectator’s position — a distant or proximate view of a building — and on a building’s physical setting, such as its place in a rural or an urban space. The streets in a town or the country paths leading to a house or a church present the spectator with various views of a building and offer him multiple possibilities of adopting architecture with his eyes. In extensively describing these ways of physically approaching an edifice, Dibdin demonstrates to what extent the evaluation of an architectural structure depends upon its surrounding environment. 3. Secondary factors, such as atmospheric conditions of light or the weather, as well as the actual state of the edifice, decisively influence the way a building is perceived. Since the viewer’s judgement is not founded upon any solid factual basis, these factors determine and confirm the spectator’s 7  8 

Dibdin, A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour, i, 19. Dibdin, A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour, i, 48.

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mood. For example, after visiting the Abbey of Saint-Ouen in Rouen in the evening light, Dibdin points out its ‘faery-like effect’: ‘We declared instinctively that the Abbey of Saint-Ouen could hardly have a rival; certainly not a superior’.9 His ‘instinctive’ assessment of Saint-Ouen is due, in part, to the specific atmospheric conditions of viewing. Although instinct and feelings might appear to be inadequate instruments of evaluation, they involve a wide range of faculties of perception that depend on personal taste and knowledge, and they engage the reader’s own feelings, encouraging him to agree with the author. 4. Finally, Dibdin neglects — at least in speaking about medi­eval architecture — fixed aesthetic judgements. He also ignores historical and archaeological research, highlighting instead the effects buildings have on the viewer and focusing on details pleasing or overwhelming to the eyes. His enthusiasm for ancient buildings includes Romanesque as well as late Gothic architecture. In this, he distances himself from contemporary antiquarian research, which interpreted medi­eval architecture as a manifestation of the evolution and progress of the Gothic. Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829), for example, described the evolution of medi­eval architecture to its high point and then its degeneration, which resulted in late Gothic.10 Dibdin is not concerned with this kind of artistic teleology. Each of these aspects highlights the importance of the visual in writing about architecture; indeed, they underscore the idea of architecture as a lived experience, for they are part of the act of perceiving a monument, an experience by which a building is transformed into a picture. The perception of a monument is thus framed by personal histories, by the particular circumstances of observation, and by meteorological conditions. As such, these pictures cannot be fixed, but are changing every moment: ‘It is almost black from age’, Dibdin says about the façade of Notre-Dame de Paris. And after describing the exterior sculptures, he continues: I entered the cathedral from the western door, during service-time. A sight of the different clergymen engaged in the office, filled me with melancholy — and made me predict sad things of what was probably to come to pass! These clergymen were 9 

Dibdin, A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour, i, 72 and 75. Friedrich Schlegel, ‘Briefe auf einer Reise durch die Niederlande, Rheingegenden, die Schweiz und einen Teil von Frankreich in dem Jahre 1804 und 1805’, in Poetisches Taschenbuch für das Jahr 1806 (Berlin: Friedrich Unger, 1806), pp. 257–390. 10 

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old, feeble, […] and walked and sung in a tremulous and faltering manner. The architectural effect of the interior is not very imposing: although the solid circular pillars of the nave — the double aisles round the choir — and the old basso-relievo representations of the life of Christ, upon the exterior of the walls of the choir — cannot fail to afford an antiquary very singular satisfaction. The choir appeared to be not unlike that of St. Denis.11

Verbal ‘pictures’ of this kind were common during the early part of the nineteenth century.12 Yet, such ‘pictures’ existed before they were ‘translated’ into words, for some perceived ‘reality’ in ‘pictures’. Charles Nodier (1780–1844), for example, expressly used the word ‘tableau’ in the first volume of Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’ancienne France: Ancienne Normandie (1820). Studying the effects of the ruined abbey church of Jumièges under changing conditions of light, he noted that ‘Quelques heures plus tard, tout ce tableau avoit changé de face’ (Several hours later, the appearance of the entire picture has changed).13 This kind of record of the experience of an edifice involves the reader in such a way that he is drawn directly into the author’s encounter with a building and becomes part of the spectacle.

Word and Image in Dibdin’s Tour In Dibdin’s volume, the descriptions of buildings as verbal pictures capturing a fleeting moment are perfectly complemented by George Lewis’s splendidly etched drawings which accompany the text and illustrate the events of the journey (Figure 8.2). These drawings, printed sometimes as plates and sometimes as figures, are like snapshots which function in the same manner as the text, putting the reader into a history experienced by the travellers. Dibdin characterizes the drawings as ‘picturesque’ and ‘antiquarian’,14 making clear 11 

Dibdin, A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour, ii, 95–96. Anne Hultzsch has examined the transformation from perception into description of architecture from a diachronic perspective: Architecture, Travellers and Writers: Constructing Histories of Perception, 1640–1950, Studies in Comparative Literature, 26 (Oxford: Legenda, 2014). 13  Charles Nodier, Isidore Justin Taylor, and Alphonse de Cailleux, Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’ancienne France: Ancienne Normandie, 3 vols (Paris: P. Didot l’ainé, 1820–78), i, 48. Unless otherwise indicated, English translations by S. Glaser. 14  Dibdin, A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour, i, pp. vi–viii. Lewis is one of many English artists interested in the picturesque and antiquarian aspects of medi­eval art of northern France; see Yves Bottineau-Fuchs, ‘La Redécouverte de l’architecture médiévale dans la peinture du xixe siècle: L’Exemple normand’, in Arcisse de Caumont (1801–1873): Érudit 12 

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Figure 8.2. George Lewis / I. Byrne, Rouen, Rue du Bac, etching, 22.3 × 13.6 cm, from Dibdin, A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour, i, plate facing p. 112. Courtesy of Universität Osnabrück, Kunsthistorisches Institut.

that they are executed in a free manner, but also rigorously drawn with attention to detail. This fact is important, for it underscores the artist’s freedom to transform what he has observed in reality. Referring to a scene in Strasbourg Cathedral, Dibdin directs the reader’s attention to Lewis’s drawing: ‘See, what a delightful thing Mr Lewis has made of it’.15 ‘Delightful’ calls attention to the normand et fondateur de l’archéologie française, ed. by Vincent Juhel, Mémoires de la Société des antiquaries de Normandie, 40 (Caen: Société des antiquaries de Normandie, 2004), pp. 25–39. 15  Dibdin, A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour, iii, 32.

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Figure 8.3. Thomas Frognall Dibdin, Angel at the Tomb of Christ. Benedictional of Archbishop Robert, Rouen, Bibliothèque municipale, MS Y 7, fol. 21v, woodcut, 14 × 10.5 cm, from Dibdin, A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour, i, 171. Courtesy of Universität Osnabrück, Kunsthistorisches Institut.

free and subjective nature of perception. Likewise, in speaking about Lewis’s picture of the Abbey of St Stephen at Caen, he emphasizes the very specific character of the illustration as a result of the liberty of the artist’s imagination, which takes a creative distance from the monument: ‘It unites the fidelity of antiquarianism with all the picturesqueness of which the subject is capable’.16 Drawings of this kind thus differ considerably from the ‘fac-similes’ of manu­ script illuminations traced by the author himself and reproduced as woodcuts in his book (Figure 8.3).17 16 

Dibdin, A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour, i, 282. Dibdin, A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour, i, 171–72. See Johann Christian Klamt, ‘Zur Reproduktionsgeschichte mittelalterlicher Schriftformen und Miniaturen in der Neuzeit. Teil II: Die erste Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts’, Quaerendo, 29 (1999), 247–74. 17 

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Dibdin was well aware that images are able to render visual perception often more precisely than the written word can. He therefore placed great importance on publishing illustrations in his works, and the first edition of the Tour contained more than 140 of them. Nonetheless, he seems to have felt that he was competing with the artist, since he continually compares the illustrations to his text. After describing Houdan Castle, for example, he turns the reader’s attention to the accompanying illustration and laments his inability to render the castle fully in prose: ‘But let Mr Lewis’s pencil supply these deficiencies of the foregoing description’.18 It thus appears that Dibdin relied on the artist to play at least an equal role in telling the stories of the journey by depicting the buildings encountered as plates inserted within the text. Dibdin seems to allow Lewis’s task to be to put the reader there, perhaps even more than a writer may be able to do. Given this, it is important to note that Dibdin carefully records the position of the artist and gives an account of his working conditions.19 We learn, for example, that in order to draw the southern transept of Rouen Cathedral (Figure 8.4, p. 242), poor Mr Lewis spent five days in a room (‘entre-sol’) just above a liquor shop in the building across from the cathedral and that he spent the same amount of time drawing Strasbourg Cathedral as he did Rouen.20 This information about the circumstances of production heightens the reader’s awareness of the work involved for the artist and writer to prepare the book. This appeals to the reader’s sympathies and make him more involved in the whole venture. But the text and the image combine into an intermediary that encourages the reader to produce his own mental pictures: ‘Now, my good friend’, the author remarks after writing about Strasbourg Cathedral for some pages, ‘taking the whole of the preceding description together, you may form a pretty fair notion of the exterior of the cathedral of Strasbourg’.21 This notion 18 

Dibdin, A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour, ii, 70. Even William Henry Fox Talbot did this some twenty years later, when he introduced his first photographs to the public: The Pencil of Nature (London: Longman, Hurst, Reese, Orme and Brown, 1844). See Bernd Stiegler, ‘William Henry Fox Talbot: Der Zeichenstift der Natur. Bestimmungen eines neuen Mediums’, in Die Eroberung der Bilder: Photographie in Buch und Presse (1816–1914), ed. by Charles Grivel, André Gunthert, and Bernd Stiegler (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2003), pp. 26–39. 20  Dibdin, A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour, i, 50, and iii, 12, where he praises Lewis’s drawing of the façade, which was ‘the result of five days unintermitting and severe application’. 21  Dibdin, A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour, iii, 23–24. 19 

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Figure 8.4. George Lewis / H. Le Keux, Rouen Cathedral. South Transept, etching, 16.4 × 19.1 cm, from Dibdin, A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour, i, plate following p. 51. Courtesy of Universität Osnabrück, Kunsthistorisches Institut.

is a Totaleindruck, a complete impression of the whole even within the limited sphere of perception.22 The verbal and visual representations of architecture in Dibdin’s Tour, however, are not only based on pure perception, but informed by current aesthetics on the sublime. Edmund Burke (1729–1797) found the sublime exemplified in medi­e val buildings: ‘vastness’, ‘infinity’, ‘succession and uniformity’, and even 22  ‘Totaleindruck’ was used by many in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including Georg Forster (1754–1794), Friedrich Schlegel, and Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859). See Klaus Niehr, Gotikbilder — Gotiktheorien: Studien zur Wahrnehmung und Erforschung mittelalterlicher Architektur in Deutschland zwischen ca. 1750 und 1850 (Berlin: Gebrüder Mann, 1999), pp. 78–80.

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dark rooms were said to be signs of the sublime and of having ‘a tendency to fill the mind with […] delightful horror’.23 Dibdin observed just such traits while visiting the Abbey Church of Saint-Ouen: As the evening came on, the gloom of almost every side chapel and recess was rendered doubly impressive by the devotion of numerous straggling supplicants; and invocations to the presiding spirit of the place reached the ears and touched the hearts of the by-standers. The grand western entrance presents you with the most perfect view of the choir — a magical circle, or rather oval — flanked by lofty and clustered pillars, and free from the surrounding obstructions of screens, &c. Nothing more airy and more captivating of the kind can be imagined.24

Thus the combination of text and illustrations, like those of Rouen Cathedral (Figure 8.4), aid in imparting at least the impression of the edifice’s monumental size and shape which overwhelms the eye. Besides the aesthetics of the sublime, British nationalism tinges Dibdin’s interpretations. Like many of his day,25 Dibdin considered Norman history and Norman buildings to be somewhat English, for they belong to ‘a country, from which our Kings, and a great portion of our Nobility, have sprung — and in which many of the churches and castles are supposed to have been erected either by English money or by English hands’.26 This view of the connection between Normandy and England came across quite clearly in an article appear23 

Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas on the Sublime and Beautiful [1757], ed. with an introd. and notes by J. T. Boulton (London: Routledge & Paul, 1958), pp. 72–75, 81, and 141–43. 24  Dibdin, A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour, i, 73. 25  For the interest in Normandy shown by British artists and scholars, see Edward Kaufman, ‘Architecture and Travel in the Age of British Eclecticism’, in Architecture and its Image: Four Centuries of Architectural Representation. Works from the Collection of the Canadian Centre for Architecture, ed. by Eve Blau and Edward Kaufman (Montréal: Canadian Center for Architecture, 1989), pp. 59–85, esp. p. 70; and also Matthias Noell, ‘“Standards of Taste”: Augustus Charles Pugin und die Specimens of the Architectural Antiquities of Normandy’, in Visualisierung und Imagination: Materielle Relikte des Mittelalters in bildlichen Darstellungen der Neuzeit und der Moderne, ed. by Bernd Carqué, Daniela Mondini, and Matthias Noell, 2 vols, Göttinger Gespräche zur Geschichtswissenschaft, 25 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006), ii, 417–64. 26  Dibdin, A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour, i, p. xi. Dibdin’s nationalism comes to the fore in his discussion with the translator of the French edition of the Tour. Compare the introduction by Théodore Licquet, in Voyage bibliographique, archéologique et pittoresque en France par le Rév. Th. Frognall Dibdin, trans. by Theódore Licquet and G. A. Crapelet, 4 vols (Paris: Crapelet, 1825), i, pp. xii–xvii, and Dibdin’s response in the second English edition of 1829 (London: Robert Jennings and John Major), i, pp. xxvi–xxxi.

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ing in the Quarterly Review of 1821: In ‘Normandy, the most important of our transmarine provinces […] an Englishman feels himself as much within the pale of English history as if he were in Yorkshire’.27 This interest would be sustained through the nineteenth century, as British antiquarians continued the quest to discover the origins of their past on the Continent.28

The Scientific Approach to Architecture The botanist and antiquarian Dawson Turner (1775–1858) had expressed similar feelings in his 1820 Account of a Tour in Normandy, when writing about his love for the ‘sober English sky’ of northern France.29 Calling Saint-Ouen in Rouen ‘unquestionably the noblest edifice in the pointed style in [that] city, or perhaps in France’, Turner speaks only in terms of modern political geography and not of mental or historical possession, stating that since the French of the early nineteenth century were ‘blind […] to the beauties of Gothic architecture’, they must have been blind to good art in the Middle Ages as well.30 Although Turner shares Dibdin’s nationalistic view of Normandy, his focus on the monuments differs markedly from Dibdin’s. And, while creating verbal pictures like Dibdin, Turner restricts his experience of architecture to certain parts of the book. In Letter IV for example, he writes about what greets the eye as he approaches Rouen: Rouen, from this point of view, is seen to considerable advantage, at least by those who, like us, make a détour to the north, and enter it in that direction: the cathedral, St. Ouen, the hospital and church of La Madeleine, and the river, fill the picture.31

27 

Francis Cohen, ‘Normandy: Architecture of the Middle Ages’, Quarterly Review, 25 (1821), 112–47 (pp. 113 and 114). 28  See Elizabeth Lewis, ‘Les Rapports avec les antiquaires anglais’, in Arcisse de Caumont (1801–1873), ed. by Juhel, pp. 273–83. 29  Dawson Turner, Account of a Tour in Normandy; Undertaken Chiefly for the Purpose of Investigating the Architectural Antiquities of the Duchy, with Observations on its History, on the Country, and on its Inhabitants, 2 vols (London: John and Arthur Arch, 1820), i, 45. 30  Turner, Account of a Tour in Normandy, i, 169–70. This harsh statement was confirmed by nineteenth-century French scholars, such as Charles Duhérissier de Gerville, who in 1824 admitted that ‘C’est en Angleterre que nous devons chercher des auteurs pour nous diriger dans l’étude de notre architecture ecclésiastique’. Quoted in Nikolaus Pevsner, Some Architectural Writers of the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), pp. 21–22. 31  Turner, Account of a Tour in Normandy, i, 47.

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This scene does not interfere with his description and historical evaluation of monuments that are found only later, in Letters VIII to XIII. Letter VIII begins with a short summary: My researches in this city [Rouen] after the remains of architectural antiquity of the earlier Norman æra, have hitherto, I  own, been attended with little success. I may even go so far as to say, that I have seen nothing in this circular style, for which it would not be easy to find a parallel in most of the large towns in England. On the other hand, the perfection and beauty of the specimens of the pointed style, have equally surprised and delighted me.32

Turner is one of the first authors to separate science from adventure, and he uses the new scientific methods of analysing works of architecture. By the 1820s classifying medi­e val architecture according to its stylistic particularities had become necessary for understanding its structures, and antiquarians and theorists studied edifices in order to pick out stylistic differences and date buildings accordingly. 33 In England, for example, Thomas Rickman’s (1776–1841) Attempt to Discriminate the Styles of English Architecture (1817) systematized the nomenclature of periods of Gothic architecture.34 On the Continent Arcisse de Caumont (1801–1873) developed a new vocabulary for the phases of medi­eval building.35 In the same ‘scientific’ vein, Turner describes in detail the different stages of medi­eval architecture and dates the buildings he visits.

32 

Turner, Account of a Tour in Normandy, i, 103. A historical survey of this method is given in Stilfragen zur Kunst des Mittelalters: Eine Einführung, ed. by Bruno Klein and Bruno Boerner (Berlin: Reimer, 2006). 34  Thomas Rickman, An Attempt to Discriminate the Styles of English Architecture, from the Conquest to the Reformation; with Notices of Eight Hundred English Buildings: preceded by a Sketch of the Grecian and Roman Orders, 2nd edn with additions (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, [1819]). 35  Arcisse de Caumont, ‘Essai sur l’architecture religieuse du moyen âge, particulièrement en Normandie’, Mémoires de la Société des Antiquaires de la Normandie, 1 (1825), 535–677. See Maylis Baylé, ‘La Théorie de l’art d’Arcisse de Caumont’, in Arcisse de Caumont (1801–1873), ed. by Juhel, pp. 111–36, and Klaus Niehr, ‘Von der optischen Qualität verdichteter Masse: Annotationen zur Geschichte kunsthistorischer Methodik’, in Stil-Linien diagrammatischer Kunstgeschichte, ed. by Wolfgang Cortjaens and Karsten Heck, Transformationen des Visuellen, 2 (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2014), pp. 20–33 (pp. 24–26). 33 

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Romanticism’s Roving Spectator As we know, Dibdin was not interested in chronology or taxonomy, and, what is more, he seems to have little interest in the problem that fascinated most of the antiquarians during that time: ‘la lutte entre l’architecture romane et l’ogive’ (the battle between Romanesque and Gothic), as Charles Duhérissier de Gerville (1769–1853) put it.36 Although Dibdin was aware that in writing his Tour he was taking on the roles both of the historian and of the spectator, he privileged the latter and called attention to it in his description of Strasbourg Cathedral: ‘But ere I assume the office of the historian, let me gratify my inclinations as a spectator. Let me walk round this stupendous structure’.37 In what follows we find an indication that Dibdin doesn’t actually ‘walk round’ Strasbourg Cathedral, as he had proposed, for he describes the architecture in a way that shows that he has been influenced by existing literature on the building, just as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) had been when he first came to Strasbourg.38 Like Goethe, Dibdin is only interested in the façade and in the tower. He finds the nave and its aisles, the transept, and the choir not worthy of note: ‘They sink’, he writes ‘into perfect insignificance’.39 Dibdin’s most important aim is to guide the reader by fixing his position one step at a time, beginning with a first breathtaking impression: At this moment, therefore, consider me as standing in full gaze before its west front — from which the tower springs. This tower seems to reach to heaven. Indeed the whole front quite overwhelms you with alternate emotions of wonder and delight.40

However, the spectator Dibdin could not have a complete view of the cathedral because of its location (‘there is some little space before it’), and thus he would 36 

Charles-Alexis-Adrien Duhérissier de Gerville, ‘Détails sur l’église de Mortain et sur la cathédrale de Coutances, adressés à M. le baron de Vaussay’, Mémoires de la Société des Antiquaires de la Normandie, 1 (1825), 142–66 (p. 146). See Elizabeth Williams, ‘The Perception of Romanesque Art in the Romantic Period: Archaeological Attitudes in France in the 1820s and 1830s’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 21 (1985), 303–21. 37  Dibdin, A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour, iii, 11. 38  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, ‘Von Deutscher Baukunst: D. M. Ervini a Steinbach’, in Von deutscher Art und Kunst: einige fliegende Blätter (Hamburg: Bode, 1773). Modern edition in Goethes Werke, ed. by Erich Trunz, Hamburger Ausgabe, 14 vols (München: C. H. Beck, 1989), xii, 7–15. See Niehr, Gotikbilder — Gotiktheorien, pp. 29–63. 39  Dibdin, A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour, iii, 25. 40  Dibdin, A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour, iii, 11.

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Figure 8.5. George Lewis / S. Rawle, Front View of Strasbourg Cathedral, etching, 24 × 15.9 cm, from Dibdin, A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour, iii, plate following p. 12. Courtesy of Universität Osnabrück, Kunsthistorisches Institut.

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have needed to move around the edifice in order to capture the full view. ‘At the further end of this space’,41 however, he is apparently able to study the façade both as a whole and in its details from its base to the top of the spire, as his eyes wander up and down it. As can be expected, Dibdin laments the difficulty in conveying this view or any other perspective without images, especially if there is no adequate place ‘for a satisfactory view of [a building], within its immediate vicinity’.42 He thus relies on Lewis’s drawings to give an impression of the entire façade and of its details (Figure 8.5). The engraving may be considered as an ideal rendering insofar as the distant and the proximate perspectives are bound together, permitting the reader to see the edifice from a point of view that the spectators in the foreground of the picture could never obtain.43 We cannot really know what Dibdin actually did see because his descriptions are derived from different kinds of sources: from his own perceptions and from texts and engravings, all of which offer different views of the cathedral. Depending on the position of the spectator, the edifice can be represented in different ways. When the spectator is standing still gazing at the façade, the cathedral appears as a two-dimensional piece of architecture. Only by walking around and by climbing it can the spectator truly see and experience its immense structure. This was the way Goethe experienced the façade of Strasbourg Cathedral.44 Likewise, Dibdin also uses movement and different perspectives to explore and understand buildings of styles other than the Gothic. But like Georg Forster (1754–1794) visiting Cologne Cathedral,45 Dibdin’s movement is sometimes restricted to the interior. At the Imperial Library in Vienna he writes of such an experience: ‘I then walked leisurely to the very extremity of the room; […]. I paced the library in various directions; and found, at every turn or fresh point of view, a new subject of surprise and 41 

Dibdin, A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour, iii, 11. Dibdin, A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour, iii, 13. 43  In his ‘Briefe’ of 1806 Friedrich Schlegel had also mentioned the obstacles which prevented the spectator from getting a complete view of complex architectural structures. In spite of trying to overcome these obstacles by using metaphors to describe the appearance of Cologne Cathedral from far away and close up, he didn’t feel able to understand the building. See Schlegel, ‘Briefe auf einer Reise’, pp. 160–61. 44  Goethe, ‘Von Deutscher Baukunst’, pp. 11–12. 45  Georg Forster, ‘Ansichten vom Niederrhein, von Brabant, Flandern, Holland, England und Frankreich im April, Mai und Junius 1790’, in Georg Forsters Werke, ed. by Gerhard Steiner, 18 vols (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1958), ix, 23–25. Further details in Niehr, Gotikbilder — Gotiktheorien, pp. 65–84. 42 

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admiration’.46 This multifocal perspective permits the viewer to better comprehend complex structures which cannot be understood from only one point in space. In the portrayal of architectural structures, the reality of buildings and perception are hardly to be separated. Eighteenth-century theoreticians and historians had praised the technical prowess and artistic achievement of Gothic buildings, yet structural details and the skill of the medi­eval craftsmen could only become visible and be appreciated upon physically approaching and closely examining a building. Without the specific relation between the individual and the architectural object and the aesthetic ramifications resulting from this relationship, which developed during the Romantic period, minute details such as the intricacy of the stonework would have been overlooked, and the craft of the sculptor would not have been recognized. Nonetheless, when the subjective connection between the spectator and the building was overridden by the scientific approach to the arts in the early 1820s, other features of a building or an artwork could be better appreciated. More than a decade later, in 1833, the French historian Jules Michelet (1798–1874) criticized the ‘old’ Romantic approach to medi­eval architecture, upbraiding those, including Victor Hugo (1802–1885), who had taken only a cursory look at Gothic edifices, those who had ‘walked around’ the buildings instead of investigating their roots and their history: Avant moi, personne n’a parlé de géographie en historien, personne n’a essayé l’histoire de l’art au moyen-âge. Je n’excepte ni les Allemands, ni l’auteur de NotreDame de Paris. Il a tourné autour des monumens. Moi, j’ai montré comment cette végétation de pierre a germé et crû.47 [Before me no one talked about geography as a historian, no one attempted a history of art of the Middle Ages. I exclude neither the Germans, nor the author of NotreDame de Paris [Hugo]. He walked around the monuments, while I showed how this lapidary vegetation germinated and grew.]

Michelet mocks the Romantic attitude of his contemporaries who raved about Gothic edifices and had only admired their forms and their structure: ‘L’école pittoresque a été superficielle. Elle n’a rien dit de la vie intérieure. Elle n’a point parlé de l’art’ (The picturesque school was superficial. It said nothing about the

46 

Dibdin, A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour, iii, 453–54. Jules Michelet, Histoire de France: Moyen Âge [1833], in Œuvres completes, 21 vols (Paris: Flammarion, 1971–82), iv, ed. by Paul Viallaneix (1974), p. 7 (italics in original). 47 

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inner life. It didn’t even talk about art).48 Michelet’s use of the term ‘tourné autour’ is significant, for walking around an edifice and observing it from different perspectives was of no use for his own historical research. He didn’t need to walk around a building to study or appreciate it; he journeyed through the books and the ideas of the past. Michelet’s approach, which didn’t involve direct contact with the arts or architecture, was novel. Although he had visited French cathedrals in the 1830s, these visits became a somewhat abstract background for his monumental history of the Middle Ages.

Multifocal Perspectives and Lived Experience in Illustration The importance placed on visual perception, however, had its roots in the eighteenth century, and even the multifocal perspective used by Dibdin, as well as by Goethe and Schlegel, has much in common with theoretical writings of that time, such as those of Johann Martin Chladenius (1710–1759). In 1742 Chladenius introduced his theory of the Sehepunckt, in which he described the relations between the mental and physical motion of the seeing subject.49 Knowing that internal and external factors influenced the shape of objects and events as well as the understanding of them, Chladenius advocated that only a continual change of location could produce complete and well-founded knowledge. According to him, all intellectual approaches to the world of objects are subjective, and only a multifocal approach could guarantee definite and objective findings. Chladenius’s theory was one of many intellectual attempts to understand perception and to create a system for the relation between vision and understanding that had developed through the eighteenth century. Considerations such as these greatly influenced Romantic views of history as well as of the arts and architecture. Such theories postulated that seeing and understanding were one art, which had to be learned and could be structured individually.50 48 

Jules Michelet, Correspondance générale, ed. by Louis Le Guillou, Simone Bernard-Griffiths, and Ceri Crossley, 12 vols (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1994–2001), ii, 1833–38 (1994), p. 12. Cf. Francis Haskell, History and its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past (New Haven: Yale Uni­ver­sity Press, 1995), pp. 257–58. 49  Johann Martin Chladenius, Einleitung zur richtigen Auslegung vernünftiger Reden und Schriften (Leipzig: Lanckischens Erben, 1742); J. M. Chladenius, Allgemeine Geschichtswissenschaft, worinnen der Grund zu einer neuen Einsicht in allen Arten der Gelahrtheit geleget wird (Leipzig: Lanckisch, 1752). Cf. Horst Walter Blanke, Historiographiegeschichte als Historik, Fundamenta Historica, 3 (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: frommann-holzboog, 1991), pp. 148–51. 50  August Langen, Anschauungsformen in der deutschen Dichtung des 18. Jahrhunderts

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Thus, impressions and experiences could become an accepted basis for both scientific research and visual representation. The cathedral in the moonlight as a kind of shadow or a silhouette is one of the most familiar images derived from such experiences. The moonlight setting for the Gothic edifice highlighted the unique forms of Gothic architecture, which, in contrast to that of other periods, was considered to be an architecture of sharp and vigorous contours. Writers such as Forster, Schlegel, Nodier, and Hugo used this setting to explore particular characteristics of medi­e val buildings, since it gave free run to the imagination and the senses.51 This was one very positive aspect of the Romantic, subjective approach to architecture. It was eventually thwarted, however, by the inexactness of reports based on feelings, which led to different representations of the same object. Dibdin offers a prime example of this in the Tour when he refers to the ‘small open place’ and ‘little breathing room’ in front of Rouen Cathedral.52 On the other hand, Dawson Turner recorded that there was a ‘spacious parvis, to which [the façade] exposes a width of one hundred and seventy feet’.53 Individual perceptions like these are of special importance to the experience and understanding of a building and the description of its character. These examples make it easy to understand how such a multifarious view of monuments was considered to be at odds with the fact-based scientific approach and idealized view of a monument. The same representational problem, the portrayal of two different realities, occurs in many publications of that time, such as Nodier’s Voyages Pittoresques. Plates 23 and 24 from the first volume (Figures 8.6 and 8.7), which picture the interior of the Abbey Church of Saint-Wandrille by Alexandre-Évariste Fragonard (1780–1850), exemplify this tendency.54 The first plate offers a (Rahmenschau und Rationalismus) ( Jena: Diederichs, 1934); Roland Recht, La Lettre de Humboldt: Du jardin paysager au daguérrotype (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1989), pp. 11–28. 51  Forster, ‘Ansichten vom Niederrhein’, p. 146; Schlegel, ‘Briefe auf einer Reise’, pp. 166–67; Nodier, Taylor, and de Cailleux, Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’ancienne France, i, 48; Victor Hugo, Correspondance familiale et écrits intimes, vol. ii, 1828–39, introd. by Jean Gaudon (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1991), p. 400. For the importance of silhouette-seeing in architectural history of the early nineteenth century, see my Gotikbilder — Gotiktheorien, pp. 117–21. 52  Dibdin, A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour, i, 48. 53  Turner, Account of a Tour in Normandy, i, 137. 54  Taylor and Nodier discuss Saint Wandrille in Nodier, Taylor, and de Cailleux, Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’ancienne France, i, 61–71, and include six plates of it at the end of the chapter (Plates 22–27).

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Figure 8.6. Alexandre-Évariste Fragonard / G. Engelmann, Ruines de la grande Église de l’Abbaye de St. Wandrille (Ruins of the Abbey Church of Saint-Wandrille), lithograph, 30.9 × 23.8 cm, from Voyages pittoresques: Ancienne Normandie, i, plate 23. 1820. Courtesy of Universität Osnabrück, Kunsthistorisches Institut.

wide-angle view of the northern transept; the second shows the upper part of the transept in detail, from a much closer position, with the light coming from the left side, which means the time is late afternoon. While both plates show the ruined church as it was in Taylor’s and Nodier’s day, one is set in the Middle Ages and the other in the nineteenth century. Both might be described in terms that designate the participatory role of the figures in the pictures, as ‘living in’ and as ‘looking at’.55 In the first plate (Figure 8.6) the monks and their assistants pay no attention to the building; while in the second (Figure 8.7), two men are climbing the clerestory and exploring the architecture. These images not only 55 

Michael Baxandall describes these types of appropriation as the acting of participants and the acting of observers in Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (New Haven: Yale Uni­ver­sity Press, 1985), pp. 109–11. See also M. G. Benton, ‘The Self-Conscious Spectator’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 35 (1995), 361–73.

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Figure 8.7. Alexandre-Évariste Fragonard / G. Engelmann, Fragmens, grande Église l’Abbaye de St. Wandrille (Northern transept of the Abbey Church of Saint-Wandrille), lithograph, 32.9 × 23.8 cm, from Voyages pittoresques: Ancienne Normandie, i, plate 24. 1820. Courtesy of Universität Osnabrück, Kunsthistorisches Institut.

show two different uses of the abbey: one religious, one archaeological; they also present different aspects of its nature. The first portrays the edifice primarily as a technical structure, built for housing the different liturgical events in medi­eval and later times; the second presents the abbey as a means of aesthetic experience and scientific examination. In both, the placement of the figures draws the spectator into the picture: in one he becomes a participant in a scene from the past, and in the other he follows the two men over the double-skinned walls and may even imagine them wandering through the aisles and galleries. These lithographs intend to revive the ‘living in’ by transforming the ‘looking

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Figure 8.8. E.-Hyacinthe Langlois / Espérance Langlois, Vue générale des ruines de l’église abble. de St. Wandrille Prise du fond de l’abside (Ruins of the Abbey Church of Saint-Wandrille), etching, 24.7 × 15.9 cm. From Langlois, Essai historique et descriptif sur l’abbaye de Fontenelle ou de Saint-Wandrille, plate III, following p. 26. 1827. Courtesy of Universität Osnabrück, Kunsthistorisches Institut.

at’ into an event of sensation and feeling. They also aim to recreate both the original and modern impact of a work of architecture.56 Other views of the Abbey Church of Saint-Wandrille, for instance those drawn by Eustache-Hyacinthe Langlois (1777–1837) in 1825, offer yet another example of how architecture can be appropriated through individual perception and thus represented. Plates III and V of Langlois’s Essai historique et descriptif sur l’abbaye de Fontenelle ou de Saint-Wandrille, edited in 1827,57 56 

See Le Men, La Cathédrale illustrée de Hugo à Monet, pp. 120–26. Eustache-Hyacinthe Langlois, Essai historique et descriptif sur l’abbaye de Fontenelle ou de Saint-Wandrille […] (Paris: Imprimerie de J. Tastu, 1827). Stephen Bann has embedded Langlois’s architectural views in a short history of illustration. Putting together a number of early nineteenth-century representations of Norman churches, he shows the impact of scientific and technical progress on illustration. Stephen Bann, Distinguished Images: Prints in the Visual Economy of Nineteenth-Century France (New Haven: Yale Uni­ver­sity Press, 2013), pp. 47–86. 57 

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Figure 8.9. E.-Hyacinthe Langlois, Vue du Cloître de St Wandrille prise de l’Angle Nd.Ot. (Cloisters of Saint-Wandrille), etching, 13.9 × 15.7 cm, from Langlois, Essai historique et descriptif sur l’abbaye de Fontenelle ou de Saint-Wandrille, plate V, following p. 86. 1827. Courtesy of Universität Osnabrück, Kunsthistorisches Institut.

differ greatly from Fragonard’s, both in their points of view and in their techniques. In Plate III (Figure 8.8), we see a line drawing without shading, a representation widely accepted as scientific by the new generation of art historians who had doubts about picturesque illustrations, which were said to absorb the public’s imagination rather than to transport the timeless reality of art. Yet this etching retains subjective, or Romantic, features. It depicts people wandering through the ruins and enthusiastically looking at the overgrown walls and pillars; some of them, however, are standing or sitting in order to study or draw the edifice in ruins. Rather than using these figures to invite the public to wander through or study medi­eval ruins, as did Fragonard, Langlois uses them to provide scale to the picture in order to illustrate the immensity and overwhelming height of the Gothic building. His ‘vue générale’ is taken from the east, ‘prise du fond de l’abside’ in order to depict the entire structure. There is no full verbal description of the building: the etching replaces the written word.

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In Plate V (Figure 8.9) the strategy is different. It shows a visitor, a member of the educated class, in the cloisters. He and his greyhound are attentively examining the ruins of the edifice. The building complex, however, no longer serves as a vehicle of contemplation, for the visitor, art guide in hand, is not looking at them to appreciate the sublime and the picturesque, but through them is learning about political, ecclesiastical, architectural, and art history: ‘Learning by seeing’. On different levels this image reflects the current situation in Europe: not only had the scientific view begun to take precedence over the Romantic, subjective view, but the illustrated art book, which, as early as the eighteenth century, had been praised as a legitimate substitute for travel, was gaining in importance.58 Seen in this light, Langlois’s volume is no exception: the text and engravings provide the spectacle of travel for the reader and the spectator at home. In line with this portrayal, it is interesting to note that the cloisters of Saint-Wandrille had also been the subject of a panorama.59 At the time, different kinds of perception and publications worked together to stimulate people to create their own individual experiences with medi­eval architecture.

Science versus Subjectivity The different types of illustration in Dibdin’s, Taylor’s and Nodier’s, or Langlois’s volumes might be used to reconstruct a history of representing medi­ eval architecture, although it would be impossible to organize this history in patterns of teleological development. For we know that even in the early nineteenth century these types of pictures were accepted as simultaneous possibilities of illustrating the single meanings of a text. This is clearly demonstrated in the plates of Seroux d’Agincourt’s (1730–1814) Histoire de l’Art par les monumens, edited in 1810,60 as well as in the lithographs of Alexandre de Laborde’s (1773–1842) Monumens de la France (1816–36)61 or Nicolas-Marie-Joseph Chapuy’s (1790–1858) and Théodore de Jolimont’s (1787–1854) Cathédrales 58 

Johannes Odenthal, Imaginäre Architektur (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1986), pp. 55–57. Le Men, La Cathédrale illustrée de Hugo à Monet, p. 97. 60  Jean-Baptiste-Louis-Georges Seroux d’Agincourt, Histoire de l’Art par les Monumens depuis sa décadence au ive siècle jusqu’à son renouvellement au xvie siècle [begun 1780] (Paris: Treuttel and Würtz, 1823). See Daniela Mondini, Mittelalter im Bild: Séroux d’Agincourt und die Kunsthistoriographie um 1800, Zürcher Schriften zur Kunst-, Architektur- und Kultur­ geschichte, 4 (Zürich: Zurich InterPublishers, 2005). 61  Alexandre de Laborde, Les Monumens de la France classés chronologiquement et considérés sous le rapport des faits historiques et de l’étude des arts […], 2 vols (Paris: P. Didot l’Ainé, 1816–36). 59 

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Figure 8.10. Edward Cresy / C. L. Taylor / J. Le Keux, Canterbury Cathedral Church, Section of nave and aisles at the west end; with elevation of the two towers, etching, from John Britton, The History and Antiquities of the Metropolitical Church of Canterbury, plate III. 1821. Courtesy of Universität Osnabrück, Kunsthistorisches Institut.

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françaises (1823–31).62 These later volumes were intended for a general public with broad interests, and this is reflected in the plates, which offer a multitude of perspectives. Such variety was important, as John Britton (1771–1857) knew when he began publishing his Cathedral Antiquities of England in 1814. He consciously produced different kinds of illustrations in order to satisfy readers of all professions: ‘geometrical elevations and details’, ‘views of the building as display its most distinguishing and interesting features’, and ‘accurate delineations of ancient sculpture’ (Figure 8.10).63 Nonetheless, Britton did not cater to those who ‘prefer pretty picturesque views and artificial effects of light and shade’, for, in his opinion, such people didn’t want to ‘trouble the thinking faculties with doubts and investigations’.64 From that time on, ‘picturesque’ became a synonym for ‘popular’. As late as 1843, however, Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877) sought to render such a picturesque: searching for ‘objects more picturesque than my own immediate neighbourhood supplies’, he went to France to take photographs of Gothic cathedrals.65 Britton dispensed with the ‘picturesque’ or what we would call ‘Romantic’ in his illustrations and thus made an important step in distinguishing between scientific and non-scientific modes of visual and verbal representation. This meant that works such as Dibdin’s would soon be out of fashion, for his approach to medi­e val architecture lacked assiduous investigation and objective information. Only five years after the first edition of Dibdin’s Tour was published, Théodore Licquet (1787–1832), a Norman historian, criticized it, 62 

Cathédrales françaises dessinées, lithographiées et publiées par Chapuy, […] avec un texte historique et déscriptif, 23 installments (Paris: Leblanc, 1823–24; Paris: Engelmann 1824–31). Compare Bilderlust und Lesefrüchte: Das illustrierte Kunstbuch von 1750 bis 1920, ed. by Katharina Krause, Klaus Niehr, and Eva-Maria Hanebutt-Benz (Leipzig : E. A. Seemann, 2005), pp. 98–101. 63  John Britton, The History and Antiquities of the Cathedral Church of Salisbury; illustrated with a series of engravings, of views, elevations, plans, and details of that edifice […] (London: Longman, Hurst, Reese, Orme and Brown, 1814), pp. vii–viii. 64  John Britton, The History and Antiquities of the See and Cathedral Church of Lichfield […] (London: Longman, Hurst, Reese, Orme and Brown, 1820), pp. v–vii. Cf. Bilderlust und Lesefrüchte, ed. by Krause, Niehr, and Hanebutt-Benz, pp. 202–05. 65  See Ronald Berg, Die Ikone des Realen: Zur Bestimmung der Photographie im Werk von Talbot, Benjamin und Barthes (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2001), p. 35. Talbot had ‘learned’ picturesque compositions from paintings and drawings of his time. See Martin Kemp, ‘Talbot and the Picturesque View: Henry, Caroline, and Constance’, History of Photography, 21 (1997), 270–82; James S. Ackerman, ‘The Photographic Picturesque’, Artibus et Historiae, 48 (2003), 73–94.

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declaring that ‘Dibdin possède une imagination vive et ardente […]. Il examine en courant, c’est-à-dire qu’il ne se donne pas le temps d’examiner, qu’il examine mal, qu’il se trompe, et qu’il expose ses lecteurs à se tromper avec lui’ (‘The English Traveller’s imagination is lively and ardent […]. He examines as he runs along; that is to say, he does not give himself time to examine; he examines ill; he deceives himself; and he subjects his readers to be deceived with him’). And of the illustrations Licquet wrote: Que l’on cherche du talent dans l’exécution de ces gravures, on en trouvera sans doute; mais que les étrangers ne se fassent point une idée de ce qui est, par le tableau supposé qu’on leur en présente. La plupart de ces dessins sont, en quelque sorte, des compositions idéales qui ne ressemblent à rien, parce qu’elles ressemblent à tout. [If talent be sought in these Engravings, it will doubtless be found in them; but strangers must not seek for fidelity of representation from what is before their eyes. The greater number of the Designs are, in some sort, ideal compositions, which, by resembling every thing, resemble nothing in particular.]66

Britton’s taxonomy and Liquet’s criticism mark the crossroads of art history in the early nineteenth century. Trying to convince the critical ears and eyes of a new generation of scientists and art lovers, both the Englishman and the Frenchman maintained that there was only one method of exact representation of facts. They were not yet able to recognize what later generations would postulate, that there is no proper way to represent objects, but that an artist’s or author’s vision and its representation transform objects and give them an individual shape, that which Hayden White has called the ‘fictions of factual representation’.67 Even so, the nineteenth century had discovered that objectivity was unstable because it depended on wishes, ideas, and demands that changed nearly every day.68 66  Théodore Licquet, ‘Préface’, in Dibdin, Voyage bibliographique, archéologique et pittoresque en France, i, pp. xvii–xviii and xxii; English in Dibdin, A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour (1829), i, pp. xxx and xxxii–xxxiii (italics in original). 67  Hayden White, ‘The Fictions of Factual Representation’, in Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni­ver­sity Press, 1987), pp. 121–34. 68  Lorraine Daston, ‘Objectivity versus Truth’, in Wissenschaft als kulturelle Praxis, 1750–1900, ed. by Hans Erich Bödecker, Peter Hanns Reill, and Jürgen Schlumbohm, Ver­ öffent­lichungen des Max-Planck-Instituts für Geschichte, 154 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 1999), pp. 17–32. See also James S. Ackerman, ‘The Conventions and Rhetoric of Architectural Drawing’, the final chapter of his Origins, Imitation, Conventions: Representations in the Visual Arts (Cam­bridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), pp. 293–317; Bernd Carqué, ‘Epistemische Dinge: Zur bildlichen Aneignung mittelalterlicher Artefakte in der Moderne’, in Bilder gedeuteter

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Conclusion In 1820, when Nodier and Taylor described themselves as ‘voyageurs curieux des aspects interéssants [de la France], et avides des nobles souvenirs’ (travellers curious about all the interesting aspects [of France], and hungry for [its] noble memories) and when they called their travels through Normandy ‘pas un voyage de découvertes [mais] un voyage d’impressions’ (not a journey of discoveries, [but] a journey of impressions), they followed the specific desires of a public interested in ‘poësie’ and ‘mythologie’.69 And the reader could imagine which kind of illustrations would follow. In 1853 even Charles Nègre (1820–1880), one of the most appreciated photographers of architecture in France, admitted that he had produced his photographs by respecting the desires of a wide range of recipients. Nègre succeeded in so doing by changing the perspective and focusing on different characteristics of the architecture: Dans la reproduction des monuments anciens et du Moyen Âge que j’offre au public, j’ai tâché de joindre l’aspect pittoresque à l’étude sérieuse des détails si recherchés par les archéologues et par les artistes architectes, sculpteurs et peintres. […] Peintre moi-même, j’ai travaillé pour les peintres en suivant mes goûts personnels. Partout où j’ai pu me dispenser de faire de la précision architecturale, j’ai fait du pittoresque; je sacrifiais alors s’il le fallait quelques détails en faveur d’un effet imposant propre à donner au monument son vrai caractère et à lui conserver le charme poétique qui l’entoure.70 [In the reproductions of ancient and medi­eval monuments that I am presenting to the public, I have attempted to join the picturesque aspect with the serious investigation of details studied by the archaeologists and the artist-architects, sculptors and painters. […] As a painter myself, I worked with the painters in mind by following my personal preferences. Wherever I could do without architectural precision, I used the picturesque; so, if necessary, I sacrificed some details in favour of an impressive effect that would render a monument’s true character and preserve the poetic charm surrounding it.] Geschichte: Das Mittelalter in der Kunst und Architektur der Moderne, ed. by Otto Gerhard Oexle, Áron Petneki, and Leszek Zygner, 2 vols, Göttinger Gespräche zur Geschichtswissenschaft, 23 (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2004), i, 55–162, esp. pp. 59–67; Klaus Niehr, ‘Dem Blick aussetzen: Das exponierte Kunstwerk’, in Visualisierung und Imagination, ed. by Carqué, Mondini, and Noell, ii, 51–102. 69  Nodier, Taylor, and de Cailleux, Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’ancienne France, i, 4–5. 70  Quoted in André Rouillé, La Photographie en France: Textes et controverses; Une anthologie 1816–1871 (Paris: Maculat, 1989), pp. 133–34.

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Such subjectivity seems to be ‘modern’ in quite a different way than the ‘old’ one appreciated by Dibdin and his contemporaries, for Nègre’s subjectivity is part of a newly found freedom, even in science. It foreshadows the insights which would come to prominence in the early twentieth century. As Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945) wrote: ‘It is characteristic of the nature of man that he is not limited to one specific and single approach to reality but can choose his point of view and so pass from one aspect of things to another’.71

71 

Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture (New Haven: Yale Uni­ver­sity Press, 1944), p. 170.

Voilà les caractères généraux de l’iconographie du moyen âge. L’art est alors à la fois une écriture, une arithmétique, une symbolique. Il en résulte une harmonie profonde. L’ordonnance des statues au portail des cathédrales a quelque chose de musical. N’y a-t-il pas là, en effet, tous les éléments d’une musique? N’y trouve-t-en pas des signes groupés suivant la loi des nombres? Et n’y a-t-il pas, dans des symboles multiples qu’on entrevoit derrière les formes, quelque chose de l’indéfinie de la musique? Le génie du moyen âge, qu’on a si longtemps méconnu, fut un génie harmonieux. Le Paradis de Dante et les porches de Chartres sont des symphonies. Aucun art, plus justement que celui de xiiie siècle, ne mérite d’être défini: ‘une musique fixée’. [Such are the general characteristics of the iconography of the Middle Ages. Art was at once a script, a calculus and a symbolic code. The result was a deep and perfect harmony. There is something musical in the grouping of the statues in the cathedral porches, and in truth all the elements of music are present. Are there not here conventional signs grouped according to the law of numbers, and is there not something of the indefinite quality of music in the infinite symbolism dimly discerned behind the outward forms? The genius of the Middle Ages, so long misunderstood, was a harmonious genius. Dante’s Paradiso and the porches at Chartres are symphonies. To thirteenth-century art more truly perhaps than to any other might be given the title of ‘frozen music’.]1

1 

Émile Mâle, L’Art religieux du xiiie siècle en France: Étude sur l’iconographie du Moyen Âge et sur ses sources d’inspiration [1898], 8th edn (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1948), p. 21; The Gothic Image: Religious Art in France of the Thirteenth Century, trans. by Dora Nussey (New York: Harper, 1958), p. 22.

Frozen Music and Symphonies in Stone: Gothic Architecture and the Musical Analogy from the Enlighten­ ment through the Fin-de-Siècle Stephanie A. Glaser*

I

n his introduction to L’Art religieux du xiiie siècle en France of 1898, Émile Mâle (1862–1954) presented his theory about thirteenth-century iconography as a sacred and symbolic writing. In the introduction’s final paragraph cited opposite, he intuited a musicality underlying the organization of the portal statues on thirteenth-century cathedrals, both in their mathematical organization and in their hewn forms that are symbols which, like music, express the intangible and indefinite. Claiming thus that harmony was the main characteristic of the medi­eval genius and declaring Dante’s Paradiso and the porches of Chartres Cathedral to be symphonies, he concluded that thirteenthcentury art is ‘une musique fixée’, frozen music. While the anachronistic association of a fourteenth-century poem, a thirteenth-century cathedral, and the modern musical form of the symphony might appear to disrupt Mâle’s praise of things medi­eval, the metaphor opens a range of discourses about intermedial relations through which my discussion will manoeuvre. Essentially, Mâle was restating familiar ideas about art, music, architecture, the creative genius, and the medi­eval mindset that nineteenth-century thinkers and artists had envisioned and elaborated throughout the century, from the  

* I presented my early research on the musical analogy at the conference ‘Concord/Discord: The Musical Analogy in Word and Image’ hosted by the Centre for the Study of Visual and Literary Cultures in France, Uni­ver­sity of Bristol, United Kingdom in March 2004. Research was funded by the Centre for the Study of the Cultural Heritage of Medi­eval Rituals at the Uni­ver­sity of Copenhagen, Denmark. Stephanie A. Glaser ([email protected]) lectures in the Department of Comparative Literature at the Ruhr Uni­ver­sity, Bochum.

The Idea of the Gothic Cathedral: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Meanings of the Medi­eval Edifice in the Modern Period, ed. by Stephanie A. Glaser, RITUS 9 (Turn­hout: Brepols, 2018) pp. 262–312 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.RITUS-EB.5.115743

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geometrical proportions underlying Gothic architecture to the erudite comparison of Dante’s Divina Commedia (1307–21) to a Gothic cathedral.2 Although the latter, the analogy of the book and the cathedral, had great currency in literary circles — primarily due to Victor Hugo’s (1802–1885) Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) — and culminated in Marcel Proust’s (1871–1922) À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27), the musical analogy, summarized here in its various facets by Mâle, was equally important to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thought about the Gothic cathedral. It was taken up by philosophers, writers, and composers and actually formed a much broader cultural discourse. Mâle’s three main tenets, architectural harmony, architecture as a symphony, and architecture as frozen music, delineate the trajectories of the comparison between Gothic architecture and music which I will follow here. These trajectories are rooted in the individual yet interwoven aspects of eighteenthcentury aesthetic discourses about Art and good taste, the French or Germanic genius, musical composition and expression, and of course, about the Gothic. Moreover, the evolving discourses reflect the changes in society from a preindustrial labour market to the rise of a leisure-seeking culture; they follow the liberation of music from its servitude to dance or lyrics (specifically operatic form) to the elevation of instrumental music as the highest and purist of the arts; they offer a battleground for Romanticism’s incremental victory over neoclassical ideas of order, simplicity, and finesse; and, inseparable from this latter point, they accompany and augment the growing academic and public interest in Gothic architecture, specifically the Gothic cathedral. The musical analogy grew out of late eighteenth-century theories about the interrelations between the arts and discussions about the harmony of the senses, later known as synaesthesia.3 These considerations led to the artistic ideal that each art form should surpass its particular formal and material limi2 

In his 1823 work Geschichte und Beschreibung des Doms von Köln (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta), Sulpiz Boisserée (1783–1854) wrote about the mathematical and geometrical proportions of Cologne Cathedral (see especially pp. 18–21). Likewise Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc described and illustrated the geometry of medi­e val construction in his Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture francaise du xie au xvie siècle, 10 vols (Paris: Librairies-Imprimeries Réunies, [n.d.]), iv, 1–279. For an in-depth study of the book-cathedral analogy, see my article ‘Construire comme une église: À la recherche du temps perdu et la tradition de l’analogie architecturale’, in Proust et les ‘Moyen Âge’, ed. by Sophie Duval and Miren Lacassagne (Paris: Hermann, 2015), pp. 177–93. 3  Erika von Erhardt-Siebold, ‘Harmony of the Senses in English, German, and French Romanticism’, PMLA, 47.2 (1932), 577–92. See also Hugh Honour, Romanticism (1979; repr. London: Penguin, 1991), p. 119.

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tations, a view which gained currency with the Romantics. Many at the time, such as Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg, 1772–1801), explored, toyed with, and philosophized about the analogies between the arts.4 Romanticism’s love of analogical thinking in connection with its privileging of music as the highest of the arts provide the foundation for all the trajectories of the musical analogy.5 I understand the musical analogy as the specific comparison of architecture to music by means of equality and metaphor (architecture = music) or by likeness and simile (architecture resembles music in certain ways), with the difference lying more in the linguistic formulation of the analogy than in what specific aspects of architecture or musical form are being compared. In such formulations, music is the index by which architecture is judged, to either the denigration of the edifice in question or its celebration. In instances where the analogy is reversed and music is compared to architecture (music is architecture, music is like architecture), the status of the architecture referred to taints or ennobles the musical form that is being discussed. Whatever the sequence of the comparison, however, both sides of the analogy can be modified. Within the broad category ‘Architecture’, for example, the emphasis here lies on Gothic architecture, which can mean the Gothic style in general, a particular building (like Strasbourg or Chartres Cathedral), or a part of an edifice (the façade or other sculptural element). Likewise ‘Music’ can be treated generally or can refer to musical elements (rhythm or harmony), to specific types or styles (like Baroque music), or to forms (the symphony). Taking my lead from Mâle, I will explore the musical analogy along three trajectories: the ‘frozen music’ metaphor, the relation between harmony and the Gothic edifice, and the comparison between the Gothic cathedral and the symphony. By analysing the various ways in which the Gothic-music analogy was used and the purposes it fulfilled, my discussion will demonstrate how these trajectories overlap and feed into one another. It will highlight changes within the analogy and in the musical discourse and it will underscore the importance of Gothic architecture in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century 4  Novalis, Das allgemeine Brouillon: Materialien zur Enzyklopädistik [1798/99], ed. by Hans-Joachim Mähl (Hamburg: Meiner Verlag, 1993). Friedrich Schiller’s Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (1795) was a key text in propagating these ideas (Honour, Romanticism, p. 119). 5  Oskar Walzel opened his founding study, Wechselseitige Erhellung der Künste (Berlin: Reuther & Richard, 1917), by discussing the musical analogy and its intellectual paradoxes, pp. 5–9. My purpose here is not to critique the analogy, but to understand it in its cultural context.

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aesthetic discourses. In so doing, it will shed further light on the changing perceptions of the Gothic edifice, its significance, and the various meanings it took on during that time.

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling: Architecture as Frozen Music The connection between architecture and music comes dramatically to the fore in the Theban legend of the building of the city’s wall. Amphion and Zethus, twin sons of Zeus and Antiope, who was a daughter of the Theban King Nycteus, were responsible for its construction. After Antiope was abducted from Thebes, she gave birth to and abandoned the twins while being ‘rescued’ by her uncle Lycus. Mistreated by him for many years, she finally escaped and encountered her sons as grown men, who, upon hearing of her dismal fate, stormed Thebes, avenged their mother, took possession of the throne, and fortified the city. As Amphion played the lyre which had been given him by Hermes, the stones brought by Zethus moved on their own to the music and arranged themselves to form the walls of Thebes.6 This myth was recounted by Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854) in support of his idea of architecture as ‘erstarrte Musik’, that is to say, petrified or congealed music. 7 Schelling’s is an intermedial comparison that emphasizes the materiality of architecture while suggesting its likeness to the ethereal character of music. Although he was discussing classical Greek architecture, the metaphor is nonetheless important for its impact on the Gothic discourse. Moreover, it is often falsely credited to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832). In reality, the ‘frozen music’ or ‘stationary music’ metaphor was thoroughly grounded in Schelling’s theory of art formulated in his 1802 Jena lectures entitled Philosophie der Kunst and published in 1859. In these lectures, which rely heavily upon Naturphilosophie, Schelling classified the three major art forms, music, painting, and sculpture (‘Plastik’), within a system akin to that of the natural world.8 He characterized music, which he 6  John Warrington, Everyman’s Classical Dictionary, 800 B.C.–A.D. 337 (London: Dent & Son; New York: Dutton, 1961), p. 36. 7  Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Philosophie der Kunst [1802–03], in Ausgewählte Werke [1856–61], 10 vols (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1966–68), v, 220, 237. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from the French and German are my own. 8  In Das allgemeine Brouillon Novalis had meditated upon the three-tiered hierarchy of the arts: sculpture, painting, and music, § 102, p. 259/19.

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saw as pure form and sound, as inorganic (‘anorgisch’);9 he qualified painting, which binds matter and light, as organic; and he praised sculpture, in which the idea and the essence of matter are unified in physical form, as the expression of the highest natural and human quality, reason (‘Vernunft’).10 Based on this schema, he explored these categories — inorganic/music, organic/painting, and ‘reason’/sculpture — as aspects of each of the major art forms.11 For example, he declared rhythm to be the inorganic element in music, harmony to be the painterly or organic element, and melody to be the sculptural or rational element.12 While in both music and painting these categories did not exist as isolated, independent forms, in sculpture, which comprised a ‘Totalität aller bildenden Kunstformen’ (totality of all the fine arts), they existed as separate entities.13 Within this larger system Schelling ordered the other arts according to their inorganic (music-like), organic (painting-like), and rational (sculpturelike) characteristics. He began with architecture, declaring it to be the inorganic art form par excellence, in other words, ‘die Musik in der Plastik’ (the music of the plastic arts).14 Against those who saw architecture as purely functional, he contended that it was an art because its utilitarian purpose was secondary to that desire which drives all artistic undertaking: the emulation of nature.15 In imitating the vegetal world architecture could be considered ‘eine Allegorie des Organischen’ (an allegory of the organic) and thus qualify as ‘Plastik’.16 Yet, 9 

Schelling, Philosophie der Kunst, p. 213. Schelling, Philosophie der Kunst, pp. 213–14, 216. ‘So ist die Musik die anorgische Kunst, die Malerei organisch, denn sie drückt in der höchsten Stufe die Identität der Materie und des Lichts aus. Erst in der dritten Kunstform wird sie absoluter Ausdruck der Vernunft’ (p. 214). 11  Schelling, Philosophie der Kunst, p. 216. 12  Schelling, Philosophie der Kunst, p. 215: ‘In der Musik z. B. ist der Rhythmus die Musik, die Harmonie die Malerei, die Melodie der plastische Antheil, aber die Musik faßt diese Formen nicht als abgesonderte Kunstformen, sondern als Einheiten von ihr selbst in sich’. 13  Schelling, Philosophie der Kunst, p. 215: ‘Die Plastik für sich allein faßt alle andern Kunstformen als besondere in sich, oder: sie ist in sich selbst wieder und in abgesonderten Formen Musik, Malerie und Plastik’. 14  Schelling, Philosophie der Kunst, p. 216: ‘Die anorgische Kunstform oder die Musik in der Plastik ist die Architektur’. 15  Schelling, Philosophie der Kunst, p. 223. 16  Schelling, Philosophie der Kunst, p. 227. While Schelling (pp. 231, 236) explained the structural and visible likeness of Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian columns to carved tree trunks, 10 

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despite its mimetic desire, architecture, like music, was not required to portray forms, but consisted of structures. Basing his theory on Vitruvian harmony and proportions, Schelling concluded that, like nature and music, architecture’s forms and structures were built upon mathematical relations: ‘Die Architektur bildet nothwendig nach arithmetischen oder, weil sie die Musik in Raume ist, nach geometrischen Verhältnissen’ (Architecture is necessarily constructed according to arithmetic or, because it is music in space, geometric proportions).17 Moreover, ‘die Musik im Raume [… ist] gleichsam die erstarrte Musik’ (music in space is, as it were, frozen music).18 The extraordinary phrase ‘music in space’, corresponding here to ‘frozen’ or ‘congealed music’, suggests that architecture spatially represents that which music embodies in its temporal unfolding. Temporality is thus inherent to both music and architecture, which, according to Schelling, represented pure movement, and he considered movement to be the essence (‘Wesen’) of the universe.19 In this regard, Schelling also called architecture ‘concrete Musik’.20 ‘Concrete’ here can be understood as the material form taken by music, which corresponds to and elucidates the ‘erstarrte Musik’ metaphor by suggesting that architecture is the material, solid, and fixed equivalent of musical motion. This implies that architecture is movement congealed or embodied, the idea that underlies his formula ‘Architektur = Musik’,21 which equates two non-representational (and thus ‘inorganic’) art forms composed of mathematically articulated units and structures that unfold, the one in space, the other in time. he praised the Gothic because it demonstrated the raw and pure imitative instinct by incorporating plant forms exactly as they appear in nature: ‘Die gothische Baukunst ist ganz naturalistisch, roh, bloße unmittelbare Nachahmung der Natur’ (p. 230). In exploring the vegetal, or ‘vegetable’, nature of the Gothic, Schelling crystallized what would become the kernel of the German appreciation of the Gothic through the nineteenth century; see Stephanie A. Glaser, ‘Explorations of the Gothic Cathedral in Nineteenth-Century France’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Indiana Uni­ver­sity, 2002), pp. 82–134. 17  Schelling, Philosophie der Kunst, p. 220. For more on architectural proportion, see Rudolf Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (1962; repr. New York: Norton, 1971). 18  Schelling, Philosophie der Kunst, p. 220. Of interest in this regard is Novalis’s meditation on the rigidity of the arts: ‘Die Skulptur und die Musik sind sich, als entgegengesezte Härten, gegen über. […] Die Skulptur ist das Gebildete Starre. Die Musik, das (gebildete) Flüssige’, Novalis, Das allgemeine Brouillon, § 102, p. 259/19 (italics in original). 19  Schelling, Philosophie der Kunst, p. 221. 20  Schelling, Philosophie der Kunst, pp. 221, 237. 21  Schelling, Philosophie der Kunst, p. 218.

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Delving deeper into the analogy, Schelling showed that, like music, painting, and sculpture, ‘die Architektur hat, als die Musik der Plastik, wie jene einen rhythmischen, harmonischen und melodischen Theil’ (as the music of the plastic arts, architecture has a rhythmic, a harmonic, and a melodic part).22 He saw architectural rhythm as resulting from the organization and grouping of parts within the greater whole.23 Identifying the temporal arrangement of musical tones with the spatial layout of architecture, he defined rhythm as the periodic disposition of similar forms, such as in a Greek cornice where each row of sculpture contains a single repeated shape and no two rows portray the same shapes nor are equal in size.24 This concurrence of regularity and change prevented uniformity and created an order analogous to the combination of rhythmical elements in music that together create ever larger rhythmical patterns.25 In this specific context he returned to both the ‘erstarrte Musik’ and ‘concrete Musik’ metaphors to emphasize the ‘frozen’ or solidified character of architectural rhythms. While, according to Schelling, rhythm in architecture dictated strict forms in sequences of regularity and change, harmony meant the concordance of pleasing physical proportions based on those of the human figure, which he felt naturally generated beauty.26 Because of its proportions, a beautiful work of architecture could be perceived as music to the eye: Die Architektur schließt sich auch dadurch ganz an die Musik an, so daß ein schönes Gebäude in der That nichts anderes als eine mit dem Aug empfundene Musik, ein nicht in der Zeit-, sondern in der Raumfolge aufgefaßtes (simultanes) Concert von Harmonien und harmonischen Verbindungen ist.27 [Architecture affiliates itself so entirely with music that a beautiful building is in fact nothing else than music perceived by the eye, experienced as a simultaneous concert of harmonies and harmonic relations that occur not in the flow of time but as sequence in space.] 22 

Schelling, Philosophie der Kunst, p. 234. Schelling did not go into detail about the melodic aspect of architecture, writing only that architecture’s melodic aspect arises from the union of its rhythmic and harmonic aspects; see pp. 240–41. 23  Schelling, Philosophie der Kunst, p. 234. 24  Schelling, Philosophie der Kunst, p. 234: ‘Das Rhythmische hierin einzusehen, müssen wir die Erklärung zurückrufen, daß es in einer periodischen Eintheilung des Gleichartigen besteht. In der Musik sind die Weiten Zeitentfernungen, in der Architektur Raumweiten’. 25  Schelling, Philosophie der Kunst, p. 234. 26  Schelling, Philosophie der Kunst, p. 238. 27  Schelling, Philosophie der Kunst, p. 239.

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The metaphor is remarkable for several reasons. Since musical harmony has to do with sonority, simultaneity, and progression, the metaphor implies that the spatial relations in a work of architecture are like the harmonic connections which make up the fabric of and comprise the content of instrumental music. Furthermore, it suggests that architectonic proportions, based as they are on mathematical ratios, work in unison in the same way that musical harmonies do. Most important, it has a synaesthetic aspect: in equating the visual experience of architecture to the auditory perception of music and the similarity of effect on the beholder/listener, Schelling left the careful logic and ‘scientific’ procedure of his argument behind and took his theory into the subjective realm privileged by Romanticism, combining the two often contradictory methodologies that Klaus Niehr has delineated in the preceding essay. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had already intuited this in 1773 in ‘Von Deutscher Baukunst’, to which we will turn shortly, and is purported to have reiterated the idea in 1829: ‘Ich habe unter meinen Papieren ein Blatt gefunden […] wo ich die Baukunst eine erstarrte Musik nenne. Und wirklich, es hat etwas; die Stimmung, die von der Baukunst ausgeht, kommt dem Effekt der Musik nahe’ (‘I have found, among my papers […] a leaf, in which I call architecture frozen music. There is something in the remark; the influence that flows upon us from architecture is like that from music’).28 In other words, the feeling or mood that emanates from architecture affects the beholder as music does the listener. The final aspect of Schelling’s metaphor that I would like to discuss is the word ‘Concert’ (from the Latin ‘concertare’, meaning ‘entities working together in unison’), which had two meanings in eighteenth-century German. Early in the century it meant ‘concerto’, the Baroque instrumental genre made up of three contrasting movements for orchestra and solo instrument(s) that had become extremely popular during the first half of the century. In the second half of the century the term came to be used mostly to mean public performances of music.29 Schelling might very well have been playing on the double 28  Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten jahren seines Lebens, in drei Theile, 3 vols (Leipzig: Brodhaus, 1868), ii, 60; English translation in Conversations with Goethe in the Last Years of his Life, in Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature, 14 vols, ed. by George Ripley, trans. by S. M. Fuller (Boston: Hilliard, Gray, 1838–42), iv (1839), 282. 29  ‘Konzert’ is the modern German spelling for both concerto and concert. See Erich Reimer’s discussion of the term: ‘Concerto/Konzert’, in Handwörterbuch der musikalischen Terminologie, ed. by Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht (Weisbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1972–2005), iii, Auslieferung (1973). A project of the Akademie der Wissenschaft und der Literatur Mainz, this dictionary (known as HmT) can be found on the website of the Staatliches Institut für

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meaning inherent in ‘Concert’: architecture as a spatially structured music-like composition and as a visual performance equal to that of an orchestral concert, which underscores the synaesthetic element contained in the music-to-the-eye metaphor discussed above. In either case, the notion of ‘performing in unison’ that is inherent in both meanings of the word was exactly what the Romantics would praise in the symphony, derived from the Greek συμφωνία, ‘sounding together’, and in the Gothic cathedral. Indeed, with the concert metaphor Schelling seems to lay the groundwork for the nineteenth-century development of the musical analogy which celebrated the specific architectural form of the Gothic cathedral and compared it to the musical form of the symphony. Even while logically building up the comparison between architecture and music by comprehensively fleshing out underlying similarities between the two, Schelling’s argument remained primarily on the general level, and in the end his complex musical analogy boiled down to the frozen-music metaphor, which circulated first around Berlin and eventually made its way through Europe, as did many Romantic ideas, thanks to Madame de Staël (1766–1817). Deracinated from its nature-philosophical context, the analogy puzzled many and gave much room to reflection.30 Still, it became a touchstone of Romantic thought, used by Madame de Staël in Corinne, ou l’Italie (1807) in connection with Saint Peter’s in Rome: Saint-Pierre est un temple posé sur une église. Il y a quelque alliance des religions antiques et du christianisme, dans l’effect que produit sur l’imagination l’intérieur de cet édifice. […] La vue d’un tel monument est comme une musique continuelle et fixée, qui vous attend pour vous faire du bien quand vous vous en approchez.31 [Saint Peter’s is a temple placed on a church. There is a certain alliance between antique religions and Christianity in the effect that the interior of this building produces on the imagination. […] The view of such a monument is like continuous and fixed music that does you good as you approach it.]

Yet even here it is not the late Renaissance St Peter’s itself, but the view of the monument that is being likened to continuous and fixed music. In this instance Musikforschung (SIM), see . For ‘Konzert’, see [accessed April 2016]. 30  See Honour, Romanticism, pp. 340–41, n. 3; See also von Erhardt-Siebold, ‘Harmony of the Senses’, pp. 586–88. 31  Madame de Staël, Corinne, ou l’Italie (Paris: Lebailly, 1838), p. 105.

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the metaphor refers to the act of beholding the edifice — and the temporality of that act, emphasized by the adjective ‘continuous’ — and thus reflects the Romantic predilection for perception and experience. Nonetheless, Madame de Staël’s translation of ‘erstarrte Musik’ as ‘musique fixée’ would persist through the nineteenth century, at least in the French tradition, as evidenced by Mâle’s use of it. By 1819 it appears that the frozen-music metaphor had become a cliché. In that year Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) published Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, in which he criticized the metaphor on the grounds that the ‘temporalization (music) of the spatial (architecture) [… was] a contradiction within the terms’.32 He also argued that music and architecture were irreconcilable means of representation: the former expressed essences, while the latter represented for him what Schelling might have called ‘concrete’. Thus dissatisfied, Schopenhauer altered the metaphor. Comparing the ‘ordering principles’ of symmetry in architecture and rhythm in music, he declared that music that freed itself from rhythm was like a ruin lacking symmetry, and could be referred to as a ‘frozen cadenza’.33 This idea was taken up by both Richard Wagner (1813–1883) and Friedrich Nietzsche. To explore this aspect of the analogy in depth would go beyond the scope of our inquiry, yet the metaphor’s wider application testifies to its significance during the nineteenth century. As regards Gothic architecture, when and where exactly and under what circumstances the frozen-music metaphor was used in connection with it is difficult to say. It is unlikely that Goethe was specifically thinking of the Gothic in 1829, since after his initial infatuation with Strasbourg Cathedral he changed his preferences to classical art and architecture. In 1844 Josef von Eichendorff (1788–1857) used the metaphor in connection with the neo-Gothic Marienburg Castle.34 Even so, a neo-Gothic castle is not in the same category as a Gothic cathedral; however, the connection between the Gothic and music would be brought out in other ways.

32 

Kiene Brillenburg Wurth, The Musically Sublime: Indeterminacy, Infinity, Irresolvability (New York: Fordham Press, 2009), p. 73. 33  Wurth, The Musically Sublime, pp. 74–76. 34  Honour, Romanticism, p. 345, n. 61. The Marienburg was built for Marie von SachsenAltenburg, wife of King George V of Hannover, in Lower Saxony from 1857 to 1867.

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The Eighteenth Century: Harmony and Gothic Architecture The inverted analogy, which compares music to architecture, evolved like its literary counterpart, the analogy between literature and architecture, during the eighteenth century. Importantly Gothic architecture played a prominent role in both analogies, embedded as they were in the polarized aesthetic controversies of the day. Since the fifteenth century ‘Gothic’ had been a convenient term to express contempt for all that was considered ugly, barbaric, unnatural, complicated and confused, and generally insulting to good taste.35 Eighteenth-century aesthetics praised simplicity, naturalness, regularity, order, and symmetry in works of art, literature, architecture, and music and dismissed almost anything that did not fulfil these criteria as ‘Gothic’.36 Yet even while the Gothic was disparaged by many, early in the century sentiments towards it began to change. Liberal thinkers in England began to equate it with their freedom-loving Saxon ancestors who had drawn up the Magna Carta.37 Concurrently, English literary critics, seeking to rehabilitate the works of Edmund Spenser (1552–1599), William Shakespeare (1564–1616), and John Milton (1608–1674) set up a paradigm which underscored similarities between these English literary giants and Gothic architecture. It is in the context of this paradigm that the inverted musical analogy can be better understood in its various aspects. Since Antiquity, verbal works have been compared to architectural ones.38 Within this tradition, the comparison of literature (poem, book, an author’s oeuvre) to the Gothic, and specifically to the cathedral, is a very recent development which flourished during Romanticism and carried through into the twen35  See E. S. de Beer, ‘Gothic: Origin and Diffusion of the Term; The Idea of Style in Architecture’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 11 (1948), 143–62; G. Lüdtke ‘“Gothisch” im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert’, Zeitschrift für Deutsche Wortforschung, 4 (1903), 133–52. 36  Bernd Sponheuer lays out the use of the term ‘Gotisch’ specifically in the musical discourse in ‘Zur Kategorie des “Gotischen” (nicht nur) in der Bach-Rezeption des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts’, in Rezeption als Innovation: Untersuchungen zu einem Grundmodell der europäischen Kompositionsgeschichte, ed. by Bernd Sponheuer, Siegfried Oechsle, and Helmut Well (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2001), pp. 217–46; see especially pp. 224–27. 37  See Samuel Kliger, The Goths in England: A Study in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Thought (Cam­bridge, MA: Harvard Uni­ver­sity Press, 1952), pp. 3, 28–33. 38  See, for example, Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: Uni­ver­sity of Chicago Press, 1966) and Ellen Eve Frank, Literary Architecture, Essays Toward a Tradition: Walter Pater, Gerald Manley Hopkins, Marcel Proust, Henry James (Berkeley: Uni­ver­sity of California Press, 1979), pp. 249–53.

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tieth century.39 The analogy had as much to do with aesthetics as with nationalism and the developing historical consciousness, both of which contributed to the re-evaluation of Gothic, which took place at different moments and crystallized in distinctive ‘national’ forms across Europe, as Michael J. Lewis succinctly explains in his essay in this volume. The analogy was integrated into a paradigm that opposed the literary and architectural output of different historical eras, contrasting those of the Middle Ages or the Renaissance with those of classical Antiquity or the eighteenth century. By thus suggesting a relationship between architecture and literature, this intermedial comparison brought out observed similarities between them, drew attention to the merits and weaknesses of each, and, by the same token, sought to differentiate between aesthetic sensibilities. In 1715 the poet and essayist John Hughes (1677–1720) contrasted Spenser’s Faerie Queene with the works of Virgil and Homer, arguing that to criticize the former for not abiding by the rules of epic poetry was as unfair as condemning the Gothic by the standards of Roman architecture. Hereby setting up an equivalence between The Faerie Queene and the Gothic by placing them in contrast to epic poetry and Roman architecture, Hughes introduced the paradigm that would be taken up and modified by others: for example, on the side of Gothic architecture, Spenser would be replaced by Shakespeare, who would later be joined by Milton and then Dante in the nineteenth century; on the other side, Greek architecture would be used instead of Roman in some cases, whereas in others eighteenth-century poetry and neoclassical architecture stood out as the contrasting aesthetic systems to the Gothic and Shakespeare or Spenser.40 Although Hugues criticized both The Faerie Queene and the Gothic in the conventional disparaging terms of barbarity, variety of ornaments, and unpredictability, he did not see either in a wholly negative light but claimed that they were products of a different — and thus equally valid — aesthetic. Later Alexander Pope (1688–1744), Richard Hurd (1720–1808), and William Hazlitt (1778–1839) took up the paradigm in rehabilitating Shakespeare’s works against neoclassical rules and norms. In the nineteenth century August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767–1845) expanded it, and Victor Hugo (1802–1885) built upon it as he formed his own aesthetic ideas in the 1820s.41 39 

For a detailed discussion of the analogy from Chateaubriand through Proust, see Glaser, ‘Construire comme une église’. 40  Peter Collins discusses the paradigm in Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture, 1750–1950 (London: Faber and Faber, 1965), pp. 36–38. 41  For an explanation of Hugo’s aesthetic development in parallel with his modifications of the literary paradigm, see Glaser, ‘Explorations of the Gothic Cathedral’, pp. 371–74.

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In this respect, the paradigm and the literary analogy lie at the foundation of Romantic aesthetics. Four aspects of Hughes’s paradigm carried into the nineteenth century. First, and foremost, it underscored similarities between literary works and architectural ones. For example, in Preface to Shakespeare (1725), Alexander Pope connected Shakespeare’s faults and irregularities with the majesty, strength, solemnity, and variety of Gothic architecture.42 Second, it emphasized a dichotomy between classical and Gothic architecture, and the two became representative not only of different tastes, but of completely different aesthetic systems. Third, it was characterized by an imprecision of historical eras: The Faerie Queene was published in 1590 (Shakespeare began publishing his plays around that time as well), and Gothic architecture flourished in England from the twelfth through the early sixteenth centuries; classical Antiquity comprises the six-hundred- to seven-hundred-year span between Homer and Virgil and takes in both Roman and Greek architecture. Though not corresponding to the modern preoccupation with periodization and historical accuracy, these views were common at the time and thus do not discredit the analogy, which operates on the level of reception and constructions of reality. Fourthly, by relating English poetry and drama to Gothic architecture, considered to be ‘English’ and equating freedom and equality for liberal thinkers, the analogy bore an unmistakably nationalistic stamp, which would remain a constant strain throughout the discourses and cultural contexts in which it was elaborated.43 In the nineteenth century Schlegel would give it a Germanic note by adding the Stefansdom in Vienna to the side of Shakespeare and Westminter Abbey, contrasting these with Sophoclean tragedy and the Pantheon in Rome.44

42 

See Collins, Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture, p. 61. Although Hugo, whose paradigm underlay his philosophy of art, included a range of literature from all eras, such as the Veda, the Nibelungenlied, and Byron’s poetry. See the end of the chapter ‘Ceci tuera cela’ in Notre-Dame de Paris [1831] (Paris: Gallimard 1966), pp. 251–54. 44  August Wilhelm Schlegel, Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur [1808–09, pub. 1909–11], in Kritische Schriften und Briefe, ed.  by Edgar Lohner, 7  vols (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer Verlag, 1966), v, 22: ‘Das Pantheon ist nicht verschiedener von der Westminsterabtei oder der St Stephanskirche in Wien als der Bau einer Tragödie von Sophokles von dem eines Schauspiels von Shakespeare’ (The Pantheon is as different from Westminster Abbey or St Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna as is the construction of a tragedy by Sophocles from a Shakespearean drama). 43 

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While the literary analogy became part and parcel of the overarching aesthetic debate that would turn into the nineteenth-century battle between the Classiques and Romantiques, coming to a head in France with the production of Victor Hugo’s Hernani in February 1830 and ultimately finding its fulfilment in his novel Notre-Dame de Paris, the musical analogy played a much more subdued role within the equally volatile musical controversies over style and expression that arose in the eighteenth century. Many factors were responsible for this aesthetic debate: the development and increasing popularity of orchestral genres such as the concerto and the symphony, the ever-widening gulf between vocal (i.e. opera) music and instrumental music, and the concurrent growth of an autonomous and paying middle class who demanded public musical entertainments of all kinds and favoured clear, tuneful melodies that were easy on the ear.45 The proponents of this new ‘classical’ style celebrated its melodic clarity, which they considered ‘natural’ in its simplicity and straightforwardness, while they disdained the harmonic complexities typical of the ‘antiquated’ musical practices of the Baroque.46 Harmonic music, exemplified by polyphony and counterpoint, was by its nature complex and demanded more attention and knowledge from the listener and from the musicians, which meant that highly ornate polyphonic compositions had little appeal for the new, entertainment-thirsty public. The debate over melody and harmony swept across Europe during the 1730s and 1740s and peaked around 1750. One of the proponents of the classical taste, the German composer Johann Adolph Scheibe (1708–1776), a student of Johann Sebastian Bach’s (1685–1750), criticized the artistically intricate contrapuntal harmonies of the Renaissance and Baroque periods and held up Bach’s music as the primary example of the out-of-date style.47 He introduced the musical paradigm in his periodical Critischer Musicus.48 Although it resembled the literary one, there is to my knowledge no evidence that he was influenced by the English Shakespeare debate. Lamenting the loss of pure 45 

Robert Greenberg, The Symphony (Chantilly, VA: The Teaching Company, 2004), Lecture 2: ‘The Concerto and the Orchestra’ and Greenberg, How to Listen to and Understand Great Music, 3rd edn (Chantilly, VA: The Teaching Company, 2006), Lecture 17: ‘The Enlightenment and an Introduction to the Classical Era’. 46  See Sponheuer, ‘Zur Kategorie des “Gotischen”’, pp. 224–27. 47  Sponheuer, ‘Zur Kategorie des “Gotischen”’, p. 225. 48  Sponheuer quotes Scheibe’s article ‘Abhandlung vom itzigen Geschmack in der Musik’ which appeared in Critischer Musikus in 1745 (Leipzig, 1745; repr. Hildesheim: Olms, 1970), pp. 750–95.

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melody (‘bewegender Gesang’), which had originated in ancient Greece, to the ‘complete concurrent sounding’ and ‘fugue-like noise’ (‘ein concertierendes und fugenmäßiges Geräusche’) of complex polyphony, Scheibe vilified sixteenth-century madrigals, which he saw as being of ‘Gothic’ parentage: ‘Die Harmonie herrschte darinnen. Man hörte ein verwirrtes Tongewebe, welches mehr ein Kennzeichen der Barbarey, oder vielmehr einer gothischen Nachkommenschaft war, in welchem eine gewisse mühsame Kunst herrschte, die […] ohne Merkmale der Natur war’ (Harmony inwardly controlled [the madrigals]. There was a confused musical texture which was a mark of barbarity or even more, of Gothic descent, in which prevailed a certain cumbersome art lacking any natural characteristics).49 Scheibe used the term ‘gotisch’ to label what he saw as barbarous, unnatural, and convoluted polyphonic harmonies; indeed, he is renowned in German music history for his negative use of ‘gotisch’ and for associating it with Bach.50 His main criticism was that the polyphonic complexity muddled the melodic clarity and thus made the composition hard to follow, thereby implying its similarity to the ornamental character of Gothic architecture. To illustrate this, he pointed out a resemblance between single-voiced melodies and classical buildings on the one hand and Bach’s intricate madrigals and the Gothic on the other, asserting: ‘Man kann sich dieses nicht besser vorstellen, als wenn wir in der Baukunst den Riß eines alten und prächtigen gothischen Gebäudes, gegen den Riß eines natürlich schönen und regelmäßigen Gebäudes halten’ (One can envision this best by counterposing an architectural drawing of an old and magnificent Gothic building with that of a naturally beautiful and regular one).51 He thus likened that which is clear to the ear to that which is ‘natural’ and easy on the eye, and equated music which is hard on the ear and creates confusion with that architecture which distresses the eye. 52 Similarly to the literary paradigm discussed above, Scheibe contrasted works of classical Antiquity with those of the sixteenth century in terms of eighteenth-century aesthetic categories: clear and natural versus complex and barbaric. Different 49 

Sponheuer, ‘Zur Kategorie des “Gotischen”’, p. 225, quotes from Scheibe, ‘Abhandlung vom itzigen Geschmack in der Musik’, p. 755. 50  Sponheuer, ‘Zur Kategorie des “Gotischen”’, p. 225. 51  Sponheuer, ‘Zur Kategorie des “Gotischen”’, pp. 225–26, quotes from Scheibe, ‘Abhandlung vom itzigen Geschmack in der Musik’, p. 755. 52  For a discussion of Scheibe’s use of ‘natürlich’, see Rainer Bayreuther, ‘Perspektiven des Normbegriffs für die Erforschung der Musik um 1700’, in Musikalishe Norm um 1700, ed. by Rainer Bayreuther (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2010), pp. 5–62 (pp. 42–43).

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from the English paradigm, however, he used ‘Gothic’ pejoratively and associated it with ‘Germanic’ (Bach was of north German origin). Moreover, by contrasting the harmonic complexity typical of northern compositional styles to melody, a product of the south, he introduced the north/south dichotomy into the paradigm which would become pronounced in German Romanticism. Scheibe purportedly influenced the music theorist Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg (1718–1795), who propagated similar ideas in his periodical, Der critische Musicus an der Spree, describing ‘Gothic taste’ in vocal music as ‘superfluous embellishments’ to the melody and ‘monstrous leaps’ in the place of gentle and straightforward arpeggios.53 In support of this he printed his German translation of a French letter written in 1748 by the composer Gottfried Christian Krause (1719–1770),54 who felt that the elaborate ornaments of contemporary French music suffocated musical expression, just as the overcharged details of Gothic architecture dissembled the view of the architectural structure.55 Nonetheless, Krause appears to have appreciated highly ornate French vocal music,56 which brings his comparison closer to the English literary paradigm in which Gothic, though not fully pejorative, was used to point to weaknesses. Difficult as it is to determine how much influence Krause’s letter had on the musical debate in France, the music–Gothic architecture comparison was brought up by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), whose ‘Lettre sur la musique française’, which was published in 1753, fuelled the long-standing controversy about the pre-eminence of Italian music over French that had 53 

‘Man betrachte die überflüßigen Zierathen, als ein Ueberbleibsel des Gothischen Geschmacks; man lasse nicht die Stimme arpeggiren [sic.], und schaffe die ungeheuren Sprünge ab, bey deren Anhörung sich mancher einbilden mögte, als ob er sich in einer cabriolirenden Seiltänterbude befände’. Here Sponheuer, ‘Zur Kategorie des “Gotischen”’, p. 226, n. 53, quotes from Marpurg’s Der critischen Musicus an der Spree (Berlin: Haude und Spener 1749–50; repr. Hildesheim: Olms 1970), i, 4. Marpurg is best known for his instructional piano treatise, Die Kunst das Clavier zu spielen (Berlin, 1750); see Gerald Abraham, The Concise Oxford History of Music (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 1985), p. 516, n. 19. 54  In The Correspondence of Christian Gottfried Krause: A Music Lover in the Age of Sensibility (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), p. 74, Darrell M. Berg notes that Marpurg translated Krause’s Lettre à Mr le Marquis de B. sur la différence de la musique italienne et la musique française. 55  Sponheuer, ‘Zur Kategorie des “Gotischen”’, p. 226, n. 53, quotes from Marpurg’s Historisch-Kritishe Beyträge zur Aufnahme der Musik, 5 vols (Berlin: Schützens 1754), i, 3: ‘[die] häufigen und am unrechten Orte angebrachten Zeirathen […] den Ausdrück ersticken; daß solche in diesem Stücke der gothischen Baukunst ähnlich ist, wo vor der vielen sie verstellenden Zierathen nicht das Hauptwerk erkennen kann’. 56  Berg, Correspondence, p. 74, n. 3.

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begun early in the century and which came to a head in the early fifties with the Querelle des bouffons.57 The philosopher took the side of Italian opera in the ‘Lettre’ and attacked French-language opera’s principal composer, JeanPhilippe Rameau (1683–1764). Praising the simplicity, naturalness, precision, clarity, and poignancy of Italian vocal melody, he contrasted it with the cacophony made by the complex textures of French music which had denatured melody and suffocated song.58 Above all, he disapproved of complex instrumental accompaniments, to which he referred as ‘la symphonie’ — literally meaning notes or melodies sounding in unison.59 To him the contrasting movements, the increasing quantities of harmonies, notes, and voices, and the combination and ‘piling up’ of melodies, musical ideas and instrumental parts only resulted in ‘confusion and noise’ (‘il ne résulte du tout que de la confusion et du bruit’), which he denounced as ‘dessins gothiques’ (Gothic designs).60 Significantly, he drew an analogy between this musical complexity and Gothic architecture: À l’égard des contre-fugues, doubles fugues, fugues renversées, basses contraintes, et autres sottises difficiles que l’oreille ne peut souffrir, et que la raison ne peut justifier, ce sont évidemment des restes de barbarie et de mauvais goût, qui ne subsistent, comme les portails de nos Églises gothiques, que pour la honte de ceux qui ont eu la patience de les faire.61 [Regarding counterfugues, double fugues, fugues renversées, ground base, and other imbecilities that the ear can’t stand and that reason can’t justify, these are clearly the remains of barbarity and bad taste that only survive, like the portals of our Gothic churches, because of the shame of those who had the patience to make them.] 57 

In 1702 François Raguenet had set off the debate with his pro-Italian treatise, Parallèle des Italiens et des Français en ce qui regarde la musique et les opéras; see Abraham, The Concise Oxford History of Music, p. 377, n. 87. 58  Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ‘Lettre sur la musique française’ [1753], in Essai sur l’origine des langues (Pairs: G. F. Flammarion, 1993), pp. 127–84 (pp. 156–57). 59  Rousseau, ‘Lettre sur la musique française’, p. 148. 60  Rousseau’s critique takes the form of a question, ‘Comment le Musicien vient-il à bout de produire ces grandes effets? Est-ce à force de contraster les mouvements, de multiplier les accords, les notes, les parties? Est-ce à force d’entasser dessins sur dessins, instruments sur instruments?’ (‘Lettre sur la musique française’, p. 157). The quotations are found on p. 158 and p. 162, respectively. 61  Rousseau, ‘Lettre sur la musique française’, p.  162; Sponheuer, ‘Zur Kategorie des “Gotischen”’, p. 225, n. 45, also quotes this passage.

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Rousseau’s analogy is more precise than any we have yet encountered, for he found parallels in specific aspects of musical form (types of fugues and ground base) and one architectural element (Gothic portals), both of which he saw as convoluted and laborious forms that refuted reason, were evidence of barbarity and bad taste, and had disagreeable effects. Categorizing them as imbecilities, he suggested that their craftsmanship was a product of shame and patience, the latter term referring almost certainly to the immense effort involved in crafting such difficult and intricate musical or sculptural patterns. His use of ‘shame’ in this context seems to imply that the French creative output, whether in contemporary music or in the portals of ‘our’ Gothic churches is an insult to national pride. This disparaging nationalistic note not only reflects the general ‘barbaric’ and ‘confused’ aesthetic represented by the Gothic, but it succinctly sums up the common French prejudice against the Gothic at the time.62 We can thus surmise that the negative association of Gothic architecture with dense polyphonic musical compositions took root in the fact that both were considered to be overloaded with ornament that obstructed the clarity of forms and thus hindered the perception of the whole. Yet, as the perspective on Gothic architecture grew more favourable in the latter half of the century, this association came to be weighted differently. The turning point in the German Gothic discourse came in 1773 with Goethe’s essay ‘Von Deutscher Baukunst’, which was published anonymously and then in Johann Gottfried Herder’s (1744–1803) volume, Von Deutscher Art und Kunst.63 In his essay Goethe consciously broke away from neoclassical prejudices and initiated a new understanding of the Gothic; he endorsed a new artistic — and Germanic — model, exemplified by Strasbourg Cathedral, and brought Gothic architecture 62  In contrast to England, where landscape gardens often included Gothic-looking buildings or ruins, at this early date only a handful of the French, such as Abbé Jean-Louis de Cordemoy (1655–1714) and Jacques-Germain Soufflot (1713–1780), showed enthusiasm for Gothic structures, though not for its ornament. See Robin D. Middleton, ‘The Abbé de Cordemoy and the Graeco-Gothic Ideal: A Prelude to Romantic Classicism’ Part I, Journal of the Warburg and Courtald Institutes, 25 (1962), 278–320. Soufflot praised Gothic structure in his ‘Mémoire sur l’architecture gothique’ written for the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Lyon in 1741. It is published in the exhibition catalogue Le Panthéon: Symbole des revolutions. De l’Église de la Nation au Temple des grands homes (Paris: Picard, 1989), pp. 305–08. See also W. D. Robson-Scott, The Literary Background of the Gothic Revival in Germany: A Chapter in the History of Taste (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), pp. 48–53. 63  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, ‘Von Deutscher Baukunst: D. M. Ervini a Steinbach’ [1773], in Von deutscher Art und Kunst: einige fliegende Blätter, ed. by Hans Dietrich Irmscher (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1988), pp. 93–104.

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to the forefront of the eighteenth-century aesthetic discussion.64 Moreover, in his poeticized account of his initial, crucial experience of the Gothic cathedral, which lies at the heart of his essay, he perceived a musicality in its structures. Goethe’s early, pre-Strasburg views on the Gothic were in line with those presented by the Swiss philosopher Johann Georg Sulzer (1720–1779) in his four-volume encyclopaedia, Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (1771–74), which might be considered as the summation of classical aesthetics.65 In it Sulzer described Gothic architecture as visibly demonstrating impropriety, lacking in beauty and good proportions, and generally being a tasteless extravagance deficient in the Beautiful, the Agreeable, and the Refined.66 Thus expecting to see the cathedral as a disorganized, unnatural, overloaded muddle,67 Goethe, in the narrative persona of the essay, becomes overwhelmed with an impression of totality and coherency created from the façade’s many tiny units: ‘Ein, ganzer, großer Eindruck füllte meine Seele, den, weil er us tausend harmonierenden Einzelnheiten bestand, ich wohl schmecken und genißen, keines wegs aber erkennen und erklären konnte’ (‘The impression which filled my soul was whole and large, and of a sort that [since it was composed of a thousand harmonizing details] I could relish and enjoy, but by no means identify and explain’).68 64 

See Robson-Scott, The Literary Background of the Gothic Revival in Germany, p. 84. Robson-Scott explains how influential Sulzer was at the time and that his encyclopaedia ‘became the Bible of the German art-lover’, The Literary Background of the Gothic Revival in Germany, p. 12. 66  In his article ‘Gotisch’ Sulzer wrote, ‘Fürnehmlich scheint er eine Unschicklichkeit, den Mangel der Schönheit und guter Verhältnisse, in sichtbaren Formen anzuzeigen. […] Das Gotische ist überhaupt ein ohne allen Geschmack gemachter Aufwand auf Werke der Kunst, denen es nicht am Wesentlichen, auch nicht immer am Grossen und Prächtigen, sondern am Schönen, am Angenehmen und Feinen fehlt’. See Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste [accessed April 2016]. 67  Goethe, ‘Von Deutscher Baukunst’, p. 99: ‘Als ich das erste mal nach dem Münster gieng [sic], hatt ich den Kopf voll allgemeiner Erkenntniß guten Geschmacks. […] Unter die Rubrick Gothisch, gleich dem Artikel eines Wörterbuchs, häufte ich alle synonimische Misßverständnisse, die mir von unbestimmtem, ungeordnetem, unnatürlichem, zusammengestoppeltem, aufgeflicktem, überladenem, jemals durch den Kopf gezogen waren’ (‘The first time I went to the Minster, my head was full of the common notions of good taste. […] Under the term Gothic, like the article in a dictionary, I threw together all the synonymous misunderstandings, such as undefined, disorganized, unnatural, patched-together, tacked-on, overloaded, which had ever gone through my head’); ‘On German Architecture’, in Goethe on Art, selected, ed., and trans. by John Gage (Berkeley: Uni­ver­sity of California Press, 1980), pp. 103–14 (pp. 106–07). 68  Goethe, ‘Von Deutscher Baukunst’, p. 99; Goethe, ‘On German Architecture’, ed. and trans. by Gage, p. 107. 65 

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Expressing the power of subjective experience with all the emotional energy characteristic of the Sturm und Drang, much more than Schelling would do with his comparably tame metaphor of architecture as ‘music for the eye’, Goethe described his encounter with Strasbourg Cathedral in terms of tasting and enjoying (‘schmecken und genießen’), which contrast dramatically with the analytic words ‘recognize’ and ‘explain’ (‘erkennen und erklären’). His use of synaesthesia here contributes to the subtle allusion to music sustained through the text, for in engaging the senses rather than the intellect, the Gothic edifice stimulates a similar impression to that of hearing a musical composition. Just as it is not the individual notes that stand out to the listener’s ear, but the sonority created by their combination, their interaction in sequences, and the modulations that develop into a whole, so too the details of the Gothic coalesce into an unbelievable and rationally ungraspable consonance. While Goethe emphasized an equivalence of experience and not of the objects themselves, at a time when ‘it was generally believed […] that music appealed to the senses and heart rather than to the intellect’,69 through synaesthesia he likened the encounter with the Gothic cathedral to the experience of music and of the sublime. Goethe not only praised Strasbourg Cathedral’s ‘harmonizing details’, he evoked its harmonious masses along with its ‘attuned’ proportions and their principle chords.70 His choice of the words ‘harmonizing’ and ‘harmonious’ are significant. While ‘harmony’ in the musical polemic discussed above was used specifically to designate the intricate polyphonic practices that had carried through from the Baroque as opposed to the straightforward melodic compositions which appealed to neoclassical taste, the term ‘harmony’ in its broader and more general sense was positive not only when applied to music in general, but also to the visual arts, poetry, and rhetoric. Sulzer defined musical harmony as (1) notes played together to make a chord,71 (2) the sonority of a musical composition achieved through chord sequences rather than through melody 69 

Honour, Romanticism, p. 120. ‘[der] Eindruck [bestand] aus tausend harmonierenden Einzelheiten’, Goethe, ‘Von Deutscher Baukunst’, p.  99; ‘[das] stimmend[es] Verhältniß’ and ‘die großen, harmonsichen Massen’, p. 100; ‘[die] Verhältnisse, […] deren ‘Hauptakkorde’ man beweisen […] kann’, pp. 102–03. 71  Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste, : ‘dieses Wort […] bedeutet […] die Vereinigung vieler zugleich angeschlagenen Töne in einen einzigen Hauptklang, das ist, den Klang eines Akkords’ [accessed April 2016]. The following quotations from Sulzer’s Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste come from the address cited in this footnote. 70 

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(what we would today consider as the science of harmony),72 and (3) the consonance of multiple notes.73 Moreover, he indicated that beyond music the term ‘Harmonie’ was used when individual objects were so unified or in such accord that the beholder could only with difficulty differentiate the individual contours or identities.74 This threefold definition of musical harmony seems to underpin Goethe’s reflections on the cathedral façade. Just as a chord is made up of different notes played in unison and thus not heard separately (Sulzer’s first point), so Goethe perceived that the individual details of the façade worked together to create larger units that themselves were sequenced in patterns that generated the greater whole (Sulzer’s second point): ‘wie froh konnt ich […] schauen die großen harmonischen Massen, zu unzählig kleinen Theilen belebt; wie in Werken der ewigen Nature, […] alles Gestalt, und alles zweckend zum Ganzen’ (‘how happily I could […] gaze at the harmonious masses, alive with countless details. Just as in the eternal works of nature […] all contributing purposefully to the whole’).75 Like a piece of music that develops through the use of harmonic modulation and sequencing, so the arrangement of the façade consists of larger elements ‘invigorated’ by successions of smaller individual details. This successive, processual, dynamic organization becomes key to Goethe’s reflections on the organic nature of the Gothic, in which each individual and indispensable element concurred together to create a harmonious ensemble (Sulzer’s third point).76

72 

‘Versteht man durch dieses Wort die Beschaffenheit eines Tonstücks, insofern es als eine Folge von Akkorden angesehen wird. Man sagt von einem Tonstück, es sei in der Harmonie gut oder rein, wenn die Regeln von der Zusammensetzung und Folge der Akkorde darin gut beobachtet sind. In diesem Sinne wird also die Harmonie eines Stücks der Melodie entgegengesetzt. Also ist diese Harmonie nichts anders als der Wohlklang oder die gute Zusammenstimmung aller Stimmen des Tonstücks’. 73  ‘Bisweilen drückt man das Wohlklingen, das gute Konsonieren oder das Zusammenfließen mehrerer Töne in einen, durch das Wort Harmonie aus’. 74  ‘In dieser Bedeutung wird das Wort außer der Musik gebraucht, so oft man sagen will, dass verschiedene Dinge so genau zusammen stimmen oder sich so vereinigen, dass es schwer ist einen einzeln Teil besonders zu unterscheiden’. 75  Goethe, ‘Von Deutscher Baukunst’, pp. 100–101; Goethe, ‘On German Architecture’, ed. and trans. by Gage, p. 108. 76  Sponheuer also emphasizes the dynamic, processual character of Goethe’s interpretation of the Gothic, ‘Zur Kategorie des “Gotischen”’, pp. 229–32.

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While the Gothic’s ‘willkürliche Größen’ had long been a favourite target of criticism, Goethe observed that the seemingly arbitrary, haphazard, and random dimensions of Strasbourg Cathedral were actually ‘stimmend’.77 He perceived the edifice to be ‘attuned’ through its proportions inasmuch as the configuration of the façade corresponds to the inner arrangement of the edifice: ‘über dem Haupteingang […] sich der weite Kreis des Fensters öffnet, den dem Schiffe der Kirche antwortet’ (‘how the great circle or the window opens above the main door which […] echoes the nave of the church!’).78 Moreover, the ‘principle chords’ of the proportions, suggesting that all parts of the edifice are in accord, implies again the idea of ‘sounding together’, which corresponds to Sulzer’s first definition of harmony and answers to Goethe’s idea of a concordance of innumerable parts making up the whole: ‘[die] Verhältnisse, die allein schön und von Ewigkeit sind, deren Hauptakkord man beweisen, deren Gehimnisse man nur fühlen kann, in denen sich allein das Leben der gottgleichen Genius in seeligen Melodien herumwälzt’ (‘those proportions, which alone are beautiful and eternal, whose principle harmonies may be proved, but whose secrets can only be felt, in which alone the life of the godlike genius is whirled around to the music of the soul’).79 Possessing an inner melody which stands apart from yet complements their overarching harmony, the cathedral’s proportions are based on eternal, and therefore natural, principles. In highlighting the cathedral’s inherent musical likeness, Goethe elevated the Gothic from the disparaging view of neoclassicism and turned it into the harbinger of a new aesthetic. When the Romantics rediscovered ‘Von Deutscher Baukunst’ around 1800, they would celebrate Gothic architecture as a Germanic creation, turning the cathedrals of Strasbourg and Cologne into Romantic icons.80 77 

Goethe, ‘Von Deutscher Baukunst’, p. 100. ‘Stimmen’ comes from the old High German noun ‘stimma’ (‘mouth’) and means both ‘to be correct’ and ‘to fit together’ or ‘to harmonize’; see Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Deutschen, under the direction of Wolfgang Pfeifer (München: Deutscher Taschen Verlag, 1999), pp. 1364–65. As Sulzer put it in his article ‘Stimmen, Stimmung (Musik)’, the clarity of musical consonance (‘die Reinheit der Harmonie’) depends on all instruments playing in tune (Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste, [accessed April 2016]). Taking up this idea, I have translated ‘stimmenden’ as ‘attuned’. 78  Goethe, ‘Von Deutscher Baukunst’, p. 100; Goethe, ‘On German Architecture’, ed. and trans. by Gage, p. 107. 79  Goethe, ‘Von Deutscher Baukunst’, pp. 102–03; Goethe, ‘On German Architecture’, ed. and trans. by Gage, p. 109. 80  Robson-Scott, The Literary Background of the Gothic Revival in Germany, pp. 91–95. The search for Gothic origins in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries became a matter

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Still, Goethe’s essay did impact some of his contemporaries. It was read in musical circles, and Johann Friedrich Reichardt (1752–1814), who besides composing operas and musical dramas had also set hundreds of contemporary poems (including some of Goethe’s) to music, was particularly taken with it.81 In 1782, a decade after ‘Von Deutscher Baukunst’ was written, he quoted Goethe’s entire cathedral passage in an essay entitled ‘Johann Sebastian Bach’, thereby directly relating Bach’s music to Strasbourg Cathedral and placing the former under the positive aura with which Goethe had bathed the edifice. 82 Since Goethe had upset the neoclassical ideal in showing that Gothic ornamentation was neither arbitrary nor excessive but created a harmonious whole, Gothic architecture was now positioned to be the measure of greatness in artistic, and specifically Germanic, expression. Reichardt had studied with one of J. S. Bach’s students, Johann Philipp Kirnberger (1721–1783), and it is most likely that through this connection he had come to appreciate Bach’s music. Very much aware of the musical debates in favour of the predominant aesthetic taste, Reichardt openly sided with Rousseau in disapproving of ‘den sinnlosen Mißbrauch und die fatale allgemeine Anwendeung der Harmonie’ (the inane abuse and disastrous general practice of harmony) in his day that made him want to preach Sulzer’s doctrine of order and beauty.83 Nonetheless, Reichardt placed Bach in another league altogether, arguing that, like no composer before him, not even the most profound Italian, Bach had explored and implemented all the possibilities of harmony with audacity and originality. Though he had not surpassed Georg Friedrich Händel’s (1685–1759) consummate sense of truth and expressive feeling, Bach had been a diligent and an erudite artist. Consequently, Reichardt hailed Bach and Händel as the greatest German harmonists, who, he asserted, of national pride, and even with many theories circulating, as late as the 1830s, it was widely accepted that the Gothic was of Germanic origin. Jules Michelet (1798–1874) saw the Germanic love of nature, longing for infinity, and mystical genius mirrored in the heavenward ascent and spatial extension of the Gothic; see Histoire de France: Moyen Age [1833], in Œuvres Complètes, 21 vols (Paris: Flammarion, 1971–82), iv, ed. by Paul Viallaneix (1974), p. 718; and Glaser, ‘Explorations of the Gothic Cathedral’, pp. 399–418. 81  Sponheuer, ‘Zur Kategorie des “Gotischen”’, pp. 232–33; Abraham, The Concise Oxford History of Music, p. 531. 82  Johann Friedrich Reichardt, ‘Johann Sebastian Bach’, in Musikalisches Kunstmagazin (Berlin, 1782), i, 196–202. 83  All quotations and the points in this paragraph are taken from Reichardt, ‘Johann Sebastian Bach’, p. 196.

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had they been free from stylistic conventions, would have pushed the musical art so far that they would have represented ‘die höchsten Kunstideale unsere Kunst’ (the highest artistic ideal of our art); any new musical creation after them — and here Reichardt seems to have intuited what Arnold Schönberg (1874–1951) would ultimately undertake — would have to result from overturning the entire tonal system. From this summary we can draw several parallels to ‘Von Deutscher Baukunst’. First, Reichardt’s depiction of Bach and Händel as limited by circumstances which impeded the full expression of their genius resembles very much the dichotomy Goethe saw between the actual cathedral with its single tower and the ideal, unrealized two-towered edifice.84 Like Goethe, who saw the ideal contained within the existing cathedral, and could thereby envision the edifice as a complete, harmonious whole, Reichardt perceived the unrealized yet abundant possibilities of Bach’s and Händel’s compositional techniques. Second, Goethe’s affirmation of Strasbourg Cathedral as German architecture: ‘das ist deutsche Baukunst, unsre Baukunst’ (‘this is German architecture, our architecture’),85 resonates in Reichardt’s claiming Bach and Händel to be Germanic composers who embodied the great potential and soul of Germanic art. Finally, Goethe’s essay is an artistic call to arms, and in like manner, Reichardt wanted to awaken his fellow composers to the extraordinary bits of greatness and beauty in Bach’s and Händel’s works.86 He did this by evoking the effects their music had on him. Asserting that they lifted his soul with joy, he transcribed Goethe’s rapture over Strasbourg Cathedral to express his delight and pleasure about the music. By means of this common experience, which partakes in the sublime, he placed Bach’s compositions on par with Strasbourg Cathedral. Fully cognizant of Bach’s weaknesses, through his use of ‘Von Deutscher Baukunst’ Reichardt liberated Bach and his harmonic craft from the pejorative associations surrounding them. He overturned the preGoethean musical analogy to elevate Bach and complex harmonic practices as supreme examples of the Germanic musical genius which paralleled the architectural genius evidenced in Strasbourg Cathedral. 84  Goethe, ‘Von Deutscher Baukunst’, p. 100. For more on unrealized and idealized edifices in Germany, see my article ‘“Ein, ganzer, großer Eindruck füllte meine Seele”: German Romanticism and the Gothic Façade’, in Changing Borders: Contemporary Positions in Intermediality, ed. by Jens Arvidson and others (Lund: Intermedia Studies Press, 2007). pp. 239–55. 85  Goethe, ‘Von Deutscher Baukunst’, p. 101; Goethe, ‘On German Architecture’, ed. and trans. by Gage, p. 108. 86  Reichardt, ‘Johann Sebastian Bach’, p. 197.

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Reichardt’s student E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776–1822) built upon this connection to create a musical paradigm comparable to the literary one. Best known for his literary achievements, Hoffmann studied law and became a civil servant under the Prussian regime. While working in Berlin from 1798 to 1800, he took music lessons from Reichardt, composing both sacred and theatre music in his spare time.87 After Napoléon’s defeat of Prussia in 1806, Hoffmann worked as musical director of the Bamberg theatre and later of a travelling company, becoming involved in the musical and aesthetic debates of the period, thereby contributing to the creation of the Romantic musical ideal.88 He took up the melody-harmony debate and made it the basis of a new paradigm, which he put forward in a pseudonymous article published in 1814:89 ‘Da sagte mein geistreicher Freund: “Sebastian Bachs Musik verhält sich zu der Musik der alten Italiener ebenso, wie der Münster in Straßburg zu der Peterskirche in Rom”’ (‘An ingenious friend of mine observed that Bach’s music differs from that of the early Italians just as the cathedral in Strasbourg differs from St Peter’s in Rome’).90 Following the familiar antithetical structure of the paradigm, he used precise examples on each side, showing his indebtedness to both Goethe and Reichardt: he linked Bach with Strasbourg Cathedral and contrasted them with Italian religious music and Saint Peter’s in Rome.91 The buildings are representative types of Gothic and Renaissance architecture commensurate to the religious music referred to: on one side, Bach’s poly87 

Sponheuer, ‘Zur Kategorie des “Gotischen”’, p. 235. Henry Garland and Mary Garland, The Oxford Companion to German Literature, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 1997), p. 388; Carl Dahlhaus, Die Idee der absoluten Musik (Bärenreiter: Kassel, 1978), pp. 17, 47–51. 89  E. T. A. Hoffmann, ‘Höchst zerstreute Gedanken’, in Fantasiestücke in Callots manier: Blätter aus dem Tagebuche eines reisenden Enthusaisten [1814/15], in E. T. A. Hoffmann Werke, 4 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1967), i, 44–53. The essay is part of his Kreisleriana cycle, written by the fictive Kapellmeister Johannes Kreislers, a main character in his final novel, Lebensansichten des Kater Murrs (1819–21). The essay in question was first published in Zeitung für die elegante Welt, 14 (4–8 January 1814) under the name of ‘Kapellemeister Johannes Kreislers’; see Hoffmann, Werke, i, 570. 90  Hoffmann, ‘Höchst zerstreute Gedanken’, p. 45; English translation from ‘Extremely Random Thoughts’, in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Musical Writings: Kreisleriana, The Poet and the Composer, Music Criticism, ed. by David Charlton, trans. by Martyn Clarke (Cam­bridge: Cam­ bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 1989; repr., 2003), pp. 103–13 (p. 104). 91  Sponheuer, ‘Zur Kategorie des “Gotischen”’, p. 235, n. 125, and Charlton (Hoffmann, ‘Extremely Random Thoughts’, p. 104, n. 167) make the connection with ‘Von Deutscher Baukunst’. 88 

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phonic motets, written early in the eighteenth century, and on the other, the influential sacred choral music of Orazio Benevoli (1605–1672) and Giacomo Antonio Perti (1661–1756): Ich sehe in Bachs achtstimmigen Motetten den kühnen, wundervollen, romantischen Bau des Münsters mit all den fantastischen Verzierungen, die künstlich zum Ganzen verschlungen, stolz und prächtig in die Lüfte emporsteigen; sowie Benevolis, in Pertis frommen Gesängen die reinen grandiose Verhältnisse der Peterskirche, die selbst den größten Massen die Kommensurabilität geben und das Gemüt erhaben, in dem sie es mit heiligem Schauer erfüllen. [I see in Bach’s eight-part motets the wonderfully bold, romantic structure of the cathedral rising proudly and gloriously into the air, with all its fantastic ornaments artfully blended into the whole; and in Benevoli’s and Perti’s religious settings the pure, magnificent proportions of St Peter’s, which bring even the most massive forms into balance, and elevate the spirit by filling it with divine wonder.]92

Differing from the literary paradigm, in which historical concomitance played a lesser role than did representative types, Hoffmann’s possesses an equilibrium created by its entirely religious content, by a rich concurrence of time and place, and by the Bach–Strasbourg Cathedral connection established by Reichardt. Although Strasbourg Cathedral, completed in the early fifteenth century, predates Bach by almost 250 years, the connection is unsurprising when considered in light of the eighteenth-century tradition which we have discussed. Saint Peter’s (1506–1616) and Benevoli are connected temporally and spatially, since Benevoli grew up in Rome and was eleven when Saint Peter’s was consecrated. And even if Perti was born in Bologna half a century after this, he and Bach were contemporaries: he was Bach’s senior and outlived him by six years. These internal connections give the paradigm a solidity that the literary paradigm had never possessed. Like Reichardt and Goethe, Hoffmann emphasized the effects of the music as a synaesthetic experience. Hearing it made him ‘see’ the architecture (‘Ich sehe’), which suggests what Scheibe had also perceived, that the qualities exhibited by the architecture are present in the music. Echoing Goethe’s style in ‘Von Deutscher Baukunst’, Hoffmann described Bach’s marvellous ornamentation (‘mit all den fantastischen Verzierungen’), artfully interlaced into a whole (‘die künstlich zum Ganzen verschlungen’), and soaring proudly and magnificently 92 

Hoffmann, ‘Höchst zerstreute Gedanken’, pp. 45–46; Hoffmann, ‘Extremely Random Thoughts’, ed. by Charlton, trans. by Clarke, p. 104.

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heavenward (‘stolz und prächtig in die Lüfte emporsteigen’).93 He thus considered Bach’s polyphonic motets to be like the audacious (‘kühn’), wonderful, and Romantic cathedral (by this time the cathedral was called ‘Romantic’ architecture).94 In contrast, Italian choral music recalled for him the grand and pure proportions of Saint Peter’s which balance out the huge masses, elevating the mind and inspiring the beholder with a ‘holy frisson’ or ‘divine wonder’. Importantly, under the auspices of the sublime, Hoffmann did not use the paradigm to denigrate one style or the other; rather, he praised both sides as representing different aspects of it, the one dynamic (in line with Goethe’s processual Gothic), the other static.95 Hoffmann’s ‘tönenden “Gotik”’ thereafter influenced German thinking about Bach, and it filtered into the musical discourse.96 To my mind, this development implies that music could no longer be conceived of as the fixed forms typical of classicism like minuet and trio, sonata, or rondo form, but as developing, organic, and dramatic works of self-expression, which Hoffmann saw exemplified in both Bach’s motets and especially in Beethoven’s symphonies.

The Symphony and the Gothic Cathedral Historically, the symphony grew out of Baroque opera overtures, which came to stand on their own as individual, entertaining instrumental works. During its evolution from the seventeenth through the eighteenth centuries, the symphony was rivalled only by the concerto in importance and popularity until the latter part of the eighteenth century, when it emerged as the most prestigious musical genre.97 This was due in part to its foremost composers, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) and Franz Joseph Hayden (1732–1809), who 93 

Sponheuer, ‘Zur Kategorie des “Gotischen”’, pp. 235–38, shows how closely Hoffmann follows Goethe in using similar language and ideas. 94  The Gothic cathedral was inextricably bound up with the founding ideas of German Romanticism; see Glaser, ‘Explorations of the Gothic Cathedral’, pp. 118, 134–35. In 1820 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) described the Gothic as ‘Romantic architecture’, in Ästhetik [1820], ed. by Friedrich Bassenge, 2 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt GmbH, [n.d.]), ii, 71–86. 95  Cf. Sponheuer, ‘Zur Kategorie des “Gotischen”’, pp. 237 and 239. 96  Sponheuer, ‘Zur Kategorie des “Gotischen”’, p. 240, quotes Carl Dahlhaus Die Musik des 19. Jahrhunderts, in Neues Handbuch der Musikwissenschaft, 13 vols (Laaber: Laaber Verlag, 1980), vi, 32. 97  Greenberg discusses this development in The Symphony, Lectures 2–3.

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had crystallized the form into the standard four-movement composition with which we are familiar, typically with its first movement in sonata form, the second slow and lyrical, the third in minuet and trio form, the fourth usually a rondo. Firmly established by 1780 and known as the Viennese classical style, the symphonic form demonstrated the characteristic aspects of neoclassical taste: elegance, purity, restraint, tuneful melody and clear harmonic development, balance and order.98 The triumphant rise of the symphony after mid-century was accompanied by a change in aesthetic taste, for the idea of music as popular entertainment gradually gave way to the nineteenth-century idea of music as Art. By that time instrumental music no longer had to vie with vocal, for it was celebrated as the purest musical form, of which the symphony was considered to be the highest expression.99 In 1799, less than a decade after Mozart’s death and just four years after Hayden had written his 104th and last symphony, the German poet Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853) declared: ‘der höchste Sieg, der schönste Preis der Instrumente sind die Symphonien’ (The greatest victory, the most beautiful reward of the instruments are the symphonies).100 That same year the German-born Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) was composing his first symphony (C major, Op. 21) which premiered in Vienna in 1800.101 Even 98 

Robert Greenberg, Symphonies of Beethoven (Chantilly, VA: The Teaching Company, 1998), Lectures 5 and 6. Mozart composed his first symphony in 1764, at the age of eight, and his forty-first, and last, known as the ‘Jupiter’ Symphony, in 1788. Hayden wrote 104 symphonies from 1757 to 1795. 99  At this time the idea of ‘absolute’ music began to germinate: in 1801 Carl Philippe Emmanuel Bach (1714–1788), J. S. Bach’s third son, characterized instrumental music as ‘pure music’ (‘die reine Musik’), and the Romantic generation would hold it to be the actual, true, and proper music (‘die “eigentliche” Musik’). See Dahlhaus, Die Idee der absoluten Musik, pp. 15–17. 100  Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder and Ludwig Tieck, Phantasien über die Kunst [1779] (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1973; repr. 2000). In ‘Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder und die Sonatenform’, Athenäum: Jahrbuch für Romantik, 6 (1996), 137–52, Werner Keil discusses the intellectual and musical context of the Phantasien. The work is a sequel to Herzensergießsungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (1796) elaborated and published by Tieck after Wackenroder’s death in 1798; see Richard Benz, ‘Nachwort’ in Wackenroder and Tieck, Phantasien über die Kunst, pp. 142–58 (p. 142). 101  Beethoven lived in Vienna from 1792 to 1803. He had studied (and broken) with Hayden in the early 1790s (1792–94), and then studied for a brief time (until 1795) with the composer and Kapellmeister at St Stephen’s Cathedral, Johann Albrechtsberger (1736–1809), and, probably from 1798, with Antonio Salieri (1750–1825). Beethoven’s three trios for piano, violin, and cello, Op. 1, published in 1795, were modelled on Hayden’s late symphonies (known as the ‘London Symphonies’); see Maynard Solomon, Beethoven, 2nd rev. edn (New

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while paying homage to Hayden and Mozart and working within the classical symphonic model, Beethoven broke with its forms, replacing, for example, the staid minuet and trio form of the third movement with a scherzo (‘joke’, a fast, light, piece in the triple meter of minuet and trio), elevating rhythm to an equal status with tuneful melodies (such as the repeated rhythmic patterns in the so-called ‘fate motif ’ that open his fifth symphony), doing away with artistic restraint to turn the symphony into a means of self-expression, a narrative created by small phrases repeated, modified, modulated, sequenced, harmonized, fragmented, and reconstituted as part of an audacious and sonorous drama. In his symphonies, melodies and even whole movements grow out of these short, concise motivic ideas, which are picked up in later movements and reintegrated in often surprising ways to create a thoroughly unified and organic whole. His fifth symphony, C minor, Op. 67, composed from 1804 to 1808 and premiered along with his sixth, F major, Op. 68, in Vienna in 1808, marks Beethoven’s complete rupture with the classical symphony.102 It was as dramatic a break with established instrumental tradition as Victor Hugo’s Hernani would be to the theatre in 1830. Although the fifth symphony bombed at its premiere, eighteen months later Hoffmann celebrated it in his 1810 article, ‘Beethoven op, 67 C-moll Symphonie’, which he revised as part of his 1813 essay ‘Beethovens Instrumental-Musik’.103 In it Hoffmann hailed Hayden, Mozart, and Beethoven as emanating the Romantic spirit and as masters of instrumental music, yet he elevated Beethoven’s musical compositions over those of his predecessors, hailing them as sublime and infinite works of genius.104 As we know, Gothic architecture was also praised according to the categories Romantic, sublime, infinite, and genial, yet Hoffmann did not explicitly compare Beethoven’s works to the Gothic as he would Bach’s, rather, sensing the organic nature of Beethoven’s York: Schirmer Trade Books, 2001), pp. 89–103, esp. pp. 94, 97–98; and Greenberg, Symphonies of Beethoven, Lecture 3. 102  For a presentation of Beethoven’s originality in the face of tradition and his disparagement of the classical style, the organic quality of his music, and a discussion of his symphonies, see Greenberg, Symphonies of Beethoven, Lectures 1–17. 103  Hoffmann, ‘Beethovens Instrumental-Musik’, in Werke, i, 36–44. The 1810 piece appeared in Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung in July and the revision appeared in 1813 in Zeitung für die elegante Welt, Hoffmann, Werke, i, 570. See also ‘Beethoven’s Instrumental Music: Translated from E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Kreisleriana with an Introductory Note’, trans. by Arthur Ware Locke, Musical Quarterly, 3.1 (1917), 123–33. 104  Hoffmann, ‘Beethovens Instrumental-Musik’, pp. 37–38.

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music, he subtly linked it to Gothic architecture through various allusions to ‘Von Deutscher Baukunst’. For example, his ekphrastic description of the symphony recalls Goethe’s idea of the Gothic as a whole made up of alternating individual parts themselves forming smaller wholes: Alle Sätze sind kurz, beinahe alle nur aus zwei, drei Takten bestehend, und noch dazu verteilt in beständigem Wechsel der Blas- und der Saiteninstrumente; man sollte glaube, daß aus solchen nur etwas Zerstückeltes, Unfaßbares entstehen könne, aber statt dessen ist es eben jene Einrichtung des Ganzen […] die das Gefühl einer unnennbaren Sehnsucht bis zum höchsten Grade steigert. [All the themes are short, nearly all consisting of two or three measures and besides that they are allotted with increasing variety first to the wind then to the string instruments. One would think that something disjointed and confused would result from such elements, but, on the contrary, this very organization of the whole work as well as the constant reappearances of the motives and harmonic effects […] intensify […] that feeling of inexpressible longing.]105

Out of short phrases and alternating timbres what could have turned into a fragmented, piecemeal work becomes at the hands of the ‘master’ an inspiring whole, held together by repetition of phrases and chords and recurring allusions to the sonata’s first theme.106 In similar terms he praised the theme of the final movement: ‘Welche wunderbare kontrapunktische Verschlingungen verknüpfen sich hier wieder zum Ganzen’ (‘What wonderful contrapuntal interweavings bind the whole together’).107 His wording recalls Goethe’s reflections on Strasbourg Cathedral, ‘das Werk des Meisters, der zuerst die zerstreute Elemente in Ein lebendiges Ganze zusammen schuf ’ (‘the work of the master who first welded the scattered elements into a living whole’).108 Celebrating the contrapuntal interlacing that Beethoven wove into a unified whole, Hoffmann intimated Goethe’s vision 105  Hoffmann, ‘Beethovens Instrumental-Musik’, p. 40. Hoffmann’s ekphrasis of the symphony can be found on pp. 39–41. ‘Beethoven’s Instrumental Music’, trans. by Locke, p. 129. Compare Tieck’s description in Symphonien: ‘die […] aus mannigfachen Elementen zusammengesetzten Symphonien’ (Wackenroder and Tieck, Phantasien über die Kunst, p. 108). 106  Hoffmann, ‘Beethovens Instrumental-Musik’, pp. 40–41, repeatedly refers to Beethoven as ‘Meister’ or ‘hohe Meister’. 107  Hoffmann, ‘Beethovens Instrumental-Musik’, pp. 40–41; ‘Beethoven’s Instrumental Music’, trans. by Locke, p. 130. 108  Goethe, ‘Von Deutscher Baukunst’, p. 101; Goethe, ‘On German Architecture’, ed. and trans. by Gage, p. 108.

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of the Gothic as an organic, dynamic work, where the individual yet inter­ dependent elements actively bring the whole into existence. Moreover, echoing Goethe’s closing words to the second section of ‘Von Deutscher Baukunst’ in which the cathedral is compared to a divine tree, ‘der […] verkündet, die Herrlichkeit des Herrn, seines Meisters’ (‘which […] proclaims […] the glory of its master, the Lord’), Hoffmann closed his ekphrasis of the fifth symphony by extolling its internal linkings and organic structure, its thematic development and instrumentation, and especially the deep relation between the themes which ‘die besonnene Genialität des Meisters herrlich verkündet’ (‘proclaims the self-conscious genius of the Master’).109 If Goethe’s text is a hymn, Hoffmann’s is a rhapsody in which individual words, particular phrasings, and underlying ideas echo Goethe’s vision of Strasbourg Cathedral. Indeed, Goethe’s essay serves as a subtext for Hoffmann’s in several other ways: his enthusiasm for the cathedral forms a partial backdrop to Hoffmann’s fervour for Beethoven; Strasbourg cathedral looms implicitly as the organic work par excellence and thus as the index of artistic greatness. Particularly noteworthy in this context is the parallel Hoffmann drew between Beethoven and Shakespeare, which precedes his ekphrasis of the fifth symphony: just as Beethoven’s music had been criticized, so had Shakespeare’s works been faulted for their lack of inner unity and internal coherency, yet to his mind, the musical and literary works shared a common creative principle, that of deliberate construction and dynamic unfolding. This could only be perceived through deeper study, which would reveal at the heart of Shakespeare’s works ‘ein schöner Baum, Blätter, Blüten und Früchte aus einem Keim treibend erwächst’ (‘the beautiful tree with leaves, blossoms, and fruit growing from one germinating seed’), imagery which is reminiscent of Goethe’s divine and wide-branching tree ‘mit tausend Ästen, Millionen Zweigen, und Blättern wie der Sand am Meer’ (‘with its thousand branches, millions of twigs and leaves more numerous than the sands of the sea’).110 This image is the central symbol 109 

Goethe, ‘Von Deutscher Baukunst’, p. 99; Goethe, ‘On German Architecture’, ed. and trans. by Gage, p. 106. Hoffmann, ‘Beethovens Instrumental-Musik’, p. 40; ‘Beethoven’s Instrumental Music’, trans. by Locke, p. 130. 110  Hoffmann, ‘Beethovens Instrumental-Musik’, p. 39. I quote the whole passage from ‘Beethoven’s Instrumental Music’, trans. by Locke, p. 129: ‘Aesthetic mechanicians have often lamented the absolute lack of underlying unity and structure in Shakespeare, while the deeper glance could see the beautiful tree with leaves, blossoms, and fruit growing from one germinating seed; so it is that through a very deep study of Beethoven’s instrumental music is that conscious thoughtfulness of composition disclosed’. Goethe, ‘Von Deutscher Baukunst’, pp. 98–99; Goethe, ‘On German Architecture’, ed. and trans. by Gage, p. 106.

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of Goethe’s text, illustrating his view of the Gothic’s processual and dynamic ordering. Through this image Hoffmann unites Shakespeare and Beethoven with Gothic architecture, specifically with Strasbourg Cathedral, and brings the literary and musical paradigms together by subtly praising the northern genius and hailing the English dramatist and German composer as authors of complex, organic works that develop from within to create an awe-inspiring, sublime whole like the Gothic cathedral.111

The Gothic Façade as Symphony in Stone Beethoven had achieved great notoriety — his contemporaries considered him to be the greatest living composer112 — by the time his ninth and last symphony (D Minor, Op. 125) premiered in Vienna in 1824, where it met with stupendous acclaim. In it he did what heretofore had been deemed impossible: thoroughly integrating instrumental and vocal music in the choral finale showcasing Friedrich Schiller’s (1759–1805) ode ‘An die Freude’ (1785) and thereby proving that the symphony truly was the supreme form of musical expression.113 Indeed, it has been argued that Beethoven’s ninth symphony was the most influential piece of music written in the nineteenth century and the greatest symphony ever composed.114 It left its mark on ensuing generations, and from that time forward, the symphony was exclusively acclaimed as Art that manifested Romantic ideals such as the sublime, the God-like creator, and organic unity. 111  Herder lauded Shakespeare as the prime example of the northern genius. See his essay, ‘Shakespear’ [sic], in Von deutscher Art und Kunst, ed. by Irmscher, pp. 65–91, which directly precedes Goethe’s ‘Von Deutscher Baukunst’. 112  See Paul Mies’s two articles in The Age of Beethoven, 1780–1830, vol. viii of New Oxford History of Music, ed. by Gerald Abraham, 10 vols (London: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 1982): ‘Beethoven’s Orchestral Works’, pp. 120–56 (p. 126) and ‘Orchestral Music of Beethoven’s Contemporaries’, pp. 157–205 (p. 158). 113  Greenberg states that the ninth symphony ‘obliterated the time-honored distinctions between abstract and literary music’, and he explains how in it Beethoven blurred the boundaries between musical genres and thereby showed that form was not limited to conventions, but that it could and should be used to meet compositional and expressive needs (Greenberg, Symphonies of Beethoven, Lecture 32). 114  Greenberg, Symphonies of Beethoven, Lecture 28. For contemporary reactions to Beet­ hoven’s music in general, see Robert Pascall, ‘Major Instrumental Forms, 1850–1890’, in Romanticism, 1830–1890, vol. ix of New Oxford History of Music, ed. by Abraham (1990), pp. 534–658 (p. 534); and Mies, ‘Orchestral Music of Beethoven’s Contemporaries’, pp. 204–05.

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In early nineteenth-century France, however, Beethoven’s orchestral works generally met with resistance and criticism. They were nonetheless promoted by the violinist François-Antoine Habeneck (1781–1849), who regularly conducted public performances of them from 1806 to 1828.115 After this, as director of the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, he often featured Beethoven’s works, and he inaugurated the Société’s first season in March 1828 with Beethoven’s third symphony (in E flat major, Op. 55, ‘Eroica’).116 In the audience that evening sat an enraptured Hector Berlioz (1803–1869),117 whose exhilaration for Beethoven’s music turned into unfaltering enthusiasm which approached Goethe’s and Hoffmann’s celebration of the sublime genius. In his correspondence and in a short biography that appeared in the first volume of the periodical Critique Musicale in 1829, Berlioz fervently lauded the composer and his works.118 Through written reviews, frequent performances, and Berlioz’s verbal championing, Beethoven’s works — especially his symphonies — gained recognition in Paris during the late 1820s and by the mid-1830s Beethoven was revered by the French and his music celebrated.119 During this period of intense artistic foment, Berlioz composed his first symphony, the Symphonie fantastique, a musically dramatized autobiography, which, with its literary and Gothic influences and aspirations combined with the pianist’s unique musical ideas and original manner of using the orchestra, was equalled by none.120 115 

See Abraham, The Concise Oxford History of Music, p. 606; and Michel Austin, ‘Berlioz and Beethoven’: ‘Discovery’, in Berlioz: Predecessors and Contemporaries, The Hector Berlioz Website, [accessed April 2016]. 116  See D. Kern Holoman, The Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, 1828–1967 (Berkeley: Uni­ver­sity of California Press, 2004), p. 3. 117  Greenberg, The Symphony, Lecture 11. At that time Berlioz, a pianist, was a student at the Conservatoire de musique in Paris. 118  See Austin, ‘The Champion of Beethoven: The Music Critic’ and ‘The Champion of Beethoven: The Conductor’. Berlioz wrote about all of Beethoven’s symphonies in A travers chants (Paris: Michel Lévy, 1862), see Pascall, ‘Major Instrumental Forms’, p. 534. The Hector Berlioz Website has digitalized Berlioz’s writings on Beethoven’s symphonies, Étude critique des symphonies de Beethoven, see [accessed April 2016]. 119  Claude Coste has discussed the passionate reception of Beethoven’s symphonies by French writers from Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) to Hippolyte Taine (1828–1893) to Édouard Schuré (1841–1929) in his article ‘La Cathédrale en musique’, in La Cathédrale, ed. by Joëlle Prungnaud (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses de l’Université Charles-de-Gaulle–Lille 3, 2001), pp. 263–73 (pp. 265–67). 120  Among Berlioz’s influences were Goethe’s Faust, which Gérard de Nerval (1808–1855) had translated in 1828, Shakespeare, and the composer’s unrequited love for the actress Harriet

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Indeed, it has been claimed to be the most influential nineteenth-century symphony after Beethoven’s ninth.121 This original and passionately expressive work, however, was comprehended by few at its debut, yet the discussion it raised certainly heightened the fervour for the symphonic genre in France.122 It was premiered by the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire in December 1830, at the time Victor Hugo was writing what was, in many ways, the most influential novel of French Romanticism, Notre-Dame de Paris. In this context, it is hardly surprising that in that novel Hugo would claim the cathedral façade to be a symphony. In the chapter ‘Notre-Dame’ Hugo declared the façade, with its innumerable details intricately organized within larger parts, to be a ‘vaste symphonie en pierre’. His use of the musical metaphor is more precise than what we have heretofore encountered, as it connects a particular part of a specific cathedral (the façade of Notre-Dame) explicitly with a musical form (the symphony). Moreover, he interwove the metaphor into his ekphrasis of the façade in three ways. First, by describing the façade as an organic unity in which all parts interact to create the greater whole: Il est, à coup sûr, peu de plus belles pages architecturales que cette façade où, successivement et à la fois, les trois portails creusés en ogive, le cordon brodé et dentelé des vingt-huit niches royales, l’immense rosace centrale flanquée de ses deux fenêtres latérales comme le prêtre du diacre et du sous-diacre, la haute et frêle galerie d’arcades à trèfle qui porte une lourde plate-forme sur ses fines colonnettes, enfin les deux noires et massives tours avec leurs auvents d’ardoise, parties harmonieuses d’un tout magnifique, superposées en cinq étages gigantesques, se développent à l’œil en foule et sans trouble, avec leurs innombrables détails de statuaire, de sculpture et de ciselure, ralliés puissamment à la tranquille grandeur de l’ensemble; vaste symphonie en pierre, pour ainsi dire. [There are assuredly few finer pages in architecture than that façade where successively and simultaneously the three recessed, pointed doorways, the embroidered Smithson, who played Ophelia in the English-language performance of Hamlet Berlioz had seen in 1827. Greenberg discusses this latter aspect in The Symphony, Lecture 11, ‘Berlioz and the Symphonie Fantastique’. 121  Greenberg, The Symphony, Lecture 11. 122  Although not well received at its premiere, the Symphonie fantastique gained popularity and recognition, being conducted every year by Berlioz; see Gregory W. Harwood, ‘Symphonie fantastique 1830: Symphony by Hector Berlioz’, in Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era 1760–1850, ed. by Christopher John Murray (London: Taylor and Francis, 2004), pp. 1114–16, and Greenberg, The Symphony, Lecture 11.

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and serrated band of the twenty-eight royal niches; the immense central rosewindow, flanked by the two side windows like the priest by the deacon and subdeacon, the lofty, slender gallery of trefoiled arches supporting a heavy platform on its delicate small columns; finally the two dark, massive towers with their slate eaves, harmonious parts of a magnificent whole, rising one above the other in five gigantic storeys, all unfold before one’s eye, multitudinous and unconfused with their innumerable details of statuary, sculpture, and carvings, adding powerfully to the calm grandeur of the whole; a vast symphony in stone, so to speak.]123

This passage delineates the vertical ascension of the edifice in rhythmic phrases that become successively longer and richer in detail as they build up to the climatic ‘enfin’. Each begins with the main architectural feature of one of the five storeys, and each consecutive phrase adds more elements: the three portals, the lace-like band of royal niches, the immense rose flanked by its two side windows, the high and delicate arcaded gallery bearing the heavy platform, and finally the two black and massive slate-eaved towers at the top. Resembling Goethe’s processual form, Hugo’s description also intimates the developmental character of Beethoven’s symphonies (and of Goethe’s divine tree), which Hoffmann so clearly pointed out in his ekphrasis of the fifth symphony. Secondly, the successive and simultaneous unfolding of the façade to the eye reinforces the symphony metaphor, insofar as this is how the individual notes, chords, harmonies, and themes develop to the ear and create the unified symphonic whole. Thirdly, as a symphony consists of different movements, each with its own themes, harmonies, and tempi which nevertheless are interconnected, so the façade is made up of five stories, each containing its own thematic units working together within the whole. For example, the interconnection of the most antithetical parts, such as the slender colonettes which support the heavy platform, not only signals the sublime, but creates a unity, inasmuch as they are working together towards the ‘grandeur of the whole’. All the façade’s elements, from the most minute carving to the heavy towers, are ‘harmonious parts of a magnificent whole’. Hugo’s use of the adjective ‘harmonieux’ seems to be the equivalent of Goethe’s organic whole, a concept which is underscored by the rhythm in Hugo’s phrases that make up the complex construction of his one-sentence description of the façade.124 123 

Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris: 1482 [1831] (Paris: Gallimard, 2002), pp. 155–56; Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris, trans. by Alban Krailsheimer (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 1999), pp. 119–20. 124  For a detailed discussion of the grammatical structure of the passage, see my article, ‘The Gothic Façade in Word and Image: Romantic and Modern Perspectives on Notre-Dame

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In keeping with the aesthetic preferences of his day and as Hoffmann before him had done with Bach and Beethoven,125 Hugo emphasized the sublime and the infinite, describing the Gothic façade as ‘immense’ and ‘gigantesque’, its details as ‘innombrable’, and by using consecutive phrases that portray the façade’s upward ascension which point to its impressive height and thorough organization.126 Moreover, adjectives like ‘fin’ (thin), ‘massif ’ (massive), and ‘lourd’ (heavy) underscore the materiality of the edifice as do others, ‘creusé’, ‘brodé’, ‘dentelé’, which call attention to the working of the stone that has been sculpted, carved, embroidered, and notched. All these ideas coalesce in the symphony metaphor of the façade as a ‘vast symphony in stone’, which literally brings us back to Schelling’s ‘erstarrte Musik’. Even as the trajectory of the symphony metaphor intersects with that of frozen music, Hugo brings up the crux of the musical analogy, which had, in its early days, hindered understanding of the frozen music metaphor, and which Schelling had tried to get around through the use of generalizing concepts such as rhythm and harmony and categories of representation. It seems that for Hugo, on the contrary, it was both the internal order of an organic, dynamic whole (as it was for Goethe), manifested visibly and concretely in combination with the sublime antitheses within the structure and the immensity of the edifice that he saw corresponding to the greatness and transcendent character of the symphony.

The Gothic Cathedral as Symphony In a different vein the restoration architect Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814–1879) used the musical analogy to underscore the main tenet of his theory of Gothic architecture as a rational constructive system, which he put forward in his ten-volume Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française du xie au xvie siècle (1854–68). This was the first thorough study of Gothic construction, and its impact was widespread and lasting. In the tradition of the great encyclopaedias and with a methodology similar to that of comparative anatomy,127 de Paris’, in Media inter Media: Essays in Honor of Claus Clüver, ed. by Stephanie A. Glaser (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), pp. 59–94 (pp. 69–71). 125  Hoffmann, ‘Beethovens Instrumental-Musik’, pp. 38–41; Sponheuer, ‘Zur Kategorie des “Gotischen”’, pp. 237–39. 126  Cf. Glaser, ‘“Ein, ganzer, großer Eindruck füllte meine Seele”’, pp. 243–44, 248–49. 127  On this topic, see Martin Bressani, ‘Opposition et équilibre: Le Rationalisme organique de Viollet-le-Duc’, Revue de l’art, 112 (1996), 28–37; and Bernard Thaon, ‘Viollet-le-

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the Dictionnaire treated every aspect of medi­eval architectural construction in France, beginning with ‘abacus’ (the block on the top of a capital) and ending with ‘zodiac’ (whose signs decorated many cathedral portals).128 In it Violletle-Duc dissected architectural structures, analysing in text and image each constituent part in its form and structure, its function and placement within a construction, and its historical evolution and occurrence in different buildings in order to grasp the underlying principles and ‘rules’ of medi­eval architectural construction.129 Thereby showing that every part, including ornament, had a precise function within the greater whole, he proved Gothic architecture to be a logical and unified constructive system.130 In his 113-page entry, ‘Cathédrale’, Viollet-le-Duc developed most extensively his theories about the origins of medi­eval religious architecture, explaining at length the social, political, religious, and artistic forces at work in the creation of the prodigious edifices. One of the ways he showed this was in his discussion of the related historical development of medi­eval music and architecture, preceded by a general comparison of music and architecture. He claimed that the two explained each other, since both were non-imitative, constructive arts which resulted from intellectual design and inspiration: planning and combining simultaneous sounds in a score, the composer hears a complicated harmonious piece, while the architect sees an edifice and the effects of mass and space, light and shadow in the outlines of geometric forms and numbers.131 He also pointed out structural similarities between architecture and music that are by now familiar to us: L’architecture antique, c’est la mélodie; l’architecture du moyen âge, c’est l’har­ monie. L’harmonie, dans le sens que nous attachons à ce mot, c’est-à-dire, l’arrange­ ment et la disposition des sons simultanés, était inconnue chez les anciens Grecs; Duc, pensée scientifique et pensée architecturale’, in Actes du Colloque international Viollet-leDuc, ed. by Pierre-Marie Auzas (Paris: Nouvelles éditions latines, 1982), pp. 131–42. 128  Viollet-le-Duc, Dictionnaire raisonné, i, 1–3 and ix, 551–52. 129  For a critical view of the interworking of text and image in the Dictionnaire, see Françoise Boudon, ‘Le Réel et l’imaginaire chez Viollet-le-Duc: Les Figures du Dictionnaire de l’architecture’, Revue de l’art, 58–59 (1983), 95–114. 130  While the manifold treatises, tracts, and illustrated volumes that preceded it in the nineteenth century had all contributed to the positive view of the Gothic, it was not until the Dictionnaire was published that the aspects of Gothic construction were fully understood and Gothic architecture achieved wide renown as a viable, logical, and admirable constructive system. 131  Viollet-le-Duc, Dictionnaire raisonné, ii, 384–85.

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l’antiphonie, aux temps d’Aristote, était seule pratiquée, c’est-à-dire les octaves produits par des voix […] chantant la même mélodie.132 [Ancient architecture is melody; medi­eval architecture is harmony. Harmony, according to the meaning we give this word, which is the arrangement and ordering of simultaneous sounds, was unknown to the Greeks. In the days of Aristotle antiphony was the only form practiced, that is to say, octaves produced by voices singing the same melody.]

In equating Greek architecture with melody and medi­e val architecture with harmony, Viollet-le-Duc probably did not intend to revive the eighteenthcentury musical paradigm, yet seen in the larger context of our discussion, his paradigm deepens the musical analogy in unexpected ways, coming as it does from the perspective of a practicing architect who was intimately familiar with medi­e val architecture and its religious, cultural, and political context, a knowledge which no one up until this point had possessed in such depth. For this reason, it represents much more than a dichotomy between simplicity on one side and complexity on the other, and it goes deeper than a perceived likeness between music and architecture due, on one side, to clarity of form and, on the other, to density and depth. Here there is no talk of aesthetics, no Romantic privileging of the senses or praise of the god-like creator, and, most significantly, no judgement on either side. Rather, Violletle-Duc’s paradigm elucidates the inherent similarities between architecture and music in different epochs in order to shed light on his main subject, the medi­e val cathedral. From this perspective, it is worth examining his paradigm in detail. His historical take is founded upon the Saint-Simonian doctrine of organic and critical epochs, where the organic eras of Ancient Greece and the High Middle Ages represent the height of Western culture.133 According to Viollet-le-Duc’s paradigm, because Greek architecture and melody grew out of a common culture and system of beliefs, they possess similar characteristics; likewise develop132 

Viollet-le-Duc, Dictionnaire raisonné, ii, 384. See Barry Bergdoll’s two articles, ‘The Dictionnaire raisonné: Viollet-le-Duc’s Encyclopedic Structure for Architecture’, in Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, The Foundations of Architecture: Selections from the Dictionnaire raisonné, trans. by Kenneth D. Whitehead (New York: George Braziller, 1990), pp. 1–30 (p. 10); and ‘“The synthesis of all I have seen”: The Architecture of Edmond Duthoit (1837–89)’, in The Beaux-Arts and Nineteenth-Century French Architecture, ed. by Robin Middleton (London: Thames and Hudson, 1982), pp. 217–49. For the influence of Saint-Simonianism in French thought, see D. G. Charlton. Secular Religions in France, 1815–1870 (London: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 1963). 133 

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ing under the influence of Christianity, medi­eval architecture and music resemble one another in their inner workings. Thus Viollet-le-Duc did not refer to melody in the neoclassical sense of ‘tuneful clarity’, but equated it with mono­ phony, voices singing the same melody at the same time in different octaves. On the other hand, he used the term ‘harmony’ synonymously with ‘symphony’ in its original meaning as the sounding together of individual notes in music, which, he argued, was as common to medi­eval polyphonic practice as to nineteenth-century instrumental music, though it took different forms at different times. Significantly, while harmonic practice took root and was germinating in the Middle Ages, architecture was also evolving.134 This historical concomitance accounted for their likeness in structure and complexity, implying that Greek architecture was monophonic in texture like Greek music, while Gothic resembled polyphonic harmonies, the concordance of many different ‘sounds’, the ‘simultaneity’ of which, he observed, was the driving factor of the medi­eval constructive mind, a concept to which we will return. To underscore the structural connection between medi­eval polyphony and the Gothic, Viollet-le-Duc briefly traced the incremental historical development of music and architecture from Antiquity through the Middle Ages, explaining how the simple, antiphonal melodies of ancient Greece were first modified by the introduction of intervals (fourths and fifths) early in the Christian era.135 Although harmony was slow to develop within the Greek Church, in the Roman it evolved rapidly from organum in the eighth century to the ‘fixed and fertile’ rules established for harmonic intervals and resolutions in the tenth. According to Viollet-le-Duc these rules made possible increasingly complex musical forms and more intervals until the full harmonic palette which ‘formed the basis of modern musical composition’ could be explored in every detail through intricate double counterpoint and imitative polyphony.136 Parallelly, architecture underwent an analogous development, reaching its apex under the Roman Church. Still under the influence of the polytheistic religion of Ancient Greece, which had required temples dedicated to dif134 

Viollet-le-Duc, Dictionnaire raisonné, ii, 384. Viollet-le-Duc, Dictionnaire raisonné, ii, 384: ‘Ce ne fut que pendant les premiers siècles de notre ère que l’usage des quartes et des quintes fut admis dans la musique grecque’. 136  Viollet-le-Duc, Dictionnaire raisonné, ii, 384. Viollet-le-Duc gleaned his history from the organist and medi­eval music specialist Félix Clément (1822–1885), and he also acknowledged Charles Edmond Henri de Coussemaker (1805–1876), who wrote the influential study, Histoire de l’harmonie au Moyen Âge (1852) (Abraham, The Concise Oxford History of Music, p. 88, n. 27; Viollet-le-Duc, Dictionnaire raisonné, ii, 384, n. 2). 135 

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ferent divinities, Christianity developed the Romanesque style in which local legends, saints, and the Bible fused with ‘bizarre animal figures’ in characteristic ‘multiplicity’.137 Around the eleventh century, however, logic and reason stepped in, rules were applied and systems created, so that the twelfth-century Church gradually established an architectural form that bespoke monotheism and expressed universal harmony through a rigorous systematization in the Gothic.138 Both medi­eval music and architecture were born of this rationalist tendency. Seen from this perspective, Viollet-le-Duc’s paradigm is based on the difference of cultural context: Ancient Greece is characterized by stasis and waning, the Middle Ages by change and dynamism. Even while fragmentation reigned in Antiquity, as was manifested in the diverse divinities, each with their personal edifices and melodies, in the medi­eval period, a desire for experimentation and striving for unity led to the creation of rules and systems that promoted complexity in music and in architecture. This ‘law of unity’ which brought about systematization represented for Viollet-le-Duc the highest human drive because it was a result of calculation and rationalism, the essential characteristics of music and architecture.139 Unity was the basis of musical harmony. Without it there could be no concordance of sounds, only noise. He believed that the same was true for medi­eval architecture, and he showed that the Gothic constructive system and iconography were based on it: Avec la cathédrale de la fin du xiie siècle, surgit l’iconographie méthodique, et, pour en revenir à notre comparaison musicale, chaque sculpteur, en faisant sa partie, concourt à l’ensemble harmonique; il est astreint à certaines lois dont il ne s’écarte pas, comme pour laisser à la symphonie sa parfaite unité.140 [The methodical iconography emerged with the cathedral at the end of the twelfth century, and, to return to our musical comparison, each sculptor, in doing his part, worked towards the harmonic whole; he was constrained by certain laws from which he never strayed, so as to allow the symphony its perfect unity.]

Thus, the twelfth-century striving for unity brought about a unified iconographical programme, made possible by the craftsmen’s obedience to rules or ‘laws’, which permitted each individual contribution to create the harmonious 137 

Viollet-le-Duc, Dictionnaire raisonné, ii, 387, 382. Viollet-le-Duc, Dictionnaire raisonné, ii, 386. 139  Viollet-le-Duc, Dictionnaire raisonné, ii, 384. 140  Viollet-le-Duc, Dictionnaire raisonné, ii, 387. 138 

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whole. Using the word ‘harmonique’ (harmonious) in the literal sense of simultaneous concordance, Viollet-le-Duc implied that in music and in architecture, unity does not mean homogeneity, but rather many different elements concurring in accordance with the overarching idea which holds the work together. On another level, the workers might be compared to musicians, whose individual contributions collectively make up the whole. On a larger scale, this law of unity guaranteed that as a group, all twelfth-century cathedrals were unified in doctrine, symbolism, and iconography. Viollet-le-Duc emphasized this more fully as he elaborated upon the paradigm, demonstrating that the difference between the Greek and Gothic systems exactly corresponds to that between melody and harmony in music: L’architecture grecque est une mélodie rhythmée; mais ce n’est qu’une mélodie, admirable, nous en tombons d’accord. Enlever d’une mélodie un membre, ce qui restera n’en sera pas moins un fragment de mélodie; enlevez un membre d’un temple grec, ce sera toujours un ordre que vous pourrez appliquer à un palais, à une maison, à un tombeau. D’un morceau d’harmonie, d’une symphonie, retirez une partie, il ne reste rien, puisque l’harmonie n’est telle que par la simultanéité des sons.141 [Greek architecture is a rhythmic melody, but it is only one melody, though admirable, we agree. Take away part of a melody, and what will remain will not be less than a fragment of a melody; remove an element of a Greek temple and there will always be an order that you can use in a palace, a house, a grave. Take out a part of a harmony, of a symphony, and nothing remains because harmony is only such by the simultaneity of sounds.]

Since all Greek buildings contain the same elements, Greek architecture in general can be understood as one melody in diverse rhythms (‘mélodie rhythmée’), with each building type representing, as I interpret it, a different rhythm, which is why an architectural element, like a column, for example, that is taken away from a Greek temple can be reused in any type of building in that style. Gothic architecture, however, is based on completely different constructive techniques, which are the same as those underlying harmonic musical forms, where every note exists in connection with the others and only for this purpose. This means that taking out a part of an intricate harmonic structure destroys its unity and wholeness. As such, the symphony, whether understood as ‘sounding together’ or as the modern musical form, becomes the constructive model that explains the Gothic: 141 

Viollet-le-Duc, Dictionnaire raisonné, ii, 385.

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De même, dans un édifice ogival, toutes les parties se tiennent: elles ont adopté certaines formes que par suite d’un accord d’ensemble. La lecture de ce Dictionnaire le prouverait; nous ne pouvons nous occuper d’un détail de l’architecture ogivale, et expliquer sa fonction, qu’en indiquant sa place, les circonstances qui ont imposé sa forme, sa raison d’être, indépendement du goût de l’artiste ou du style dominant.142 [Likewise, all the parts hang together in a Gothic edifice: they have adopted certain forms only as a result of the harmony of the whole. Reading this Dictionary should prove it; we cannot focus on one detail of Gothic architecture and explain its function without indicating its place, the circumstances that imposed its form, its raison d’être, independently from the artist’s taste or the dominant style.]

This is the fundamental connection Viollet-le-Duc perceived between the Gothic cathedral and the symphony: both result from a unified conception, and both are organic works whose forms exist because of the accord of every element. Thus, in the twelfth-century cathedral, where each element has a specific place and function within the whole and whose particular form resulted from particular historical and cultural circumstances, all parts, whether structural or decorative, are interconnected in a unified totality: ‘la parfait concordance des détails avec l’ensemble, l’harmonie de toutes les parties’ (the perfect concordance of details with the whole, the harmony of all its parts).143 Violletle-Duc recognized this important principle — comparable to the Romantic view of Gothic architecture as an organic whole in which all details and parts concurred to create the ensemble — to be the dominant constructive rule or ‘law’ of the Gothic. It lies at the core of his architectural theory. And this thesis is underscored and illuminated by the musical analogy, his historically based musical paradigm, and the metaphor of the symphony.

The Musicality of Chartres Cathedral’s Façade Like the Dictionnaire, Émile Mâle’s Art religieux du xiiie siècle en France of 1898 is a theoretical treatise that, despite its focus on iconography, was equally ambitious in its implications. Whether he was aware of the concept of ‘l’icongraphie méthodique’ or not, Mâle topped Viollet-le-Duc’s idea of unity by arguing that the entire medi­eval world view was reflected in the statuary and stained glass of the Gothic cathedral. He proved this by demonstrating that the iconography of Chartres Cathedral (1194–1250) depicted the four mirrors of the universe as 142  143 

Viollet-le-Duc, Dictionnaire raisonné, ii, 385. Viollet-le-Duc, Dictionnaire raisonné, I, p. xiv.

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laid out by Vincent de Beauvais (c. 1190–1264) in his encyclopaedic work of 1244, Speculum Majus. Consequently, Mâle concluded that Chartres Cathedral was a medi­eval treatise in stone in its iconographic subject matter, its encyclopaedic repertoire of human knowledge, and its symbols which bespeak divine truths. Since the similarity between the two twelfth-century works, Chartres Cathedral and Beauvais’s Speculum Majus, is the premise that permitted his investigation in the first place, Mâle solidified his theory by citing Hugo as an authority — ‘Victor Hugo a dit vrai, la cathédrale est un livre’ (Victor Hugo was right, the cathedral is a book)144 — thereby making the literary analogy the overarching metaphor of his treatise. Yet, as we saw in the quotation with which we began our inquiry, Mâle fused the literary and musical analogies in the final paragraph of the introductory chapter to praise Dante’s Paradiso and the porches of Chartres as symphonies.145 In bringing the literary and architectural examples together, Mâle intertextually referred to Notre-Dame de Paris, where Hugo both theorized that architecture was the book of humanity and declared Dante to be the last Romanesque church and Shakespeare to be the last Gothic cathedral.146 Yet Mâle modified the literary analogy in several ways: first, by connecting Dante explicitly with Gothic architecture; secondly, by relating a precise work, the climactic third poem of the Divina Commedia, to a specific element of a particular cathedral, the porches of Chartres; thirdly, by evoking neither exorbitance and irregularity, nor the sublime, but a similar expressive language, mathematical structuring, and symbolism, which combined to create an inner harmony.147 Medi­eval expression was a sacred writing that used conventions to denote specific characteristics (e.g. a halo for spirituality) or personages from biblical and Christian history.148 It was also a symbolic code in which even small details carried spiritual meaning.149 Most importantly, it was regulated by the ‘science of numbers’, exemplified by the seven tones of Gregorian chant, purportedly 144 

Mâle, L’Art religieux, p. 395. Mâle, L’Art religieux, p. 21. 146  See the chapter ‘Ceci tuera cela’ in Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris, pp. 237–54, esp. p. 238: ‘l’architecture est le grande livre de l’humanité’, and p. 252: ‘Dante au treizième siècle, c’est la dernière église romane; Shakespeare au seizième la dernière cathédrale gothique’. 147  Mâle, L’Art religieux, p. 21: ‘L’art est alors à la fois une écriture, une arithmétique, une symbolique. Il en résulte une harmonie profonde’. 148  Mâle, L’Art religieux, pp. 2–3. 149  Mâle, L’Art religieux, pp. 14–17. 145 

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the sensory rendition of universal order, and most celebrated in Dante’s Divina Commedia, itself erected according to sacred and symbolic numerals.150 Medi­ eval music and poetry were thus connected by ‘sacred mathematics’151 as well as by symbols intimating the spiritual realm, which he saw carried over into Chartres Cathedral. Thus, the disposition of the portal statues, their underlying mathematical order, and their metaphysical symbolism — which was not so much sculpted into the stone as pointed to by the sculptures — together manifest an inner harmony that binds the whole together.152 Indeed, he asserted that the four mirrors of Vincent de Beauvais would serve to explain the façade of the cathedral and reveal its wholeness: ‘chaque detail se trouvera à sa place et l’harmonie de l’ensemble apparaîtra’ (every detail will find its place and the harmony of the whole will appear).153 The idea of the harmonious ensemble brings us back to the symphony metaphor. While it is possible that Mâle might have used ‘symphonie’ in the general sense of harmonious concord or ‘sounding together’, it is likely that, with Hugo in mind, he was referring specifically to symphonic form, which in the aftermath of Romanticism still stood out as the organic form par excellence. Like a self-contained and highly complex symphony, in which all elements, from motifs to single chords to entire movements, work together in mathematical relations to achieve an awe-inspiring, transcendent whole, so the cathedral’s porches and Dante’s poem can be considered as thoroughly structured works: each part of a greater whole, each one complete in itself. Even more, through its symbols and underlying mathematical structure each one testifies to eternal truths. Where Hugo incorporated the musical analogy to extol the organic nature of the Gothic façade and Viollet-le-Duc used it to explain the Gothic’s rigorous and rational constructive unity, Mâle relied on it to bring out the Gothic’s theological purposes. Like Schelling, Mâle emphasized the mathematical relations underlying both music and architecture, not in Schelling’s sense of spatial rhythms, but as a symbolic system that manifested transcendent truths. Indeed, it is the musicality of Chartres that makes possible the complete iconographical work that is as profoundly organized and spiritually transcendent as a symphony.

150 

Mâle, L’Art religieux, pp. 10–12. Mâle, L’Art religieux, p. 5. 152  Mâle, L’Art religieux, p. 21; see the quotation at the beginning of this essay. 153  Mâle, L’Art religieux, p. 26. 151 

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Writing at the time that the symbolists were extolling music as the highest form of artistic expression exactly because of its ethereal and transcendent character, Mâle elevated Gothic art to the status of a creation that not only suggested a greater reality beyond the phenomenal world — which was the subject of much symbolist painting and poetry — but also represented the supreme artistic achievement insofar as it transcended the physical world through, and precisely because of, the tangible, solid material out of which it is created. As such, his ideas about the otherworldly connotations of the portal sculpture and his emphasis on their material substance and visible organization expresses most elegantly Schelling’s idea of architecture as frozen music.

Conclusion: The Gothic Cathedral as Music We have seen how in the eighteenth century the musical discourse developed and changed concomitantly to the Gothic discourse. Although these did not parallel each other in a teleological sense, nor did their individual proponents necessarily exchange hypotheses and ideas, the discourses intersected at critical points: at times when aesthetic questions were of uppermost importance and when different systems were emerging. Indeed, they interwove as classicism in music was gaining ground to the disadvantage of Baroque practices and again as a new awareness and sensibility embracing the infinite and the sublime were surfacing and replacing classical tenets and taste. The musical analogy in its different trajectories was a product of this intermingling. As the literary analogy also developed in a similar aesthetic context, I have touched on its complexities insofar as they shed light on, fed into, or, to my mind, offered a model for the musical paradigm. Significantly, E. T. A. Hoffmann, who moved in both musical and literary circles, welded them together in his celebration of Beethoven. More modestly, Émile Mâle combined them, delineating the three trajectories of the musical analogy we have explored. These trajectories — the Gothic/harmony relationship and the ‘frozen music’ and symphony metaphors — cross-fertilized each other in subtle and significant ways. Harmony lies at the root of all these trajectories, whether in the precise musical sense that referred to polyphonic practice and, by extension, to Bach and Baroque music, or in the general aesthetic sense of consonance that was praised by Goethe and the writers after him. Essentially these meanings are close, but when paired up with the Gothic cathedral and in resonance with the different polemics of the time, the word ‘harmony’ was imbued with either negative or positive connotations until Goethe’s essay gained popularity and the general affirmation of Gothic overrode all unfavourable associations of the

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term. In its precise meaning, ‘harmony’ underlies the symphony metaphor, for Hoffmann gloriously tacked the symphony — and Beethoven — onto the tail end of the harmony debate via Bach, Strasbourg Cathedral, and the sublime. It also formed the basis of Viollet-le-Duc’s claim that modern harmonic practice, typified in the symphony, originated in medi­e val polyphonic and harmonic practices. Besides this, after Goethe the harmonious concord of parts became synonymous with the idea of the organic whole, as we saw in Hugo’s description of Notre-Dame’s façade and in Viollet-le-Duc’s explanation of Gothic structure. Even more powerfully, however, Schelling’s frozen-music metaphor coalesced with that of the symphony in the nineteenth century, as the material substance of the Gothic cathedral was increasingly emphasized, seen by many as a challenge to its spiritual aspiration. In this lay both the dichotomy and the beauty of the Gothic: that transparency, light and lightness, and elevation could be achieved with rough and heavy stone. Consequently, at the end of the century the Gothic came to be seen more and more as the physical manifestation of a transcendent reality. This idea corresponded to symbolist ideas that objects and events in the here and now could be used as springboards to a non-tangible, otherworldly reality. The French writer and art critic J.-K. Huysmans (1848–1907) explored the paradox between the material and eternal through medi­e val symbolism in his 1898 novel, La Cathédrale. While the literary analogy lies at the root of this novel, the musical analogy underpins his preceding novel, En route of 1895.154 Its first chapter, in which the protagonist, Durtal, attends Mass at the church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris, presents an extended reflection on various aspects of the musical analogy too numerous to discuss here. Suffice it to say that the underlying hypothesis of these reflections is that religious music corresponds exactly to religious architecture. As Durtal ponders the similarities between the plainchant lament De Profundis and the architectural structure, he exclaims, ‘Le plain-chant est la paraphrase aérienne et mouvante de l’immobile structure des cathedrals’ (Plainchant is the airy and moving paraphrase of the immobile structure of the cathedrals).155 Here restating the frozen-music metaphor, Durtal not only contrasted the stasis and solidity of the cathedral with the lightness and fluctuation of music, but he reconciled architecture and music by claiming the latter to convey that which Gothic architecture expresses in its static forms. 154  J.-K. Huysmans, La Cathédrale (Monaco: Editions du Rocher, 1992); Huysmans, En Route (Paris: Gallimard, 1996). 155  Huysmans, En Route, p. 62.

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Huysmans’s novel clearly shows how the revival of plainchant in France after mid-century influenced the musical discourse by bringing Gothic architecture into an even closer relationship with music. He stressed temporal (i.e. medi­ eval) concomitance, which is more in line with Mâle’s historically based analogy than with Viollet-le-Duc’s idea of historical development. He also demonstrated that music and architecture were connected by a perceived similarity in their audible and plastic expressions and mood, as we saw with Viollet-leDuc, who emphasized structural complexity based on rules, and with Mâle, who stressed the symbolic structuring of the portals. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Huysmans used the analogy nationalistically, which is also true for Viollet-le-Duc and for Mâle. At the time, Gregorian chant was the best known of plainchant forms. Since it had originated in the Frankish or Gallic section of the Carolingian Empire and was standardized under Pope Gregory the Great (540–604) late in the sixth century, Gregorian chant bore a particularly Gallic stamp, just as Gothic architecture did.156 These three points come to the fore in the most extreme examples of the musical analogy we have yet to encounter, musical compositions which portray Gothic architecture in terms of parallel chords typical of medi­e val chant, namely Ogives (1886) by Erik Satie (1866–1925) and La Cathédrale engloutie (1910) by Claude Debussy (1862–1918). Although space does not permit us to analyse these compositions in detail, both incorporate the trajectories of the musical analogy we have discussed, and they strikingly redefine its premises. Among the proponents of plainchant were the Swiss composer Louis Niedermeyer (1802–1861) and Joseph d’Ortigue (1802–1866) who together wrote the Traité theórique et pratique de l’accompagnement du plain-chant (1857).157 Four years earlier Niedermeyer had opened the École Niedermeyer as a school for church music and Gregorian chant, and it is probably through Gustave Vinot, who had studied there, that Satie became familiar with medi­eval music.158 His Ogives, consisting of four movements or ‘ogives’ (pointed arches), was inspired by plainchant and has thus been designated at ‘Neugregorianik’ in the same sense as the term neo-Gothic was used, to indicate a replication of 156  Abraham, The Concise Oxford History of Music, p. 60. Viollet-le-Duc propagated the idea of Gallic ingenuity: ‘Les arts qui se développent à la fin du xiie siècle sont sortis du sein de la nation gallo-romaine, ils sont comme le reflet de son esprit, de ses tendances, de son génie particulier’ (Dictionnaire raisonné, i, 160). 157  Louis Niedermeyer and Joseph Ortigue, Traité theórique et pratique de l’accompagnement du plain-chant [1857], nouvelle édition (Paris: Heugel, [n.d.]). 158  Greta Wehmeyer, Erik Satie (Regensburg: Bosse, 1972), p. 24.

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medi­eval outward forms without the deep structure.159 The piece itself consists of four parts, each composed of four phrases and the indication that they are to be played very slowly, ‘très lent’. Each begins with a melody that recalls plainchant, played piano which is followed by its repetition in parallel chords moving in unison, which was typical of organum, played fortissimo in the second phrase, varied and played pianissimo in the third phrase, and repeated fortissimo in the fourth and final phrase. While the parallel chords call to mind the organ and its central place in the edifice and in the liturgy, the contrasting dynamics suggest the chanting in the Mass, led by the priest to whom the congregation responds.160 In this, the music conjures up the sonorous space in which the Mass is celebrated. Each ‘Ogive’ evokes a solemn and reverent mood, and seems, in its slow tempo, to replicate, indeed, to ‘paraphrase’ the staid forms or the ‘immobility’ of medi­eval architecture as well as to underscore its temporal duration.161 This idea becomes even clearer when we look at the article ‘Ogive’ in Viollet-le-Duc’s Dictionnaire, which Satie had read in 1885–86,162 where the architect states: ‘si nous voulons […] faire une voûte d’arête […], élevons quatres arcs brisés’ (if we want […] to make a cross vault […], we raise four pointed arches).163 With this subtext, Satie’s title would seem to indicate that the four movements together make up the musical equivalent of a Gothic vault, which is deep and high, soaring and heavy. In this light, the composition can be seen as an expression of a particular Gothic structure, and in this it offers an example of that which Huysmans intuited: that music can replicate architecture. Claude Debussy seems to have been influenced by Satie’s use of parallel chords, and he used them in the opera Pelléas et Mélisande (1893–1902) and in his tenth piano prelude, La Cathédrale engloutie.164 This piece alludes to the 159 

Wehmeyer, Erik Satie, pp. 20–25. Anne Rey, Erik Satie (Paris: Seuil, 1974), p. 22. 161  Alan M. Gillmor, Erik Satie (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1988), p. 36. For temporality in architecture, see my article, ‘Space, Time and Narrative: The Literary Unfolding of Architecture’, in Text-Architekturen: Baukunst (in) der Literatur des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. by Robert Krause and Evi Zemanek (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), pp. 13–30. 162  See Gillmor, Erik Satie, p. 34. 163  Viollet-le-Duc, Dictionnaire raisonné, vi, 426. I discuss Satie’s piece in the context of the nineteenth-century understanding of the pointed arch in ‘Lectures de l’ogive au xixe siècle’, in Images du Moyen Âge, ed. by Isabelle-Durand-Le Guern (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2006), pp. 333–47. 164  Greta Wehmeyer, Erik Satie: Bilder und Dokumente (München: Spangenberg, 1992). p. 30. Claude Debussy, Préludes, premier livre [1910] (Paris: Éditions Durande, [n.d.]), pp. 39–43. 160 

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Breton legend of the Ville d’Ys, which recounts that the inhabitants were so evil that God caused their magnificent city to sink into the ocean; as a reminder of this, it is said, on foggy mornings, it is possible to hear the bells of the sunken cathedral and the singing of the monks.165 Debussy’s prelude can thus be heard as a narrative of the cathedral sinking into the Atlantic. Significantly, the cathedral theme is expressed in parallel chords made up of fourths, fifths, and octaves common to medi­eval music. Ascending in unison, these chords seem to denote the heavenward extension of religious architecture until they give way to the polyphonically textured middle sections, which eventually evolve into the water theme, composed of rising and falling eighth notes in the bass clef. The solidity of the cathedral, reflected in the long and slowly rising chords, is contrasted with the fluidity, speed, and lightness of the water motif. In the last section, the water and cathedral motifs are played simultaneously, as the cathedral chords are gradually drowned out by the insistent water theme. Yet in the final line, only the cathedral theme is repeated, and each time it ends on a very high G chord, which recalls the chiming of the bells, another sonorous aspect of a church or cathedral. In terms of the musical analogy, medi­eval musical structures, including intervals and monophonic parallel chords, evoke the cathedral both in their ‘medi­eval’ sound (temporal concomitance) and in their ascending and descending movements (expression of structure). Through this crafting the music actually becomes the cathedral. At the same time, represented by the parallel ascending chords and their medi­eval tonality the cathedral has become music. Hereby capturing the intangible character that a medi­eval edifice was thought to possess, the composition goes a step further, for the musical narrative of the cathedral’s submersion reconciles the solidity of matter that must sink with the ethereal and transcendent qualities the cathedral was thought to share with music. In the case of Satie and Debussy, the cathedral is not frozen music, it is music. It is represented as harmonic structures derived from medi­e val musical practice. And, although transcendent, it is definitely not a symphony. In these compositions, the trajectories of the musical analogy converge to surpass even the subtleties of written language to achieve the ideal hinted at by nearly two centuries of debate and crossovers between the musical and Gothic discourses. There is, however, yet another parallel in the two discourses. Just as nineteenth-century architects had been (and still were at the century’s end) obsessed with finding an appropriate architectural style for the time, for which 165 

The legend is recounted in Robert E. Schmitz, The Piano Works of Claude Debussy (New York: Dover, 1966), p. 155, and by Ron Howat in his introduction to Claude Debussy, Préludes, Book I: The Autograph Score (New York: Pierpont Morgan Library, 1987), p. viii.

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the Gothic was thought to offer the most promising possibilities, at the end of a century dominated by German music, the French were seeking a particularly French expressive style. In this context, Satie’s and Debussy’s use of Gregorian chant (in addition to the intertexts of Viollet-le-Duc’s Dictionnaire and the legend from Brittany) might well be regarded as expressions of national pride. In 1904 Debussy praised Rameau (who, we will recall, had been criticized by Rousseau in his plea for a ‘natural’ and ‘simple’ form of musical expression) and François Couperin (1668–1733) as having composed graceful and natural music. Accordingly, he asserted, ‘la musique française, c’est la clarté, l’élégance, la déclamation simple et naturelle; la musique française veut, avant tout, faire plaisir […]. Le génie musical de la France c’est quelque chose comme la fantaisie dans la sensibilité’ (‘French music is marked by clarity, elegance and a simple and natural form of declamation; French music desires, above all, to give pleasure […]. The French musical genius is a kind of combination of fantasy and sensibility’).166 Debussy’s music emulated these ideals in its clarity, grace, and inventiveness and thereby countered the pompous and overly expressive music of Germanic composers like Richard Wagner and Beethoven.167 Given that through the sublime Beethoven and the symphony had been associated with the Gothic, we might consider that in the prelude, a genre which is a fragment, an introduction, or a preface, and thus the very antithesis of a grand, four-movement, self-contained symphony, Debussy, with his characteristic elegance, subtlety, and imagination, claimed the cathedral in music, even if sunken, definitively for France. 166 

Stephen Jarocinski, Debussy: Impressionsime et symbolisme, trans. from Polish by Thérèse Douchy (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1970), p. 118. He quotes from an article by Debussy published in the Revue bleue in April 1904. English translation: Stefan Jarocinski, Debussy: Impressionism and Symbolism, trans. from the French by Rollo Meyers (London: Eulenburg Books, 1976), p. 103. 167  Many of the French poets and composers at the end of the century were Wagner enthusiasts; see Grange Woolley’s founding study of Wagnerism in France, Richard Wagner et le Symbolisme Français: Les Rapports principaux entre le wagnérisme et l’évolution de l’idée symboliste (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1931). Jarocinski discusses Debussy’s turning away from Wagner (Debussy, pp. 112–20) and Beethoven (p. 118) toward Bach. In 1902 Debussy praised Bach’s free fantasy, declaring that the composer had disregarded harmonic formulae: ‘Le vieux Bach, qui contient toute la musique, se moquait […] des formules harmoniques’; see Jarocinski, Debussy, pp. 119–20. Debussy, trans. by Meyers, p. 104: ‘Old Bach, in whom all music is contained […] despised harmonic rules’. Coste (‘La Cathédrale en musique’, pp. 270–73) presents La Cathédrale engloutie as a sort of anti-cathedral opposing Wagner’s religion of art and as embodying the twentieth-century tendency towards disintegration of or even absence of the medi­eval edifice, as evidenced in Olivier Messiaen’s compositions.

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a première fois que m’est venue à l’esprit l’intuition de l’hallucination gothique, c’était en visitant, à la fin de l’année 1999, le Musée des monuments français au palais de Chaillot, un extraordinaire ensemble de plâtres collectionnés pour raconter de façon méthodique l’histoire de la sculpture et de l’architecture médiévale en France (Figure 10.1). Le musée avait été ravagé par un projet scénographique insensé, qui ne projetait rien d’autre que le retour à l’état imaginé par Gabriel-Jean-Antoine Davioud (1823–1881) du palais du Trocadéro avec ses cimaises rouges et ses charpentes métalliques alors que la rutilence encore Second Empire en avait été soigneusement dissimulée au début des années 1930 derrière les staffs et les plâtres blancs de Léon Azéma (1888–1978), de Jacques Carlu (1890–1976) et de Louis-Hippolyte Boileau (1878–1948). Il avait été ravagé aussi, bien sûr, par l’incendie mystérieux qui s’était déclaré en 1997 dans les combles, puis par les trombes d’eau que les pompiers avaient dû déverser pour juguler le sinistre. Il l’avait été encore par un comportement muséographique à la limite de l’aberration, qui avait arraché précipitamment des cimaises les plâtres encore intacts et avait entassé les décombres pour les livrer aux soins de restaurateurs débutants dans l’objectif de limiter les dépenses. C’est dans ce musée humilié que je me rendis ce jour-là, en compagnie de mon ami le peintre Jürg Kreieinbuhl (1932–2007) : il voulait peindre ce rassemblement de gisants royaux doublement morts et aussi le Jean-Michel Leniaud ([email protected]) est directeur d’études à l’Ecole pratique des hautes études, professeur à l’Ecole nationale des chartes, membre de l’université Paris Sciences et Lettres, et ancien directeur de l’Ecole nationale des chartes. The Idea of the Gothic Cathedral: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Meanings of the Medieval Edifice in the Modern Period, ed. by Stephanie A. Glaser, RITUS 9 (Turn­hout: Brepols, 2018) pp. 313–335 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.RITUS-EB.5.115744

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Figure 10.1. Musée des monuments français. Photo de l’auteur.

Transi de Ligier Richier (1500–1567) qui, par le hasard de ce déménagement dérisoire, montrait d’un geste pathétique, de l’autre côté de la Seine, la tour Eiffel aux ferrailles de laquelle une gigantesque enseigne lumineuse, clignotant au chiffre de l’an 2000, conférait une vulgarité puissante. Fut-ce grâce à la sensibilité contagieuse de l’artiste ou à la détresse poignante qu’exprimait le lieu souillé par la brutalité des hommes et désormais, semblait-il, livré à l’abandon ? Je fus pris d’une émotion inattendue  : j’entrai dans un pathétique cimetière monumental. C’était comme si Piranèse (1720–1778) était venu ordonner à sa manière la scène qu’il graverait bientôt dans les salles désertes et dévastées. Après des années consacrées à l’étude du rationalisme constructif dont EugèneEmmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814–1879) avait voulu faire la principale caractéristique de l’architecture médiévale, je retrouvais tout à coup ce qui avait fondé le retour au Moyen Âge dans les dernières décennies du xviiie siècle : le fantastique gothique. La visite au musée offrait l’occasion de rouvrir le dossier : je présentai mes premières conclusions dans une communication publiée en 2001 sous le titre : « Piranèse, Moyen Âge et musée des monuments français »1. 1 

Jean-Michel Leniaud, « Piranèse, Moyen Âge et musée des monuments français », dans Le musée de sculpture comparée : naissance de l’histoire de l’art moderne (Paris : Editions du patrimoine, 2001), pp. 54–67.

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Détour par les peintres romantiques Ce fantastique gothique, nuls mieux que les peintres germaniques n’ont su l’exprimer en créant un climat de tension entre le calme apparent des choses et l’angoisse qui envahit sourdement l’espace. Ernst Ferdinand Oehme (1797–1855) peint en 1821 une Cathédrale en hiver (Dom im Winter, Figure 10.2) : une haute façade s’aperçoit à contre-jour sur un ciel gris depuis un sombre portique en arc brisé ; à l’intérieur de la cathédrale, une étrange lueur rougeâtre se diffuse depuis le maître-autel où brûlent des cierges incandescents et propage les couleurs de l’incendie jusqu’aux hautes et étroites verrières de la nef. Les flocons de neige qui tombent sur les architectures et sur le sol recouvrent toutes choses d’un manteau blanc et auraient pu suggérer le calme et le silence qui siéent aux jours d’hiver. Mais l’étrangeté de cette lueur, entre bienfaisante et terrible, évoque à la fois le Buisson

Figure 10.2. Ernst Ferdinand Oehme, Dom im Winter (La Cathédrale en hiver), huile sur toile, 127 × 100 cm, Dresde, Galerie Neue Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen. 1821. © bpk / Staatliche Kunst­samm­ lungen Dresden / Elke Estel / Hans-Peter Klut.

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Figure 10.3. Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Mittelalterliche Stadt an einem Fluß (Ville médiévale au bord d’un fleuve), huile sur toile, 95 × 140.6 cm, Berlin, Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. 1815. © bpk / Nationalgalerie, SMB /Jörg P. Anders.

ardent apparu à Moïse et le jour du Jugement de l’humanité tout entière, les éruptions volcaniques peintes par le chevalier Volaire (1729–1799) et les cieux apocalyptiques de John Martin (1789–1854). Dehors, de hautes silhouettes, sombres et toutes vues de dos, des moines, se hâtent d’un air recueilli vers le sanctuaire désert : s’agit-il de l’office des Vêpres ou d’un événement inattendu ? C’est encore une atmosphère de tension qui parcourt les célèbres tableaux de Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1787–1841) : Ville médiévale au bord d’un fleuve (Mittel­alterliche Stadt an einem Fluß, 1815) et Cathédrale gothique au bord de l’eau (Gotischer Dom am Wasser, 1815). Sur le premier (Figure 10.3), une troupe armée s’approche, ou sort comme en triomphe, d’une ville prospère bâtie au bord d’un fleuve et à l’entrée de laquelle, comme une gigantesque chapelle dédiée à l’archange qui garde les portes du Paradis, saint Michel, se dresse une immense cathédrale ou, du moins, la façade occidentale de celle-ci, marquée par son inachèvement babélien, puisqu’une seule flèche s’élance du puissant massif de pierre. Que fait cette troupe ? Est-elle pacifique ou malfaisante ? On ne le sait pas… Un puissant contre-jour baigne l’ensemble de la composition : l’orage menace-t-il ou, au contraire, s’éloigne-t-il de la ville ? La moitié d’un arc-

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Figure 10.4. J. M. W. Turner, Tintern Abbey, the Transept, aquarelle, 34,5 × 25,4 cm, Londres, British Museum. c. 1795. © bpk / The Trustees of the British Museum.

en-ciel parcourt l’azur et semble protéger la cathédrale, mais de façon irréaliste puisqu’il se dessine dans la partie la plus enténébrée du ciel. Le signe de l’alliance entre Dieu et les hommes vient-il d’apparaître ou bien s’éloigne-t-il ? Où en est-on du drame ? Le tableau garde son secret. Le second tableau (Voir Lewis, Figure 2.4) montre encore une cathédrale qui, à l’instar de la Jérusalem biblique, semble, de ses architectures, protéger ses habitants comme la poule le fait de son aile pour ses poussins, ainsi que nous le dit le Livre sacré. Au premier plan, d’industrieux bateliers s’affairent ; plus loin, un haut pont, à nouveau un symbole d’alliance, franchit la rivière qui paraît encercler comme une île le massif rocheux sur lequel est bâti l’édifice. Le soleil se couche à l’occident, le chevet est déjà dans l’ombre ; quelques lueurs éphémères passent à travers les dentelles des deux tours de la façade. Par l’implantation de l’abside au confluent de deux bras d’eau, la cathédrale fait penser à Notre-Dame de Paris mais les couronnes de dentelle de la façade s’inspirent sans nul doute

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Figure 10.5. John Constable, Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows, huile sur toile, 153,7 × 192,0 cm, Londres, Tate Gallery. 1831. © Tate, London, 2016.

de celles que Pierre Adrien Pâris (1745–1819) a conçues pour la cathédrale d’Orléans à la fin du règne de Louis XVI. Pour autant, les Allemands ne sont pas seuls à peindre des fantasmes gothiques. Dans un lavis précoce (c. 1795), Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851) peint une église en ruine (Figure 10.4) ; la voûte s’en est effondrée et la végétation croît le long des pierres. À l’entrée du chœur, des gravois se déversent d’une brouette renversée ; au fond, un groupe de touristes élégants, deux femmes et un homme, conversent avec un individu armé d’une pelle, occupé peut-être à creuser le sol à la recherche de sépultures. Turner a peint un site britannique, Tintern Abbey, mais les événements révolutionnaires, le saccage de l’abbatiale de Saint-Denis et d’une infinité d’autres lieux confèrent au sujet de la ruine une valeur d’actualité dramatique. John Constable (1776–1837), de son côté, s’en tient à la tension d’ambiguïtés contradictoires, comme celles qui animent les œuvres de Schinkel : dans Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows, 1831, (Figure 10.5) la cathédrale de Salisbury dresse au bord

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Figure 10.6. William Kent, Merlin’s Cave (The Section of Merlin’s cave in the Royal Gardens at Rich­ mond. As designed by Mr Kent), gravure, Some Designs of Mr Inigo Jones and Mr Wm. Kent, plate 32. 1744. Avec l’aimable autorisation de l’Uni­ver­sity of Rochester Library, Rochester, New York.

de l’eau sa flèche bienfaisante parmi les arbres mais la nature est violente et, malgré la promesse d’un arc-en-ciel, les orages laissent des stigmates sur les branches vrillées par les tornades. Rien de nouveau dans tout cela : peut-être… On se propose maintenant d’interroger les œuvres à la manière dont Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962) a étudié les rêves et les images, dans La Terre et les rêveries de la volonté et La Terre et les rêveries du repos : le poète-philosophe a mis en évidence diverses figures à la manière des archétypes de Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961), tels la boue, le rocher, la grotte, le labyrinthe, etc2.

Retour sur quelques archétypes Le rapport entre la cabane, que Vitruve a érigée en prototype de l’architecture, et les premières réalisations néo-gothiques a déjà été souligné à maintes reprises, notamment par Jurgis Baltrušaitis dans Le Moyen Âge fantastique : la 2 

Gaston Bachelard, La terre et les rêveries de la volonté (Paris : José Corti, 1948) et La terre et les rêveries du repos (Paris : José Corti, 1948).

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Figure 10.7. Alexander Carse, « Willow Cathedral » Built by Sir James Hall in his Garden, dessin, Londres, Royal Institute of British Architects, Library Drawings Collection. 1792. RIBA Collections.

cabane ne se conçoit pas seulement comme un intermédiaire entre la nature et la construction, entre la forêt de haute futaie et la nef gothique, mais comme la démonstration de la capacité de l’homme à bâtir de façon raisonnée, c’està-dire en distinguant la structure porteuse des parois à fonction d’isolation3. La cabane apparaît ainsi comme la première manifestation de l’art du charpentier, de « l’art royal », ainsi appelé parce que réservé à l’élite intelligente des métiers du bâtiment. Dans cet esprit, William Kent (1685–1748) reproduit la « Merlin’s Cave » en 1733 (Figure 10.6) : la nef et les bas-côtés sont voûtés de croisées d’ogives et faits de matériaux végétaux ; le bâtiment s’élève en pleine forêt dans l’idée de souligner le lien qui unit la nature et le travail du concepteur et de faire comprendre cette métaphore que François-René de Chateaubriand (1768–1848), plus tard, développera avec tant de succès dans le Génie du christianisme4. Un peu plus tard, c. 1794, Alexander Carse (1770–1843) reproduit 3  Jurgis Baltrušaitis, Le Moyen Âge fantastique : Antiquités et exotismes dans l’art gothique (Paris : Flammarion, 1981; repr. 1993). 4  François-René de Chateaubriand, Génie du christianisme ou les Beautés de la religion

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Figure 10.8. Heinrich Christoph Jussow, Löwenburg, Kassel, Löwenburg. 1793–1801. Collection privée.

une cathédrale miniature (Figure 10.7), construite en osier dans les jardins de James Hall (1761–1832). Une flèche posée au sol semble en cours de construction ; un homme s’affaire d’ailleurs à lier entre eux les brins végétaux ; comme la « Merlin’s Cave », l’édifice est construit dans une clairière, en pleine forêt. En pendant de l’archétype de la cabane, Vitruve avait caractérisé celui de la caverne. Autant la première résulte de la rationalité humaine, autant la caverne, la grotte, l’anfractuosité dans le rocher ou l’empilement de matériaux pierreux sont le produit plus ou moins aléatoire de la nature, dont l’homme profite pour y installer son abri. À cet archétype sont rattachées les architectures en creux, qu’il s’agisse d’édifications souterraines ou d’entassements de maçonneries généralement frustres et massives. Je propose de ranger dans cette catégorie la Löwenburg à Kassel en Allemagne (Figure 10.8). Le landgrave Guillaume IX (1785–1821) avait fait construire sur les hauteurs le château de Wilhemshöhe en style néoclassique, avec colonnes et fronton triangulaire. Un peu plus tard (1793–1801), il commanda à Heinrich Christoph Jussow (1754–1825) la construction de la Löwenburg, encore plus haut encore sur la colline et dans chrétienne, 2 tomes (Paris : Migneret, 1802).

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les bois. Conçu comme une sorte de ruine artificielle en style médiéval, l’édifice fait moins penser à un château fort à la manière de Pierrefonds ou du HautKoenigsburg qu’à un gigantesque empilement de blocs rudement maçonnés à l’intérieur duquel serait ménagé une sorte de repaire en forme de grotte. Quelques années après, Charles Nodier (1780–1844) développera une image semblable dans sa nouvelle intitulée Jean Sbogar (1818) avec la fantastique caverne dans laquelle se rassemblent les brigands. Une autre figure archétypique se profile à Kassel, celle du labyrinthe. Les percements erratiques qui déchirent les façades, les différences de niveau d’une construction à l’autre, les juxtapositions capricieuses de constructions font comprendre avant même de pénétrer dans les lieux que le plan en est aussi complexe que celui de la forteresse abandonnée dans « Inès de las Sierras » de Théophile Gautier (1811–1872)5, ou celui de l’abbaye de Typhaines dans le roman éponyme (1849) d’Arthur de Gobineau (1816–1882) ou encore de la forteresse de « La torture par l’espérance » dans les Nouveaux contes cruels (1888) de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (1839–1889). Le pathos qui découle de la désorientation qu’on éprouve dans ces volumes complexes ou dans ces grottes obscures s’apparente au vertige qui s’empare de celui qui pénètre dans un espace anxiogène. Ce sentiment de vertige procède aussi de l’immensité des espaces intérieurs de cathédrales gothiques. L’abbé Marc-Antoine Laugier (1713–1769) l’avait déjà signalé au milieu du xviiie siècle6. Stendhal (1783–1842) y accorde une importance considérable lorsqu’il parcourt la vaste étendue de la cathédrale de Florence : pour lui, la hauteur des voûtes opprime l’esprit en le tyrannisant par l’idée de religion7. Mais ils sont peu nombreux à l’époque romantique à penser ainsi : la plupart considèrent, au contraire, qu’elle élève l’homme au-dessus de sa condition terrestre. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), pour sa part, admettra le fait dans Le Gai Savoir (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft), mais pour le déplorer8. Gustave Umbdenstock 5  Théophile Gautier fait allusion au conte éponyme de Charles Nodier paru en 1846. Le poème de Théophile Gautier prend pour titre complet « Inès de las Sierras, A la Petra Camara » ; il paraît en 1852 dans Émaux et camées (Paris : Gallimard, 1981) pp. 77–80. On y trouve ces vers très éclairants pour notre sujet : « Un vrai château d’Anne Radcliffe / Aux plafonds que le temps ploya, / Aux vitraux rayés par la griffe / Des chauves-souris de Goya, // Aux vastes salles délabrées / Aux couloirs livrant leur secret, / Architectures effondrées / Où Piranèse se perdrait » (p. 77, v. 5–12). 6  Marc-Antoine Laugier, Essai sur l’architecture (Paris: Duchesne, 1753). 7  Stendhal, Rome, Naples et Florence en 1817 (Paris : Delaunay, 1817). 8  Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, dans Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke in drei Bänden, éd. par Karl Schlecta (München : Hanser, 1982), ii.

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Figure 10.9. Charles Wild, North-West View of Fonthill Abbey, aquarelle sur papier, 29,2 × 23,5 cm, collection privée. Autour de 1815. © Bridgeman Images.

(1866–1940), professeur d’architecture à l’École Polytechnique au début du xxe siècle, rend compte des vastitudes spatiales conçues par le Moyen Âge dans sa représentation de l’élévation intérieure de la cathédrale de Sienne9. Le vertige est également associé à la flèche gothique. La forme s’interprète comme la tour de Babel, tentative insolente mais vouée à l’échec pour égaler le divin. William Beckford (1760–1844), auteur de Vathek, conte arabe10, roman dans lequel on lit qu’une tour immense avait été érigée pour aller à la rencontre du ciel, avait fait construire dans son domaine de Fonthill une immense tour néo-gothique, comme on peut le voir sur une aquarelle de Charles Wild (1781–1835) peinte en 1799 (Figure 10.9). Sur le modèle des catastrophes 9 

Gustave Umbdenstock, Cours d’histoire de l’architecture à l’École polytechnique, 2 tomes (Paris : Gauthier-Villars, 1930). 10  [William Beckford], Vathek, conte arabe (Paris : Poinçot, 1787). Beckford écrivit le roman en français en 1783. La traduction anglaise fut publiée en 1786 : [William Beckford], An Arabian Tale from an Unpublished Manu­script with Notes : Critical and Explanatory (London : printed for J. Johnson and entered at the Stationer’s Hall, 1786).

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Figure 10.10. Bellut (charpentier), Charpente de la flèche de la Sainte-Chapelle, Paris, photo. 1853–55. Collection privée.

babyloniennes conçues par John Martin, la flèche de Fonthill s’effondra sur elle-même au début des années 1820. Mais il est aussi des flèches chrétiennes sur lesquelles souffle l’esprit de Pentecôte, lequel communique le don des langues alors que la colère de Babel avait introduit la confusion. C’est le cas de la flèche de la Sainte-Chapelle réédifiée par Jean-Baptiste Lassus (1807–1857) entre 1853 et 1855. La flèche vue de l’intérieur (Figure 10.10) donne l’image de la spirale, non moins vertigineuse que les voûtes immenses. Mais cette spirale qui se resserre au fur et à mesure qu’elle progresse communique paradoxalement la sensation de la chute, qu’elle soit ascendante ou descendante. Alfred de Musset (1810–1857) donne dans la cinquième partie de La Confession d’un enfant du siècle (1836) une analyse éclairante de cette sensation : cette spirale procède à la manière de la pensée. « Quand la pensée, tournant sur elle-même, s’est épuisée à se creuser, lasse d’un travail inutile, elle s’arrête épouvantée ». Il ajoute :

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Il semble que l’homme soit vide, et qu’à force de descendre en lui, il arrive à la dernière marche d’une spirale. Là, comme au sommet des montagnes, comme au fond des mines, l’air manque et Dieu défend d’aller plus loin. Alors, frappé d’un froid mortel, le cœur, comme altéré d’oubli, voudrait s’élancer au-dehors pour renaître ; il redemande la vie à ce qui l’environne, il aspire l’air ardemment, mais il ne trouve autour de lui que ses propres chimères, qu’il vient d’animer de la force qui lui manque, et qui, créées par lui, l’entourent comme des spectres sans pitié.

La clé de ce passage est fournie par la comparaison que Musset fournit dès l’entrée : « Comme ces derviches insensés qui trouvent l’extase dans le vertige »11. Cette fois, on a compris : l’orientalisme de la figure du derviche, l’étourdissement qui saisit ce dernier quand, à force de tourner, il devient ivre de l’oxygène qu’il absorbe, renvoient à un autre stimulant de la chute sans fin dans des songes épuisants : l’opium ou ses dérivés.

Drogue et archétypes du gothique L’œuvre de Musset démontre à elle seule que les images piranésiennes, en particulier celles de l’espace amplifié, du cachot, du labyrinthe et du souterrain, vont de pair dans l’imaginaire romantique avec la consommation du haschich. Plus précisément, il faudrait signaler désormais le lien étroit qui unit l’usage de la drogue avec les archétypes du gothique. On peut en trouver le premier exemple dans l’œuvre de Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859), qui apparaît d’ailleurs, avec Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), et à plusieurs reprises, comme le fondateur d’un romantisme piranésien. Commençons par ce petit texte extrait de Suspiria de Profundis (1845) dans lequel il évoque une église construite sur l’ancien modèle anglais, avec des bas-côtés, des tribunes et un orgue. Là, pendant la prière, le narrateur, alors enfant, est sujet à une vision, à une hallucination religieuse qui, d’après lui, prédispose à celles que l’opium et ses dérivés procurent : But not the less the blare of the tumultuous organ wrought its own separate creations. And oftentimes in anthems, when the mighty instrument threw its vast columns of sound, fierce yet melodious, over the voices of the choir — when it rose high in arches, as might seem, surmounting and overriding the strife of the vocal parts, and gathering by strong coercion the total storm into unity — sometimes I seemed to walk triumphantly upon those clouds which so recently I had looked up to as mementos of prostrate sorrow, and even as ministers of sorrow in its creations; 11 

Alfred de Musset, La Confession d’un enfant du siècle (Paris : Gallimard, 1973), p. 265.

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yes sometimes under the transfigurations of music I felt of grief itself as a fiery chariot for mounting victoriously above the causes of grief. [Le tumulte éclatant de l’orgue effectuait séparément ses propres créations. Et souvent dans les antiennes, lorsque le puissant instrument jetait ses vastes colonnes sonores, impétueuses quoique mélodieuses, par-dessus les voix du chœur — là-haut sous les voûtes ; lorsqu’il semblait s’élever, surmontant et chevauchant le conflit des parties vocales et rassemblant par une forte contrainte tous les éléments de la tempête en un seul tout ; parfois, il me semblait, moi aussi, m’élever et marcher triomphalement sur ces nuages que, voici à un moment à peine, j’avais regardés d’en bas comme les memento du chagrin prostré ; oui, parfois, grâce aux transfigurations de la musique, je ressentais le chagrin lui-même comme un char de feu capable de surmonter victorieusement les causes du chagrin.]12

Thomas De Quincey exprime ici la sensation d’amplification de l’espace gothique que suggère l’hallucination par la musique. Viollet-le-Duc, dont on ne sache pourtant pas qu’il ait été opiomane, a évoqué une correspondance semblable entre fantasmagories architecturales et délire musical en le complexifiant d’un vertige de couleurs suscité par les verrières de Notre-Dame de Paris13. Dans les Confessions d’un mangeur d’opium (1822), De Quincey complète son analyse des transformations des sensations de spatialité qui découlent de l’absorption d’opium : The sense of space, and in the end the sense of time, were both powerfully affected. Buildings, landscapes. &c., were exhibited in proportions so vast, as the bodily eye is not fitted to receive. Space swelled, and was amplified to an extent of unutterable infinity. [Le sens de l’espace, et à la fin le sens de la durée furent modifiés avec la même puissance. Des édifices, des paysages, etc., se montraient dans des proportions si vastes qu’elles dépassaient la limite du champ optique. L’espace flottait et s’amplifiait en étendues inexprimables qui se succédait à l’infini.]14

12 

Thomas De Quincey, Suspiria de Profundis, dans Confessions of an English Opium Eater and ‘Suspiria de Profundis’ (Boston : Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1850), p. 170. Les Confessions d’un mangeur d’opium: Suites aux confessions d’un mangeur d’opium anglais, trad. par Pierre Leyris (Paris : Gallimard, ‘L’imaginaire’, 1990), pp. 196–97. 13  Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Entretiens sur l’architecture, 2 tomes (Paris  : A. Morel, 1863–72), i, 22. 14  De Quincy, Confessions, p. 97. Confessions d’un mangeur d’opium, trad. par V. Descreux (Paris : Stock, 1903), p. 285.

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Et il ajoute, pour ce qui concerne la temporalité : « This, however, did not disturb me so much as the vast expansion of time ; I sometimes seemed to have lived for seventy or one hundred years in one night » (‘Cela me troublait beaucoup moins que le vaste agrandissement du temps. Parfois je croyais avoir vécu soixante-dix ou cent ans dans une nuit’)15. Dans The English Mail-Coach (La Malle-poste anglaise) (1849) du même auteur se combinent tous ces thèmes : dilatation de l’espace et du temps, transformation de la forêt en une nef gothique sous l’empire de l’opium. La haute futaie sous laquelle la malle-poste poursuit une course folle se transforme progressivement en cathédrale gigantesque, une cathédrale de soixante-dix lieues, sorte de nécropole à la manière de l’abbatiale de Westminster, dans la nef de laquelle les harmonies de l’orgue et des chœurs éclatent, les vapeurs d’encens s’élèvent, les guerriers de pierre qui ornent les sépulcres s’inclinent au passage des chevaux haletants16. Thomas De Quincey était adonné au laudanum. Héros d’Alexandre Dumas (1802–1870), Franz d’Épinay, dans Le Comte de Monte-Cristo (1844), fait l’expérience du haschich au sein du palais souterrain de Simbad le marin. Il le consomme sous la forme de confiture, la fameuse confiture verte dont étaient friands les hôtes de l’hôtel Pimodan. Parmi les habitués, Gautier et Nerval ont décrit les visions d’émeraude qu’ils éprouvaient en rapport avec la couleur de ce qu’ils absorbaient. Dumas, pour sa part, dépeint la sensation d’élargissement de l’horizon qui s’empare de Franz ; cependant, cet horizon n’est pas vert mais bleu. Puis il fait allusion à une grotte marine, fraîche et parfumée. Rien de plus : aucun rapport entre cet onirique univers souterrain et la cathédrale. C’est pourtant cette analogie que, plus tard, Jules Verne (1828–1905) (on sait qu’il était, sur le tard, éthéromane) décrit dans Voyage au centre de la terre (1864) : Parfois une succession d’arceaux se déroulait devant nos pas comme les contre-nefs d’une cathédrale gothique. Les artistes du moyen âge auraient pu étudier là toutes les formes de cette architecture religieuse qui a l’ogive pour générateur. Un mille plus loin, notre tête se courbait sous les cintres surbaissés du style roman, et de gros piliers engagés dans le massif pliaient sous la retombée des voûtes17.

Un peu plus loin, Jules Verne rejoint sans le savoir probablement la théorie de Viollet-le-Duc sur les cristaux comme modèle originel des formes architecto15 

De Quincy, Confessions, p. 97. Confessions, trad. par Descreux, p. 285. Thomas De Quincey, Joan of Arc : The English Mail-Coach, éd. par J. M. Hart (New York : Holt, 1893), pp. 112–14. 17  Jules Verne, Voyage au centre de la terre (Paris : Hetzel, 1867), p. 95. 16 

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niques : « Je m’imaginais voyager à travers un diamant creux, dans lesquels les rayons se brisaient en mille éblouissements »18. Le texte qui mêle le plus étroitement haschich et voyage souterrain se trouve dans Voyage en Orient (1844) de Gérard de Nerval (1808–1855), dans « L’Histoire du calife Hakem », dont le début, précisément, s’intitule « Le Hachich »19 : on y trouve ensemble cette ambiance vert émeraude de la confiture verte, la légende de maître Hiram, bâtisseur du temple de Salomon — autour de l’évocation de l’assassinat duquel s’organise le rituel maçonnique du troisième degré —  et, par conséquent, les fondements des théories sur l’origine franc-maçonne des cathédrales, dont Ludovic Vitet (1802–1873) et Daniel Ramée (1806–1887) donnaient alors la traduction savante dans leur monographie de la cathédrale de Noyon20. Adoniram s’y place en successeur des architectes de la tour de Babel, se propose de construire des monuments qui dureront jusqu’à la fin des temps et, conduit par Tubal-Caïn, fait la découverte de la montagne de Kaf avec sa pierre d’émeraude, prototype de la flèche et de la colonne, qui sert de racine et de pivot au globe terrestre21. Le vert émeraude du haschich éclaire de son étrange lueur un nombre considérable de scènes d’un roman occultiste, dû à la plume de Gustav Meyrink (1868–1932), banquier tchèque adonné au spiritisme après avoir été ruiné par la crise de 1929 et auteur d’un roman célèbre, Le Golem22. Je pense ici à L’Ange à la fenêtre d’Occident (Der Engel vom westlichen Fenster, 1927), dans lequel le lecteur est confronté à d’étranges réincarnations, à des mystères cabalistiques qui se diffusent à la faveur des fumées de narcotiques et au terrible Ange vert : Mein Schwur erfüllt das Gemach wie ein wallender Rauch, wie Geflüster zahlloser Dämonen, wie Rauschen von grünen … ja, von grünen Engelsfittichen. — — Burggraf Rosenberg ist das, der da vor mir auf und ab schreitet und mit bedauernder Miene die Achseln hebt und senkt. — Dann weiß ich plötzlich, wo ich bin: das farbige Dämmerlicht, das uns umgibt, fällt durch hohe Glasfenster eines Chor­ umgangs, und wir stehen hinter dem Hochaltar des Sankt-Veit-Doms auf der Burg. 18 

Verne, Voyage au centre de la terre, p. 108. Gérard de Nerval, « L’Histoire du calife Hakem », dans Voyage en Orient I, 2 tomes, dans Œuvres complètes, 6 tomes (Paris, Michel Lévy, 1867–77), ii (1867), 340–81 ; « Le Hachiche », 340–48. 20  Ludovic Vitet, Monographie de l’église Notre-Dame de Noyon : Plans, coupes, élévations et détails par Daniel Ramée, Collection de documents inédits sur l’histoire de France, 3me sér., Archéologie (Paris : Imprimerie Royale, 1845). 21  Pour Adoniram et la franc-maçonnerie, voir Nerval, Œuvres complètes, ii, 421–22. 22  Gustav Meyrink, Der Golem (Leipzig : Kurt Wolff, 1915). 19 

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[Mon serment remplit la pièce comme une fumée ondulante, comme le murmure d’innombrables démons, comme le bruissement d’ailes vertes…, oui, comme un bruissement d’ailes d’Ange vert. L’homme qui va et vient devant moi, balançant les épaules avec une expression de regret, est le burgrave Rosenberg. Alors, je réalise soudain où je suis : la lumière aux couleurs crépusculaires, qui baigne la pièce, tombe du haut vitrail d’un déambulatoire ; nous nous trouvons derrière le maître-autel de l’église de la citadelle, Sankt-Veit.]23

Ici encore le fantasme est associé à la cathédrale gothique, mais pas n’importe laquelle : nous sommes à Saint-Guy, à Prague, capitale de l’occultisme. En 1857, Thomas De Quincey fut plus ou moins pastiché par un Américain, Fitz Hugh Ludlow (1836–1870), qui publia cette année-là The Hasheesh Eater. Au chapitre VIII, intitulé « Vos non vobis — wherein the Pythagorean is a By-stander », l’auteur raconte les hallucinations auxquelles l’un de ses amis a été sujet après avoir absorbé du haschich. Le récit est placé sous le signe des correspondances puisque durant la scène un tiers personnage joue du piano : « Architecture is frozen music » déclare le héros de l’expérience24. En voici les grandes lignes : après avoir consommé la drogue quelques heures auparavant, il se rend chez un ami pianiste sans que ce dernier ne remarque quoi que ce soit de son état, s’allonge sur un sofa et le prie de jouer du piano. Dès les premières notes, il se trouve porté dans le chœur d’une vaste cathédrale. Les vitraux en étaient merveilleusement colorés, le pavement fait d’une somptueuse mosaïque, l’atmosphère parfumée de vapeurs d’encens ; des moines priaient en silence. Tout à coup, l’orgue se mit à jouer, d’abord faiblement ; des chœurs se firent entendre ; c’était un Miserere pathétique. Un convoi funèbre entra dans l’église, le cercueil fut porté devant le chœur : le rêveur assistait à l’enterrement de Félix Mendelssohn. Puis la cérémonie s’acheva, les porteurs et la foule sortirent de la cathédrale. L’homme se réveilla : le pianiste venait de lui jouer la Marche funèbre de Mendelssohn25. 23 

Gustav Meyrink, Der Engel vom westlichen Fenster (Leipzig : Grethlein, 1927), Kapitel 7 [accès Avril 2016]. Meyrink, L’Ange à la fenêtre d’Occident, ill. par Isabelle Drouin, trad. par Saint-Helm (Paris : Retz, 1975), p. 207. 24  Fitz Hugh Ludlow, The Hasheesh Eater Being Passages from the Life of a Pythagorean (New York : Harper, 1857), p. 118 : « Do you remember those words, ‘Architecture is frozen music ?’ With your ascending notes I saw grand battlements rise immensely into the sky ; with the descending tones they sank again, and through all your song I have sat enamoured of one delicious dance of Parian marble ». 25  Ludlow, The Hasheesh Eater, pp. 119–20 : « The prelude began. With its first harmoni-

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En 1975, une réédition du livre de Ludlow fut illustrée de gravures d’un artiste de San Francisco, Wilhelm Sätty (1939–1982)26. Tempérament éclectique, auteur de films, de posters, de couvertures d’ouvrages et d’illustrations, Sätty s’intéressait aussi bien à l’orgue qu’à Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) ou aux Rolling Stones. On trouve dans cette réédition du Hasheesh Eater une composition graphique (Figure 10.11) sur le passage qui vient d’être analysé. L’artiste a rendu compte du caractère onirique du gothique en développant un espace à la fois dilaté (points de vues sur des paysages de plaine et de montagne) et éclaté (on ne compte pas moins de six compositions de nefs médiévales, non compris une représentation inversée de voûte à caissons, de style classique). Divers détails mettent en accord ces architectures avec le texte : chœur de chanteurs dans la tribune, procession funèbre, buffet d’orgue. Ludlow, Thomas De Quincey et le groupe romantique de l’hôtel Pimodan n’auraient probablement rien renié de cette puissante création néo-piranésienne (contraste des noirs et des clairs et travail sur l’espace). Après Ludlow, la fin du xix e siècle offre encore un texte qui fait allusion à ces cathédrales de fumée que l’opium suscite. En 1894, Alfred Jarry (1873–1907) est tout juste âgé de vingt et un ans. Il publie dans Les Minutes de sable : mémorial un court récit intitulé : « L’opium ». « Suçant de mes lèvres brûlantes de fièvre le biberon lourd où dormait l’oubli » : ainsi commence-t-il sans ambiguïté27. Alors, le « corps astral » du rêveur entre dans une « morgue ous rise and fall the dreamer was lifted into the choir of a grand cathedral. Thenceforward it was heard no longer as exterior, but I shall proceed to tell how it was internally embodied in one of the most wonderful imaginative representations that it has ever been my lot to know. « The window of nave and transept were emblazoned, in the most gorgeous coloring, with incidents culled from saintly lives. Far off in the chancel, monks were loading the air with essences that streamed from their golden censers ; on the pavement, of inimitable mosaic, kneeled a host of reverent worshipers in silent prayer. « Suddenly, behind him, the great organ began a plaintive minor like the murmur of some bard relieving his heart in threnody. This minor was joined by a gentle treble voice among the choir in which he stood. The low wail rose and fell as with the expression of wholly human emotion. One by one the remaining singers joined in it, and now he heard, thrilling to the very roof of the cathedral, a wondrous miserere. […] At the farther end of the nave a great door slowly swung open and a bier entered, supported by solemn bearers. […] It was the dead Mendelssohn! « The last cadence of the death-chant died away ; the bearers, with heavy tread, carried the coffin through the iron door to its place in the vault ; one by one the crowd passed out of the cathedral, and at last, in the choir, the dreamer stood alone. […] ‘What piece have you been playing ?’ asked Fred. The musician replied it was ‘Mendelssohn’s funeral March!’ ». 26  Fitz Hugh Ludlow, The Hasheesh Eater (San Francisco, CA : Level Press, 1975). 27  Alfred Jarry, Les Minutes de sable : mémorial (Paris : Mercure de France, 1894), pp. 61–70 (p. 61).

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Figure 10.11. Wilfried Sätty, Neogothic Vision, dans Fitz Hugh Ludlow, The Hasheesh Eater. 1975. Collection privée.

immense » où dorment d’innombrables morts plongés dans la glace, qui pleure « des larmes vertes »28. Encore le vert ! Puis le rêveur se trouve tenir entre les mains un livre, écrit par lui, mais calligraphié en « gothique bleu de ciel »29. Et, pour finir, je cite encore Jarry : Sous les voûtes de la cathédrale, je me retrouve clamant des incantations bachiques, et les cardinaux augustes me reprochent cette inconvenance. Et pour mieux me confondre, les voici soudain, évêques et cardinaux, diacres et sous-diacres, formant un orchestre. Le pape bat la mesure, et les cuivres grondent et les piliers s’amollissent pour faire place aux manches des contrebasses démesurées. Et l’hymne infernal commence : Peuple, auditez ma vocale angélie ! Ouvrez vos auditifs canaux !

28  29 

Jarry, Les Minutes de sable , pp. 62–63. Jarry, Les Minutes de sable , p. 68.

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Figure 10.12. Louis Morin, L’Église, dans Claude Farrère, Fumée d’opium. 1904. Collection privée.

Figure 10.13. Henri Mayeux, Chapelle de Saint-Guénolé, dans Fantaisies architecturales, planche 51. 1890. Collection privée.

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Les murs s’écartent, les voûtes s’élèvent comme des ballons dont on verrait l’intérieur, et les colonnes poussent rapides pour soutenir l’étendue sans cesse accrue de l’architecture titanesque30.

Un dernier exemple littéraire : Fumée d’opium, de Claude Farrère (1876–1957), paru en 1904 et illustré par Louis Morin (Figure 10.12). L’une des scènes se déroule pendant la nuit à la cathédrale de Lyon, dans laquelle le narrateur s’est laissé enfermer et s’endort. Lorsqu’il s’éveille, il voit arriver, remontant la nef vers l’autel, un chevalier du Temple. Là, tourné vers l’Orient, l’étrange personnage fait brûler une substance aromatique qui dégage des volutes de fumée en spirale. Tout au long de cette mystérieuse cérémonie, le narrateur reste pétrifié de terreur jusqu’au moment où le Templier pousse un cri terrible, se retourne, redescend la nef obscure, ouvre le portail et disparaît dans la nuit31. Ancien officier de marine, ayant séjourné en Extrême-Orient, Farrère était connu, comme beaucoup d’anciens marins, pour avoir expérimenté personnellement l’opium. Plusieurs architectes se sont intéressés à ces interprétations oniriques du gothique  : Henri Deverin (1846–1941), Rêves et réminiscences d’architecture pittoresque. France et Italie  ; le polytechnicien Gustave Umbdenstock (1866–1940), Recueil de compositions architecturales ; et aussi Henri Mayeux (1845–1929), professeur d’art décoratif à l’École des beaux-arts32. On trouve dans ses Fantaisies architecturales (1890) plusieurs compositions qu’on pourrait mettre en rapport avec tout ce qui vient d’être dit : tels le Monument pour Westminster, la Chapelle de Saint-Guénolé (Figure 10.13), le Perron du calvaire, ou encore Le Clocher, la Basilique de Saint-Michel, Le Narthex et, pour finir, la Clé pendante (Figure 10.14)33. Les Carceri d’invenzione de Piranèse (c. 1745–50) ont puissamment contribué à la réinterprétation fantasmagorique du gothique ; ils alimentent un courant particulier, différent en tout cas de ce qu’on a pu voir chez les peintres romantiques allemands Oehme et Schinkel. Mais l’opium et ses dérivés, eux, ont facilité, de Coleridge et de De Quincey jusqu’à Ludlow en passant par les Romantiques français, cette lecture onirique. Ils ont mis en évidence aussi ces 30 

Jarry, Les Minutes de sable , pp. 68–69. ‘L’Église’, dans Claude Farrère, Fumée d’opium, préface par Pierre Louÿs, illustrations de Louis Morin (Paris : Flammarion, 1919), pp. 109–22. 32  Henri Deverin, Rêves et réminiscences d’architecture pittoresque : France et Italie (Paris : Aulamin 1895). Gustave Umbdenstock, Recueil de compositions architecturales (Paris : Schneider et Mary, 1922). 33  Pierre-Henri Mayeux, Fantaisies architecturales (Paris : Armand Buérinet, 1890). 31 

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Figure 10.14. Henri Mayeux, Clé pendante, dans Fantaisies architecturales, planche 10. 1890. Collection privée.

archétypiques architecturaux dont j’ai parlé au début : la cabane et la caverne, le labyrinthe et le souterrain, la flèche et la spirale. De passage à Barcelone, Jean Lorrain (1855–1906), auteur par ailleurs des Contes d’un buveur d’éther, donne en 1895 une description de ce qu’il a vu à la cathédrale : Une obscurité presque effrayante y règne, baignant jusqu’à la voûte cinquante-huit piliers massifs […]  ; juste devant [le] chœur, se creuse, béante et noire, telle une chausse-trappe, la crypte des évêques aux ténèbres mouvantes, hantées de feux follets par la flamme des cierges. […I]ci tout n’est qu’ombre et reflets ! c’est le royaume de la terreur mystique. […] [Il] flotte en cette église une odeur à la fois de latrines et d’encens ; quand il s’y joint le parfum de l’œillet, il paraît que c’est là l’atmosphère de l’Espagne34. 34 

« La Cathédrale » dans Barcelone, dans Un démoniaque. Espagne. Voyage du bord de l’eau (Paris : Dentu, 1895), pp. 158–64 (pp. 160, 162).

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En une époque, le xixe siècle, qui a longuement analysé l’architecture gothique sous l’angle de la rationalité constructive au point de lui faire courir le risque du dessèchement, les opiomanes et les autres ont réintroduit en ses murs ce que les théoriciens en avaient retiré : lumières ténébreuses et ténèbres ponctuées de sombres lueurs, flots musicaux s’écoulant de nulle part comme des nuées célestes et venant s’adjoindre à des silences lourds et séculaires, entêtantes fumées de cierges et vapeurs d’encens, gestes mystérieux de sacrificateurs antiques. Ils leur ont rendu, à ces vieux murs, la poésie et le mystère.

The Cathedral as Time Machine: Art, Architecture, and Religion Richard Utz

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n her widely read monograph of 1998, The Shock of Medi­evalism, Kathleen Biddick summarizes what she sees as the decisive moment in the modern history of the reception of medi­eval culture. Commenting on the main methods used to establish the subject of medi­eval studies in the nineteenth century, Biddick writes: In order to separate and elevate themselves from popular studies of medi­eval culture, the new academic medi­evalists of the nineteenth century designated their practices, influenced by positivism, as scientific and eschewed what they regarded as less-positivist, ‘nonscientific’ practices, labeling them medi­evalism. They isolated medi­eval artifacts from complex historical sediments and studied them as if they were fossils. Scholars such as Gaston Paris in literature, Viollet-le-Duc in art history, and Bishop Stubbs in history each used versions of these isolating methodologies. Gaston Paris’s insistence on documentary readings of medi­eval poetry in his new philology severed the study of medi­eval literature from poetics. Viollet-le-Duc produced scientific medi­ eval art history by splitting off images from their material milieu. Stubbs refused to teach any constitutional history beyond the seventeenth century on the grounds that it was too presentist. Through these different kinds of exclusions, justified as avoiding sentimental medi­evalisms, these scholars were able to imagine a coherent inside to the discipline of medi­eval studies. Medi­evalism, a fabricated effect of this newly forming medi­eval studies, thus became visible as its despised ‘other’, its exteriority.1 1  Kathleen Biddick, The Shock of Medi­evalism (Durham, NC: Duke Uni­ver­sity Press, 1998), pp. 1–2.

Richard Utz ([email protected]) is Chair and Professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech, and President of the International Society for the Study of Medi­evalism.

The Idea of the Gothic Cathedral: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Meanings of the Medieval Edifice in the Modern Period, ed. by Stephanie A. Glaser, RITUS 9 (Turn­hout: Brepols, 2018) pp. 337–351 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.RITUS-EB.5.115745

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Biddick perceptively identifies and describes the period during which Western societies transferred the study of the premodern past from well-to-do uppermiddle-class and upper-class ‘dilettantes’ (from Italian dilettare, ‘to delight’), ‘amateurs’ (from Latin amare, ‘to love’), and ‘enthusiasts’ (from Greek enthous, ‘possessed by a god’, ‘inspired’) into the hands of academy-educated full-time scholars who championed disinterested, scientific, or at least science-like scholarly practices. Klaus Niehr’s essay presents an illustrative example of several important gradations of this process, which ensued for more than 150 years, by comparing the descriptions and depictions of medi­eval cathedrals by gentlemanly traveller-antiquarians like Thomas Frognall Dibdin (1776–1847), on the one hand, and professional historians like Jules Michelet (1798–1874) on the other. His study complicates and helps complete Biddick’s and other scholars’ findings from among the busy late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cultural interchanges between British and Continental voices.2 Of special significance in Niehr’s study is the evidence he provides of the continuing creative hybridity, for example, Dawson Turner (1775–1858) and Thomas Rickman (1776–1841), that characterizes responses to and representations of the major architectural features of the medi­eval cathedral from Romanticism through the beginning of the twentieth century. Thus, at least for the reception of these features, many of those who visited and viewed the cathedrals in the early modern and modern periods maintained a healthy dose of distrust of the ‘fictions of factual representation’ offered by the academic specialists who demanded that the investigating subjects remain emotionally distant from the subjects of their investigation so that objectivist and positivist paradigms could produce a much more narrowly defined and scientifically valid research on the medi­eval past. In a cross-section of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German and French thought Stephanie Glaser surveys a similar attempt to make modern sense of Gothic architecture, and the examples in her essay, too, seem like creative and often conservative responses to an increasingly scientific and abstract world. To compare, as did Émile Mâle (1862–1954) in L’Art religieux du xiiie siècle 2 

For other case studies of this general process, see Norman  F. Cantor, Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great Medi­evalists of the Twentieth Century (New York: Morrow, 1991); Renate Haas, V. A. Huber, S. Imanuel und die Formationsphase der deutschen Anglistik: Zur Philologisierung der Fremdsprache des Liberalismus und der sozialen Demokratie (Frankfurt: Lang, 1990); David Matthews, The Invention of Middle English, 1765–1910 (Minneapolis: Uni­ver­sity of Minnesota Press, 1999); and Michelle R. Warren, Creole Medi­evalism: Colonial France and Joseph Bédier’s Middle Ages (Minneapolis: Uni­ver­sity of Minnesota Press, 2011).

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en France (1898), Dante’s Paradiso or Chartres Cathedral to ‘frozen music’; to correlate, as did Victor Hugo (1802–1885) in Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), Shakespeare with a Gothic cathedral; or to intuit, as did Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) in ‘Von Deutscher Baukunst’ (1773), musicality in the structural features of Strasbourg Cathedral, preserved cultural space for subjective, non-scientific, forms of expression and communication. These specific forms of intermedial comparison, including harmony, allegory, symbol, symphony, concordance, and metaphor, seem to offer a connection backwards in time to a pre-scientific and pre-industrial kind of ontology, a vaguely medi­eval imaginary of Creator-like genial individuals who, in their art, architecture, literature, and music, contribute to the kind of ‘universe’ in which every object corresponds somehow to any other object, and in which all objects finally reveal themselves as human expressions of a lost premodern unity, perhaps similar to what Mircea Eliade (1907–1986) called an ‘archaic ontology’. For Goethe, Hugo, Mâle, and many of their contemporaries, the Middle Ages and medi­eval artefacts (at that time often referred to as ‘antiquities’) represented access to the life of ‘archaic man’, to a period when human productions, including works of art, ‘acquire their reality, their identity, only to the extent […] to which [they] repeat a primordial act’ and express a reality that is a ‘function of the imitation of a celestial archetype’.3 These eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thinkers and artists, many of them Christians, saw in the Gothic cathedral the most powerful material bridge to overcome the ever-deepening chasm between the premodern and their own lifetime that had been revealed by historical and archaeological research. This deep-seated desire to reconnect with the greatest achievements — produced by ‘naïf ’ and ‘primitif ’ monk-artists like those described by Alexis-François Rio (1797–1874) in De l’Art chrétien (1861–67) — of a much less fragmented medi­eval past led them to embrace ever so many forms of subjective analogy, the kind of subjective rhetorical analogy scientists had begun to interrogate and challenge in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.4 3  Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History, trans. by Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper, 1959), p. 5; French original: Le Mythe de l’eternel retour: Archétypes et répetition (Paris: Gallimard, 1949). 4  See the chapter ‘Undoing Substantial Connection: The Late Medi­e val Attack on Analogical Thought’, in Sheila Delany, Medi­eval Literary Politics: Shapes of Ideology (Manchester: Manchester Uni­ver­sity Press, 1990), pp. 19–41. On the fascination for the medi­e val ‘primitive’ artists’ work among nineteenth-century writers and critics, see Laura Morowitz, ‘Primitive’, in Medi­evalism: Key Critical Terms, ed. by Elizabeth Emery and Richard Utz (Cam­bridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2014), pp. 189–96.

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Moreover, this desire for an idealized past drove them to express their observations and findings from within the lexicon of emotion, not science, like Goethe who ‘tastes’ and ‘enjoys’ the structure of Strasbourg Cathedral. Very often this manifested itself as national emotion, also expressed by Goethe, in claiming Strasbourg Cathedral to be an example of ‘deutsche Baukunst, unsre Baukunst’ or by Claude Debussy (1862–1918) who appropriated the cathedral for France. Jean-Michel Leniaud begins his essay with an introductory section, ‘Avertissement en forme de fragment autobiographique’, that seems to indicate that even today the personal encounter of an investigating subject with his historical subject of investigation provides an important, perhaps essential, motivation for that scholar’s selection of a research topic and methodology. Very much in the tradition of Dibdin, Goethe, and Hugo, it is Leniaud’s 1999 visit to the then underfunded and fire- and water-ravaged Musée national des Monuments Français that elicits ‘une émotion inattendue’ and makes him realize ‘tout à coup ce qui avait fondé le retour au Moyen Âge dans les dernières décennies du xviiie siècle: le fantastique gothique’. Leniaud associates his visit with that to ‘un pathétique cimetière monumental. C’était comme si Piranèse […] était venu ordonner à sa manière la scène qu’il graverait bientôt dans les salles désertes et dévastées’, and his own visit to the Musée reveals to him (and to the readers of his scholarly essay) one of the foundational causes for the Romantic obsession with the Gothic cathedral: its connection with essential human archetypes of space. By virtue of his ‘Avertissement’, Leniaud stylizes his own experience as analogous to that of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) who, according to Thomas De Quincey’s (1785–1859) recollection, had once likened his own visions during a fever-induced delirium to Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s (1720–1778) Carceri d’invenzione (Imaginary Prisons, c. 1745–50), a series of etchings depicting vast Gothic halls, on the floor of which stood all sorts of engines and machinery, wheels, cables, pulleys, levers, catapults, etc., etc., expressive of enormous power put forth, and resistance overcome. Creeping along the sides of the walls, you perceived a staircase; and upon it, groping his way upwards, was Piranesi himself: follow the stairs a little further, and you perceive it come to a sudden abrupt termination, without any balustrade, and allowing no step onwards to him.5

5 

Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings, ed. by Robert Morrison (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 2013), pp. 3–80 (p. 70). Perhaps the most illuminating analysis of Piranesi’s work was written by Marguerite Yourcenar, ‘Le Cerveau noir de Piranèse’, in Sous benefice d’inventaire (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), pp. 116–69; published in

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De Quincey is enthralled by Coleridge’s response to Piranesi’s phantasmagoric images because it corresponds to his own drug-induced experiences of various archetypes of the Gothic: the amplified space, the dungeon, the labyrinth, the nave-like forest, and the underground cave. The oneiric, nightmarish, and wild ‘readings’ of De Quincey and others — Leniaud’s essay includes discussions of Gustav Meyrink (1868–1932), Fitz Hugh Ludlow (1836–1870), and Claude Farrère (1876–1957) — provide perhaps the most radical and impassioned counterbalance against the increasingly dry-as-dust art-historical/academic analysis of the medi­eval cathedrals existing in the midst of modern cities. I would like to use one of De Quincey’s most fascinating archetypal ‘visions’ of the Gothic cathedral to contextualize the value the three preceding essays in this section add to our understanding of modern medi­evalism. In his 1849 essay ‘The English Mail-Coach’, especially in the section entitled ‘The Glory of Motion’, De Quincey celebrates the modern marvel of the ‘continually augmenting velocity’ of travel throughout the country.6 His opium-induced vision accelerates and intensifies towards the final section, entitled ‘Dream-Fugue, On the Above Theme of Sudden Death’, and at its climax, the entranced narrator feels transported in a ‘triumphal car, amongst companions crowned with laurel’, entering ‘at a flying gallop […] the grand aisle of the cathedral’. Once inside, the ‘mighty minster’ reveals itself as a structure of colossal proportions, displaying ‘a vast necropolis rising upon the far-off horizon — a city of sepulchres, built within the saintly cathedral for the warrior dead that rested from their feuds on earth’, and ‘battle-fields that, long since, nature had healed and reconciled to herself with the sweet oblivion of flowers’ and ‘battle-fields that were yet angry and crimson with carnage’, until the vision ends in the synaesthetic ‘passion of the mighty fugue’. The ‘golden tubes of the organ, […] — gleaming amongst clouds and surges of incense — threw up, as from fountains unfathomable, columns of heart-shattering music’, and the living and the dead rendered ‘thanks to God in the highest’.7 As Niehr, Glaser, and Leniaud demonstrate in their essays, it would be wrong to dismiss some of the strongly emotional, creative, haptic, oneiric, or trance-like responses to the Gothic cathedral as merely idiosyncratic and, thus, English as ‘The Dark Brain of Piranesi’, in The Dark Brain of Piranesi and Other Essays, trans. by Richard Howard (Henley-on-Thames: Aidan Ellis, 1985), pp. 88–128. 6  ‘The English Mail-Coach’, in De Quincey, Confessions, pp. 173–222 (p. 178). The essay was published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1849. 7  De Quincey, ‘The English Mail-Coach’, pp. 213, 217–21.

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ephemeral. The large number of thinkers and artists who chose the medi­e val cathedral as their preferred object for deeply felt aesthetic and often political commentary about their own times would indicate that the cathedral and many of its features offer a particularly inviting creative space for communicating about what many of them recognized, more or less consciously, as the main change agent of their time: ‘movement’. That De Quincey would begin his dream vision with an ekphrastic section on ‘The Glory of Motion’, and that his drug-induced, ever-accelerating voyage is brought to some kind of finality within a cathedral-like structure, attests to the power of the cathedral as a time machine capable of connecting human beings with a past, and perhaps even the divine, rendered ever more distant and Other by the intensifying historicization of time and the gradual but inexorable disenchantment of all aspects of life by research in the social sciences, natural sciences, and medicine. In an essay called ‘Travelling in England in Old Days’ (1843), De Quincey had already lauded the increased speed and efficiency of mail coach travel and the post office.8 Interestingly, however, he favours modes of efficient movement and organization that grew out of premodern ones. Thus, although he is fully intent on erasing ‘the bars of space and time’ for all forms of communication and travel in the British Empire, his preoccupation with matters of temporality does not make him latch on to any and all technological innovations.9 He prefers an embodied and human-centred path to technological perfection in which the speed on the mail coach could be measured and felt (especially when sitting on the outside upper seats) to one in which ‘iron tubes and boilers have disconnected man’s heart from the ministers of his locomotion’ and have eliminated ‘the inter-agencies […] in the mode of communication between the horse and his master, out of which grew so many aspects of sublimity’.10 Thus, while De Quincey’s goals may at first sound revolutionary or idiosyncratic, they are in fact rooted in the same pre-industrial nostalgia that informs so many other anti-modernist and conservative voices of his day.11 While he diagnoses ‘move8 

Thomas De Quincey, ‘Travelling in England in Old Days’, in The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, ed. by David Masson, 14 vols (Edinburgh: A. and C. Black, 1889), i, 267–86. 9  De Quincey, ‘Travelling in England,’ pp. 270–71. 10  De Quincey, ‘The English Mail-Coach’, pp.  183–84. For an in-depth study of De Quincey’s ideas of efficient motion and communication, see Andrew Franta, ‘Publication and Mediation in “The English Mail-Coach”’, European Romantic Review, 22.3 (2011), 323–30. 11  Nostalgic and anti-technology medi­e valist agendas have, of course, continued to exist since the nineteenth century, even in cultural narratives that have no direct connection to the

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ment’ and ‘temporality’ as the central transformational issues of his own age more keenly than most of his contemporaries, like many of them he decides to resolve the radical social and cultural change they herald by taking refuge in the medi­eval cathedral, the ultimate time machine that, in his eyes, has successfully withstood centuries of change and offers a refuge from the fascinatingly vertiginous but also overpowering and potentially inhuman acceleration that characterizes modern life.12 When De Quincey manages to slow down the dizzying speed of his everaccelerating ‘mail coach’ within the otherworldly and potentially divinely inspired structural confines of the ‘mighty minster’, he exhibits the same conservative concern about ‘movement’, ‘change’, and temporality in general that scholars in cultural semantics have identified during the period from 1770 to 1830. For this transitional period, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s Deutsches Wörterbuch (1854–1961) records more than one hundred neologisms that qualify ‘time’ as compounds (for example, the ubiquitous ‘Zeitgeist’) or otherwise define temporality (for example, ‘movement’, ‘formation’, ‘duration’, ‘epoch’).13 Likewise, The Oxford English Dictionary records the increased use of Middle Ages at all, as Louise Fradenburg has demonstrated for director Chris Noonan’s Oscarwinning 1995 movie, Babe. In ‘“So that We May Speak of Them”: Enjoying the Middle Ages’, New Literary History, 28 (1997), 205–30 (pp. 205–06), she explains that the film ‘celebrates love between master and servant (these days, animals have to stand in for the peasants), and rural life as the scene in which such love might be rediscovered. It expresses distaste for technology, focused especially on communications in the form of a Fax machine, but also recuperates the Fax, as well as discipline, training, technique. These figures recall the master tropes of anti-utilitarian medi­evalism in the nineteenth century. So does the film’s insistent association of meaningless speech with commercialism and disbelief in the remarkable, and its association of meaningful speech with Babe’s taciturn but loving farmer — a man behind the times who nonetheless is able to succeed because he recognizes the distinctive gifts of his animals, even when they want to do the work of the “other” (even, that is, when the pig Babe wants to do the work of a sheep dog)’. 12  De Quincey’s observations on ‘The English Mail-Coach’ also confirm the various synaesthetic connections between cathedral and music advanced by Stephanie Glaser. He compares the British Mail Service to the miraculous harmony of the symphonic orchestra led by a genial conductor. ‘To my own feeling’, he intuits, ‘this Post-office service recalled some mighty orchestra, where a thousand instruments, all disregarding each another, and so far in danger of discord, yet all obedient as slaves to the supreme baton of some great leader, terminate in a perfection of harmony like that of heart, veins, and arteries, in a healthy animal organisation’ (p. 173). 13  See the comprehensive summary of these German terms by Reinhart Koselleck, Ver­ gangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten (1979; repr. Frankfurt am Main: Suhr­

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the word ‘movement’ from the late eighteenth century on as indicative of ‘the way in which events or conditions are moving at a particular time or in a particular sphere; a tendency, a trend’. After 1830 the term ‘formation’ is employed as ‘the action or process of forming; a putting or coming into form; creation, production’. The following meanings for ‘duration’ and ‘durational’, ‘lasting, continuance in time; the continuance or length of time; the time during which a thing, action, or state continues’, come into use in the early eighteenth century. Finally, ‘epoch’, which indicates ‘the beginning of a “new era” or distinctive period in the history of mankind, a country, an individual, a science’, is a seventeenth-century invention.14 According to Reinhart Koselleck, these neologisms, which point towards a foundational experiential shift in the qualifying and conceptualizing of time, entered into competition with the vocabulary of pre-eighteenth-century sources, which indicate temporal movement in other terms: the stars, nature, living conditions, calling, fate, or chance. While the new concepts of time never did completely eradicate the old ones, they quickly began to afford a ‘change in the perspective of an open future’, and within such an ‘open future’ social strata as well as cultural and artistic expression would now become open to choice and follow diverse paths.15 From the early nineteenth century on, writes Koselleck, ‘time itself becomes a title of legitimation open to occupation from all sides. Specific legitimizing concepts [are] no longer possible without temporal perspective’.16 This is mirrored as well as propagated by the numerous ‘‑isms’ invented to project historical movement into a future perspective: Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) coined ‘republicanism’, a term Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) replaced with ‘democratism’.17 ‘Socialism’ and ‘communism’ followed, along with other terms that summarized the slowing down and arresting of the tendencies towards movement and change that De Quincey kamp, 1989); Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. by Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia Uni­ver­sity Press, 2004), p. 247. All quotations are from the English edition. 14  For these terms, I accessed the continually updated online version of the Oxford English Dictionary at the Georgia Institute of Technology Library in September 2014. The OED’s definitions are current ones, which also describe the historical uses of terms at the time they originated. Note that ‘movement’, as a ‘principal division of a musical work, having a distinctive melodic and rhythmical structure of its own’, and as the ‘harmonious variety in the lines and ornamentation of a building; freedom alike from monotony and incongruity’, emerges in the 1770s. 15  Koselleck, Futures Past, pp. 247–48. 16  Koselleck, Futures Past, p. 248. 17  Koselleck, Futures Past, pp. 248–49.

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and a good many of his contemporaries in art, architecture, cultural criticism, and music exemplify; among these terms are ‘conservatism’, ‘romanticism’, and ‘medi­evalism’.18 Thus, those hoping to protect cherished artistic, religious, and social continuities (De Quincey’s ‘inter-agencies’ and ‘sublimity’) against the disruptive powers of modernity (De Quincey’s ‘iron tubes and boilers’) repeatedly returned to romanticized images of the Middle Ages and their most potent and evocative remains (cathedrals, castles, manu­scripts, etc.) in search of support. John Ruskin (1819–1900), who is usually credited with one of the first uses of ‘mediaevalism’ in an 1853 lecture on Pre-Raphaelitism,19 lamented in The Seven Lamps of Architecture ‘how cold […] all history’ and ‘how lifeless all imagery’ was when attempting to stay connected with a medi­e val culture further and further removed into ‘otherness’ by scientific progress and academic historical research. He concluded that ‘there are but two strong conquerors of the forgetfulness of men, Poetry and Architecture’.20 These two powerful representatives of apparently sempiternal memorialization, which the modern scientific disciplines were increasingly treating as lifeless textual or visual corpora and corpses to be dissected, categorized, and archived, could, from Ruskin’s early Victorian vantage point, still bridge that which early modern temporalization and academization were increasingly setting apart. Therefore, he recommended an affective and even physical contact with the past, one that preserves a flavour or touch of the past in which one’s own present might find its origins as well as its future in combining ‘profit in our knowledge of the past’ with ‘joy in the thought of being remembered’.21 Reading, preserving, touching (and being 18  On ‘conservatism’, see Koselleck, Futures Past, p. 249. On ‘medi­evalism’ as a similar linguistic weapon in the arsenal against modern movement and change, see Richard Utz, ‘Negotiating Heritage: Observations on Semantic Concepts, Temporality, and the Centre of the Study of the Cultural Heritage of Medi­eval Rituals’, Philologie im Netz, 58 (2011), 70–87 [accessed April 2016]. For statistical evidence of the historical usages of ‘communism’, ‘conservatism’, ‘feminism’, ‘medi­evalism’, and ‘socialism’ in Google’s database of British English between 1810 and 1880, see Richard Utz, ‘Medi­evalism’s Lexicon: Preliminary Considerations’, Perspicuitas, 2014, [accessed April 2016]. On ‘romanticism’ as a nineteenth-century synonym for ‘medi­evalism’, see Leslie J. Workman, ‘Medi­evalism and Romanticism’, Poetica, 39–40 (1994), 1–44. 19  John Ruskin, ‘Pre-Raphaelitism’ [1853], in Lectures on Architecture and Painting (London: George Allen, 1902), pp. 182–223 (pp. 186–87). 20  John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (London: Smith, Elder, 1849), p. 164. 21  Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, p. 164. For further discussion of artistic and

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touched by) past poetic or architectural texts is his and many of his contemporaries’ acceptance of the Janus-faced quality of medi­evalism, its simultaneously backward- and forward-looking aspects.22 As Jean-Michel Leniaud’s ‘Avertissement […] autobiographique’ would suggest, it may be helpful or even necessary for postmodern or at least twenty-firstcentury scholars to frame their narratives within forms of personal or affective access to one’s subject matter to better comprehend why our modern predecessors, those scholars and enthusiasts, would have singled out the cathedral as such an attractive subject for their cultural work. The three preceding essays in this section demonstrate, in fact, that only a combination of scientific and affective approaches may offer observations that do epistemological justice to the various responses to the art and architecture of the cathedral between the late eighteenth and the early twentieth century. They fit the theoretical framework established by Carolyn Dinshaw’s How Soon Is Now? (2012), a study that ‘takes nonprofessionals and dilettantes seriously as they operate in nonmodern temporalities of their own’, thereby challenging scientistic grand narratives and revealing asynchronous ‘temporalities that are not the laminar flow of some putative stream of time, not historicist, not progressive or developmental in the modern sense’.23 However, does this framework fully explain the fervour with which the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artists and thinkers focus their attention on medi­eval cathedrals? Several times in the course of my reflections I have called the medi­e val cathedral a time machine, by which I mean to express the sense of the cathedral as a creative space which arrests the historical flow of time and thereby offers an opportunity for extraordinary reflection and even for inhabiting and connecting with otherwise inaccessible and historically removed experiences and cultures, especially concerning the Christian God. All the major features art-historical memorializations of medi­e val culture similar to Ruskin’s, see Mette Bruun and Stephanie Glaser’s ‘Introduction’ to the section ‘Artistic Negotiations with the Medi­eval Heritage’, in Negotiating Heritage: Memories of the Middle Ages, ed. by Mette B. Bruun and Stephanie Glaser (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), pp. 249–56. 22  On the impressive power of ‘touch’ to bridge past and present, see Carolyn Dinshaw’s Getting Medi­eval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Durham, NC: Duke Uni­ver­sity Press, 1999). For the specific affective appeal of the troubadour and troubadour poetry to both Romantic and early Victorian poets and their readers, see Elizabeth Fay, ‘Troubadour’, in Medi­evalism, ed. by Emery and Utz, pp. 255–63. 23  Carolyn Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now? Medi­eval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (Durham, NC: Duke Uni­ver­sity Press, 2012), p. xv.

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of the medi­e val cathedral harmonize to generate such a space. More often than not, early episcopal churches were built inside Roman castra and closely resembled Roman civic buildings, or the episcopal cathedra was established in the praetorium of former imperial administrators, hereby invoking a kind of continuous authority. Cathedrals also effect a successful symbiosis of essential religious and secular authority through royal and imperial coronations and the investment of priests and bishops, establishing thereby a perfect union between throne and altar in which the rituals of liturgy exalt the sacred functions of Christian rulers and Christian rulers guarantee the status of Christianity as state religion. (Gothic) cathedrals provide a universal functionality similar to a ‘house with many rooms’ insofar as they consist of dozens of smaller chapels in which lay individuals as well as organizations like the guilds sought to connect to the building’s spiritual power and prestige. The record-seeking height of their vaults and spires represents both theological symbolism (an omnipresent verticality strongly suggests an aspiration towards heaven) as well as regional and national political ambitions, civic pride, and even commercial interests. Cathedrals are structures in which all holy Christian rites and sacraments are celebrated, specifically the Eucharist, which is a presentist commemoration of Christ’s last supper meant to eliminate the historical time that has passed since Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. Stained-glass windows not only provided an essential visual catechesis (for example as a Biblia pauperum), but are part of an entire theological hermeneutic of sacred light, according to which their ‘multicolor loveliness […] called [one] away from external cares, […] transporting [one] from material to immaterial things’.24 Many of these architectural features meant to inspire impressions of infinity and aspire to the divine retained much of their efficacy throughout the nineteenth century. For example, the nineteenth-century nationalist fervour graced many Gothic cathedrals and churches with spires, and Gothic cathedrals remained the tallest and most impressively spacious buildings in their cities at least until around 1900, and in many cases long into the twentieth century.25 More importantly, however, as Margaret Lavinia Anderson 24 

So wrote Abbot Suger of St Denis, generally considered one of the founding fathers of medi­e val Gothic architecture. I am quoting from David Burr’s translation of Suger’s De administratione (On What Was Done During his Administration, c. 1144–48), provided by Paul Halsall for Fordham Uni­ver­sity’s Medi­eval Sourcebook in 1996, [accessed April 2016] (§XXXII). 25  In 1889, the Mole Antonelli in Turin, Italy, was the tallest masonry construction in Europe. It rose to 167.5 metres, higher than the tallest European cathedrals in Ulm, Cologne,

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has pointed out, the appeal of Catholicism did not decrease as much as many secular humanist grand narratives would have us believe. In comparing statements by English politician, essayist, and historian Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859) around 1840, Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881) around 1880, and German liberal pastor Friedrich Naumann (1860–1919) around 1907, Anderson demonstrates that, like most other nineteenth-century observers, none of the three would have had any doubt as to the unbroken vitality of the Roman Catholic Church, ‘a vitality that lay not in the church’s wealth or its institutional power’, but in the ‘willingness of the “people”, in a century whose economy and institutions were offering unprecedented freedom of thought, movement, and decision, to ally themselves with the church; […] to offer up their freedom to the most authoritarian structure around’.26 Whether this process should be termed an actual ‘revival’ or should more appropriately be defined as an unbroken continuity or longue durée of (medi­ eval) Catholic belief occluded by secularized scholarship in the twentieth century is difficult to decide.27 What is clear is that the ongoing vitality of Catholicism is true even for post-revolutionary France. While many of her cathedrals were vandalized from 1798 to 1830, a combination of Romantic nationalism and resilient Catholicism eventually reinstated the buildings to their former glory.28 And one of the public voices of the nineteenth-century Catholic ‘revival’ in France is none other than Victor Hugo, whose NotreRouen, Strasbourg, and Lincoln. Conceived originally as a synagogue, it was later considered a monument to national unity. See Museo Nazionale del Cinema, [accessed April 2016]. Also in 1889 the Eiffel Tower, which was propagated as a symbol of social concord, attained 300 meters and was the tallest construction at the time; see Stephanie A. Glaser, ‘The Eiffel Tower: Cultural Icon, Cultural Interface’, in Cultural Icons, ed. by David Scott and Keyan Tomaselli (Hoejbjerg: Intervention Press; Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press 2009), pp. 59–83. 26  Margaret Lavinia Anderson, ‘The Limits of Secularization: On the Problem of the Catholic Revival in Nineteenth-Century Germany’, Historical Journal, 38.3 (1995), 647–70 (p. 648). 27  Anderson concludes: ‘Not the secularization of Europe in the nineteenth, but only the secularization of scholarship in the twentieth century can account for the absence of the catholic revival from our research agendas for so long’ (‘The Limits of Secularization’, p. 648). 28  On this topic, see André Vauchez, ‘La Cathédrale’, in Les Lieux de Mémoire, ed. by Pierre Nora, 2nd edn, 3  vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), iii, 3109–40 (pp.  3122–34), and Alain Erlande-Brandenburg, ‘Notre Dame de Paris’, in Les Lieux de Mémoire, ed. by Nora, iii, 4177–4213.

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Dame de Paris had considerable influence on how his contemporaries viewed Catholicism and medi­eval cathedrals. The novel attracted thousands of French and international visitors to Paris, pressuring the city officials to begin restoring the building. In the words of his friend Félicité de Lammenais (1782–1854), one of the leaders of the French Catholic revival, Hugo’s writings were able ‘to give wings to Catholic thought’.29 One of the most favourable reviews of the novel was penned by another leader of the ‘revival’ movement, Charles-ForbesRené, Comte de Montalembert (1810–1870), in L’Avenir, a Catholic daily to which Hugo himself also contributed.30 I only dwell on Hugo’s religious connections because I believe they help achieve a more comprehensive understanding of the conspicuous fascination for the medi­eval cathedral displayed by the various artists, writers, and thinkers in Niehr’s, Glaser’s, and Leniaud’s essays than an exclusively art-historical or aesthetic focus can afford. Consider further that Thomas Rickman, originally a Quaker, was a member of the ‘Catholic Apostolic Church’, a religious movement often referred to as ‘Irvingism’ that spread from Britain through Germany and the United States and whose intent was to restore ancient Christianity in the Western world. 31 Thomas De Quincey’s writings reveal his English evangelical upbringing and, later, his growing conservative Protestantism.32 Gustav Meyrink was one of the founding members of the Blue Star Lodge in Prague, an organization that promoted the revival of mysticism and favoured the esoteric side of Christianity by making available texts the Church authorities considered heretical.33 Thomas Frognall Dibdin took holy orders in the Anglican Church and expressed his Christian faith in numerous publications.34 29 

Graham Robb, Victor Hugo: A Biography (New York: Norton, 1997), p. 85; and Max Bach, ‘The Reception of V. Hugo’s First Novels’, Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures, 18.2 (1964), 142–55. 30  Seamus Deane, ‘A Church Destroyed, the Church Restored: France’s Irish Catholicism’, Field Day Review, 7 (2011), 203–49 (p. 206). 31  David Hitchin, Quakers in Lewes: An Informal History (Lewes: Lewes Quakers, 2010), pp. 53–54. 32  See, for example, Robert Morrison and Daniel Sanjiv Roberts, ‘“I Was Worshipped, I Was Sacrificed”: A Passage to Thomas De Quincey’, in Thomas De Quincey: New Theoretical and Critical Directions, ed. by Robert Morrison and Daniel Sanjiv Roberts (New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 1–18 (p. 10). 33  Kirsten J. Grimstad, The Modern Revival of Gnosticism and Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2002), pp. 21–22. 34  The anonymous obituary in The Gentleman’s Magazine, 29 ( January 1848), 87–92

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John Ruskin’s Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) and Stones of Venice (1851–53) are indebted to his deeply held Christian beliefs, and his fascination with the cathedral was due to his rejection of a liberal political economy that disconnected individuals and destroyed the human interaction, association, and cooperation he saw represented in Christian medi­eval culture.35 And Claude Debussy was part of a Catholic symbolist revival that also manifested itself in literature (Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867), Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898)) and painting (Gustave Moreau (1826–1898)), men who were devoutly antipositivistic, experimented with séances, hypnotism, and various forms of occultism, and favoured a devotional piety focused on emotional experience expressed in the cult of the Virgin Mary.36 Clearly, what attracted many artists and writers to admire the art and architecture of the cathedral from the late eighteenth through the early twentieth century was, more often than not, an astonishingly cross-confessional and generally conservative and nostalgic desire to arrest the ever-accelerating movement of time, academic historicism and scientific positivism, and the many other disquieting and de-individualizing cultural, economic, and social consequences of modernism.37 Any scholarly perspective that would occlude the foundational subjective religious convictions informing the post-medi­e val reception of the cathedral would re-enact the epistemological fallacy Kathleen Biddick holds responsible for the othering of (subjective) medi­evalism by (academic and scientific) medi­eval studies. In the long history of the reception of medi­eval culture in post-medi­eval times, secular humanism, which has dominated twentieth-century academic views on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century responses to the cathedral, is now itself under critical revision by those (p. 87), calls him ‘Rector of St Marys, Bryanstone-square, Vicar of Exning, Suffolk, and Chaplain in Ordinary to her Majesty’. 35  See Michael Wheeler, Ruskin’s God (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 1999), and David M. Craig, John Ruskin and the Ethics of Consumption (Charlottesville: Uni­ver­sity of Virginia Press, 2006), specifically the section ‘The Politics of Medi­evalism’ (pp. 202–48). 36  Stephen Schloesser, ‘Vivo ergo cogito: Modernism as Temporalization and its Discontents’, in The Reception of Pragmatism in France and the Rise of Roman Catholic Modernism, 1890–1914, ed. by David G. Schultenover (Washington, DC: Catholic Uni­ver­sity of America Press, 2009), pp. 21–58 (pp. 47–49). 37  Nigel Yates, Liturgical Space: Christian Worship and Church Buildings in Western Europe, 1500–2000 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008). In the chapter ‘Ecclesiology and Neo-Medi­ evalism’, Yates demonstrates how Protestants and Catholics alike saw the cathedral as the ideal space for the celebration of Christian ritual.

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who can once again see the value of subjectivity, enthusiasm, and amateurism in reconnecting with the past.38

38  See William Calin, ‘Christianity’, in Medi­evalism, ed. by Emery and Utz, pp. 35–41, who debunks another secular humanist myth, that of the dichotomy of the medi­e val ‘age of faith’ and the Renaissance ‘age of humanism’: ‘There was no humanist revolution in the Renaissance. The umanisti were, first and foremost, schoolteachers. They taught grammar, rhetoric, history, and aesthetics as the increments of a general education. The assumption was always that humanistic studies would develop virtue, would make one a better and more truly Christian person. These Renaissance humanists were all Christian; a number of them were ordained priests. They were, for the most part, apolitical; they relished the contemplative life and endorsed a hereditary or elective monarchy. Oriented toward the past rather than toward the future, to the extent that they held a personal philosophy, it was Christian Neoplatonism. They were textcentered, book people. Finally, they did not envisage the Middle Ages as different from their own time with regard to faith, nor did they either praise or denigrate a Christian Middle Ages’ (p. 35). See also my attempt at defining temporality as the concept keeping twentieth-century scholars from investigating and writing about religion, in ‘Medi­evalism Studies and the Subject of Religion’, Studies in Medi­evalism, 24 (2015), 11–19.

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Eighteenth Century Carter, John, Specimens of Gothic Architecture and Ancient Buildings in England; comprised in One Hundred and Twenty Views, 4 vols (London: Edward Jeffery and Son, 1824) Cordemoy, Jean-Louis de, ‘Gothique’, in Nouveau Traité de toute l’Architecture ou l’art de bastir; utile aux entrepreneurs et aux ouvriers […]; avec un dictionnaire des termes d’Architecture (Paris: J. B. Coignard, 1714), pp. 241–43 Forster, Georg, ‘Ansichten vom Niederrhein, von Brabant, Flandern, Holland, England und Frankreich im April, Mai und Junius 1790’, in Georg Forsters Werke, ed.  by Gerhard Steiner, 18 vols (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1958), ix Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, ‘Von Deutscher Baukunst: D.  M. Ervini a Steinbach’ [1773], in Von deutscher Art und Kunst: einige fliegende Blätter, ed. by Hans Dietrich Irm­scher (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1995), pp. 93–104 Laugier, Marc-Antoine, Essai sur l’architecture (Paris: Duchesne, 1753) Murphy, James, Plans, Elevations, Sections, and Views of the Church of Batalha. […] To which is prefixed an Introductory Discourse on the Principles of Gothic Architecture (London, I. & J. Taylor, 1795) Seroux d’Agincourt, Jean-Baptiste-Louis-Georges, Histoire de l’Art par les Monumens depuis sa décadence au ive siècle jusqu’à son renouvellement au xvie siècle [begun 1780] (Paris: Treuttel and Würtz, 1823)

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Soufflot, Jacques-Germain, ‘Mémoire sur l’architecture gothique’ [1741], in Michael Petzet, Soufflots Sainte-Geneviève und der französische Kirchenbau des 18. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 1961), pp. 135–41 Wren, Christopher, ‘Memorial to the Bishop of Rochester, in the Year 1713’, in Parentalia: or Memoirs of the Family of the Wrens, comp. by his son Christopher Wren and ed. by Steven Wren (London: T. Osborne, 1750), pp. 297–98

Nineteenth Century Boisserée, Sulpiz, Ansichten, Risse, und einzelne Theile des Domes von Köln (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1821) —— , Geschichte und Beschreibung des Doms von Köln (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1823) —— , Histoire et description de la cathédrale de Cologne, accompagnée de recherches sur l’architecture des anciennes cathédrales (Paris: F. Didot père et fils, 1823) Britton, John, Cathedral Antiquities: Historical and Descriptive Accounts […] of the following English Cathedrals, Canterbury, York, Salisbury, Norwich, Winchester, Lichfield, Oxford, Wells, Exeter, Peterborough, Gloucester, Bristol, Hereford, and Worcester, 14 vols (London: Longman, Hurst, Reese, Orme and Brown, 1814–31) Caumont, Arcisse de, ‘Essai sur l’architecture religieuse du moyen âge, particulièrement en Normandie’, Mémoires de la Société des Antiquaires de la Normandie, 1 (1825), 535–677 Chapuy, Nicolas-Marie-Joseph, Cathédrales françaises dessinées, lithographiées et publiées par Chapuy, […] avec un texte historique, ed. by F. T. Jolimont, 23 vols (Paris: Leblanc, 1823–24; Paris: Engelmann, 1824–31) Chateaubriand, François-René de, ‘Les Églises gothiques’, in Génie du Christianisme [1802], 2 vols (Paris: G. F. Flammarion, 1966), i, 399–401 De Quincey, Thomas, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings, ed. by Robert Morrison (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 2013) Dibdin, Thomas Frognall, A  Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, 3 vols (London: Shakespeare Press, 1821); commentary in French translation Voyage bibliographique, archéologique et pittoresque en France par le Rév.  Th. Frognall Dibdin, trans. by Theódore Licquet and G.  A. Crapelet, 4 vols (Paris: Crapelet, 1825) Fergusson, James, The Illustrated Handbook of Architecture: Being a Concise and Popular Account of the Different Styles of Architecture Prevailing in All Ages and Countries, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1855) —— , History of Architecture, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1865–67) Freeman, Edward Augustus, A History of Architecture (London: J. Masters, 1849) Gerville, Charles-Alexis-Adrien Duhérissier de, ‘Détails sur l’église de Mortain et sur la cathédrale de Coutances, adressés à M. le baron de Vaussay’, Mémoires de la Société des Antiquaires de la Normandie, 1 (1825), 142–66 Görres, Joseph von, ‘Der Dom in Köln’, Rheinischer Merkur (20 November 1814), repr. in Joseph von Görres’ Ausgewählte Werke und Briefe, ed. by Wilhelm Schellberg, 2 vols (Kempten: Verlag der Jospeh Kösel’schen Buchhandlung, 1911), i, 592–95

Select Bibliography 355 Hugo, Victor, Notre-Dame de Paris: 1492 [1831] (Paris: Gallimard, 2002) Huysmans, J.-K., En Route [1895] (Paris: Gallimard, 1996) —— , La Cathédrale [1898] (Monaco: Editions du Rocher, 1992) —— , La Bièvre et Saint-Séverin (Paris: Stock, 1898) Laborde, Alexandre de, Les Monuments de la France classés chronologiquement et considérés sous le rapport des faits historiques et de l’étude des arts […], 2 vols (Paris: P. Didot l’Ainé, 1816–36) Langlois, Eustache-Hyacinthe, Essai historique et descriptif sur l’abbaye de Fontenelle ou de Saint-Wandrille […] (Paris: Imprimerie de J. Tastu, 1827) Lassus, Jean-Baptiste, Eugène-Emmanuel Armaury Duval, Adolphe-Napoléon Didron, and Paul Durand, Monographie de la cathédrale de Chartres, 9 vols (Paris: Imprimerie impériale, 1842–65) Mâle, Émile, L’Art religieux du xiiie siècle en France: Étude sur l’iconographie du Moyen Âge et sur ses sources d’inspiration [1898], 8th edn (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1948) Michelet, Jules, Histoire de France. Moyen Âge [1833], in Œuvres completes, 21 vols (Paris: Flammarion, 1971–82), iv, ed. by Paul Viallaneix (1974) Moller, Georg, Denkmäler der Deutschen Baukunst, i (Darmstadt: Heyer und Leske, 1815–21), ii (Darmstadt: Leske, 1822–31), iii, continued by Ernst Gladbach (Darmstadt: Leske, 1844–51) Morris, William, ‘Shadows of Amiens’ [1856], in Prose and Poetry (1856–1870) by William Morris (London: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 1913), pp. 617–31 —— , William Morris on Architecture, ed.  by Chris Mile (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996) Nodier, Charles, Isidore Justin Taylor, and Alphonse de Cailleux, Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’ancienne France: Ancienne Normandie, 3 vols (Paris: P. Didot l’ainé, 1820–78) Pater, Walter Horatio, ‘Notre-Dame d’Amiens’ [1894], in Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays (London: Macmillan, 1924), pp. 109–25 Pugin, A. W. N., Contrasts: Or, a Parallel between the Noble Edifices of the Middle Ages, and Corresponding Buildings of the Present Day; Shewing the Present Decay of Taste (1836; repr. London: Charles Dolman, 1841) —— , The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture (London: J. Weale, 1841) Reichensperger, August, Fingerzeige auf dem Gebiete der kirchlichen Kunst, 2nd edn (Leipzig: Weigel, 1855) Rickman, Thomas, An Attempt to Discriminate the Styles of English Architecture, from the Conquest to the Reformation; with Notices of Eight Hundred English Buildings: preceded by a Sketch of the Grecian and Roman Orders, 2nd edn with additions (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, [1819]) Rodenbach, Georges, Le Carillonneur [1897] (Bruxelles: Les Éperonniers, 1987) Ruskin, John, The Seven Lamps of Architecture [1849], in The Works of John Ruskin, ed. by E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols (London: George Allen, 1903–12), viii (1903)

356

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—— , ‘The Nature of Gothic’, in The Stones of Venice [1851–53], vol. ii, The Sea-Stories, in The Works of John Ruskin, ed. by E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols (London: George Allen, 1903–12), x (1903), 180–269 —— , Lectures on Architecture and Painting [1853], in The Works of John Ruskin, ed. by E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols (London: George Allen, 1903–12), xii (1904) —— , The Bible of Amiens [1884], in The Works of John Ruskin, ed. by E.  T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols (London: George Allen, 1903–12), xxxiii (1908) Schlegel, Friedrich, ‘Briefe auf einer Reise durch die Niederlande, Rheingegenden, die Schweiz und einen Teil von Frankreich in dem Jahre 1804 und 1805’, in Poetisches Taschenbuch für das Jahr 1806 (Berlin: Friedrich Unger, 1806), pp. 257–390 Soler, Ramón López, La catedral de Sevilla, novela tomada de la que escribió el célebre Victor Hugo en francés con el título de Notre Dame de Paris (Madrid: Repullés, 1834) Street, George Edmund, Some Account of Gothic Architecture in Spain (London: John Murray, 1865) Turner, Dawson, Account of a Tour in Normandy; Undertaken Chiefly for the Purpose of Investigating the Architectural Antiquities of the Duchy, with Observations on its History, on the Country, and on its Inhabitants, 2 vols (London: John and Arthur Arch, 1820) Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène-Emmanuel, Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française du xie au xvie siècle [1854–68], 10 vols (Paris: Librairies-Imprimeries Réunies [ancienne maison Morel], [n.d.]) —— , Entretiens sur l’architecture, 2 vols (Paris: A. Morel, 1863–72) —— , Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale (Paris: J. Hetzel et Cie, 1878) Vitet, Ludovic, Monographie de l’église Notre-Dame de Noyon: Plans, coupes, élévations et détails par Daniel Ramée, Collection de documents inédits sur l’histoire de France, 3rd ser., Archéologie (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1845) Zola, Émile, Le Rêve [1888] (Paris: Gallimard, 1986)

Twentieth Century Adams, Henry, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres [1904] (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986) Farrère, Claude, Fumée d’opium, preface by Pierre Louÿs, illustrations by Louis Morin (Paris: Flammarion, 1919) Gerstenberg, Kurt, Deutsche Sondergotik: Eine Untersuchung über das Wesen der deutschen Bau­kunst im späten Mittelalter [1913] (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesell­ schaft, 1969) Kropotkin, Peter, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution [1902] (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2006) Magre, Maurice, ‘La Cathédrale furieuse’, in La Montée aux enfers (Paris: Fasquelle, 1918) Mâle, Émile, L’Art allemand et l’art français du Moyen Âge (Paris: Armand Colin, 1918) —— , ‘La Cathédrale de Reims (à propos d’un livre récent) [Paul Vitry, La Cathédrale de Reims]’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, February 1921, 73–88 [Mérovak], La Cathédrale des morts (Aix-les-Bains, [1918])

Select Bibliography 357 Mithouard, Adrien, ‘L’Art gothique et l’art impressionniste’, in Le Tourment de l’unité (Paris: Mercure de France, 1901), pp. 311–48 Morand, Eugène, Les Cathédrales: poème dramatique créé par Mme Sarah Bernhardt (Paris: Librairie théâtrale, artistique et littéraire, 1915) Proust, Marcel, ‘La Mort des cathédrales’ [1904], in Contre Saint-Beuve: précédé de ‘Pastiches et mélanges’ et suivi de ‘Essais et articles’, ed. by Pierre Clarac and Yves Sandre (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), pp. 141–49 —— , À la recherche du temps perdu [1913–27], ed. by Jean-Yves Tadié, 4 vols (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1987–89) Rilke, Rainer Maria, ‘L’Ange du Méridien’, ‘Die Kathedrale’, ‘Das Portal’, ‘Die Fensterrose’, ‘Das Kapital’, ‘Gott im Mittelalter’, in Neue Gedichte [1907–08] (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1974) Rodin, Auguste, ‘The Gothic in the Cathedrals and Churches of France’, dictated by Rodin to a stenographic reporter and trans. by Frederick Lawton, North American Review, 180.579 (February 1905), 219–29 —— , Les Cathédrales de France [1914] (Paris: Editions Denoël, 1983) Ruskin, John, La Bible d’Amiens, trans. by Marcel Proust (1904; repr. Paris: Mércure de France, 1947) Symons, Arthur, Studies in the Seven Arts (London: Constable, 1906) Worringer, Wilhelm, Formprobleme der Gotik (München: R. Piper, 1911)

Secondary Works Araguas, Philippe, ‘Le Style mudéjar et l’architecture néo-mudejare comme composantes de l’idéologie nationaliste dans l’Espagne de la fin du xixe siècle et du début du xxe siècle’, in Nations en quête de passé: La Péninsule ibérique (xixe–xxe siècles), ed. by Carlos Serrano (Paris: Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 2000), pp. 73–92 Baltrušaitis, Jurgis, Le Moyen Âge fantastique: Antiquités et exotismes dans l’art gothique (Paris: Flammarion, 1981; repr. 1993) Beer, E. S. de, ‘Gothic: Origin and Diffusion of the Term; The Idea of Style in Architecture’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 11 (1948), 143–62 Bercé, Françoise, Viollet-le-Duc (Paris: Editions du Patrimoine, Centre des monuments nationaux, 2013) Bergdoll, Barry, ‘The Ideal of the Gothic Cathedral in 1852’, in A. W. N. Pugin: Master of Gothic Revival, ed. by Paul Atterbury (New Haven: Yale Uni­ver­sity Press, 1995), pp. 103–35 Bernier, Roland R., Monument, Moment, and Memory: Monet’s Cathedral in Fin-de-Siècle France (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell Uni­ver­sity Press, 2007) Beutler, Ernst, Von Deutscher Baukunst: Goethes Hymnus auf Erwin von Steinbach. Seine Entstehung und Wirkung (München: F. Bruckmann, 1943) Bisky, Jens, Poesie der Baukunst: Architekturästhetik von Winckelmann bis Boisserée (Wei­ mar: Verlag Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 2000)

358

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Borger-Keweloh, Nicola, Die mittelalterlichen Dome im 19. Jahrhundert (München: C. H. Beck, 1986) Bremner, G. A., Imperial Gothic: Religious Architecture and High Anglican Culture in the British Empire, c. 1840–70 (New Haven: Yale Uni­ver­sity Press, 2013) Bressani, Martin, Architecture and the Historical Imagination: Eugène-Emmanuel Violletle-Duc (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014) Brooks, Chris, The Gothic Revival (London: Phaidon, 1999) Carqué, Bernd, Daniela Mondini, and Matthias Noell, eds, Visualisierung und Imagina­ tion: Materielle Relikte des Mittelalters in bildlichen Darstellungen der Neu­zeit und der Moderne, 2 vols, Göttinger Gespräche zur Geschichtswissenschaft, 25 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006) Chapeaurouge, Donat de, ‘Die “Kathedrale” als moderns Bildthema’, Jahrbuch der Ham­ burger Kunstsammlungen, 18 (1973), 155–72 Clark, Kenneth, The Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste (1928; repr. New York: Harper and Row, 1974) Crook, J.  Mordaunt, John Carter and the Mind of the Gothic Revival (London: W.  S. Maney & Son in association with the Society of Antiquaries of London, 1995) Curie, Maylis, ‘The Representation of the Cathedral in French Visual Culture, 1870–1914’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Uni­ver­sity of Edinburgh, 2005) Eastlake, Charles, A History of the Gothic Revival: An Attempt to Show How the Taste for Mediæval Architecture, which Lingered in England during the Two Last Centuries Has since Been Encouraged and Developed (London: Longmans, Green, 1872) Eimer, Gerhard, Caspar David Friedrich und die Gotik: Analysen und Deutungsversuche aus Stockholmer Vorlesungen (Hamburg: Verlag Christoph von der Ropp, 1963) Emery, Elizabeth, Romancing the Cathedral: Gothic Architecture in Fin-de-Siècle French Culture (New York: SUNY Press, 2001) Emery, Elizabeth, and Laura Morowitz, Consuming the Past: The Medi­eval Revival in Finde-Siècle France (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003) Erlande-Brandenburg, Alain, La Cathédrale (Paris: Fayard, 1989) —— , ‘Notre-Dame de Paris’, in Pierre Nora, Les Lieux de mémoire [1984–92], 2nd edn, 3 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), iii, 4177–4213 Foucart, Bruno, ‘La “Cathédrale synthétique” de Louis-Auguste Boileau’, Revue de l’art, 3 (1969), 49–66 Fraisse, Luc, L’Œuvre cathédrale: Proust et l’architecture médiévale (Paris: José Corti, 1990) —— , ‘Proust et Viollet-le-Duc: De l’ésthétique de Combray à l’esthétique de La Recherche’, Revue de l’histoire littéraire de la France, 100.1 (2000), 45–90 Frankl, Paul, The Gothic: Literary Sources and Interpretations through Eight Centuries, trans. by Priscilla Silz (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni­ver­sity Press, 1960) Germann, Georg, The Gothic Revival in Europe and Britain: Sources, Influences and Ideas, trans. by Gerald Onn (London: Lund Humphries, 1972) —— , Neogotik: Geschichte ihrer Architekturtheorie (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlangs-Anstalt, 1974)

Select Bibliography 359 Glaser, Stephanie A., ‘Construire comme une église: À la recherche du temps perdu et la tradition de l’analogie architecturale’, in Proust et les ‘Moyen Âge’, ed. by Sophie Duval and Miren Lacassagne (Paris: Hermann, 2015), pp. 77–93 —— , ‘“Deutsche Baukunst”, “Architecture Française”: The Use of the Gothic Cathedral in the Construction of National Memory in Nineteenth-Century Germany and France’, in Orientations: Space / Time / Image / Word, ed. by Claus Clüver, Leo Hoek, and Véronique Plesch, Word and Image Interactions, 5 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), pp. 77–91 —— , ‘“Ein, ganzer, großer Eindruck füllte meine Seele”: German Romanticism and the Gothic Facade’, in Changing Borders: Contemporary Positions in Intermediality, ed. by Jens Arvidson and others (Lund: Intermedia Studies Press, 2007), pp. 239–55 —— , ‘Explorations of the Gothic Cathedral in Nineteenth-Century France’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Indiana Uni­ver­sity, 2002) —— , ‘The Gothic Cathedral and Medi­evalism’, in ‘Forum: Falling into Medi­evalism’, Universitas, 2.1 (2006), —— , ‘The Gothic Façade in Word and Image: Romantic and Modern Perspectives on Notre-Dame de Paris’, in Media inter Media: Essays in Honor of Claus Clüver, ed. by Stephanie A. Glaser (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), pp. 59–94 —— , ‘Lectures de l’ogive au xixe siècle’, in Images du Moyen Âge, ed. by Isabelle Durand-Le Guern (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2006), pp. 333–47 —— , ‘Of Revolutions, Republics and Spires: Nineteenth-Century France and the Gothic Cathedral’, in Signs of Change: Transformations of Christian Traditions and their Representation in the Arts, 1000–2000, ed. by Nils Holger Petersen, Claus Clüver, and Nicolas Bell (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), pp. 453–73 —— , ‘Space, Time and Narrative: The Literary Unfolding of Architecture’, in TextArchitekturen: Baukunst (in) der Literatur des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. by Robert Krause and Evi Zemanek (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), pp. 13–30 —— , ‘Tour de fer et tours de pierre: La Tour Eiffel et la cathédrale gothique dans l’imaginaire au tournant du xxe siècle’, in L’Imaginaire moderne de la cathédrale, ed. by Georges Roque (Paris: Librairie d’Amérique et d’orient, Jean Maisonrouge, 2012), pp. 41–69 —— , ‘“Les Vitraux toujours en fleur”: Évolution d’un thème littéraire et artistique de Victor Hugo à Robert Delaunay’, in La Cathédrale, ed. by Joëlle Prungnaud (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses de l’Université Charles-de-Gaulle–Lille 3, 2001), pp. 215–28 Hamilton, George Heard, Claude Monet’s Paintings of Rouen Cathedral (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 1960) Harvey, J. H., ‘The Origins of Gothic Architecture: Some Further Thoughts’, Antiquaries Journal, 48 (1968), 87–99 Haus, Andreas, ‘Gedanken über K. F. Schinkels Einstellung zur Gotik’, Marburger Jahr­ buch für Kunstwissenschaft, 22 (1989), 215–31 Herbert, Robert L., ‘The Decorative and the Natural in Monet’s Cathedrals’, in Aspects of Monet: A Symposium on the Artist’s Life and Times, ed. by John Rewald and Frances Weitzenhoffer (New York: Harry Abrams, 1984), pp. 162–79

360

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Källström, Staffan, Framtidens katedral: medeltidsdröm och utopisk modernism (Stock­ holm: Carlsson, 2000) Kalter, Barrett, ‘DIY Gothic: Thomas Gray and the Medi­eval Revival’, English Literary History, 70.4 (2003), 989–1019 Kamphausen, Alfred, Gotik ohne Gott: Ein Beitrag zur Deutung der Neugotik und des 19. Jahrhunderts (Tübingen: Matthiesen, 1952) Kronenberger, Dagmar, Die Kathedrale als Serienmotiv: Motivkundliche Studien zu einem Bildthema in der Malerei des französischen Impressionismus (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1996) Le Men, Ségolène, La Cathédrale illustrée de Hugo à Monet: Regard romantique et modernité (Paris: CNRS, 1998) Leniaud, Jean-Michel, Les Cathédrales au xixe siècle (Paris: Economica, 1993) —— , Fallait-il achever Saint-Ouen de Rouen? Débats et polémiques, 1837–1852 (Rouen: ASI Editions, 2002) —— , Jean-Baptiste Lassus (1807–1857) ou le temps retrouvé des cathédrales, Bibliothèque de la société français d’archéologie (Geneva: Droz; Paris: Arts et Métiers graphiques, 1980) —— , ‘Die Kathedrale im Frankreich des 19. Jahrhunderts: Ein Denkmal des Kondordats’, in Kunst Macht, und Institution: Studien zur Philosophischen Anthropologie, soziologischen Theorie und Kultursoziologie der Moderne, ed. by Joachim Fischer and Hans Joas (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2003), pp. 569–76 —— , Viollet-le-Duc ou les délires du système (Paris: Éditions Mengès, 1994) Lewis, Michael J., The Gothic Revival (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002) —— , The Politics of the German Gothic Revival: August Reichensperger (Cam­bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993) Lüdtke, G., ‘“Gothisch” im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert’, Zeitschrift für Deutsche Wortforschung, 4 (1903), 133–52 März, Roland, ‘The Cathedral of Romanticism. Gothic Visions of Architecture: Lyonel Feininger and Karl Friedrich Schinkel’, trans. by Michael Robinson, in The Romantic Spirit in German Art, 1790–1990, ed. by Keith Hartley and others (London: South Bank Centre; Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland; München: Oktagon Verlag, 1994), pp. 164–70 Mateo, Matilde, ‘En busca del origen del Gótico: El viaje de Thomas Pitt por España en 1760’, Goya: Revista de Arte, 292 (2003), 9–22 —— , ‘La frontera del gótico: James Fergusson y la marginación del gótico español’, Quintana: revista del Departamento de Historia del Arte, 13 (2014), 79–99 —— , ‘The Making of the Saracen Style: The Crusades and Medi­eval Architecture in the British Imagination of the 18th and 19th centuries’, in The Crusades: Other Experiences, Alternate Perspectives, ed. by Khalil I. Semaan (Binghamton, NY: Global Academic Publishings, 2003), pp. 115–40 —— , ‘Medi­eval Art in the Neoclassical Age of Spain: Sources and Ideas of Spanish Criticism of Medi­eval Art (1759–1808)’ (unpublished master’s thesis, Uni­ver­sity of Essex, 1994)

Select Bibliography 361 —— , ‘La visión británica del arte medi­eval cristiano en España (siglos xvii–xix)’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Uni­ver­sity of Santiago de Compostela, 1994) Michaud-Fréjaville, Françoise, ed., Images de la cathédrale dans la littérature et dans l’art, Art sacré, 26 (Châtillon-sur-Indre: Rencontre avec le patrimoine religieux, 2008) —— , ed., Viollet-le-Duc et la cathédrale idéale, Art sacré, 23 (Châtillon-sur-Indre: Ren­ contre avec le patrimoine religieux, 2007) Middleton, Robin D., ‘The Abbé de Cordemoy and the Graeco-Gothic Ideal: A Prelude to Romantic Classicism’ Part  I, Journal of the Warburg and Courtald Institutes, 25 (1962), 278–320, and Part  II, Journal of the Warburg and Courtald Institutes, 26 (1963), 90–123 —— , ‘Viollet-le-Duc’s Influence in Nineteenth-Century England’, Art History, 4.2 (1981), 203–19 Middleton, Robin D., and David Watkin, Neoclassical and 19th Century Architecture, vol. ii (Milano: Electa, 1980) Murphy, Kevin D., ‘Cubism and the Gothic Tradition’, in Architecture and Cubism, ed. by Eve Blau and Nancy  J. Troy (Montréal: Centre canadien d’architecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture; Cam­bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), pp. 59–76 —— , ‘The Historic Building in the Modernized City: The Cathedrals of Paris and Rouen in the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Urban History, 37.2 (2010), 278–96 —— , ‘Memory and Modernity: Architectural Restoration in France, 1830–1848’ (un­ published doctoral dissertation, Northwestern Uni­ver­sity, 1992) —— , Memory and Modernity: Viollet-le-Duc at Vézelay (Uni­ver­sity Park: Pennsylvania State Uni­ver­sity Press, 2000) —— , ‘Restoring Rouen: The Politics of Preservation in July Monarchy France’, Word and Image, 11.2 (1995), 196–206 Niehr, Klaus, Gotikbilder — Gotiktheorien: Studien zur Wahrnehmung und Erforschung mittel­alterlicher Architektur in Deutschland zwischen ca. 1750 und 1850 (Berlin: Ge­ brüder Mann, 1999) —— , ‘Die perfekte Kathedrale: Imagination des monumentalen Mittelalters im französischen 19. Jahrundert’, in Bilder gedeuteter Geschichte: Das Mittelalter in der Kunst und Architektur der Moderne, ed. by Otto Gerhard Oexle, Áron Petneki, and Leszek Zygner, 2 vols, Göttinger Gespräche zur Geschichtswissenschaft, 23 (Göttingen: Wall­stein Verlag, 2004), i, 163–221 Nipperdey, Thomas, ‘Der Kölner Dom als Nationaldenkmal’, Historische Zeitschrift, 233 (1981), 595–613 —— , ‘Nationalidee und Nationaldenkmal in Deutschland im 19. Jahrhundert’, Historische Zeitschrift, 206 (1968), 529–85 Padre, Nieves Panadero, ‘Teorías sobre el origen de la arquitectura gótica en la historiografía ilustrada y romántica española’, Anales de Historia del Arte, 4 (1994), 203–11 Panofsky, Erwin, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism: An Inquiry into the Analogy of the Arts, Philosophy, and Religion in the Middle Ages (1951; repr. New York: Meridian, 1975) Pevsner, Nikolaus, Some Architectural Writers of the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Claren­ don Press, 1972)

362

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Prungnaud, Joëlle, ed., La Cathédrale (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses de l’Université Charlesde-Gaulle–Lille 3, 2001) —— , Figures littéraires de la cathédrale, 1880–1918 (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses du Septentrion, 2008) —— , Gothique et Décadence: Recherches sur la continuité d’un mythe et d’un genre au xixe siècle en Grande-Bretagne et en France (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1997) Raquejo, Tonia, ‘The “Arab Cathedrals”: Moorish Architecture as Seen by British Travellers’, Burlington Magazine, 128.1001 (1986), 555–63 —— , El palacio encantado: La Alhambra en el arte británico (Madrid: Taurus, 1989) Recht, Roland, ed., L’Art et les révolutions, Section 6: Survivances et réveils de l’architecture gothique, Actes du XXVIIIe congrès international d’histoire de l’art (Strasbourg: Société Alsacienne pour le Développement de l’Histoire de l’Art, 1992) —— , ‘Gottfried Semper et Viollet-le-Duc: Leurs conceptions du patrimoine monumental’, Revue germanique international, 131 (2000), 155–68 —— , ed., Victor Hugo et le débat patrimonial (Paris: Somogy editions de l’art/Institut natio­nal du patrimoine, 2003) Robson-Scott, W.  D., The Literary Background of the Gothic Revival in Germany: A Chapter in the History of Taste (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965) Roque, Georges, ed., L’Imaginaire moderne de la cathédrale (Paris: Librairie d’Amérique et d’orient, Jean Maisonrouge, 2012) Sedlmayer, Hans, Die Entstehung der Kathedrale (1950; repr. Freiburg im Breisgau: Verlag Herder, 1993) Simson, Otto von, The Gothic Cathedral: Origins of Gothic Architecture and the Medi­eval Concept of Order, Bollingen Series (1956; repr. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni­ver­sity Press, 1989) Sponheuer, Bernd, ‘Zur Kategorie des “Gotischen” (nicht nur) in der Bach-Rezeption des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts’, in Rezeption als Innovation: Untersuchungen zu einem Grundmodell der europäischen Kompositionsgeschichte, ed. by Bernd Sponheuer, Siegfried Oechsle, and Helmut Well (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2001), pp. 217–46 Sumowski, Werner, ‘Gotische Dome bei Caspar David Friedrich’, in Klassizismus und Ro­ man­tik in Deutschland: Gemälde und Zeichnungen aus der Sammlung Georg Schäfer, Schweinfurt (Schweinfurt: Weppert, 1966), pp. 39–42 Trachtenberg, Marvin, ‘Suger’s Miracles, Branner’s Bourges: Reflections on “Gothic Archi­tecture” as Medi­eval Modernism’, Gesta, 39.2 (2000), 183–205 Utz, Richard, ‘The Medi­eval Cathedral: From Spiritual Site to National Super-Signifier’, The Year’s Work in Medi­evalism, 15 (2001), 127–31 Vaisse, Pierre, ‘Le Corbusier et le gothique’, Revue de l’art, 118 (1997), 17–27 Vauchez, André, ‘La Cathédrale’, in Les Lieux de Mémoire, ed. by Pierre Nora, 3 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), iii, 3109–40 Wagner, Christoph, ‘Gotikvisionen am Bauhaus’, in Mittelalter und Mittelalterrezeption (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2005), pp. 382–406 Whittingham, Selby, Constable and Turner at Salisbury, 2nd edn (Salisbury: Friends of Salis­bury Cathedral, 1980)

Select Bibliography 363 Williams, Elizabeth, ‘The Perception of Romanesque Art in the Romantic Period: Archaeo­logical Attitudes in France in the 1820s and 1830s’, Forum for Modern Lan­ guage Studies, 21 (1985), 303–21

Exhibition Catalogues 20 Siècles en cathédrales, ed. by Catherine Arminjon and Denis Lavalle (Paris: Éditions du patrimoine, 2001) Cathédrales 1789–1914: Un Mythe Moderne (Paris: Somogy editions d’art, 2014) Le ‘Gothique’ retrouvé avant Viollet-le Duc (Paris: Caisse National des Monuments Histo­ riques et des Sites, 1979) L’Invention du passé: Gothique mon amour, 1802–1830, exhibition catalogue (Paris: Hazan, 2014) Die Kathedrale: Romantik — Impressionismus — Moderne (München: Hirmer Verlag, 2014)

Index

aesthetics: 1, 2, 12–13, 41–42, 60–61, 62–64, 76, 77, 91, 208–09, 258, 264, 266, 273, 274, 275, 276–80, 281, 282–83, 285, 287, 289–91, 294, 300, 304, 307, 312; see also classicism; picturesque; Romanticism; sublime; symbolist aesthetic Alhambra: 66, 67, 69, 70 Amiens Cathedral (Cathédrale Notre-Dame d’Amiens): 7 n. 15, 11 nn. 26–28, 107, 133, 200, 202–03, 214–15, 229; see also Morris, William; Pater, Walter; Proust, Marcel anarchism: 41,149–56, 158, 160, 163–65, 168, 169–70, 209, 219, 221, 227; see also anarchy under cathedral; Luce, Maximilien; Pissarro, Camille architecture and literature see literary paradigm and music: 191, 299–302, 308–10, 325–26, 329–31, 329–30 n. 25, 331, 333, 335, 341, 343 n. 12; see also frozen music; musical paradigm; symphony and propaganda: 1–2, 40, 71–80, 83, 89, 92–93, 94–96, 109, 112–13, 116, 120–28, 129, 142, 143–46, 183–84, 189–90 structural readings of: 132–36, 138–39; see also space; structuralism textual readings of: 132, 136–37, 138–9, 141, 146 see also cathedral; Gothic architecture Avila Cathedral (Catedral de Ávila): 53, 54

Babel: 316, 323–24, 328 Bach, Johann Sebastian: 276–78, 285–86, 287–89, 291, 298, 307–08, 312 n. 167; see also Hoffmann, E. T. A.; Reichardt, Johann Friedrich; Scheibe, Johann Adolph Bachelard, Gaston: 138, 139–40, 319 Baltrušaitis, Jurgis: 57 nn. 12–13, 319–20 Barcelona Cathedral (Catedral de Barcelona): 54, 54–55, 334 Barthes, Roland: 108 n. 18, 136 Baxandall, Michael: 252 n. 55 Beauvais Cathedral (Cathédrale Saint-Pierre de Beauvais): 188 n. 58, 226 Beauvais, Vincent de: 305, 306 Speculum Majus: 305 Beckford, William: 132–33, 134, 323; see also Fonthill Abbey Vathek: 133, 323 Beethoven, Ludwig van: 289, 290–98, 307–08, 312; see also Hoffmann, E. T. A. Bentley, John Francis: 39 Berlin Cathedral (Berliner Dom): 94–99, 95, 96, 97 Berlioz, Hector (Symphonie fantastique): 295–96 Boileau, Louis-Auguste: 39 Boisserée, Sulpiz: 5, 12, 14, 19, 84, 264 n. 2 Ansichten, Risse, und einzelne Theile des Domes von Köln: 19, 84 Geschichte und Beschreibung des Doms von Köln: 19, 264 n. 2 Britton, John: 9–10, 10 n. 23, 19, 257, 258, 259 Cathedral Antiquities of England: 10, 19, 258

366

Burgos Cathedral (Catedral de Burgos): 55, 55–56, 63, 64–65 Burke, Edmund: 242–43 Butterfield, William: 4, 11, 43 Canterbury Cathedral: 257 Carter, John: 9–10, 10 n. 23 Specimens of Gothic Architecture: 10 n. 23 Carus, Carl Gustav: 12, 13 Carver, Raymond (Cathedral): 26 Cassirer, Ernst: 261 cathedral and anarchy: 152–53, 156, 160, 163, 164, 168–69, 170 and death: 185–89, 190, 192, 228, 341 as symbol: 1, 6, 9, 13, 41, 43, 81, 83, 109, 121, 126, 126 n. 75, 149, 153, 163, 170, 171, 172, 184, 189, 191–92, 199, 217, 218, 219, 220, 227, 229, 317; see also utopia as martyr: 183–84, 227–28 as woman (femme-cathédrale): 179–80, 184 building lodge (Bauhütte):14, 22, 67, 93, 96 Catholicism see Christianity Caumont, Arcisse de: 18, 18 n. 55, 110, 245 Chapuy, Nicolas-Marie-Joseph: 15–16, 54, 256, 258 Cathédrales françaises: 15–16, 256, 258 Galerie du Jardin de la Cathédrale de Barcelonne: 54 Chartres Cathedral (Cathédrale NotreDame de Chartres): 17, 19 n. 59, 22, 135, 179, 200, 211, 215, 225, 226, 262–64, 265, 304–06, 339; see also Huysmans, Joris-Karl; Mâle, Émile Chateaubriand, François-René Comte de: 15, 206, 274 n. 39, 320 Génie du christianisme: 15, 206, 320 children’s literature: 101–05, 108, 110, 111–19, 125–28, 150 Chladenius, Johann Martin: 250 Christianity (including Catholicism, Protestantism): 2, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 21, 36, 43, 44, 47–53, 49 n. 3, 59, 71–73, 75, 77, 79, 83, 91, 92, 93, 94–95, 96–98, 109, 114, 117–18,

INDEX 119–24,135, 136, 146, 149, 150, 179–80, 184, 189, 192, 198, 199, 211, 224, 225, 229, 252–53, 271, 301–02, 305, 328, 339, 346–50, 350 n. 37, 351 n. 38 classicism, neoclassicism: 12, 35, 43, 61, 65, 71, 76, 77, 79, 90 n. 16, 91, 93, 94, 96, 122–24, 133–34, 138–39, 209, 264, 266, 269, 272, 274, 275, 276–80, 281, 282–84, 285, 289, 290–91 301, 307 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor: 325, 333, 340–41 Cologne Cathedral (Kölner Dom): 7 n. 15, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 19, 20, 21, 29, 37, 83–84, 84, 86, 90, 92–93, 95, 96–97, 144–45, 248, 248 n. 43, 264 n. 2, 284, 347 n. 25; see also Boisserée, Sulpiz; Forster, Georg; Görres, Joseph von; Schlegel, Friedrich; Warhol, Andy Constable, John: 9, 26, 318, 318–19 Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows: 318, 318–19 Cordemoy, Jean-Louis de: 59 n. 18, 61, 280 n. 62 Nouveau Traité de Toute l’Architecture: 59 n. 18, 61, 63–64 Cordoba, Great Mosque of (Mezquitacatedral de Córdoba): 66, 67, 68, 69, 72 Cuenca Cathedral (Catedral de Santa María y San Julian de Cuenca): 53, 53–54 Dante Alighieri: 262–63, 264, 274, 305, 305 n. 146, 306, 339 Paradiso: 262, 305, 339 Debussy, Claude: 26, 44, 309, 310–11, 312, 340, 350 La Cathédrale engloutie: 26, 309, 310–11, 312, 312 n. 167 Delaunay, Robert: 17, 26, 37, 43, 135 n. 8 Saint-Séverin: 135 n. 8 Tours de Laon: 17, 26 De Quincey, Thomas: 325–27, 329, 330, 333, 340–43, 344–45, 349 Confessions of an English Opium-Eater: 326–27 The English Mail-Coach: 327, 341–42, 343, 343 n. 12 Suspiria de Profundis: 325–26

INDEX Travelling in England in Old Days: 342–43, 345 Dibdin, Thomas Frognall: 235–44, 240, 246–49, 247, 250, 251, 256, 258–59, 261, 338, 340, 349 A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany 235–43, 239, 240, 242, 246–49, 247, 251, 258–59; see also Lewis, George Didron, Adolphe-Napoléon: 16, 19–20 n. 59, 20, 20 n. 63, 21, 44 Duban, Félix: 138–39 Château de Blois: 139 Dugdale, William: 8, 84–85 Monasticon Anglicanum: 8, 84–85 Eichendorff, Josef von: 272 Eiffel Tower: 26, 154, 155, 159, 348 n. 25 Eisenach Regulativ: 4, 93, 94 Eliade, Mircea: 339 Falcones, Ildefonso (La catedral del mar): 43 Farrère, Claude (Fumée d’opium): 171, 322, 333, 341 Feininger, Lyonel (Kathedrale): 14, 81, 98, 99, 144 Félibien des Avaux, Jean-François (Recueil historique de la vie et des ouvrages des plus célèbres architectes): 62 n. 23, Fénelon, François de Salignac de la Mothe (Dialogues sur l’éloquence en géneral et sure celle de la chaire en particulier): 62–63 Fergusson, James (The Illustrated Handbook of Architecture): 54 n. 8, 55, 55–56, 74 n. 36, 79 n. 41 Florence Cathedral (Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore): 322 Follet, Ken (The Pillars of the Earth): 25, 43 Fonthill Abbey: 132–33, 323, 323–24; see also Beckford, William Ford, Richard (A Hand-Book for Travellers in Spain, and Readers at Home): 54 n. 8 Forster, Georg: 12, 242 n. 22, 248, 251 Ansichten vom Niederrhein, von Brabant, Flandern, Holland, England und Frankreich im April, Mai und Junius 1790: 248 n. 45, 251

367

Fragonard, Alexandre-Évariste: 15 n. 44, 251–55, 252, 253; see also Nodier, Charles Freeman, Edward Augustus (A History of Architecture): 54–55 freemasonry (franc-maçonne): 67, 328 Friedrich, Caspar David. 12, 13, 33, 43, 87–88, 88 Abtei im Eichwald (The Abbey in the Oakwood): 87–88, 88 Friedrichswerdersche Kirche: 91, 92; see also Schinkel, Karl Friedrich frozen music (erstarrte Musik, musique fixée): 262–64, 265, 266, 268–70, 271–72, 298, 307, 308, 311, 329, 339 Gautier, Théophile: 43 n. 122, 175, 322, 327 Gerstenberg, Kurt: 7, 7 n. 15, 32 Gerville, Charles-Alexis-Adrien Duhérissier de: 18, 244 n. 30, 246 Gilkin, Iwan (L’Église, in La Nuit): 184 Görres, Joseph von: 13 n. 35, 83–84, 86, 87, 91, 92 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von: 5, 12, 30, 36, 43, 87, 91, 246, 248, 250, 266, 270, 272, 280–85, 286, 287, 288–89, 292–94, 295, 295 n. 120, 297, 298, 307–08, 330, 339, 340 Von Deutscher Baukunst: 87, 246, 248, 270, 280–85, 286, 288–89, 292–94, 339 Gojon, Edmond (Le Visage penché): 171 Gothic architecture deprecation of: 60, 61, 62–64, 71, 76, 78–80, 122–23, 125–26, 273, 277–80, 281, 284; see also aesthetics fantastique gothique (fantasme): 42, 54, 184, 313–19, 332, 333, 334, 340–41; see also hallucinations and forests: 71, 205–06, 224, 319, 320, 320–21, 327, 341 origins of: 1, 7, 7 n. 15, 9, 14, 14 n. 38, 18, 20, 28, 33, 40, 56–57, 56–57 n. 12, 58–65, 68–71, 73–74, 76–77, 101, 119, 126, 145, 206, 213, 219, 273, 284–85 n. 80, 299, 328 see also Moorish-Gothic style Gothic Revival: 26–32, 33, 34, 38, 44, 49 n. 3, 81–83, 86–87, 93, 132–33, 144–45, 192; see also neo-Gothic

368

Gray, Thomas: 133 Gropius, Walter: 14, 22, 43 Guizot, François: 34 n. 103, 113–14 Histoire de France racontée à mes petitsenfants: 113–14 Hall, James: 320, 320–21 Hallmann, Anton: 95, 96, 96 hallucinations (dream, vision, rêve): 42, 135, 172, 186, 191, 313, 325–27, 328–31, 331, 333–35, 340–41, 342 Hasenpflug, Carl Georg: 12, 33 Hayden, Franz Joseph: 289–91 Hetzel, Pierre-Jules: 101–04, 102, 108, 109, 111, 113, 114, 115–16, 117–18, 125 n. 73 Magasin d’éducation et de recreation: 103, 105 n. 10, 109, 113, 114, 125 n. 73 Hire, Jean de la (La Torera): 171 historicism: 42, 132–33, 136–39, 143–44,146, 346, 350 history writing 106–09, 111–29, 143–44 Hoffmann, E. T. A.: 6 n. 14, 287–89, 291–94, 295, 297, 298, 307, 308 Beethovens Instrumental-Musik: 291–94 Höchst zerstreute Gedanken: 287–89; see also Bach, Johann Sebastian Hughes, John: 274–75 Hugo, Victor: 5, 6, 16, 25, 34 n. 103, 35, 36, 37, 43, 47, 85, 108, 111, 124,150, 153 n. 12, 215–16, 217, 249, 251, 264, 274, 275 n. 43, 276, 291, 296–98, 305, 306, 308, 339, 340, 348–49 Hernani 276, 291 Notre-Dame de Paris : 6, 16, 25, 85, 108, 150, 215–16, 249, 264, 275 n. 43, 296–98, 305, 305 n. 146, 348–49 Huysmans, Joris-Karl: 17, 44, 120 n. 57, 135, 135 n. 8, 149, 150, 171, 176, 179, 211, 225, 308–09, 310 La Cathédrale: 120 n. 57, 135, 149, 150, 171, 179, 211, 225, 308–09 En route: 225, 308–09 Là-bas: 176, 225 industrialization (modernization): 10, 85, 86–87, 137, 146, 152, 155, 157, 159, 221–22, 223, 227, 264, 339, 342; see also Eiffel Tower

INDEX Jarry, Alfred: 330–31, 333 Jussow, Heinrich Christoph: 321–22 321 Koselleck, Reinhart: 343 n. 13, 344, 345 n. 18 Krause, Gottfried Christian: 278 Kropotkin, Peter Alekseyevich: 43, 152–53, 153 n. 12, 156, 210 Kupka, Frantisek: 26, 43 Lammenais, Félicité de: 349 Langlois, Eustache-Hyacinthe: 254–56, 254, 255 Essai historique et descriptif sur l’abbaye de Fontenelle ou de Saint-Wandrille: 254–56 Laon Cathedral (Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Laon): 17, 26, 107; see also Delaunay, Robert Lassus, Jean-Baptiste: 16, 19 n. 59, 21, 21 n. 66, 35, 83, 139, 140–42, 324 Laugier, Marc-Antoine: 322 Lefebvre, Henri: 131–32, 136, 138, 140–42, 144–45 Le Prévost, Auguste: 18, 18 n.55 Leroy, Julien-David: 134; see also Soufflot, Jacques-Germain Lewis, George: 235, 236, 238–42, 239, 242, 247, 248; see also Dibdin, Thomas Frognall Lichtenstein, Roy: 36–37, 44 Licquet, Théodore: 243 n. 26, 258–59 Lille Cathedral (Cathédrale Notre-Dame de la Treille): 21 literary paradigm: 264, 273–76, 278, 287, 288; see also Hughes, John; Pope, Alexander; Shakespeare, William; Schlegel, August Wilhelm Lorrain, Jean (La Cathédrale): 174, 334 Luce, Maximilien: 16, 37, 41, 43, 150–53, 163 n. 29, 164–70, 166, 167, 213 Notre-Dame (c.1900): 167, 167–69 Notre-Dame (c.1901–04): 169 Le Quai Saint-Michel et Notre-Dame de Paris: 166, 167–68 Ludlow, Fitz Hugh: 329–30, 331, 333, 341 Lyon Cathedral (Cathédrale Saint-JeanBaptiste de Lyon): 333

INDEX Magre, Maurice: 172–74, 177–84, 190, 191–92, 194–95, 219, 227 La Cathédrale furieuse, in La Montée aux enfers: 172, 177–84, 194–95 Mâle, Émile: 17, 44, 120 n. 57, 149, 150, 183, 190, 225, 227–28, 262–64, 265, 272, 304–07, 309, 338–39 L’Art allemand et l’art français du Moyen Âge: 183, 190 n. 64, 227 L’Art religieux du XIIIe siècle en France: 120 n. 57, 149, 150, 225, 262–64, 304–07, 309, 338–39 Marpurg, Friedrich Wilhelm: 278 Matisse, Henri: 16, 37, 43, 165 Mayeux, Henri (Fantaisies architecturales): 332, 333, 334 medieval artisan (craftsman, Gothic artist): 3 n. 5, 11, 93, 124, 159, 159 n. 24, 162, 170, 206–13, 218–19, 220, 221, 222, 223, 280, 339–40 medievalism (médiévalisme, médiévaliste, retour au Moyen Âge): 24–26, 38, 42, 44, 75–76, 82, 84–87, 172, 174–76, 179, 191, 193, 197–99, 219, 314, 322, 337–41, 342–43 n. 11, 345–46, 350–51 n. 38 memory (memorial, commemorate): 1, 37, 41, 81–82, 132, 137–38, 139, 144, 188–89, 192–93, 203–04, 207, 213–19, 221, 222–23, 229, 260, 345 Mérimée, Prosper: 16, 34 n. 103, 85–86, 134, 144 Mérovak:172–77, 176, 177, 185–92, 219, 225, 227 La Cathédrale des morts: 172, 185–92, 185, 187 Metz Cathedral (Cathédrale Saint-Étienne de Metz): 186, 189 Metzinger, Jean: 17 Meyrink, Gustav: 328–29, 341, 349 Der Engel vom westlichen Fenster: 328–29 Michelet, Jules: 16, 249–50, 285 n. 80, 338 Moller, Georg: 12, 14, 19, 86, Denkmäler der Deutschen Baukunst : 14 n. 38, 19, 86 Monet, Claude: 16, 26, 36–37, 43, 149–50, 156–57, 158, 160–61, 160–61 n. 25, 163 n. 28, 166, 170, 201–02, 213, 227, 229

369

La Cathédrale de Rouen: 26, 36–37, 158–59, 160–61, 227 Montalembert, Charles-Forbes-René Comte de:  21, 349 Moorish-Gothic style (Moresque): 50–80 Morand, Eugène (Les Cathédrales): 171, 183–84 Morris, William: 3, 3 n. 5, 11, 43, 192–93, 209, 210, 214–15; see also Sandburg, Carl Shadows of Amiens: 192–93, 214–15 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus: 289–91; see also symphony Mudéjar: 72–80 Müntz, Johann Heinrich (Proposal for Publishing by Subscription a Course of Gothic Architecture): 74 Musée National des Monuments Français (Musée des monuments français): 313–14, 314, 340 musical paradigm: 264–65, 276–80, 285–86, 287–89, 291–94, 300–04; 308, see also Bach, Johann Sebastian; Beethoven, Ludwig van; Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von; Hoffmann, E. T. A.; Reichardt, Johann Friedrich national identity: 37, 75, 138, 143, 144, 220, 223 nationalism: 2–17, 18–20, 18 n. 55, 27, 37, 40, 41, 42, 50, 75, 78–80, 81–82, 86–93, 94–95, 98–99, 119, 124–26, 129, 137, 143–46, 150, 186, 191, 192, 197, 199, 216, 217–20, 223–29, 243–44, 274, 275, 280, 284–85 n. 30, 309, 312, 340, 347, 348; see also patriotism, republicanism national monument: 33–34, 34 n. 103, 44, 124–25, 127, 129, 139, 143, 150 nature: 63–64, 88, 203, 204–13, 216, 221, 266–68, 277, 283, 284, 285 n. 80, 316, 317, 318, 319–21, 327–28, 341, 344; see also forests under Gothic architecture Nègre, Charles: 260–61 neo-Gothic: 4, 8–9, 11, 12, 21 nn. 66 & 68, 27–28, 32, 93, 94–98, 132, 272, 309–10, 319–21, 323; see also Eisenach Regulativ; Schinkel, Karl Friedrich Nerval, Gérard de: 295 n. 120, 327, 328

370

Nodier, Charles: 15 n. 44, 238, 251–52, 256, 260, 322 Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’ancienne France: 15, 34, 238, 251–54 252, 253, 260 Nora, Pierre: 1 n.1, 132, 137–38, 139–40, 143 n. 26, 146 Les Lieux de Mémoire: 1, 34, 37 n.114, 137–38, 143 n. 26, 188 n. 60, 348, n. 28 Notre-Dame de Paris (Cathédrale NotreDame de Paris): 16, 133, 135, 139, 140–43, 150, 141, 143, 150, 165, 165–70, 174, 215–16, 237, 296–98, 317, 326; see also Hugo, Victor; Lassus, Jean-Baptiste; Luce, Maximilien; Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène-Emmanuel restoration of: 16, 139, 140–42, 143 Noyon Cathedral (Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Noyon) see Monographie de l’église Notre-Dame de Noyon Oehme, Ernst Ferdinand: 315, 315–16, 333 Dom im Winter: 315 opium: 171, 178, 181–82, 325–35, 340–42 orientalism (the Orient): 50–80, 145, 325, 328, 330–31, 333 Panofsky, Erwin: 33, 44, 135 Paris Cathedral see Notre-Dame de Paris Pater, Walter: 11, 20 patriotism: 9, 18, 41, 86, 88, 89, 91, 93, 98, 115–29, 183–84, 189, 190, 219 perceiving subject: 54–56, 59, 140, 203, 212, 213–15, 234–37, 238 n. 12, 239–43, 246–51, 253–56, 270, 272, 276–78, 280–82, 286, 288–89, 293, 304, 340; see also representation photography: 37, 109 n. 21, 186, 190, 227, 258, 260 picturesque: 8, 9, 15, 20, 77, 197, 235, 238–40, 249–50, 251–56, 258, 260, 333; see also Nodier, Charles; Talbot, Henry Fox Piranesi, Giovanni Battista (Piranèse) 314, 322 n. 5, 325, 330, 333, 340–41 Carceri d’invenzione: 333, 340–41 Pissarro, Camille: 16, 37, 41, 43, 149–64, 154, 156, 157, 160, 162, 166, 168,

INDEX 169–70, 170, 209–10, 213, 222, 226 Rue de l’Epicerie, Rouen: 162, 163–64 Rue Malpalue, à Rouen: 157, 157–58, 163 Les Toits du vieux Rouen, temps gris (la cathédrale): 160, 160–63 Turpitudes Sociales: 153–55, 154, 158, 163 Vue de Rouen (cours-la-reine): 156, 156–57, 163 plainchant revival: 309–10 Pope, Alexander: 43, 274–75 Preface to Shakespeare: 275 Proust, Marcel: 6 n. 12, 17, 20, 22, 31, 43, 129 n. 83, 201 n. 12, 202, 203, 215, 219, 224, 226, 228, 264, 274 n. 39 À la recherche du temps perdu : 31, 219, 264 La Bible d’Amiens: 22, 201 n. 12, 203 La Mort des cathédrales: 6 n. 12, 129 n. 83, 224, 228 and Ruskin, John: 22, 23 n. 76, 201 n. 12, 202, 203 Protestantism see Christianity Pugin, Augustus Welby Northmore: 4, 5, 10–11, 20 n. 63, 21, 43, 49 n. 3, 82, 85, 86–87 Contrasts: 85, 87 True Principles: 21 Ramée, Daniel: 19, 328 Rameau, Jean-Philippe: 279, 312 rationalism: 7, 83, 85, 101, 116, 121, 126, 134, 138, 139, 298–99, 302, 306, 314, 335 Reichardt, Johann Friedrich: 285–87, 288 Reichensperger, August: 5, 7, 21, 29, 83–84, 92, 95, 96, 97 Reims Cathedral (Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Reims): 17, 37, 41, 88, 105, 106, 107, 133, 183–84, 186, 189, 200, 226, 227–29; see also Morand, Eugène and Monet, Claude: 227, 229 World War I bombings of: 17, 37, 41, 183–84, 186, 189, 227–29 representation: 48, 51, 56, 68–70, 72, 74–75, 81, 87–88, 89–90, 98, 105–06, 128–29, 135, 153–58, 160–64, 165–69, 179–81, 187–88, 232, 233–44, 246–59, 257, 260–61, 281–84, 292–94, 296–97, 309–11, 325–26, 327–28, 330–31, 341;

INDEX see also perceiving subject; word-image relations republicanism: 8, 40, 108, 114–20, 124–28, 143–44, 149–50, 344; see also nationalism restoration, monumental: 2–3, 4, 5, 14, 16, 18, 20 n. 61, 33, 34 n. 103, 35, 39, 41, 82, 86, 110, 127, 134, 132, 134, 136, 139, 140–42, 143, 144, 146, 150, 222–23; see also Notre-Dame de Paris Revanchard stance: 115, 186, 190 Rickman, Thomas: 9–10, 10 n. 23, 245, 338, 349 An Attempt to Discriminate the Styles of English Architecture: 10 n. 23, 245 Rilke, Rainer Maria: 22 Roberts, David: 51, 52, 53, 55, 66 The Court of the Lions, Alhambra: 66 Seville Cathedral, Entrance to the Court of the Orange Trees: 52 West Front of the Cathedral at Bourges: 55 Rodenbach, Georges (Le Carillonneur): 176, 179 Rodin, Auguste: 17, 20, 22, 37, 41, 43, 197–29, 201 Les Cathédrales de France: 22, 41, 197–29, 201 The Gothic in the Cathedrals and Churches of France: 199–00 and Rilke, Rainer Maria: 22 Romanesque: 10 n. 23, 18 n. 55, 35, 38–39, 39 n. 119, 62–64, 67 n. 29, 73 n. 34, 94 n. 24, 106 n. 12, 131, 206, 218, 237, 246, 302, 305, 327 Romanticism (Romantisme): 12, 71, 76–77, 86, 91, 169, 171, 172, 175, 191, 197, 205–06, 233, 234, 235–36, 246–56, 258, 264–65, 27–73, 278, 284, 287, 289, 290 n.99, 291, 296, 300, 304, 306, 315–19, 322–25, 333, 338, 340, 345, 348 Rouen Cathedral (Cathédrale NotreDame de Rouen): 26, 36–37, 149–50, 156–64, 156, 157, 160, 162, 169–70, 227, 236, 239, 241, 242, 243, 251, 348 n. 25; see also Dibdin, Thomas Frognall; Lewis, George; Monet, Claude; Pissarro, Camille

371

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: 278–80, 285 Lettre sur la musique française: 278–80 Ruskin, John: 3, 5, 7, 10–11, 22, 41, 43, 44, 49 n. 3, 82, 83, 85, 201, 202–13, 216–17, 221–23, 226, 345–46, 350 The Bible of Amiens (La Bible d’Amiens): 3 n. 5, 7 n. 15, 22, 201 n. 12, 202–3, 203 The Nature of Gothic: 3 n. 5, 7 n. 15, 203, 204–08; see also Stones of Venice and Proust, Marcel: 22, 23 n. 76, 201, 202, 203 The Seven Lamps of Architecture: 3 n. 5, 85, 202 n. 15, 203–04, 206, 210–11, 216–18, 222–23, 345–46, 350 The Stones of Venice: 3 n. 5, 202 n. 15 Sätty, Wilhelm: 330, 331 Neogothic Vision: 331 Said, Edward W.: 77 n. 39 Saint-Ouen de Rouen: 161, 237, 243, 244 Saint-Séverin, église: 135 n. 8 Saint-Sulpice, église: 308 Saint-Wandrille, Abbey of (Abbaye SaintWandrille de Fontenelle): 251–56, 252, 253, 254, 255 Sainte-Chapelle: 324, 324 Sainte-Geneviève: 134; see also Soufflot, Jacques-Germain Salisbury Cathedral: 9, 26, 318, 318–19; see also Constable, John Sandburg, Carl (Salvage): 192–93: see also Morris, William Satie, Erik: 20, 44, 309–10, 311, 312 Ogives: 44, 309–10 Scheibe, Johann Adolph: 276–78, 288 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph: 266–72, 282, 298, 306, 307, 308 Philosophie der Kunst 266–71 Schinkel, Karl Friedrich: 12, 13, 33, 43, 81, 82, 87, 89, 89–92, 92, 93, 94, 96, 144, 316, 316–18, 333; see also Friedrichswerdersche Kirche Gedenkdom für die Freiheitskriege (Memorial Cathedral to the Wars of Liberation): 81, 82, 89, 144 Gotischer Dom am Wasser (Cathédrale gothique au bord de l’eau): 89, 89–90, 316, 317–18

372

Mittelalterliche Stadt an einem Fluß (Ville médiévale au bord d’un fleuve): 316, 316–17 Schlegel, August Wilhelm: 43, 274, 275, Schlegel, Friedrich: 7 n. 15, 12, 30, 237, 248 n. 43, 242 n. 22, 248 n. 43, 250, 251, 344 Briefe auf einer Reise durch die Nieder­ lande, Rheingegenden, die Schweiz und einen Teil von Frankreich in dem Jahre 1804 und 1805: 7 n. 15, 237, 248 n. 43 Schmidt, Friedrich von: 93, 98 Scott, Sir George Gilbert: 4, 11, 21 n. 66 Segovia Cathedral (Catedral de Segovia): 54, 54–55 Semper, Gottfried: 4, 87, 95 separation of church and state (séparation des églises et de l’État): 6 n. 12, 129 nn. 82–83, 189, 198, 223–24, 229 Seroux d’Agincourt, Jean Baptiste Louis Georges: 256 Histoire de l’Art par les monumens 256 Seville Cathedral (Catedral de Santa María de la Seda de Sevilla): 47–49, 48, 50–53, 52, 72, 145–46 Shakespeare, William: 43 n. 121, 273, 274–75, 276, 293–94, 295 n. 120, 305, 339 Siena Cathedral (Duomo di Siena): 323 Soissons Cathedral (Cathédrale SaintGervais-et-Saint-Protais de Soissons): 213, 229 Soler, Ramón López (La catedral de Sevilla): 47 n.1 Soufflot, Jacques-Germain: 133–34, 280 n. 62 Mémoire sur l’architecture gothique: 133 space: 1, 36, 37, 41, 42, 43, 44, 47–49, 109, 131–35, 138–46, 143, 144, 191, 227, 268–69, 310, 322–23, 324–27, 330, 339, 340–41, 342, 346, 347; see also hallucinations archetypes of: 319–34, 340, 341 spatio-temporality: 326–27, 342–45, 346–47 Spenser, Edmund: 273, 274 The Faerie Queene: 274, 275 Staël-Holstein, Anne-Louise Germaine de (madame de Staël): 271–72

INDEX Statz, Vincenz: 93, 96–98, 97 Stephansdom (Saint Stephen’s Cathedral, Vienna): 275 Stier, Wilhelm: 94–95, 95, 96 Strasbourg Cathedral (Cathédrale NotreDame de Strasbourg, Straßburger Münster): 11, 12, 87 n. 13, 91, 183–84, 239, 241, 246–48, 247, 265, 272, 280–84, 285, 286, 287–88, 292–94, 308, 339, 340, 348 n. 25; see also Dibdin, Thomas Frognall; Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von; Hoffmann, E. T. A.; Lewis, George; Morand, Eugène Strawberry Hill: 6–7 n. 14, 27, 132; see also Walpole, Horace Street, George Edmund: 4, 11, 21 n. 66, 74 n. 36 Some Account of Gothic Architecture in Spain: 74 n. 36 structuralism: 136, 139 subject see perceiving subject sublime: 8, 9, 12, 20, 51, 70, 77, 91, 133, 197, 212, 226, 242–43, 256, 282, 286, 289, 291, 294, 295, 297–98, 305, 307, 308, 312, 342, 345 Suger: 108, 110 n. 23, 120, 132, 347 Sulzer, Johann Georg: 281, 282–84, 285 Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste: 281, 282–83 Swinburne, Henry: 51, 53 Travels through Spain, in the Years 1775 and 1776 symbolist aesthetic (le symbolisme): 37, 172, 174, 179–80, 199, 225, 307, 308, 350 Symons, Arthur: 11 symphony: 262–64, 265, 271, 276, 279, 289–98, 301, 302, 303–04, 305, 306, 307–08, 311, 312, 339, 343 n. 12; see also Beethoven, Ludwig van; Hugo, Victor; Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus; Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène-Emmanuel Talbot, Henry Fox: 241 n. 19, 258 Taylor, Isidore Justin see Nodier, Charles Tintern Abbey see Turner, Joseph Mallord William Toledo Cathedral (Catedral de Santa María de Toledo): 55, 55–56

INDEX Tournemine, René-Joseph de: 59–61, 62, 63–65, 67, 73 Turner, Dawson: 244–45, 251, 338 Account of a Tour in Normandy: 244–45 Turner, Joseph Mallord William: 9, 317, 318 Tintern Abbey: 317, 318 Umbdenstock, Gustave: 322–23, 33 Ungewitter, Georg Gottlob: 93 Urquhart, David: 51, 53 utopia (utopie): 150–53, 152 n. 9, 155, 158, 160, 164, 168, 169, 170, 193, 227 Utrillo, Maurice: 16 Vaudoyer, Léon: 39, 138 Verhaeren, Émile: 43 n. 122, 164–65, 174 Verne, Jules: 103, 104 n. 9, 327–28 Vézelay, Church of the Madeleine: 127, 134, 144 Villaamil, Jenaro Perez: 55, 70, 74, La España Artística y Monumental: 70, 74 Torre de Santa María de Illescas: 70 View in the Choir of the Cathedral at Toledo: 55 Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène-Emmanuel: 3, 3 n. 4, 5, 5 n. 11, 15 n. 44, 16, 20, 20 n. 61, 21, 30, 34, 34 nn. 103–04, 35–36, 35 n. 106, 38 n. 117, 40, 43, 82–83, 85, 86, 101–29, 105, 107, 123 128, 134–35, 139, 140–41, 143–44, 150, 150 n. 4, 153 n. 12, 203, 223, 232, 233, 264 n. 2, 298–304, 306, 308, 309, 310, 312, 314, 326, 327, 337 Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française du XIe au XVIe siècle: 3 n. 4, 20, 20 n. 61, 38 n. 117, 105, 106, 106 n. 11, 120, 125, 126 n. 75, 139, 141, 232, 264 n. 2, 298–304, 309 n. 156, 310, 312 Entretiens sur l’architecture : 125, 326 (cf. 135) Histoire d’un hôtel de ville et d’une cathédrale : 40, 101–02, 105–29, 105, 107, 123, 128, 134, 143–44, Vitet, Ludovic: 16, 19, 19 n. 59, 36, 85, 113 n. 38, 114 n. 39, 328 Monographie de l’église Notre-Dame de Noyon: 16, 19, 328 Vitruvius (Vitruve): 268, 321

373

Wagner, Richard: 272, 312, 312 n. 167 Walpole, Horace: 6–7 n. 14, 27, 132–33, 134; see also Strawberry Hill The Castle of Otranto: 6–7 n. 14, 133 Warhol, Andy: 37, 44 Westminster Abbey: 88, 275, 327 Westminster Cathedral: 39 White, Hayden, 259 Wild, Charles: 323, 323 word-image relations: 107, 123–25, 236, 237–44, 246–48 World War I (la Grande Guerre): 7, 17, 33, 37, 41, 172, 181–82, 183–84, 186, 188–89, 190, 191–93, 198, 219, 227–29 Worringer, Wilhelm: 7, 7 n. 15, 33 Wren, Christopher: 59–61, 67 Zola, Émile (Le Rêve): 17, 171

Ritus et Artes

All volumes in this series are evaluated by an Editorial Board, strictly on academic grounds, based on reports prepared by referees who have been commissioned by virtue of their specialism in the appropriate field. The Board ensures that the screening is done independently and without conflicts of interest. The definitive texts supplied by authors are also subject to review by the Board before being approved for publication. Further, the volumes are copyedited to conform to the publisher’s stylebook and to the best international academic standards in the field. Titles in Series The Medieval Cathedral of Trondheim: Architectural and Ritual Constructions in their European Context, ed. by Margrete Syrstad Andås, Øystein Ekroll, Andreas Haug, and Nils Holger Petersen (2007) Creations: Medieval Rituals, the Arts, and the Concept of Creation, ed. by Sven Rune Havsteen, Nils Holger Petersen, Heinrich W. Schwab, and Eyolf Østrem (2007) Medieval Ritual and Early Modern Music: The Devotional Practice of Lauda Singing in Late-Renaissance Italy, ed. by Eyolf Østrem and Nils Holger Petersen, (2008) Negotiating Heritage: Memories of the Middle Ages, ed. by Mette B. Bruun and Stephanie Glaser (2009) Resonances: Historical Essays on Continuity and Change, ed. by Nils Holger Petersen, Eyolf Østrem, and Andreas Bücker (2011) Rituals, Performatives, and Political Order in Northern Europe, c. 650–1350, ed. by Wojtek Jezierski, Lars Hermanson, Hans Jacob Orning, and Thomas Småberg (2015) Music, Liturgy, and the Veneration of Saints of the Medieval Irish Church in a European Context, ed. by Ann Buckley (2017)

In Preparation Martin Wangsgaard Jürgensen, Ritual and Art across the Danish Reformation: Changing Interiors of Village Churches, 1450–1600