The Church of Saint-Eustache in the Early French Renaissance (Architectura Moderna) 9782503555140

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The Church of Saint-Eustache Early French Renaissance

in the

ARCHITECTURA MODERNA Architectural Exchanges in Europe, 16th-17th Centuries Vol. 12

Series Editors: Krista De Jonge (Leuven) Piet Lombaerde (Antwerp)

Advisory Board: Barbara Arciszewska (Warsaw) Gordon Higgott (London) Stephan Hoppe (München) Werner Oechslin (Zürich) Konrad Ottenheym (Utrecht) Charles van den Heuvel (Amsterdam/The Hague) Honorary members: Howard Burns (Vicenza/Pisa) Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann (Princeton) Jean Guillaume (Paris)

The Church of Saint-Eustache in the Early French Renaissance

Anne-Marie Sankovitch

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Cover illustrations: Background image: Saint-Victor plan of Paris, detail with Saint-Eustache. Paris, Bibliothèque historique de la ville de Paris. Detail: Saint-Eustache, high vaults. Credit: Marvin Trachtenberg and Dorothy Ko.

© 2015, 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/2015/0095/83 ISBN 978-2-503-55514-0 eISBN 978-2-503-56484-5 DOI 10.1484/M.ARCHMOD-EB.5.107426 Printed on acid-free paper

Contents

Series Editor’s Foreword by Krista De Jonge

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Forewordix by Jean Guillaume Responsexi by Étienne Hamon Anne-Marie Sankovitch and Saint-Eustache by Marvin Trachtenberg

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Editor’s Acknowledgments

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Anne-Marie Sankovitch, Publications 1994–2006 

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The Church of Saint-Eustache in the Early French Renaissance Chapter 1: A Critical Historiography of Saint-Eustache

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Chapter 2: Problems of the Site and the Struggle to Enlarge the Church

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Chapter 3: A Royal Project: Saint-Eustache Unbound

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Chapter 4: A Revised Building History, the First Master, and Serlio

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Chapter 5: Toward the Identity of the Architect (Jean Delamarre?)

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Chapter 6: The Presence of the Past at Saint-Eustache from Cluny to Pavia

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Chapter 7: Gothic and Late-Gothic Strategies of Architectural Composition

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Bibliography 

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Author’s Acknowledgments

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Saint-Eustache, south transept facade.

Series Editor’s Foreword By Krista De Jonge

Why accept a book on a Parisian church – and one with a fairly bad press in the “classic” manuals of our field to boot – into the Series Architectura Moderna? Neither purely Gothic nor properly Renaissance in the hitherto accepted view, Saint-Eustache is a difficult case, at best “interesting” to a handful of specialists – or that was still said some ten years ago. I would like to pay the author the compliment of saying that her clear and incisive argumentation alone turned the tables, but that would not be quite true, however beautiful and persuasive the text. The Series Architectura Moderna explores phenomena of exchange and influence in early modern Europe, which of course includes all the creative and inventive ways in which architects and patrons north of the Alps confronted the architecture of Antiquity. That is precisely the subject at the heart of this book. But there is more. For some time now, we have come to realize that the only possible approach to the architecture of this era, the “long” sixteenth century, must of necessity be broad, encompassing not only architecture inspired by Roman Antiquity but also the new Gothic: vigorously alive, developing in new ways, and as far from the melancholy image evoked by Huizinga as it is possible to be. Anne-Marie Sankovitch explores the complex interaction between the “Renaissance Gothic”1 and the language of Antiquity coming from Italy in Saint-Eustache, which can stand as pars pro toto for the avant-garde architecture of its time, the 1530s and early 1540s. When we joined forces ten years ago at the Fiftieth Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America in her hometown of New York, the plan was to develop this theme together with the organizer of our session, Matt Kavaler, into a fully-fledged conference. This most appropriately took place in Paris as a Rencontre de l’architecture européenne at the Centre André Chastel (Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art) in June 2007, but alas, by that time Anne-Marie was no more, and her sensitive analysis of French Late Gothic did not feature in the resulting volume of essays.2 As discussed by Jean Guillaume and Étienne Hamon in their Foreword, interest in the Flamboyant Gothic of the French sixteenth century has soared in the intervening years, however without in any way rendering the author’s study superfluous. Her exemplary and nuanced reading of the various ways in which the past – not just Roman Antiquity but also the glorious epoch of Saint Louis, the Romanesque of Cluny III and the “classical” High Gothic of Notre-Dame de Paris – is used by the creators of Saint-Eustache, ties in with the most recent concerns of architectural historians seeking to question the accepted paradigm of “the” Renaissance as a revival of Classical Antiquity. While she draws upon similes

  Term coined by Ethan Matt Kavaler, “Renaissance Gothic in the Netherlands: the Uses of Ornament”,  The Art Bulletin 82 (2000): 226–251; Idem, “Renaissance Gothic: Pictures of Geometry and Narratives of Ornament”, Art History 29 (2006): 1–46; Idem, Renaissance Gothic. Architecture and

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the Arts in Northern Europe, 1470–1540, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012. 2   Le Gothique de la Renaissance, ed. Monique Chatenet, Krista De Jonge, Ethan Matt Kavaler, and Norbert Nußbaum, Paris: Picard, 2011.

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taken from Brunelleschi and the Florentine quattrocento to illuminate this appropriation of a past which to us is fully medieval, other examples from Spain, the Low Countries, the Holy Roman Empire and Northern Europe spring to mind.3 In that sense also, “the case of Saint-Eustache” is a most fitting addition to the Series; one, we hope, which will find a most varied readership.

  See the use of the Romanesque in, among others, fifteenth-century Netherlandish painted architecture. Stephan Hoppe, “Die Antike des Jan van Eyck. Architektonische Fiktion und Empirie im Umkreis des burgundischen Hofs um 1435”, in Persistenz und Rezeption. Weiterverwendung Wiederverwendung und Neuinterpretation antiker Werke im Mittelalter,

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ed. Dietrich Boschung and Susanne Wittekind, Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2008, pp. 351–394; Idem, “Die imaginierte Antike. Bild- und Baukonstruktionen architektonischer Vergangenheit im Zeitalter Jan van Eycks und Albrecht Dürers”, Habilitationsschrift, Universität zu Köln 2009.

Foreword A Church

between

Two Worlds

By Jean Guillaume

Anne-Marie Sankovitch’s dissertation on the Parisian church of Saint-Eustache, presented at the Institute of Fine Arts in New York City in 1991, could have been published then and there. Unfortunately, the author preferred to wait in order to continue her research on the churches of France’s first Renaissance, and to extend her observations to Italy, where related developments may be ascertained in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. She was working on this enlarged project when a sudden illness carried her off prematurely. That book will never be published, but the dissertation must be, for it remains immensely valuable and, more than ever, fills a void in our scholarship. The last few years has witnessed, in fact, a rediscovery of the Flamboyant style, which dominated Parisian architecture at the beginning of 1530s when work started on Saint-Eustache and the Hôtel de Ville.1 However, the concurrent appearance of antique forms in the churches has not yet attracted scholarly attention. In spite of the stimulating articles published by Sankovitch the 1990s and Henri Zerner’s insightful introduction to his study of the French Renaissance,2 researchers have continued to focus on the châteaux of the period. As a result the dissertation published herewith, concentrating as it does on the first Saint-Eustache – that is, on the parts constructed between 1532 and c. 1545, which would define all the later construction – remains the first important study of a church in which the antique forms become, suddenly, essential components of the building. Since this church was the most ambitious ecclesiastical project planned – and finally realized – in sixteenth-century France, the importance of Sankovitch’s study for the history of French art is self-evident. Although studies of flamboyant churches have not dealt directly with Saint-Eustache, they have highlighted a Parisian interest in spacious, luminous churches, in which the greatly elevated side aisles are endowed with high windows similar to those in the central nave. This method, adopted in Saint-Etienne-du-Mont c.  1510 and then by Saint-Victor in 1517, reappears on a larger scale in Saint-Eustache in 1532, as Sankovitch explained. Thus this edifice seems closely related to the most innovative currents of the Parisian Flamboyant style, a fact that has led Étienne Hamon to attribute Saint-Eustache to Jean Delamare or Delamarre, the architect of Saint-Victor, as Anne-Marie Sankovitch had already   Florian Meunier, “Martin Chambiges, architecte des cathédrales flamboyantes”, un-published summary in École des Chartes, Positions des thèses, 1999, pp. 297– 304; Agnès Bos-Rops, Les églises flamboyantes de Paris, Paris 2003; Andreas Förderer, Saint-Nicolasde-Port: ein spätgotische Wallfahrtskirche in Lothringen, Karlsruhe 2007; Étienne Hamon, Un chantier flamboyant et son rayonnement: Gisors et les églises du Vexin français, Besançon 2008; Tiziana Pezella, Saint-Etienne-du-Mont: storia di una chiesa parigina, Bologna 2009; Étienne Hamon, Une capitale flamboyante: la création monumentale à Paris autour de 1500, Paris 2011. 1

 Anne-Marie Sankovitch, “A reconsideration of French Renaissance Church Architecture”, in L’église dans l’architecture de la Renaissance, ed. Jean Guillaume, Paris 1995, pp. 161–180; Henri Zerner, L’art de la Renaissance en France, Paris 1996, pp. 24–53 (English ed., Paris 2002). The beautiful thesis of Julien Noblet, En perpétuelle mémoire. Collégiales castrales et saintes-chapelles à vocation funéraire en France, 1450–1560, Rennes 2009, concerns mainly an architectural program proper to that period, and not the evolution of forms. 3   See chapter 5, and Hamon, Une capitale flamboyante, pp. 173, 214, 256–258, 297. 2

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argued, and to date the inception of the project to the 1520s, the height of the Flamboyant creative period.3 Should we go this far? The author of the present book insisted on the connections of Saint-Eustache with the “classic” Gothic style, but that should not induce us to see it as a structurally Flamboyant church, embellished with antique motifs. The pillars of the transept of Saint-Eustache, higher than the triforium from the beginning of the first building phase, show no trace of the Flamboyant: they are a radically new creation utilizing, in complete freedom but with perfect logic, elements borrowed from the language of the Orders. The invention of that support system, adopted from the start of the construction work and never abandoned by the builders, must be attributed to an exceptional personality, who has thought out, at one and the same time, structure and décor, in an intense creative process closely studied by Sankovitch. That personality might have been Delamare, but in that case we must suppose that he left Paris for a while in order to acquire in the Val de Loire or elsewhere a perfect knowledge of the new Italianate language. Perhaps it will be possible, one day, to securely identify “the master of SaintEustache”, but it is more important to understand his creative process: the multiple sources of his inspiration, and his very own way of organizing his material, and thus to create, from so many components, a unique work. That is what Anne-Marie Sankovitch explains perfectly, starting from the extremely precise observation of the architectural and decorative forms, of all those “details” the architect designed with great care and that expressed his personality as much as does the over-all concept. Thus we read her book with pleasure, for through her long descriptions she helps us to see the building’s many capitals, whose forms rapidly evolve, as well as pilasters, columns, and moldings bundled on the surfaces of piers in ever different combinations. And we are then able to understand how the “Gothic versus Renaissance” question has resulted in a mistaken appraisal of this church. It is not a “hybrid” but an original creation, born, like Chambord, from the encounter of several architectural cultures, and, like Chambord, a unique phenomenon in the history of French art.4 It is to be hoped that this pioneering book will receive a follow-up and that it will give rise to a renewed interest in the religious architecture of the Renaissance… a period so rich in diverse experiences, including masterworks that remain to be discovered and to be “made visible”.5

 This reading of the first Renaissance is the commonly adopted one today. See for instance Pierre-Yves Le Pogam, “Le paysage artistique vers 1500: les mots et les choses”, in France 1500. Entre Moyen Âge et Renaissance, ed. Elisabeth Taburet-Delahaye, Geneviève Bresc-Bautier, and Thierry Crépin-Leblond, Paris 2012, pp. 31–37; Jean Guillaume, “Le temps des expériences. La réception

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des formes ‘à l’antique’ dans les premières années de la Renaissance française”, in L’invention de la Renaissance, ed. Jean Guillaume, Paris 2003, pp. 143–176. 5   See for instance Flaminia Bardati, “La Salle du légat de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Paris. Une architecture oubliée de la Renaissance française”, Livraisons d’histoire de l’architecture (2006) 11: 120–148.

Response The Ultimate Masterpiece

of the

French Flamboyant Style

By Étienne Hamon

Saint-Eustache in Paris is one of the rare French monuments that challenge both the specialists of the Gothic style and those of classical art. Whether they appreciate or denigrate Saint-Eustache following the famous diatribe by Viollet-le-Duc, in their panoramas of architectural history all mention this church, so imposing in its dimensions, complexity and unity that it rivals Notre-Dame. But at the same time, Saint-Eustache usually occupies an ambiguous place in this panorama: that of a link – unrecognized by most analysts – between two systems. In many ways our understanding of the relationship between Saint-Eustache and Late Gothic architecture has evolved during the last twenty years. The scholarly approach to the French churches of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, formerly focused on questions of general arrangement and ornamental vocabulary, and then increasingly on questions of models,1 has been enriched by a better understanding of questions concerning space and light. The investigations, conducted simultaneously in the written sources and in the Parisian Gothic monuments of the years 1480–1510, allow a re-evaluation of the Flamboyant dimension, both human and technical, of the actual Saint-Eustache.2 These inquiries highlight the originality of the efforts of certain architects during the 1510s to effect a renewal of religious architecture. This scholarship has also given new meaning to numerous historical indications that invite us to situate the inception of the Saint-Eustache project at the very center of that ultimate phase of Parisian Flamboyant dynamics. Saint-Eustache, it must be remembered, was not untouched by the mutations of Late Gothic Parisian architecture. An ambitious campaign for expansion, supported by princely patronage, had been conducted between 1390 and 1430, in the period of the first Flamboyant experiments, and there are signs of this activity in the present crypt. Another campaign, more subtle, took place c.  1460. Yet another was projected from the 1490s onward. This relative modernity, reflected in renovations of interior décor, explains, as much as do the difficulties of expanding in a tight urban system, the fact that a complete re-building of the church was delayed for so long, although context and intention were eminently favorable since the last decade of the fifteenth century. A closer look at the signs insistently offered by the 1510s allows us to imagine a different scenario from that of a long sterile delay until 1532. Indeed, not only are there indications of a restructuring of the urban environment, as assembled in a study of the Halles quarter directed by Andre Chastel (the gift of a house to the north, in order to arrange   The idea of “regional renaissances” is the guiding motif in the pioneering study by Roland Sanfaçon, L’architecture flamboyante en France, Quebec 1971. 2  For a complete account of the written sources and of the artistic population, see Étienne Hamon, Documents du Minutier Central des notaires de Paris. Art et architecture avant 1515, Paris 2008; for a new look at monumental Flamboyant creation, see Agnès Bos-Rops, Les églises flamboyantes de Paris, 1

XV e–XVI e siècles, Paris 2003, and Étienne Hamon, Une capitale flamboyante. La création monumentale à Paris autour de 1500, Paris 2011. 3  On this subject, see the study by Hélène Couzy in Françoise Boudon, André Chastel, Hélène Couzy, François Hamon et al, Système de l’architecture urbaine: le quartier des Halles à Paris, Paris 1977, vol. I, pp. 247–249.

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access to the rue Montmartre; annexation of a cemetery and litigious consecration of a new one),3 there existed also “pourtraits”, i.e. financial statements and property titles of which the oldest were dated December 1519. These documents have disappeared, but they were included in the inventory of the Saint-Eustache treasury at the end of the sixteenth century. They did not, as Sankovitch thought, necessarily bear witness to an ultimate limited expansion, but might be instead interpreted as constituting the technical and urban-planning dossier of a global rebuilding project patiently elaborated and brought to maturity at the accession to the throne of Francis I. The 1519 plans were surely too precocious, and could not have affected the actual monument. Its powerful system of antique-style pilasters, marked by the rhythm of the chapels enveloping the chevet, of which the first ones are constructed in a rhythmically sustained manner,4 could not be much earlier than 1532, even if the first antique Orders had already been introduced in Parisian religious architecture, as in the portal of the Minorites in Chaillot. Nevertheless, the coincidence with the date of the Parisian monuments that share Saint-Eustache’s most important structural traits asks us to reconsider the chronology of the conception of the church of the Halles. Indeed, the most tangible trait of this church is the pyramidal structure in which the amplified side-aisles display a direct illumination that opens up the space while effecting, on the outside, a beautiful layering of bays. The archetype of that formula, borrowed from the Gothic monuments of thirteenth-century western France – and, farther back, from the great basilicas of the second Romanesque period – may be identified as the archetype of the Flamboyant Parisian style. It may be found in the choir of Saint-Étienne-du-Mont conceived in 1510, twenty years later than previously thought. Its architect, Jean Turbillon, who began his career in the vicinity of the Cathedral of Le Mans where that principle dominated since the thirteenth century, applied it also in 1517 to the new Parisian abbey church of Saint-Victor (known by engravings) employing the semicircular arch, as is also the case at Saint-Eustache. Turbillon died prematurely, at the latest at the beginning of 1519, but his idea made its way, arriving at the church of the Madeleine in Montargis, c. 1526. The introduction of the spatial model in Parisian architecture is clearly more consensual and more chronologically coherent than had been previously imagined. Thus Saint-Etienne-duMont and Saint-Eustache, although completely opposite in detailing, are not irreconcilable. Since historical facts, in our reading, suggest that a suspension of the reconstruction program of Saint-Eustache between 1519 and 1532 cannot have been caused either by the resistance of the urban grid or by the death of Jean Turbillon, it would find its most plausible explanation in the historical situation. After 1520 the kingdom passed through a series of crises of all kinds. It is impossible to keep count, from then on, of the many Parisian projects that, although supported by the king, were suspended: the Sainte-Chapelle of Vincennes, the Hôpital de la Charité, the queen mother’s residence at the Tuileries, etc. After a false start, the re-beginning of Saint-Eustache in 1532, in a transformed political and esthetic context, would redesign the project while retaining certain principles. Whether the scenarios of the carry-over of a possible comprehensive project between 1519 and 1532 should be retained or not, all indications are that the architect of 1532 was one of those who saw their destiny sealed c. 1510 in the effervescence of the last great Flamboyant projects. No name has come to us, but Sankovitch has shown how much one has to take into account Jean Delamare, whose realizations at Saint-Maclou in Pontoise (where he conducted the works at least from 1533 to 1546), at the abbatial church of Saint-Victor (his presence there, following Turbillon, is attested in 1524) and then at the  Guy Michel Leproux has recently published a contract for the painting of a chapel in 1538: La

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peinture à Paris sous le règne de François I er (Corpus vitrearum, France, Études VI), Paris 2001, p. 199.

The Ultimate Masterpiece

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French Flamboyant Style

church of Villers-le-Bel (he is the expert there in 1546) are plastically or structurally close to Saint-Eustache. Sankovitch, however, could not yet know that Delamare was connected by marriage to an old dynasty of Flamboyant architects, and was already enough known in Paris in 1519 to be given the project for a new church. From 1518 on he was the principal master of the Hôtel de Villeroy, near the Louvre, for Nicolas de Neufville, a building the king had been able very quickly to improve in its refinement when he stayed in it. In 1532 the reputation of Delamare had not waned. He had just started the reconstruction of the abbatial palace of Saint-Denis for Louis de Bourbon, and he was about to serve as adviser to the latter’s brother, François d’Estouteville, for his castle of Valmont (1541) rebuilt in the vicinity of an abbatial church representing one of the rare applications of the principles of composition established at Saint-Eustache. Given this new perspective into the architecture of the 1510s with flamboyant dynamics still intact, the paradigm of Saint-Eustache changes. We find neither continuity nor rupture with the immediate past, nor a path without issue if one would maintain the hypothesis of a reconstruction project set in 1519. Instead the architecture must be read as the outcome of thirty years of architectural effort intended to renew the Gothic style, particularly in the spatial dimensions that underlie its most beautiful creations. When work at Saint-Eustache was finally started in 1532 the structural scheme elaborated in the 1510s was taken up again with a new plasticity no doubt re-imagined more concretely. It is notably in the analysis of this scholarly rhetoric of the Orders, whose inventiveness and quality of execution illustrate the talent of the Gothic stonecutters, that Sankovitch remains to this day irreplaceable. She gives the exact measure of the evolutionary capacities of religious architecture, as evinced in the accomplishments of the last architectural masters of the Flamboyant era, and as well defining the extent of their contribution to the Parisian preClassicism that brilliantly prepared the ground for the specifically French character of the Louvre of Pierre Lescot and the Tuileries of Philibert Delorme.

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Saint-Eustache

By Marvin Trachtenberg

For Anne-Marie Sankovitch (1958–2005), it was an unforgettable moment. At one point during the 1986 Renaissance colloque at Tours on the Orders, André Chastel, who was presiding over the session, complained of the absence of current study of French church architecture. He bemoaned the neglect of its most important monument, Saint-Eustache. At that point, his collaborator, Jean Guillaume, stood up and interjected, “But such a monographic study is exactly what the American graduate student, Anne-Marie Sankovitch, among us today, is researching in her ‘belle thèse’ on Saint-Eustache”. A round of applause followed, and five years later Sankovitch brilliantly defended her completed dissertation at the Institute of Fine Arts in New York. Present were Guillaume as well as the eminent Henri Zerner from Harvard, among others. It was remarked that Chastel himself would have applauded the work had he lived another year to see it. The manuscript was immediately adopted by the Architectural History Foundation for publication as it stood, and it seemed that Chastel’s wish would soon be fulfilled. The sunny trajectory of the conversion of manuscript into book was deflected, however. Sankovitch herself, always a perfectionist, insisted on what she intended as a few, minor revisions. But when the Foundation suddenly ceased its publication activity shortly thereafter, deadlines evaporated, and revision morphed into what soon became new research, thematic expansion, and exploratory rewriting. The closed circle of the dissertation became open-ended study, as the author was led deeper into the French architectural past, and wider toward the Italian origins of the Renaissance in Italy, which she believed must be newly studied to be successfully taken into account in her project. She also read extensively in architectural theory, as she was drawn toward what at the time was called the “New Art History”. She soon found herself casting a much wider net than in the dissertation, and important fragments of this new work began to appear in conference lectures and a series of groundbreaking articles. Concurrently, the Saint-Eustache manuscript evolved, as new and old ideas crisscrossed in and outside of its old and new pages. The book became larger and more complex, and it eventually split into two projects, one centered on the French monument, the other on the question of the Renaissance itself as it developed in both Italy and France. Although some of the author’s most important work of these years appeared as articles and conference papers – which constitute over 100 pages in publications (see Bibliography) – the two books themselves remained incomplete at her sudden passing. To grasp where Sankovitch was going with her research, one needs to understand the story of Saint-Eustache as told in the dissertation – in this book. A synopsis will in any event be useful to the reader. Before the author’s work, interpretation of the building had been transfixed by the notorious mid-nineteenth-century reading of Viollet-le-Duc (see Chapter 1). He had asserted that the builders […] wanted to apply the forms of ancient Roman architecture, which they knew badly, to the construction system of Gothic churches […] As a result […] the big church of Saint-Eustache in Paris is a monument badly conceived, badly built, a confused heap of debris borrowed from all over […] a sort of Gothic skeleton draped in Roman rags sewn together like the pieces of a harlequin’s costume. Sankovitch set out to redeem the building from this curse, which had become a mantra of scholarship.

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One way to do this was to engage Viollet-le-Duc head on, a battle finally to be decided in a monumental article in the Art Bulletin (2000), in which she would wrestle him to the ground by thoroughly deconstructing the structure-ornament opposition that underlies not only his statement but modern architecture culture in general, as she demonstrates. Her earlier strategy in the dissertation, however, instead was indirect and multipronged. There she demonstrated that Saint-Eustache cannot begin to be defined or contained by any structure/ornament dualism, and that understanding the church requires multiple layers of close historical and architectural analysis. These involve not only formal issues and building history but a broad approach involving urban and site history, as well as changing factors involving the king, the bourgeoisie, Paris and the region, ultimately France and the Italian Renaissance. Not the least of these historical analyses was her extended discussion of the problematic site of the church (Chapter 2). Sankovitch shows how it was for centuries tightly confined by immovable streets and powerful, entrenched neighbors, which frustrated the desire of the parishioners to significantly expand their small church all through the long fifteenth century. She attributes the sudden breakout of the church from this gridlock in 1532 to the intervention of Francis I, which enabled the enormous scale of the new SaintEustache, equal in Paris only to Notre-Dame (Chapter 3). The royal connection not only helps explain the extraordinary dimensions of the new parish church, but its singular architectural ambition, inventiveness, and lavishness of detail, comparable in contemporary France only to other understandings of the king, in particular the Château of Chambord. Thus, at Saint-Eustache the burning architectural ambition of the parishioners would have been enabled and supercharged by royal policy, intervention and collaboration. The great monument was simultaneously both royal and local. Next, Sankovitch revises the building history of Saint-Eustache established in a 1946 Congrès archéologique article by Michel Ranjard (Chapter 4). Beyond adjusting several critical dates, she brings chronology to life. This occurs notably in her brilliant analysis of the stylistic development of the first master as he shifts 1532–1545 from an initial “Première Renaissance” fluid varietas of detail to a more normative Italianate all’antica vocabulary. She shows that the master’s second manner is directly dependent on Serlio’s treatise, in particular the Fourth Book on the Orders published in 1537, an influence probably mediated through the copy that the author had sent to Francis I at its publication, which seems to have found its way into the Saint-Eustache master’s hands. Indeed, Sankovitch identifies an inscription of 1537 on the building that precisely documents this art-historical transition. Thereby a significant turn is described not only in the internal history of Saint-Eustache, but the French Renaissance. Throughout this analysis is manifest Sankovitch’s mastery of architectural photography, its complete command from shooting on site (including upper parts of buildings accessible only through dark, filthy stairways) to printing in the darkroom. Her utilization of the resulting photographic documentation of the building is seen throughout the book. The images as well as the author’s use of them are typical of her attention to detail and her knowledge of every aspect of the building, which also includes the ways that the seventeenth-century campaigns variously imitated the different phases of the original design history. For three-quarters of a century beginning in 1850 in the first (and only) monograph on Saint-Eustache and involving such famous historians as Lefèvre-Pontalis and Geymüller, the question of the identity of the first Saint-Eustache master was debated together with notions of what might have been his prototype building. Various possibilities were discussed without consensus. Thus the “church was permitted to emerge from nowhere”, as Sankovitch emphasizes in her effort to “establish a profile for the architect”, rather than ascertain his absolute identity (Chapter 5). Through penetrating, rigorous formal analysis she demonstrates that the nave of the church of Saint-Maclou in Pontoise, in

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particular the side-aisle design (begun 1525), was by far the most likely stylistic prototype for Saint-Eustache, a connection made only superficially in previous scholarship. Thereby the extreme sophistication of the Parisian church becomes less anomalous. As to the name of its architect, which would possibly be a factor in understanding its origins, Pontoise had been connected with not only with Saint-Eustache but also with the comparatively obscure architect, Jean Delamarre. But no previous scholar had suggested a connection between all three – the monument, its prototype, and this builder. Moreover, Sankovitch noted that Delamarre had also been the architect of the lost church of Saint-Victor in Paris (1517– 1540), a possible prototype of the flamboyant aspects of Saint-Eustache. However, it was characteristic of Sankovitch’s rigor in vetting her own ideas that rather than trumpeting the possible Delamare authorship she noted that the parts of Pontoise for which his work was well-documented were not those aspects stylistically consonant with the Parisian church. Thus in the end she left the question of the “name” of the architect open. It is possible that the additional works of Delamare identified by Étienne Hamon in these pages may further the resolution of this question. In the final chapters, Sankovitch seeks to cut the Gordian knot of confusion and controversy regarding the enigmatic style of Saint-Eustache. She divides the question into two categories, one regarding the parti of the church (Chapter 6), its sources and iconography, the other studying the compositional strategies of the building (Chapter 7). Regarding the former, the author limits the role of Parisian Late Gothic prototypes such as SaintVictor and Saint-Etienne-du-Mont, explaining that “With its frankly three-part elevation, its arcaded triforium, rich and varied ornamentation, and its piers conceived as massings of forms drawn from the Orders, Saint-Eustache represents a radical and conscious departure from the flamboyant tradition”. In an extraordinary tour of the French architectural past, she shows the importance of multiple layers of French historicist models including the High Gothic of Chartres and Bourges and the High Romanesque of Cluny and Autun. She explains that the designer would have seen these not as disparate, incompatible styles, but as part of a single grand French tradition, which moreover could be combined with modern Italian Classicism, notably the Cathedral of Pavia, which in its elevation bears an uncanny similarity to Saint-Eustache. With acute insight, she notes how this move would parallel the well-known way that Florence and Venice return to their own medieval past in the origination of the Renaissance movement. The author explains that historicism was also at work in fifteenth-century France alongside the Late Gothic, in such works as Rodez, Alençon, and the revival of Rheims at the pilgrimage church of Notre-Dame de L’Épine. In a brilliant statement, she distinguishes this fifteenth-century current from the motivation of the builders of Saint-Eustache: Whereas the retrospection of the former was motivated by a desire to create meaningful links with the past, the latter was driven by the need to find a French model that could accommodate the new modern Italianate vocabulary. For one the appeal of the French medieval tradition was primarily its symbolic content, for the other it was its perceived formal classicism. This is not to say that the revivalist experiences of the fifteenth century were subsequently irrelevant, for they demonstrated to later builders that the architecture of the past was not inaccessible. At Saint-Eustache, however, the two revivalist trends, the symbolic and the formal, come together with tremendous, mutually sustaining force. The final chapter of the book, on compositional principles, was the most difficult for the author to have written, as well as being the most demanding for the reader. This

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is due not to any unclarity, but simply because the intricacy of analysis necessarily corresponds to the intricacy of the buildings themselves. Nevertheless, an elegant conceptual simplicity is revealed underneath as Sankovitch identifies two design methods at work. The first involved the pre-Flamboyant repetition of the same motif throughout the building at different scale and proportions. The second, more nuanced method employed systematic and articulate decorative variety within the same or similar forms. That is, while according to the first method there was repeated forms of differing scales and the same general […] appearance, the second allowed groups of elements to be more precisely individualized. While the first method is all encompassing, the second allows for finer distinctions to be made and for systems within the larger scheme to be articulated. The author employs these categories in a searching analysis of the entire building that brings order to its dazzling complexity of levels and variations of form, which the discussion reduces to a comprehensible program. It is revealed that Saint-Eustache is very “open-ended” in the way the “architect allows himself the freedom to devise as many different combinations of supports and capitals grouped into Orders and sub-Orders as he feels are necessary to explicate the design”. In an inspired leap, the author perceives that this freedom derives not from the classical tradition but ultimately was a crypto-Late Gothic methodology, transformed into a classical vocabulary. She writes that in a general sense the possibility of a limitless number of Orders used at Saint-Eustache and the unique uncanonical character of the components of many of the sub-Orders […] should be understood against this Late Gothic background of extreme variability and freedom of design invention […] The flamboyant conception of forms as abstract and malleable allowed the SaintEustache architect to perceive the new classical repertoire not as fixed and finite but as open to novel exploration. Finally the author illustrates how this methodological turn occurred already in the late flamboyant in the three Parisian churches of Saint-Séverin, Saint-Médard and SaintMerry, where “are found a variant of the bundle pier which is shaped according to an approach that suggestively parallels the method of the Orders used at Saint-Eustache”. The monograph, which begins with the problematics of the terrain underlying the church, thus closes with a new understanding of the all-but ineffable qualities of what one sees when standing surrounded by its visionary, mysterious architecture. Anne-Marie Sankovitch, to my mind, made only one serious error regarding her dissertation, and that was her own final assessment of it as needing further work and expansion for publication. This was not a fair judgment of this study, but rather it manifested the pressure of her own ever-searching, dynamic intellect. Any scholarly study can be improved, but the work accomplished by the present book is prodigious by any standards. It tells the unknown story of the great Parisian church from the ground up, site to patronage, authorship to building chronology and the evolution of its baffling formal complexity, here clarified. Such is the nature of the building and the questions it raises that no word on it can be final. Sankovitch herself, as noted, published several post-doctoral articles exploring further issues. But The Church of Saint-Eustache in the Early French Renaissance will serve as a standard for all those who in the future desire to understand this enigmatic building, and as a point of departure for the further study of its mysteries and its times. This book is both a bright, clear window revealing an unseen architecture, previously invisible or at best a murky episode in the history of art, and also a portal to the exploration of its as yet unknown qualities.

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Editor’s Acknowledgments

A number of individuals contributed generously to the editing and publication of AnneMarie Sankovitch’s manuscript. Since her passing, Jean Guillaume repeatedly encouraged its publication. He provided not only his own illuminating contribution to these introductory pages, but solicited the learned and insightful essay of Étienne Hamon, who also generously supplied a number of missing illustrations. Without the encouragement and expert advice of Myra Nan Rosenfeld, many problems surrounding this publication would have remained unresolved, and it is doubtful that a suitable publisher would have been found. Without the dedication and diligence of my research assistant, Marya Fisher, the manuscript would not have been restored from the fragmentary computer files, and the hundreds of photographs and negatives published here would not have been identified and expertly scanned. The confidence in this project of Chris VandenBorre at Brepols was essential to this publication. The services to this book of the series editor, Krista De Jonge, have been as generous as they are numerous. Anne-Marie would have been deeply touched by this collective support of the most important intellectual achievement of her all-too-short life. I extend my deepest thanks to all of those involved. Marvin Trachtenberg Institute of Fine Arts, New York University

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Anne-Marie Sankovitch, Publications 1994–2006 Articles “Saint-Eustache” and “Saint-Etienne-du-Mont”, in Le guide du patrimoine: Paris, ed. Jean-Marie Pérouse de Montclos, Paris: Hachette, 1994, pp. 428–439. “A Reconsideration of French Renaissance Church Architecture”, in L’église dans l’architecture de la Renaissance, ed. Jean Guillaume, Paris: Picard, 1995, pp. 161–180. “L’architecture gothique: Paris, foyer de la ‘manière française’ ”, in Paris s’exporte: Modèle d’architecture ou Architectures modèles, ed. André Lortie, Paris: Picard, 1995, pp. 22–29. “Structure/Ornament and the Modern Figuration of Architecture”, Art Bulletin 80 (1998): 687–717. “Das Begriffspaar Struktur/Ornament und seine Funktion im modernen Architekturdiskurs”, in Die Rhetorik des Ornaments, ed. Isabelle Frank and Freia Hartung, Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2001, pp. 241–275 (revised version of 1998 Art Bulletin article). “The Myth of ‘the Myth of the Medieval’: Gothic Architecture in Vasari’s rinascita and Panofsky’s Renaissance”, RES. Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics 40 (2001): 29–50. “Le Quinto Libro traduit par Jean Martin (Paris, Michel de Vascosan, 1547), édition bilingue”, in Sebastiano Serlio à Lyon: Architecture et Imprimerie, ed. Sylvie Deswarte-Rosa, vol. I: Le traité d’architecture de Sebastiano Serlio. Une grande entreprise éditoriale au XVI e siècle, Lyon: Mémoire Active, 2004, pp. 137–141. “Intercession, Commemoration, and Display: The Parish Church as Archive in Late Medieval Paris”, in Demeures d’éternité. Églises et chapelles funéraires aux XV e et XVI e siècles, ed. Jean Guillaume, Paris: Picard, 2005, pp. 247–267. “Anachronism and Simulation in Renaissance Architectural Theory”, RES. Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics 49/50 (2006): 188–203.

Reviews Review of David Thomson, Renaissance Architecture: Critics, Patrons, Luxury, in Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 55 (1996): 212–214. Review of Henri Zerner, L’art de la Renaissance en France: L’invention du classicisme, in Art Bulletin 82 (2000): 585–589. Review of Jean-Marie Pérouse de Montclos, Philibert De l’Orme: Architecte du roi (1514–1570), in Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 60 (2001): 221–223. Review of Mario Carpo, Architecture in the Age of Printing: Orality, Writing, Typography, and Printed Images in the History of Architectural History, in Art Bulletin 85 (2003): 390–393.

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The Church of Saint-Eustache in the Early French Renaissance

Fig. 1. Saint-Eustache, north transept facade.

Chapter 1 A Critical Historiography

of

Saint-Eustache

The critical history of the church of Saint-Eustache in Paris is paradoxical. The building has never been the subject of a sustained stylistic analysis, yet it cannot be said that this aspect of the building has been ignored: to the contrary, the aesthetic merits of Saint-Eustache have been the subject of countless critics, the overwhelming majority of whom have offered negative, indeed often openly hostile judgments, which in some cases deplore the fact that money was wasted on such a “worthless” enterprise. This curious situation occurs because the discourse on Saint-Eustache has been predetermined, or at least limited, by a powerful a priori assumption that has always precluded close stylistic scrutiny, allowing conclusions to be set forth with great confidence on the basis of only superficial study. This assumption has to do with the building’s seeming stylistic duality. Begun in 1532, Saint-Eustache presents many features that are clearly Gothic or medieval at the same time that the role of the imported classicizing Italian Renaissance style is also apparent (Fig. 2). Such eclecticism violates a longstanding and fundamental tenet of Western architectural theory according to which good architecture is stylistically pure, self-contained, self-referential and self-authenticating. Of course there has also been, particularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a theoretical literature advocating the principles of eclecticism, but since Alberti stylistic purity as the major criterion according to which architecture is judged has been the predominant current of architectural thinking and writing. Consequently the information that a cursory glance at the design of Saint-Eustache reveals – that it draws upon Gothic and Renaissance sources – has been deemed a sufficient basis for the formulation of critical opinions. This reductive perspective, to varying degrees and in different ways, stands in the background of most attempts to deal with the stylistic character of Saint-Eustache. Such attempts began in the mid-seventeenth century and proliferated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Prior to that, in the literary form where most pre-nineteenth-century opinions on Saint-Eustache are found, the Parisian historical guidebook, the judgments on Saint-Eustache are enthusiastic, though sweeping and bland. Thus in the sixteenth-century guidebook of Gilles Corrozet and the early seventeenth-century volume of Jacques Dubreul, both written while Saint-Eustache was still under construction, the former states that when the building was completed it was sure to be “un des plus excellent de la ville”,1 while the latter claims a more exalted status for Saint-Eustache, ranking it as “un des plus beaux bastimens de l’Europe”.2 Such uncritical hyperbole is common in the guidebook genre and is the not surprising result of the civic chauvinism that informs such works. Eventually, however, a greater level of sophistication is found in the historical guide book as authors such as Sauval, Lebeuf and Brice begin to absorb some of the points of view that had long been prevalent in mainstream architectural writing, including the

 Gilles Corrozet, Les Antiquitez, croniques et singularitez de Paris, Ville capitalle du Royaume de France, Paris 1561, fol. 156v. [Note of the Series Editor. See also Alfred Bonnardot, Gilles Corrozet et Germain Brice, études bibliographiques sur ces deux historiens de Paris, Paris 1880, passim; and Maurice 1

Dumolin, “Note sur les vieux guides de Paris”, Mémoires de la Société de l’histoire de Paris et de l’Îlede-France 47 (1924): 208–234.] 2  Jacques Dubreul, Le Théatre des Antiquitéz de Paris, Paris 1612, p. 793.

3

The Church

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Saint-Eustache

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Early French Renaissance

Fig. 2. Saint-Eustache, interior, nave. Photograph by Ralph Lieberman.

4

A Critical Historiography

of

Saint-Eustache    Chapter 1

prejudice in favor of stylistic purity. In the mid-seventeenth century Sauval writes about Saint-Eustache: Dubreul, Corrozet et les bonnes gens disent merveilles tant de son architecture que des piliers grêles et chargés de colonnes en l’air. Cette grande élévation de colonnes et un tas de moulures qu’ils ne voyent point ailleurs, cette prodigieuse longueur de pilastres et exhaussement des voûtes qui sont toutes les parties vicieuses de l’architecture, les ont surpris. Véritablement il y a quelques chapiteaux de colonnes au portail de l’aile, dont les feuilles sont fort tendres et qui seroient des plus beaux de Paris et des meilleures, s’ils n’étoient un peu gothique par enhaut. Il y en a de pareille manière et aussi bonne au côté gauche; et c’est la seule bonne chose qui se trouve dans cette Église.3 Thus Sauval begins by excusing the enthusiasm of Dubreul and Corrozet for Saint-Eustache by saying they were simply overwhelmed by an architecture they had seen nowhere else. Implicit in this reasoning is the notion that a work of architecture is suspect if it does not adhere to a recognizable and established canon, such as good Gothic or good classical architecture. Sauval’s next observation (which he offers as a concession to the admiration of his earlier colleagues), that several leaves on several Corinthian capitals are the only praiseworthy features in the building, reveals that a classical canon of purity was the object of his examination of the building. But even these comparatively admirable details are marred by being “un peu gothique enhaut”. It is revealing to compare this observation with that made by Lebeuf, writing in 1754, thirty years after the publication of Sauval’s work: Plusieurs écrivains, même parmi les modernes, ont qualifié de gothique le genre de structure que l’Architecte David4 y a employé, mais parmi les connoisseurs en genre antique de bâtimens, on ne donne ce nom qu’à ces Églises dont les cintres et toutes leurs subdivisions sont en pointe comme à la Sainte Chapelle…5 Whereas for Sauval the defects of the church lay in the way the gothic disrupts the formal integrity of classical elements, for Lebeuf the situation is the reverse: the building might be termed Gothic were it not for the un-Gothic, classicizing intrusion of rounded arches in the place of pointed ones. This difference between the two writers cannot be attributed to either of them having a stated preference for one style over the other, for each expresses admiration both for Parisian monuments of French Classicism and those from the Gothic period. Furthermore, Lebeuf is so much in accord with Sauval that the remainder of his stylistic evaluation of Saint-Eustache is nothing more than a somewhat altered and expanded revision of Sauval’s initial observation: Au reste ce qu’on peut dire de l’Église de Saint Eustache, qui pour être trèsélevée n’en est pas plus claire, est qu’il ne faut pas prendre pour une belle production de l’art, cette grande élévation de colonnes et ce tas de moulures qu’on ne voit point ailleurs, ni cette prodigieuse longueur de pilastres et exhaussement des voûtes, qui sont toutes les parties vicieuses de l’architecture.6   Henri Sauval, Histoire et recherches des antiquités de la ville de Paris, Paris 1724, vol. I, p. 437. Although not published until the early eighteenth century, Sauval’s manuscript was written in c. 1660. 4  Although Lebeuf was aware that Saint-Eustache was begun in 1532, for some reason he believed that Charles David, an architect whose epitaph at 3

Saint-Eustache informs us that he died in 1650, was the original architect. For more on David see chapter 5. 5   Abbé Jean Lebeuf, Histoire de la Ville et de tout le diocèse de Paris, Paris 1754, new annotated ed. by Hippolyte Cocheris, Paris 1863, vol. I, pp. 121–122. 6  Ibid.

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Saint-Eustache

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He has in fact rephrased Sauval in such a way that the unique aspect of Saint-Eustache, that it contains features which appear nowhere else, emerges even more emphatically as a negative quality. The only noteworthy difference between Sauval and Lebeuf is that one author further illustrates his point by claiming that the classical has been compromised by the Gothic and the other claims, though perhaps less critically, the reverse. That the two apparently opposing observations are in fact interchangeable illustrates the conceptual and perceptual confusion that results when the belief in the superiority of a unitary style comes up against the stylistic duality of Saint-Eustache. The bias which only allows for one style cannot accommodate the eclecticism of the design. It is as if the building is perceived through a lens which permits only one of the two traditions upon which the design draws to come into focus at any given moment; the other tradition never completely fades out, becoming instead a distorting presence. For a third historian, however, possessed perhaps of a keener vision, the two styles are mutually corrupting. Written in the same decade of the 1750s as Lebeuf’s work is Brice’s history of Paris which includes an angry denunciation of Saint-Eustache: L’Architecte y a fait paroître une horrible confusion du gothique et de l’antique, et a, pour ainsi dire, tellement corrompu et massacré l’un et l’autre, que l’on n’y peut rien distinguer de régulier et de supportable; ce qui fait que l’on doit plaindre avec raison la grande dépense qui a été faite de cette fabrique, sous la conduite du Maçon ignorant, qui en a donné les desseins.7 Brice depicts Saint-Eustache as nothing but utter confusion; both the classicizing and Gothic elements have been tainted and perverted by their contact with each other, and the architect stands accused of committing stylistic miscegenation. This is a much harsher assessment than those of Lebeuf and Sauval, yet it emerges from the same critical background. For all three writers what is in fact a particular theoretical position (that good architecture follows the precepts of a single style) has been deeply assimilated as a fundamental truth, having the same unquestionable weight as a categorical moral value. Indeed some of the words used to describe the building, such as “vicious” and “corrupt”, would seem to indicate that a moral imperative had been violated rather than one concerning aesthetics. It might seem surprising that none of these authors base their criticism of SaintEustache on contemporary negative attitudes towards the Gothic. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theorists and architects tended on the whole to agree with the view of Gothic architecture that originated in the Italian Renaissance according to which the Gothic was barbarous, without order, reason or merit, in distinction to that of antiquity and the Renaissance where only positive virtues of harmony, order and clarity resided.8 As has been noted, however, both Sauval and Lebeuf wrote positive assessments of many Parisian Gothic monuments, as does Brice. That these authors seem out of step with attitudes found in the writings of theorists such as the Blondels has to do with the fact that the civic pride of the guide book would hardly allow anything but panegyrics for the great Gothic monuments of Paris such as Notre-Dame and the Sainte-Chapelle.9 The effects of this local bias are most apparent in Brice’s judgement of Saint-Eustache where the qualitative  Germain Brice, Description de la Ville de Paris et de tout ce qu’elle contient de plus remarquable, new ed., Paris 1752, vol. I, p. 488. [Note of the Series Editor. See also Bonnardot, Gilles Corrozet et Germain Brice, passim.] 8   On French critical attitudes towards the Gothic in the eighteenth century see Paul Frankl, The Gothic: 7

6

Literary Sources and Interpretations through Eight Centuries, Princeton 1960, pp. 383–414. 9  It is strictly in these terms that these authors’ enthusiasm for the Gothic must be understood; their understanding of the Gothic is too simple to suggest that they might be responding to Soufflot’s theoretical advocacy of the Gothic.

A Critical Historiography

of

Saint-Eustache    Chapter 1

parity of the Gothic and the classical is stressed. His charge that the Gothic has been “corrupted and massacred” makes clear that he views this style as a worthy one, on par with the classical style that has been equally distorted. In other words Brice’s evaluation of Saint-Eustache represents the intersection of two attitudes, one emerging from the chauvinism of the guidebook that allows a positive (if superficial) assessment of the Gothic, and the other stemming from the realm of architectural theory which advocates the concept of stylistic purity. What makes Brice’s double condemnation of Saint-Eustache of historical interest is that although his logic is partially rooted in his civic spirit rather than in any profound knowledge or understanding of the Gothic, his argument cannot be dismissed as dated, for it was “proven” to be correct in the nineteenth cenFig. 3. Saint-Eustache, cross section through third nave bay, Ranjard. tury by architectural theorists who sought to seriously challenge the traditional negative view of the Gothic. They contended that the Gothic, like classical architecture, could also be understood as a rigorous system, a style, possessing a theoretical basis, an internal affirmative logic, and demonstrating a meaningful relationship between structure and ornament.10 This validation of the Gothic, together with the notion of stylistic purity that remained for most writers an unshakable tenet entrenched in mainstream critical and art historical writing attitudes that Brice had chauvinistically anticipated. Now that the Gothic and the classical were regarded as qualitatively equal they became theoretically more incompatible as closed, mutually exclusive styles, and an architecture that sought to unite them could not be accepted. We thus find Viollet-le-Duc in 1854 bitterly castigating the period that sought to do just that: On voulait appliquer les formes de l’architecture romaine antique, que l’on connaissait mal, au système de construction des églises ogivales, que l’on méprisait sans les comprendre. C’est sous cette inspiration indécise que fut commencée et achevée la grande église de Saint-Eustache de Paris, monument mal conçu, mal construit, amas confus de débris empruntés de tous côtés, sans liaison et sans harmonie; sorte de squelette gothique revêtu de haillons romains cousus ensemble comme les pièces d’un habit d’arlequin.11  Frankl, The Gothic, pp. 491–553, 563–578.  Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française du XIe au XVIe siècle, vol. I, Paris 1854, p. 240. 10 11

7

The Church

of

Saint-Eustache

in the

Early French Renaissance

It is perhaps to be expected that a chief advocate of the functionalist conception of Gothic architecture should so severely criticize Saint-Eustache. But this form-follows-function understanding of the Gothic was widely accepted and we find the same argument being used, for example, by Le Roux de Lincy, author of the first monographic study of SaintEustache, who, however, in contrast to Viollet-le-Duc’s indignant bluster, offers a carefully considered statement: Ces hauts piliers ne sont-ils pas et trop multipliés, et trop rapprochés, et trop maigres? Cette facilité, cette simplicité avec laquelle on les voit s’élancer si librement vers les magnifiques voûtes des églises du XIIIe siècle, les retrouvet-on ici? Nous le croyons pas. Il nous semble que l’architecte de notre église ne le croyait pas non plus lui-même. Évidemment il a été embarrassé de cette belle nudité, qu’il semble s’être ingénié à dissimuler; il n’a rien trouvé de mieux que d’attacher, d’agrafer, pour ainsi dire, à ses piliers toutes ces belles petites colonnettes qu’il savait faire, et qu’il avait trouvées dans le style italien. Et véritablement, supportées comme elles sont sur des pilastres d’une hauteur beaucoup trop considérable pour leur largeur, suspendues, pour ainsi dire, dans l’air, à quoi servent-elles, sinon à inquiéter l’œil et à déplaire à l’imagination? Quant à l’ornementation, sans être trop sévère, combien n’y aurait-il pas à reprendre? Ces petites têtes d’anges jetées à profusion et comme au hasard sur les étroits piédestaux des colonnettes, ces clefs pendantes multipliées sans nécessité sur les voûtes, ces minces cartouches attachés à la large ouverture des chapelles, tout cela n’a-t-il pas quelque chose qui choque et qui impatiente?12 Within the general charge of bilateral stylistic corruption that had previously been leveled against Saint-Eustache, the nineteenth-century functionalist view of Gothic architecture allowed a more precise definition of the nature of the distortion wrought on each style. The building is characterized as a confused and ill-advised attempt to superficially disguise a Gothic structure in Renaissance ornament, resulting in the violation of the functionalist integrity of the Gothic and the capricious distortion of the canonical proportions and rational deployment of the classical vocabulary. Whereas earlier the design had been described as overall stylistic confusion with details occasionally singled out for censure or praise, now the whole is reductively conceptualized as an uneasy split between structure and ornament. That some common ground might have been established between the styles, that the eclectic design might possess its own logic and integrity, are possibilities which the rigidified theoretical framework cannot even consider. It is interesting, in this regard, to note that Le Roux de Lincy, unlike the more didactic Viollet-le-Duc, feels compelled to add a qualification to his negative assessment of the building: “Malgré tout, il faut en convenir, ce monument a de la grandeur; sa structure est forte et hardie; le chœur surtout a quelque chose de sévère et d’imposant […]”.13 Although on a rational level Le Roux de Lincy can see only faults in the building, and is quite able to explain exactly where and how the design is a bad one, at another level he experiences a breach between ideological negation and perceptual affirmation, which, however, he is not equipped to articulate. Since the mid-nineteenth century there has been no significant modification of critical attitudes towards Saint-Eustache. The only real challenge to the rationalist critics of the building was an argument based on an alternative nineteenth-century conception   Adrien Le Roux de Lincy and Victor Calliat, Église Saint-Eustache à Paris, Paris 1850, p. 20.

12

8

 Ibid.

13

A Critical Historiography

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of the Gothic which had its roots in romanticism. According to this view Gothic was the quintessential expression of the Christian spirit; those qualities which had escaped definition by the classical standard of architecture – particularly its sense of “mystery” – made it morally superior to the classical as a mode for church architecture.14 Thus Saint-Eustache with its pronounced Gothic character was judged a worthier monument than the more overtly classicizing French ecclesiastical structures of the following centuries which were criticized as “temples construits dans nos siècles de scepticisme, d’indifférence réligieuse, ou de sensualisme opulent”.15 Although this validation of Saint-Eustache might seem quaint today, originally it had a number of advocates, particularly in the 1850s – the same decade that saw the publication of Viollet’s opinion and Le Roux de Lincy’s monograph.16 One proponent of this view was C. Lavergne who in 1856 described the building as a “démonstration victorieuse” of the fact that in the sixteenth century the classicizing influence “n’a pas été assez puissante pour étouffer le germe fécond et impérissable de la tradition catholique […] au grand scandale, il est vrai, des classiques purs du dix-septième siècle et des gothiques purs du dix-neuvième”.17 Paradoxically, although Lavergne presents himself as an opponent of stylistic purists, his favorable opinion of Saint-Eustache is nevertheless based on the presence of only one of the building’s styles, the Gothic. But this evangelical championing of Saint-Eustache did not have a long history and by the late nineteenth century it disappears from the literature on the building. What has survived, however, is the view of the church as bad architecture because of its attempt to reconcile two irreconcilable styles. Occasionally scholars have found themselves in the same sort of quandary as did Le Roux de Lincy; logically they are able to see how the eclecticism of Saint-Eustache “violates” principles of good architecture, but they feel compelled to qualify this assessment, sometimes by resorting to wild hyperbole. Thus in 1881 the early historian of the French Renaissance, Léon Palustre, after having enumerated the various problematic aspects of the building, (based primarily on a comparison with a Gothic ideal) concludes: Mais cela n’enlève rien à la majesté de l’édifice et si l’ornementation est parfois capricieuse, elle ne laisse jamais d’être pleine de noblesse et de grandeur, de sorte que certaines dispositions, que la sévère logique ne manquerait pas de condamner, exercent sur l’esprit une séduction extrême. L’église Saint-Eustache n’est pas seulement, au point de vue religieux, la plus brillante conception d’une époque qui a produit tant de monuments fameux, elle mérite encore une place d’honneur parmi les œuvres d’architecture que tous les âges recommandent à notre intelligente admiration.18 Displaying more scholarly reticence yet revealing an equally equivocal stance is Anthony Blunt’s much later evaluation of the building that appears in his 1953 Art and Architecture in France, 1500–1700. Blunt makes the usual observation that Saint-Eustache is a “Gothic structure […] clothed in Renaissance forms”. Like Sauval, Lebeuf, and Le Roux de Lincy before him, he points to the uncanonical proportions of the classical Orders  Frankl, The Gothic, pp. 480–487.  Abbé Gaudreau, Notice descriptive et historique sur l’église et la paroisse Saint-Eustache de Paris, Paris 1855, part 2, p. 11. 16  That so much was written about Saint-Eustache during this decade may have to do with the fact that the building had recently been refurbished and restored under the direction of Victor Baltard. The 14 15

relevant documents are contained in dossier # 1193– 1-1842–1924, at the Bibliothèque de la Direction du Patrimoine in Paris. 17  Claudius Lavergne, Restauration de l’église de Saint-Eustache, Paris 1856, p. 3. 18  Léon Palustre, La Renaissance en France, Paris 1881, vol. II, p. 131.

9

The Church

of

Saint-Eustache

in the

Early French Renaissance

and describes certain details as being of “a somewhat bastard design”. Yet in the final analysis Blunt writes: “in spite of all these eccentricities, the interior of St Eustache has a grandeur of space and proportions not to be found in any other sixteenth-century church in France […] as an isolated work it remains of great importance”.19 Whereas Palustre and Blunt are able to be quite specific about the building’s failings, when they seek to describe it in a more positive sense they can only resort to imprecise generalities, and, in Palustre’s case, to a kind of rhetorical bullying as if he hoped the overwhelming extravagance of his claim – that Saint-Eustache is one of the greatest works of architecture ever built – would somehow leave more of an impression than all his rational arguments that “proved” the contrary. Although Palustre and Blunt may feel a tension between their logical assessments and their intuitive perceptions, the disparity between the specificity of their censure and the vagueness of their praise is misleading, for both are based on superficial impressions of the building. The negative judgments, which appear more rational and concrete, are not based upon detailed analyses of the eclectic design as a whole, but instead are perfunctory descriptions of certain aspects of the building that fail to conform to canonical purist norms. This same observation holds true for the majority of late nineteenth and twentiethcentury critics who, unlike Palustre and Blunt, have not sought to moderate their negative appraisals of Saint-Eustache. Thus the prevailing critical view of Saint-Eustache remains essentially the same as the superficial reading first expressed by Brice and given theoretical support by Viollet-le-Duc. Indeed, in the last decade the criticism of Saint-Eustache has become so mindlessly entrenched in the nineteenth-century conceptual framework of equal but separate styles superficially and miscegenistically bound in a structure-versusornament opposition that two scholars, in otherwise original and penetrating studies, have simply repeated the very quotable condemnation of Viollet, without indicating any deviation of opinion of their part.20 That the critical judgment of Saint-Eustache has become so ossified, despite the fact that the building has yet to receive a thorough stylistic analysis (Le Roux de Lincy’s purist censure of the interior, written almost a century and a half ago, remains the most detailed description of the building) is partly due to the fact that late nineteenth and twentieth-century studies of French Renaissance architecture provided a convenient historical “explanation” for the building’s stylistic duality: it is “transitional”, the inevitable if unfortunate result of its position in a period that witnessed the death of one style and the birth of a new one. The architecture of the early sixteenth century as a whole was characterized as little more than a mindless continuation of medieval building types which make a feeble and anxious concession to modernity through the cosmetic application of Italian Renaissance ornament. The development of French Renaissance architecture was described as one of passive assimilation, first of the easily copied (if poorly understood) formal vocabulary of the Renaissance, and eventually of the more complex underlying principles and theories of classical architecture; this absorption paralleled the gradual shedding of familiar elements drawn from the medieval tradition. The narrative of this development was thus metaphorically pedagogical and evangelical: the child-like,

 Anthony Blunt, Art and Architecture in France 1500–1700, Harmondsworth 1953, p. 60. 20   David Thomson, Renaissance Paris: Architecture and Growth 1475–1600, Berkeley and Los Angeles 1984, p. 187; and Jean-Marie Pérouse de Montclos, 19

10

Histoire de l’architecture française de la Renaissance à la Révolution, Paris 1989, pp. 74–75.

A Critical Historiography

of

Saint-Eustache    Chapter 1

culturally backwards French being shown the true path of wisdom through the enlightened examples of Italian models.21 In recent years, however, this simplistic view of the early French Renaissance has been exposed as such. This revisionism sees intent and purpose in the architecture of the period and calls into question the appropriateness of judging what is new and imaginative in terms of what is Italianate or non-medieval. Almost every aspect of French Renaissance architecture has been questioned and reappraised, from the role of the French medieval tradition to the impact of the Italian Renaissance, from the treatment of details to programmatic concerns of planning.22 This attention, however, has been exclusively concerned with secular construction, primarily with the château; the revisionism has not been extended to church architecture in general or Saint-Eustache in particular.23 Nor can it be literally extended, for the current reevaluation does not provide a model for dealing with what has so long been the most controversial issue concerning Saint-Eustache: its stylistic duality. The discourse on secular architecture, unlike the literature on Saint-Eustache, never became entangled in the moralistic ideology of stylistic purity and the Gothic versus classical opposition, because the medieval presence in châteaux and town houses did not extensively involve the Gothic style per se. The highly evolved structural and decorative systems of Gothic architecture are not substantially present in early French Renaissance secular buildings. Instead the medieval presence there essentially involved elements which had been appropriated from the polemically neutral, “astylistic” tradition of the château fort.24 Thus the fundamental theoretical and ideological presuppositions that have so long prevented any meaningful or historically accurate understanding of Saint-Eustache remain unchallenged and the views of past centuries continue to be complacently reiterated. What I therefore find it necessary to do in this study is to set aside the assumptions that   A comparatively recent presentation of this view can be found in Louis Hautecœur, Histoire de l’Architecture classique en France, I. La formation de l’idéal classique, part 1: La première Renaissance (1495 à 1535–1540), Paris 1963, and part 2: La Renaissance des humanistes (1535–1540 à 1589), Paris 1965. 22   Among these revisionist studies are: André Chastel, “French Renaissance Art in a European Context”, Sixteenth Century Journal 12 (1981): 77–103; Monique Chatenet, Le château de Madrid au bois de Boulogne, Paris 1987; Jean Guillaume, “Azay-leRideau et l’architecture française de la Renaissance”, Les Monuments historiques de la France (1976) 5: 65–80; Idem, “Léonard de Vinci et l’architecture française, I: Le problème de Chambord, II: La villa de Charles d’Amboise et le château de Romorantin: réflexion sur un livre de Carlo Pedretti”, Revue de l’art (1974) 25: 71–84, 85–91; Idem, “L’ornement italien en France: position du problème et méthode d’analyse”, in La scultura decorativa del Primo Rinascimento, Atti del I Convegno Internazionale di studi, Pavia 1980, Rome 1983, pp. 207–212; Idem, “Serlio est-il l’architecte d’Ancy-le-Franc? A propos d’un dessin inédit de la Bibliothèque Nationale”, Revue de l’art (1969) 5: 9–18; Wolfram Prinz, Schloss Chambord und die Villa Rotonda in Vicenza: 21

Studien zur Ikonologie, Berlin 1980; Idem and Ronald G. Kecks, Das französische Schloss der Renaissance, Berlin 1985. See also Jean Guillaume, “La première Renaissance 1495–1525”; Monique Chatenet and François-Charles James, “Les expériences de la région parisienne 1525–1540”; and Jean Guillaume and François-Charles James, “L’architecture savante 1540–1560”; all of which appear in Le Château en France, ed. Jean-Pierre Babelon, Paris 1986, pp. 179– 190, 191–203, 205–216. 23  An exception to this is Henri Zerner’s “Le Frontispice de Rodez. Essai d’interprétation”, in ‘Il se rendit en Italie’: Études offertes à André Chastel, Paris 1987, pp. 301–308. Zerner stresses that the placement of a Renaissance tempietto facade on top of the soaring front of Rodez Cathedral, though perhaps shocking by Italian Renaissance standards, cannot be dismissed as the result of French provincial incomprehension, but must be understood as purposeful and deliberate – from both a strictly architectural and also a symbolic point of view. 24  For an examination of this borrowing see Jean Guillaume, “Le château français du milieu du XVe au début du XVIe siècle”, in La France de la fin du XVe siècle, colloque de Tours, 1983, Tours 1985, pp. 221–224.

11

The Church

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Saint-Eustache

in the

Early French Renaissance

have heretofore framed the discussion on Saint-Eustache. As has here been outlined, the almost moralistic prejudice in favor of stylistic purity has long been the distorting common theme running through the building’s reductive critical history. But this prejudice is itself entangled in a concatenation of assumptions, which this study attempts to unravel. It argues that the very notion of a stylistic duality – that the building draws upon a monolithic generic French Gothic tradition and a narrowly defined Italian Renaissance classical – is misleading. It reveals that it is an anachronistic mistake to assume that all that is classicizing in the building is Italianate, that all that is French is non-classicizing, that what is medieval is limited to structure and what is classical is confined to ornament, and that “ornament” can be used to signify what is unnecessary or of secondary import. These issues are discussed in successive chapters (4–7) which offer a detailed examination of the fabric and the evolution of details in the early Renaissance design; a discussion of the problem of the identity of the architect; a broader consideration of the sources of the building and their formal and symbolic significance; and finally an evaluation of the conceptual and theoretical underpinnings of the design in the context of early sixteenth-century French church architecture. Saint-Eustache offers a unique perspective on this last issue. There was very little ecclesiastical construction during the sixteenth century that sought to come to terms with the new Italianate mode, and what there was primarily consisted of small private chapels or re-modellings and extensions of older churches. In the latter group the Renaissance additions were sometimes quite extensive, but their formal novelty was generally inhibited by the presence of earlier church fabric, ranging from the early twelfth to the late fifteenth centuries, to which new construction was required to inflect in one way or another in order to minimize the disruption of overall stylistic unity within the building. Saint-Eustache is the exception, being the only church designed in the early Renaissance that was begun from the first stone in response to the new style and which does so on a monumental scale. Faced, on the one hand, with the seemingly wide formal array of small-scaled or stylistically circumscribed ecclesiastical projects and, on the other, with the apparently anomalous Saint-Eustache, it has always been difficult to arrive at a coherent definition of early sixteenth-century church architecture, particularly since the only link between the structures has seemed to be the presence of an Italianate vocabulary of ornament. But an analysis of the design of Saint-Eustache that goes beyond the mere cataloging of Renaissance details will allow us to better understand the range of strategies available to sixteenth-century architects and to see their efforts as part of a conceptually coherent whole. The singularity of Saint-Eustache also raises the questions that will be addressed in Chapters 2 and 3: why was this exceptional building built? Who was its patron? What confluence of circumstances led to the only large scale ecclesiastical undertaking of the period? To answer these questions it is necessary to examine the urban, social and economic pre-1532 history of the parish and to comprehend the beginning of work at SaintEustache within the broader context of Paris in the sixteenth century. These issues are not embroiled in the same kind of tortured historiography that attends the style, nevertheless they remain unaddressed, largely as a result of the building’s problematic status, indeed non-status, as a work of art. Although this study is devoted to a single monument it is not a monograph in the usual sense, that is, it does not attempt to be a definitive, comprehensive examination of the building in all its aspects from beginning to end. Rather, it mainly considers problems of form and style from conceptual, symbolic, and contextual points of view. Furthermore, although Saint-Eustache was begun in 1532 and completed in 1640, the subject of the following pages is primarily the early history of the building, as the title

12

A Critical Historiography

of

Saint-Eustache    Chapter 1

indicates, Saint-Eustache in the early French Renaissance. It was in this period that the decision to build was made, the design evolved, construction begun and measures were taken to ensure that the building would be completed as planned. No events in the later history of the church significantly impinged on the actions and decisions of the 1530s and 40s. The fundamental adherence of later architects to the original design is of interest in terms of seventeenth-century aesthetics and theory, as are the subtle changes that were made. But a full scale examination of these later phases and an examination of the equally interesting questions of patronage that attends them would only detract from the issue of Saint-Eustache in the early French Renaissance that is the subject of this study.

13

Fig. 4. Saint-Eustache, view from south aisle.

Chapter 2 Problems

of the

Site

and the

Struggle

to

Enlarge

the

Church

The early fortunes of Saint-Eustache were closely tied to the development of a new commercial quarter in Paris which would come to be known as les Halles. Responding to urban growth on the right bank, Louis VI (1108–1137)1 created an open air market in the Champeaux region, situated just outside the city roughly to the west of the rue Saint-Denis and to the north of the rue Saint-Honoré.2 In the 1180s the Champeaux market greatly benefited from the general expansion and embellishment of Paris promoted by Philippe Auguste (1180–1223).3 That king brought to Champeaux the fair of Saint Lazare, which had previously been located far to the north of the area he intended to transform into the preeminent and central market place of Paris,4 and he erected two large market buildings – or halles – at Champeaux to protect the merchants from the elements and to insure the continuous use of the market. These covered markets and their ever expanding neighborhoods were included within the boundaries of Philippe Auguste’s new city walls begun in 1190 (Fig. 5).5 The creation of les Halles and the subsequent population expansion of the surrounding neighborhood led to the establishment of a number of new parishes in the area. The right bank had long been served by the church of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois, whose foundation reached back to Merovingian times;6 but this venerable church, situated near the river, could not accommodate the urban expansion to the north (Fig. 5). In response to the increase in population which resulted from the founding of the open air Champeaux market, three chapels had already been upgraded to parish churches, their new territories carved from that of Saint-Germain.7 As a result of the further initiatives of Philippe Auguste at Champeaux, in c. 12108 a chapel dedicated to Saint Agnes was constructed north of les Halles just within the redefined limits of the city established by the new walls, in the eastern corner of a triangular city block bordered on its three sides by the rue du Jour, the rue Trainée   Where a king’s dates are provided they refer to the length of his reign. 2   On the origins of the market see Anne LombardJourdan, Aux origines de Paris: la genèse de la rive droite jusqu’en 1233, Paris 1985. For the placement and boundaries of the original market see Jean Martineau, Les Halles de Paris des origines à 1789. Évolution matérielle, juridique et économique, Paris 1960, pp. 12–16. 3  On Philippe Auguste and Paris see Jacques Boussard, De la fin du siège de 885–886 à la mort de Philippe Auguste (Nouvelle histoire de Paris), Paris 1976, in particular p. 315 passim; and John W. Baldwin, The Government of Philip Augustus: Foundations of French Royal Power in the Middle Ages, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London 1986. 4  This fair, also known as the fair of Saint Ladre, had originally been located at what is now the intersection of the rue Saint Denis and the boulevard Magenta. Jacques Silvestre de Sacy, Le Quartier des Halles, Paris 1969, p. 11. 1

 On the walls of Philippe Auguste see Pierre Lavedan, Histoire de l’urbanisme à Paris (Nouvelle Histoire de Paris), Paris 1975, pp. 101–104. 6  Elisabeth Chatel, Denise Fossard, Colette LamyLassale and May Viellard-Troiekouroff, “Les anciennes églises suburbaines de Paris, IVe–XIe siècles”, Mémoires de la Fédération des sociétés historiques et archéologiques de Paris et de l’Île-de-France 11 (1960): 191–194. 7   These three were Saint-Leufroy, Sainte-Opportune and Saints-Innocents. Adrien Friedmann, Paris, ses rues, ses paroisses du moyen âge à la Révolution. Origine et évolution des circonscriptions paroissiales, Paris 1959, pp. 91–92. 8  The chapel is first mentioned in 1214 when it is described as the “novae capellæ sanctæ Agnetis”; Archives Nationales, LL 387, fol. 15 and 53v; also cited by Michel Félibien, Histoire de la ville de Paris, Paris 1725, vol. III, p. 96. 5

15

The Church

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Saint-Eustache

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Early French Renaissance

and the rue Montmartre (Fig. 5). Although the chapel of Sainte-Agnès was then erected to serve as a northern outpost for the parish of Saint-Germainl’Auxerrois,9 the urban expansion of this area was very rapid and by 1216 the chapel had acquired a parish territory of its own, and had been rededicated as the church of Saint-Eustache.10 This new parish continued to prosper, and by 1255 its population and its revenues, had grown to such an extent that the bishop of Paris was obliged to issue a detailed general order regarding the division of these revenues between the curé of SaintEustache and the chapter of Saint-Germain, to whom Saint-Eustache remained administratively dependent.11 The expansion of the Fig. 5. Detail map of right bank Paris in c. 1220. parish was so intense that by 1300 the population of this north-west corner of the city had pressed beyond the walls of Philippe Auguste and by 1328 a section of wall between the rue Saint-Martin and the rue Coquillière had disappeared.12 The rapid transformation and development of Saint-Eustache from chapel to church with an increasingly populous and wealthy parish was due to two factors. First was the location of Saint-Eustache near les Halles, which

  For an account of the often quarrelsome relationship between the chapter of Saint-Germainl’Auxerrois and the curés of Saint-Eustache see Gaudreau, Notice descriptive, part 2, pp. 49–74. 10   A document of 1216 reads “[…] capella S. Agnetis quæ tunc recens erecta, postea fuit parochia S. Eustachii […]”, cited in Gallia Christiana, Paris 1744, vol. VII, col. 257. Lebeuf is probably correct when he conjectures that the abbey of Saint-Denis had given to the church several of their Saint Eustache relics which had been at Saint-Denis for nearly a century, Lebeuf, Histoire de… Paris, I, p. 119. At some point during Saint-Eustache’s medieval history a legend grew up as to its 9

16

founding. This was first recorded by Gilles Corrozet: “Un bourgeois de Paris, nommé Alais […] faisant conscience d’avoir esté inventeur de l’impost d’un denier sur chasque pannier de poisson, fit edifier une chapelle dediee au nom de Saincte Agnes, laquelle depuis a esté faicte paroise et dediee au nom Sainct Eustache”, in Les Antiquitez, croniques et singularitez de Paris, ville capitalle du Royaume de France, Paris 1586, fol. 156v. This legend has persisted and still appears, for example, in guide books to the church. 11  Gaudreau, Notice descriptive, part 2, pp. 52–55. 12  Jean Favier, Paris au XVe siècle, 1380–1500 (Nouvelle Histoire de Paris), Paris 1974, p. 19.

Problems

of the

Site

and the

Struggle

to

Enlarge

the

Church    Chapter 2

had continued to prosper and grow throughout the thirteenth century. Under Louis IX (1226–1270), Philippe III (1270–1285), and Philippe IV (1285–1314), four additional market buildings were constructed at Champeaux and the fair of Saint-Germain-des-Prés was transferred there.13 The second factor was the placement of Saint-Eustache in relation to other churches on the right bank. While there was a great concentration of churches and chapels to the east of les Halles along the rue Saint-Denis, and a number south of this region, Saint-Eustache stood alone in the neighborhood that had been created by the walls of Philippe Auguste in the north-west corner of the city. It was the only ecclesiastical structure in an area bordered by the city walls to the north and west, by the rue Saint-Honoré to the south and les Halles to the south-east (Fig. 6). The dimensions of the original church of Saint-Eustache are not known, nor is there indication that it was enlarged during the thirteenth century to accommodate its thriving and expanding parish.14 The first evidence we have of changes in the original fabric comes in the fourteenth century.15 Between c. 1300 and 1352 at least five private chapels were founded at Saint-Eustache, suggesting that a row of chapels may have been added to the church at that time.16 Such an addition might well have accompanied a lateral extension of the building by an extra – perhaps third – side aisle, as was often the case in medieval church expansion projects. Indeed, this hypothesis seems to be supported by the 1551 Truschet and Hoyau plan of Paris which depicts the city as it was in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.17 The plan shows Saint-Eustache as having two portals, one leading to the main vessel of the church, and another smaller one to the north leading to a side

 Martineau, Les Halles, p. 250; and Silvestre de Sacy, Quartier des Halles, p. 11. 14  Although Saint-Eustache may have been enlarged during the thirteenth century, it is difficult to accept the scenario of complete rebuilding first proposed by Lebeuf and later revived in the 1920s by Charles Terrasse. Lebeuf and Terrasse believed that the chapel of Sainte-Agnes, described as “new” in 1213 (see above n. 32), was torn down and replaced in 1223 by a newer, larger structure, the church of Saint-Eustache. Their argument is based on a mistaken reading of the documents which originally speak of the “capellæ sanctæ Agnetis” and only in 1223 (or 1228) mention for the first time the “ecclesiae sanct Eustache” (Gallia Christiana, VII, col. 258). Although the actual word ecclesiæ does not appear until 1223, already in 1216 the “parochia S. Eustachii” is mentioned (see above n. 34). If there was a parish of Saint-Eustache we must assume there was also a church. Not only is it unlikely that a recently erected structure would have been so rapidly demolished, the documents cited by Lebeuf and Terrasse do not support their argument, for the sole distinction between a chapel and a church was not one of size but of territory: a church had a parish, a chapel did not (Friedmann, Paris, p. 48). Thus the documents only let us conclude that sometime before 1216 the chapel of Sainte-Agnès became the parish church of Saint-Eustache. Lebeuf, Histoire de… Paris, p. 119; and Charles Terrasse, “L’architecture religieuse de la Renaissance à Paris, dans le Parisis et le Vexin”, 13

in Positions des thèses de l’École des Chartes, 1920, p. 66; Idem, “Notes sur la construction de l’église SaintEustache”, Bulletin trimestriel de la société historique et archéologique des 1er et 2e arrondissements de Paris 1 (1920): 173. 15  In c. 1220 one or two chapels or chaplaincies were founded at Saint-Eustache. The document which refers to them is too vague, however, to allow any conclusions about possible changes in the fabric to be drawn. Archives Nationales S3328 pièce 6, cited by Le Roux de Lincy, Saint-Eustache, p. 4. 16  The five chapels were founded: before 1309 by Gauthier de Bruxelles; between 1325–1331 by Philippe VI in fulfillment of the will of his father, Charles count of Valois; before 1337 by Pierre de Villiers; in 1342 by Jean Hallegrin as executor of the will of Maria Pastillaria; and in 1352 by Jean de Fontenay. Le Roux de Lincy, Saint-Eustache, p. 5; Lebeuf, Histoire de… Paris, p. 124; Gaudreau, Notice descriptive, part 2, pp. 171, 177, 196, 206, 209. 17  This plan, also known as the plan de Bâle, is one of the earliest extant plans of the city and was designed by Germain Hoyau and engraved by Olivier Truschet. Gilles Corrozet furnished the texts which appear in cartouches. It is a hand-colored wood engraving and measures 1.33 m × 0.96 m. Jean Dérens and Michel Fleury, Plan de Paris par Truschet et Hoyau, dit plan de Bâle 1552–1559, Zurich 1980.

17

The Church

of

Saint-Eustache

in the

Early French Renaissance

aisle (Fig. 7).18 As it is doubtful that the original thirteenth-century church had an asymmetrical plan (which would have presented a rare anomaly in church design), it seems probable that Truschet and Hoyau reveal a later extension to the building. That such an extension is the one suggested by the foundation of five chapels in the early fourteenth century is supported by the fact that we have no evidence from a later date that might otherwise explain it. There is evidence of two other additions made to the church in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. In 1397 the will of Jean Beaucarré, a wealthy horse trader, provides for the erection of a chapel at Saint-Eustache.19 This may be the chapel which is Fig. 6. Map of Paris in the fifteenth century showing location of churches. described as “faite nouvellement” in 1399.20 In 1403, Louis I duc d’Orléans, who had a residence in the parish of Saint-Eustache in the Hôtel de Nesle, erected a chapel dedicated to “sainct Michel et touts les anges”.21 Perhaps one of these chapels was the one which the plan of Truschet and Hoyau shows as being attached to the northern side aisle (Fig. 7). This structure was clearly an addition to Saint-Eustache and not an adjoining house, for it had no door and so could only be entered from the church interior.

18  The plan of Saint-Victor, which appeared one or two years later, shows Saint-Eustache with a symmetrical, three portal facade. Although both plans must be used cautiously, the plan of SaintVictor, which is based on the same original as the earlier one, is generally regarded as less accurate and more idealizing. This is particularly true of their representations of Saint-Eustache. Where, for example, the plan of Truschet and Hoyau exaggerates the size of the place in front of the church, the later plan goes further and makes the place into a street. Jean Dérens, “Note sur les plans de Paris au XVIe siècle”, Bulletin de la société de l’histoire

18

de Paris et de l’Île de France 107 (1980): 71–86. Boudon, Françoise, André Chastel, Hélène Couzy and Françoise Hamon, Système de l’architecture urbaine: Le Quartier des Halles à Paris, Paris 1977, pp. 68–70. 19  Archives Nationales, LL 722, fol. 36v, cited in Léon Mirot, “Un inventaire des fondations de la paroisse Saint-Eustache au XVe siècle”, Mémoires de la société de l’histoire de Paris et de l’Île de France 45 (1918): 123. 20   Archives Nationales, S* 1254, fol. 33v. 21  Lebeuf, Histoire de… Paris, p. 124.

Problems

of the

Site

and the

Struggle

to

Enlarge

the

Church    Chapter 2

The construction of at least seven chapels at Saint-Eustache to serve the private spiritual needs of aristocrats and wealthy bourgeoisie pointedly reveals the prosperity and social ascent of the parish.22 At the same time, however, beginning in the early fourteenth century, les Halles entered a period of sharp decline from which it would not recover until well into the sixteenth century. Although many factors contributed to the decline and eventual abandonment of the market, the decisive blow seems to have been dealt by the heavy Fig. 7. Truschet and Hoyau plan of Paris, detail with Saint-Eustache. taxes levied on goods in order to support the Hundred Years’ War.23 The growing tax burden drove merchants from the market to their homes where they could sell their merchandise in private, away from the spying eyes of the tax collector. Les Halles became, in the words of a noted historian of the market, “le lieu qu’il fallait éviter”.24 Thus although les Halles had been an important factor for the foundation and development of Saint-Eustache in the 1200s, by the fourteenth century the parish was well enough established that it could survive the misfortunes of its former urban magnet.25 Although the fourteenth-century chapels testify to the wealth and position of the parishioners of Saint-Eustache, that they seem to have been the only changes effected on the fabric points to the limited area available to the church for expansion. The erection of Saint-Eustache in the extreme north-west corner of the city had been a model of planning, successfully anticipating the growth of this quarter that followed the construction of les Halles and the city walls. In one respect, however, the siting of Saint-Eustache was to prove problematic, for it allowed little room for the church to be enlarged as the parish grew. It is not known how overbuilt the triangular block of land surrounding Saint-Eustache was in the thirteenth century, but we can assume that the awkward placement of the church in the eastern part of the city block was determined by the presence of other buildings already occupying the western side.

 For further evidence of the wealth of the parishioners and the amount of that wealth that went to Saint-Eustache, see Mirot, “Inventaire”, 101–170. 23  Other factors contributing to the decline of les Halles included a rise in boutique commerce at the expense of markets and fairs and a European wide slowdown of commerce and economic depression beginning in the early fourteenth century, aggravated in France by several bad harvests. The war also caused a shortage of goods and some trade – such as that with Flanders – was lost altogether. Martineau, Les Halles, pp. 139–144. 24   Ibid., p. 144. 22

 It is worth noting the divergent fortunes of the market and church, for they would continue in a pattern of convergence and divergence into the twentieth century. The sixteenth century witnessed both the building of the new, monumental SaintEustache and the revival of the market. In the nineteenth century when the new halles of Baltard were built the parish benefitted and the church itself was restored by Baltard. But their fortunes took decidedly different turns in the late twentieth century when les Halles were destroyed with the result that Saint-Eustache became a much more visible and visited monument.

25

19

The Church

of

Saint-Eustache

Fig. 8. Saint-Eustache plan.

in the

Early French Renaissance

Fig. 9a. Saint-Eustache site in c. 1400, from Boudon et al., Système de l’architecture urbaine.

We have a better idea of the configuration of this area at the end of the fourteenth century. Using the censive de l’Archevêché of 1399 and other documents, a group of C.N.R.S. researchers were recently able to reconstruct the parcelling of land and the placement of houses for a large part of the neighborhood around les Halles.26 Their reconstructed plan, however, is in error about the size and placement of Saint-Eustache (Fig. 9a). Based on Charles Terrasse’s earlier misreading of a 1623 document, this plan shows the old Saint-Eustache as occupying the area of the choir of the present church.27 A closer reading of the document, however, makes it quite clear that the walls of the old church, rather than corresponding to the perimeter of the new choir, intersected at some point with the new exterior wall.28 There is also evidence that the axis of the new church was not aligned with that of the old one, but rather was parallel with the rue Trainée. The south-east crossing pier of the present church is placed further to the east than the north-east crossing pier. The alignment of these two piers may reflect the orientation of the original church which was still standing when the piers were

 Boudon et al, Système de l’architecture, pl. 7.  Hélène Couzy in Boudon et al, Système de l’architecture, pp. 248, 298 n. 8; Terrasse, “Notes sur la construction”, pp. 174, 176. 28  In 1623 the nave and transept of Saint-Eustache had almost been completed and much of the old church, east of the new construction was still standing. A group of consulting architects was called in to give advice on how to best proceed with construction of the east-end while allowing the old choir to be used for as long as possible. It was decided to continue building on the north side of the building where the first four ambulatory chapels were already standing (Fig. 7) and that the site would allow this work to continue unhampered up to the level of “l’alignement du mur de séparation de 26 27

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la troisième chapelle dans la rotondité […]”. It was also decided that it would be necessary to “abbattre un des vieilz pilliers et arcboutans desdits bas-cotez pour au lieu d’icelluy en planter ung neuf […]”. Thus it seems that at the area of the new church’s sixth north ambulatory chapel (the third chapel in the rotondity) and its corresponding ambulatory pier, the new construction would intersect with the walls of the old church. (The exact point of this intersection is not certain because the document is not clear as to whether the old exterior pier that was to be torn down was to be replaced by a new exterior pier or an interior ambulatory pier.) Archives Nationales, Minutier Central, LIX, 51, fol. 148v, 11 February 1623.

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erected (Fig. 8).29 In any event, it would be a mistake to use the 1623 document to establish the size of the old church in 1400 because Saint-Eustache was enlarged in the fifteenth century. What can be said, however, is that based on the number of chapels known to have existed there by 1400, and working backwards from fifteenth-century additions to the church, which we will soon examine, the first Saint-Eustache must have been larger than the tiny 13 by 24 meter structure indicated in the C.N.R.S. plan, and its eastern end was closer to the rue Montmartre (Fig. 9b). Nevertheless, the plan is reliable concerning the disposition of the properties along the three streets surrounding the church’s site; it makes clear that houses and hôtels tightly circumscribed Saint-Eustache in a plot of limited size. The church was further hemmed in by its cemetery, which flanked it to the north and rear towards the rue Montmartre.30 We can thus understand why, despite the growth of the parish in the thirteenth and four- Fig. 9b. Saint-Eustache site in c. 1400, corrected version. teenth centuries, the only additions made to the church seem to have been relatively modest – chapels and perhaps a side-aisle – and that owing to the build-up of houses along the rue Trainée, the main body of the church was not, could not be, expanded.31 That this situation had frustrated the marguilliers (church wardens) is explicitly stated in the early fifteenth century when they declare that in the past “on ne povoit honnement alongier ycelle église pour ce qu’il n’y avoit mie place”.32 In the fifteenth century the restrictive dimensions of the site continued to thwart hopes for any significant enlargement of the church. Yet in the 1420s and 1430s two building projects were undertaken at Saint-Eustache that made the most of the site’s limited possibilities. This building activity coincided with one of the most difficult and troublesome periods in Paris’ medieval history: the English occupation from 1420 to 1436.33 During these crisis years marked by famine, epidemics, floods and frosts, as well as the ill-treatment of the citizenry at the hands of English soldiers, the population of Paris dramatically declined: in only one day in 1431, 1200 people fled the city.34 Many houses stood empty and the price of real estate plunged.35 The quarter of the city that lay to the west of the rue Saint-Martin and included the parish of Saint-Eustache apparently suffered less than did other areas, however, for it remained the relatively most populous neighborhood in Paris.36 Nevertheless, pockets in this area did feel the effects of the occupation: in 1434 the church of Saint-Sauveur on the rue Saint-Denis was obliged to close its doors for lack of   Michel Ranjard, “Saint-Eustache. Les campagnes de construction de 1532 à 1640”, Congrès archéologique de France 104 (1946): 108–109. 30  The location of the cemetery can be deduced from contemporary descriptions of houses which are located on the rue Montmartre and are described as “aboutissant par derriere au cymetiere de ladicte eglise [Saint-Eustache]”. Archives Nationales, LL 722, fols. 45v and 46, 29 August 1430 and 1 April 1432, cited in Mirot, “Inventaire”, 134–135. 31   It is curious that Hélène Couzy also comes to the conclusion that Saint-Eustache was hampered by a confining site even though the plan she uses, which 29

shows the church as surrounded by much available buildable land, directly contradicts this point. Boudon et al, Système de l’architecture, p. 248. 32  Archives Nationales, X 4797, fol. 35, 28 August 1432. Cited in Le Roux de Lincy, Saint-Eustache, pp. 35–36. 33  Auguste Lognon, Paris pendant la domination anglaise, 1420–1436, Paris 1878. 34  Louis Hautecœur, Paris des origines à nos jours, Paris 1972, vol. I, p. 135. 35  Favier, Paris au XVe siècle, p. 59. 36   Ibid., p. 26.

21

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attendance. As late as 1442 the chapter of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois was complaining about an insufficient congregation.37 It is thus difficult to entirely believe the 1432 claims of the marguilliers of Saint-Eustache that the church “n’est mie souffisante pour recevoir le people” and that during a mass “une partie des parroissiens estoient hors de l’église, en la place devant l’église”.38 Yet even if viewed with skepticism, this claim of a burgeoning congregation (probably exaggerated because it was offered as testimony in a suit concerning the right of the church to the “place devant l’église”) at the very least can be taken as evidence that the parish of Saint-Eustache was faring better Fig. 9c. Saint-Eustache site in c. 1500. than many others. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to understand the building activity of the 1420s and 30s at Saint-Eustache only – or even primarily – within the context of the relative stability of the parish population during this period. The projects at Saint-Eustache should instead be seen as part of a city-wide reaction to the English occupation; for despite the terrors and upheavals, this period was one of great building activity at many churches throughout Paris. In fact, ecclesiastical workshops were the only ones open during these years. Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois, Saint-Laurent, SaintMédard, Saint-Gervais-Saint-Protais, Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs, and Saint-Benoît were among the churches that were rebuilt or enlarged, often quite extensively.39 These projects were initiated and funded by bourgeois parishioners,40 perhaps because the troubled and oppressive times, when death by famine or plague was common, motivated genuine feelings of piety that were channeled into ecclesiastical expenditure (these feelings may have found further encouragement in the dropping prices of real-estate and labor).41 The parishioners of Saint-Eustache were evidently determined to participate in the rebuilding movement of the early fifteenth century, even if their site prohibited an extension on the grand scale of building campaigns in so many other parishes. Their first project, to rebuild the east end, utilized the only land of significant size that was apparently available to them: the area between the church and the rue Montmartre. We read, in a   Ibid., p. 60.  Archives Nationales, X 4797, fol. 35, 28 August 1432. Cited in Le Roux de Lincy, Saint-Eustache, pp. 35–36. 39  For the first four see Maurice Dumolin and George Outardel, Les églises de France, Paris et la Seine, Paris 1935, pp. 66, 79, 84, 95. For SaintNicolas-des-Champs see Michel Dargaud, “L’église Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs”, in Positions des thèses de l’École des Chartes, 1975, p. 61. For Saint-Benoît see Favier, Paris au XVe siècle, p. 401. Lasteyrie also 37 38

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draws attention to the fact that these years were marked by considerable church building throughout France; Robert de Lasteyrie, L’architecture religieuse en France à l’époque gothique, vol. I, Paris 1926, p. 161 passim. 40   It was not in architecture alone, but in all the arts that the bourgeoisie of Paris, rather than the nobility who had fled the city, found new roles as patrons. Favier, Paris au XVe siècle, pp. 399–408. 41   On the question of salaries see ibid., pp. 269–270.

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previously unknown document, that in 1420 permission was granted to make an encroachment 1.62 m wide along an approximately 9.72 m. stretch of the rue Montmartre “pour la fondation des murs du chevet”.42 No other documents have been found directly relating to the subsequent building campaign of the 1420s, but the finishing touches apparently came in 1430 when the main altar was rebuilt and moved about 32 cm, and a new altar dedicated to “la Saincte Trinité” was erected “derrieres icellui grant autel”.43 As well as indicating the approximate date of completion of the new fabric, the erection of the two altars allow us to deduce what the project for the new chevet may have entailed. Since the main altar was moved only a very small distance, it can be assumed that the choir itself had not been significantly enlarged or rebuilt. This fact, together with the erection of a new altar in an area behind the main altar, suggests that the chevet project principally involved construction beyond the choir, in other words an ambulatory and possibly chapels. That chapels were in fact part of the enlargement scheme is confirmed in 1493 by a description of the chapel of Saint Gregory as being “derrière le grant autel”.44 As the chevet of the 1420s had already extended the church all the way to the rue Montmartre, this chapel of Saint Gregory could not have been built after that time and should, therefore, be included in the early fifteenthcentury project. To this campaign we can perhaps also attribute the bell-tower which both the Truschet and Hoyau plan and the plan of Saint-Victor depict to the rear of the church (Fig 7) and which is described by the seventeenth-century historian Dubreul – writing when the old choir was still standing – as located “au coin de la rue Montmartre”.45 The second project undertaken at Saint-Eustache during this period was a less ambitious one, situated to the west of the church. In January of 1433 the marguilliers announced their intention de “croistre ladicte eglise en la place devant icelle et devant la rue des Provaires”.46 Although the depth of this place was small (approximately five meters),47 acquiring it had been a difficult task requiring patience and unorthodox, if ingenious, methods. Originally the area of the place had been a public passageway. When, in c. 1420, other land had become available for this passageway, the marguilliers, apparently without permission, had enclosed the original passage area by a small wall; no further action was taken until work on the east end of the church had been completed. Then in 1432, pleading squatter’s rights and making, as we have seen, exaggerated claims of spatial needs, the marguilliers were officially granted rights to the place.48 Shortly thereafter they announced their plans for westward extension. As the place was small, the planned addition was in 42  Archives Nationales, LL 723, fol. 170v, 15 August 1420. 43  Archives Nationales, LL 722, Febuary 1430, cited in Mirot, “Inventaire”, 102–103. 44   Cited in Le Roux de Lincy, Saint-Eustache, p. 6. 45  Dubreul, Le Théatre des Antiquités, 1639 ed., Supplément, p. 55. Two sixteenth-century documents concerning the reparation of windows in the old choir make it quite clear that the bell-tower abuts the choir: “le cueur de lad. eglize, du costé et tenant au clocher”, and “le cueur de lad. eglise près le clocher […] ”. Archives Nationales, Minutier Central, LXI, 81, 19 and 24 September 1575; published by Catherine Grodecki, Documents du Minutier Central des notaires de Paris: Histoire de l’art au XVIe siècle (1540–1600), vol. I, Paris 1985, pp. 231–232. 46  Archives Nationales, LL 722, fol. 47, 2 January 1433, cited in Mirot, “Inventaire”, 136–137. This document, which tells us that the place in front of

the church also opened onto the rue des Prouvaires, indicates that the two houses which, in the c. 1400 C.N.R.S. plan, abut the north-west corner of the church, must have been gone by this time and not, as Hélène Couzy states, in 1489. Boudon et al, Système de l’architecture, p. 248. 47  Four months earlier the marguilliers had won the right to build on this property, which became available when a neighbor “[…] a retrait son hostel de V toises, en entencion d’en laisser une partie pour la voierie, et de reprendre autant sur la voierie pour alongier ladite église”. As the amount given to the public passage was the same (“autant”) as that given to the church, each must have received 2.5 toises or 4.86 metres. Archives Nationales, X 4797, fol. 35, 28 August 1432, published in Le Roux de Lincy, Saint-Eustache, pp. 35–36. 48  Ibid.

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all likelihood for the “bel portail pour recevoir et couvrir les paroissiens” that four months earlier had been suggested as a possible use for this area [Saint Germain].49 The description of the portail as a shelter for the parishioners suggests that a portico or porch rather than a simple portal was intended. At the same time that the marguilliers were planning the modest westward extension of Saint-Eustache, they also made known their intentions to demolish three recently acquired houses on the rue Montmartre in order to expand the cemetery.50 This expansion, together with the two building campaigns of the 1420s and 30s, pushed SaintEustache to the very limits of its site (Fig. 9c). The chevet and cemetery now extended to the rue Montmartre, the site’s absolute eastern boundary. Since the bell tower was “au coin de la rue Montmartre”, that is at the intersection of the rue Trainée and the rue Montmartre, it can be assumed that the south flank of the church was close to the rue Trainée: also an absolute boundary. The church’s western limit was, in theory, not rigid, for houses on the rue Trainée between the rue des Prouvaires and the place de la Croix Neuf could presumably be acquired, but the twelve year effort to procure a mere five meters of land illustrates how difficult pushing into this densely built-up area could be. Similarly, the cemetery precluded building to the north. These boundaries – absolute to the east and south, and all but absolute to the west and north – remained fixed for almost a century, a period during which no further additions seem to have been made to Saint-Eustache.51 In 1519 designs were drawn up for a new project to “agrandir et accroistre” SaintEustache. Little is known about this project, for the only document concerning it is brief and does not indicate the location or scope of the planned extension.52 There is every reason to believe, however, that the church was now intended to be laterally expanded to the north, for in 1518 Saint-Eustache had received a new cemetery several blocks away on the rue Bouloi53 which made the old cemetery on the rue Montmartre (an area which is never

 Ibid.  “[…] les marregliers d’icelle eglise avoient entencion de demolir les maisons dessus dites qui furent audit Estienne Jaquelin et à Jehan Pascal et ycelle applicquer en l’augmentation et accroissement du cymetiere de la dicte église, pour ce que elles tenoyent et aboutissoient audit cymetiere […] ”, Archives Nationales, LL 722, fol. 47, 2 January 1433, cited in Mirot, “Inventaire”, 136–137. The houses, located on the rue de Montmartre, had been acquired in 1430 and 1432, Archives Nationales, LL 722, fol. 45v, 29 August 1430; LL 722, fol. 46, 1 April 1432; and LL 722, fol. 46v, 13 August 1432, Mirot, “Inventaire”, 134–135. 51  Le Roux de Lincy offers unconvincing evidence to support his conclusion that the church was again enlarged in 1466 and 1495. Although he may be right that in 1466 the church already owned one of the houses on the rue du Jour, it is impossible, given the location of the house, that any such property could have been incorporated into the church. His 49 50

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evidence for the second date comes from Lebeuf who only tells us that the marguilliers were planning to build; there is no evidence, however, to suggest that any construction actually took place. Le Roux de Lincy, Saint-Eustache, p. 18; Lebeuf, Histoire de… Paris, p. 121. 52   Archives Nationales, LL 723, fol. 186, 20 December 1519. I disagree with Charles Terrasse who believed the design mentioned in this 1519 document was the one for the church begun in 1532. The document explicitly states that the design only concerns an enlargement of the church – not the construction of a new one. It is also stylistically impossible that the present church could have been designed in 1519. Terrasse, “L’architecture religieuse”, p. 66; Idem, “Notes sur la construction”, 174. 53  The new cemetery was blessed on 6 September 1518 by the bishop of Mégare; Le Roux de Lincy, Saint-Eustache, p. 4.

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again mentioned as a cemetery) available to the church as buildable land.54 The 1519 project was never realized, but when the new church was begun in 1532, the first construction, as will be seen, occurred in the area of the old cemetery to the north of the original church. Thus the 1519 project was much like those of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: once again the plan was only to enlarge the church; again the rebuilding was to be confined to the eastern corner of the triangular city block; and again the expansion was a lateral one, for, as earlier, no axial extension of the original thirteenth-century nave was possible. Yet little more than a decade later this centuries-old scenario had been completely reversed when in 1532 the foundation stone was laid for the new church of Saint-Eustache, a project which, we will recall from Gilles Corrozet’s passage in La Fleur des antiquitez, was now planned to extend “jusques au lieu dict la croix neufve”. Thus in the years between 1519 and 1532 plans for simple enlargement were abandoned in favor of an ambitious scheme for a new church that was not only on a far grander scale than the original Saint-Eustache, but was also on a scale the city had not seen since the twelfth-century cathedral of Notre-Dame. The major obstacle to all previous hopes for construction in the area between the old church and the place de la Croix Neuf – the inability to obtain the land – evidently had suddenly been removed. Yet what is most astonishing about Corrozet’s statement, which conveys the intended and eventually realized western limit of the church, is that in 1532 most of the land to the west of the old church, needed for the nave and transept of the new structure, had not yet been acquired.55 Surprisingly, there has been virtually no scholarly curiosity as to what may have caused this dramatic new beginning in the history of Saint-Eustache, as if the project was somehow inevitable and its genesis, therefore, unexceptional. Yet the plans for a new and larger Saint-Eustache and the confidence that the land required for this monumental undertaking would become available, signals a significant turn of events in the thirteen years since the 1519 plan for a northern expansion of the church. What had happened? Who had intervened during those few years to so radically redirect the architectural future of SaintEustache? The answer can be found if we pull back from our close scrutiny of the parish and its circumstances and broaden our view to include the entire city, for Paris also saw a change in her fortunes and stature during these years. The author of this change also stood behind the ambitious new plans for Saint-Eustache.

 It was not unusual for cemeteries to be deconsecrated and their terrain appropiated for other purposes. In 1543, at Saint-Maclou in Pontoise, for example, the cemetery was deconsecrated so that the local market place could be expanded; Eugène Lefèvre-Pontalis, Monographie de l’église SaintMaclou de Pontoise, Pontoise 1888, pp. 148–150. 55   [Note of the Series Editor: Gilles Corrozet, La Fleur des antiquitez, singularitez et excellence de la plus 54

que noble et triomphante ville et cité de Paris, Paris 1532, fol. 49v: “Lan mil cincq centz trente & deux, le neufiesme iour Daoust fut la premiere pierre assise, par le provost de Paris a sainct Eustace, pour icelle eglise estre creue iusques au lieu dict la croix neufve, laquelle place est de grande estendue”.] On the eventual acquisition of properties, see below, chapter 3, pp. 61–63.

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Saint-Eustache, exterior pilaster capital between fourth and fifth north choir chapel.

Chapter 3 A Royal Project: Saint-Eustache Unbound In 1528 Francis I announced to the Parisians: Très chers et bien amez […] nostre intention est de doresnavant faire la plus part de nostre demeure et séjour en nostre bonne ville et cité de Paris et alentour plus qu’en aultre lieu du royaume […]1 Francis’ decision, to henceforth reside principally in Paris, brought the monarchy back to the capital after almost a century during which the kings and their courts had virtually abandoned the city in favor of the Loire valley. Since the reign of Charles VII (1422–1461) the only glimpses that the citizenry caught of the kings were at their triumphal entries into the city shortly after their coronations, marriages and funerals.2 Louis XI (1461–1483) had a known dislike for Paris and the Parisians, whereas he said of Tours that he was “l’ung des anciens citoyens”;3 he had even contemplated making this Loire city the new capital of France.4 During the early years of his reign (1515–1524), Francis I had also centered his activities in the Loire; he considered this region more than any other to be the home of his family and his court, for it was there that he concentrated all his building activity.5 But in 1528 Francis broke this century-old tradition and soon after, in marked contrast to the antipathy of Louis XI, described Paris as “la plus fameuse, populeuse et louable ville et cité, non-seulement de nostre royaume, mais de toute la chrestienté”.6 Various factors have been cited as motivating Francis’ decision to officially return the monarchy to Paris. His disastrous defeat at Pavia followed by his humiliating captivity in Madrid may have convinced him that it was necessary to re-ally the strength of the monarchy with that of the capital city.7 Moreover, Paris’ location near the domains of Francis’ powerful friend, Anne de Montmorency, and near the northern and eastern borders of France that were being threatened by Emperor Charles V, may have also influenced his decision.8 Yet, even if these political problems and questions of geographic strategy were the immediate and conscious reasons behind Francis’ decision of 1528, they also may have only hastened the inevitable. As Babelon has stressed: In sixteenth-century Europe, when the city, as a social organism, as a center of political and economic power, and as a locus of artistic and intellectual activity, was emerging as the preeminent cultural ideal, the isolated and itinerant court life of Francis’ early reign was clearly becoming outmoded. The ideal  In this announcement Francis also declared “[…] cognoissant nostre chastel du Louvre estre le lieu le plus comode et à propos pour nous loger; à ceste cause avons délibéré faire réparer et mettre en ordre ledict chastel […]”; Registres des délibérations du Bureau de la Ville de Paris, ed. Alexandre Tuetey, Paris 1886, vol. II, p. 17. 2  Favier, Paris au XVe siècle, p. 241. 3  Cited in Bernard Chevalier, Tours ville royale (1356–1520). Origine et développement d’une capitale à la fin du Moyen Âge, Louvain and Paris, 1975, p. 247. 4  Thomson, Renaissance Paris, p. 8. 5  Between 1515 and 1524 work was begun on the Francis I wing at Blois, the king had Leonardo draw 1

up plans for a new château at Romorantin, and the château of Chambord was begun. See Guillaume, “La première Renaissance”, pp. 184–189; and JeanPierre Babelon, Les Châteaux de France au siècle de la Renaissance, Paris 1989, pp. 110–117, 157–158, 159–167, 745, 747. [Note of the Series Editor. See also Monique Chatenet, Chambord, Paris 2001, passim, for Chambord’s construction history.] 6   Cited in Adrien Le Roux de Lincy and Victor Calliat, L’Hôtel de Ville de Paris, Paris 1844, vol. I, p. 4. 7   Jean-Pierre Babelon, Paris au XVIe siècle (Nouvelle Histoire de Paris), Paris 1986, p. 45. 8  Robert J. Knecht, Francis I, Cambridge 1982, p. 253.

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of the city, based on ancient models, had captured the imagination of popes, humanists, architects, princes, artists and poets. This was not a trend Francis could resist if he wished to remain on an equal footing – culturally or politically – with his peers. Francis apparently recognized this and his decision can be understood as an acknowledgement that he was indeed living in a urban age.9 The immediate result of Francis’ announcement to the Parisians was that the city was “re-consecrated” as the official residence of the king and became again the capital of France in all senses of the word. During the century when the Loire had been home to the royal court, Paris had remained the legal capital of France, but, I would stress, it was only now, with Francis’ decision, that the city regained its place as the symbolic and spiritual heart of the kingdom: The identity of the city was again tied to the personage of the king and to the institution of the monarchy.10 That Francis delayed taking up residency in the city and that he continued to visit the Loire should not be mistaken, as it too often has been, as evidence that the king’s 1528 statement was feigned. It is important to recognize that Francis’ intention was to re-confer upon the city the status of ville capitale, and that this status was assumed as soon as he made public his declaration. But Francis was not making only a symbolic gesture – quite the contrary. As well as restoring to the city a position it had not enjoyed for nearly a century, Francis also took upon himself a role which no French king had enjoyed for some time, that of urban benefactor; according to Corrozet “Sous le regne du […] Roy François, on ne cessa de bastir dedans la ville de Paris”.11 Unfortunately Francis’ new role in Paris has been overshadowed by his more glamorous patronage of grand architectural projects at royal châteaux throughout the Île-de-France.12 In fact the only significance that has traditionally been attributed to Francis’ 1528 decision is that it shifted royal building activity from the Loire valley châteaux to those around Paris.13 Yet Fontainebleau, Madrid and the other châteaux being remodeled or built by Francis during the 1530s and 40s should not obscure the fact that the city itself had become a focus of this great architectural patron’s ambitions. This is not to suggest that Francis’ undertakings in Paris have been ignored. With the exception of the extent of his involvement at Saint-Eustache, which will here be discussed, Francis’ urban activities are well known and include projects such as the demolition of the fausses portes in the old city walls, the building and paving of the quai du Louvre, the rebuilding of old fountains and the construction of new ones, plans for a transformation of the Louvre from a decrepit fortress into a Renaissance palace, and involvement with the new Hôtel de Ville.14 What has not been recognized, however, is that a coherent vision and specific symbolic intent can be perceived as informing several of the projects in which the king participated. That this has not been acknowledged is due to the fact that SaintEustache – not normally associated with the king in a meaningful way – is the most explicit architectural expression of these aspirations. Before this larger picture can be drawn, therefore, it is first necessary to establish the grounds for a connection between Francis and Saint-Eustache and I would like to begin by characterizing what can best be described as the somewhat contradictory nature of Francis’ role as urban patron.  Babelon, Paris au XVIe siècle, p. 16.   For the role the presence of the king played in the identification of Paris as the capital city see Roland Mousnier, “Paris, capitale politique au moyen-âge et dans les temps modernes (environ 1200–1789)”, in Paris, fonction d’une capitale (Colloques Cahiers de civilisation), Paris 1962, p. 41. 11  Corrozet, Les Antiquitez… de Paris, 1586, fol. 160r. 12   Fontainebleau and Madrid were begun in 1527, Villers-Cotterêts in 1532, Folembray in 1538, 9

10

28

Saint-Germain in 1539, La Muette and Challuau in 1542. See Chatenet and James, “Les expériences de la région parisienne”, pp. 191–199; and Babelon, Les Châteaux… de la Renaissance, pp. 198–209, 213–218, 318–327, 716, 719, 722, 726. 13   See, for example, Knecht, Francis I, p. 253. 14  A recent account of these activities appears in Babelon, Paris au XVIe siècle, pp. 119–126, 282, 289. See also Robert J. Knecht, “Francis I and Paris”, History 66 (1981): 18–32.

A Royal Project: Saint-Eustache Unbound    Chapter 3 As much as he desired to make Paris give physical expression to the renewed relationship between the monarchy and the capital and reflect its reaffirmed prestige as the capital city, Francis was not single-minded in pursuing this goal, for his attentions were diverted by projects outside the city, the most exceptional being Fontainebleau and the château of Madrid in the Bois de Boulogne, both of which allowed him to pursue his wellknown passion for hunting. Indeed, Francis specifically singled out the excellent forests surrounding these châteaux as the reason he chose to build there.15 Furthermore, these châteaux, where French and Italian architects, painters and sculptors had been commissioned to create some of the most ravishing works of sixteenth-century art, were splendid courtly retreats, and compared to the king’s city projects, were far more compelling undertakings.16 In other words, Francis was a modern sixteenth-century monarch who had come to genuinely value the importance of his capital city and, as an architectural patron, wished to leave his mark upon it and establish a residence there; but he was also a self-indulgent monarch with the means at his disposal to pursue the ends of luxury and hunting in the countryside.17 In terms of what he achieved in Paris this ambivalence often manifested itself in the form of half-hearted efforts, exaggerated claims for what was accomplished, and a willingness to turn to his advantage the architectural ambitions of others. The Louvre is probably the best example of a project that quickly stalled (Fig. 10). In 1529 Francis undertook to renovate the old-fashioned and run-down palace and began by tearing down the enormous keep which stood in the courtyard.18 This impressive undertaking was followed, however, by what were primarily only cosmetic improvements, as if Francis’ interest had waned or he thought such superficial changes sufficient. That they were not was made clear in the winter of 1539–1540 when Charles V visited Paris. The emperor was lodged in the Louvre, in hastily renovated rooms, but all festivities and ceremonies had to take place elsewhere.19 Despite the embarrassment of this situation, it was not until 1546, the year before his death, that Francis finally commissioned Pierre Lescot to design a new Louvre.20

  In 1528 Francis stated: “[…] pour prendre nostre plaisir et desduict à la chasse des grosses bestes, nous ayons puis naguerres ordonné faire construire, bastir et édiffier un édiffice au lieu de Fontainebleau… [et] en nostre bois de Boullogne […]”, Léon de Laborde, Les Comptes des bâtiments du roi (1528–1571), Paris 1877–1880, vol. I, p. 7. On Francis and hunting see Knecht, Francis I, pp. 85–86. 16  Francis’ love of hunting also sometimes kept him from his administrative duties; Charles V once complained that while Francis was out hunting the kingdom was being ruled by the king’s mother. John F. Freeman, “Louise of Savoy: A Case of Maternal Opportunism”, Sixteenth Century Journal 3 (1972): 77–78. 17   Seen in this urban-versus-courtly context perhaps Francis’ decision of 1518 or 1519 to abandon Romorantin in favor of Chambord, a decision whose motive have always seemed murky, becomes comprehensible. Romorantin was conceived by Leonardo as both a residence and as an ideal Renaissance city in the manner of an antique one, as a “Roma minor” (indeed in the sixteenth century 15

the original spelling – Remorantin – was modified to the suggestive present one). Chambord, however, despite the Italianate modernity of its centralized plan, was an intensely retrospective, symbolic evocation of a chivalric, courtly French past, and was primarily a hunting lodge, a pleasure château for Francis and entourage. For Romorantin see Sabine Kühbacher, “Romorantin”, in Architecture en région Centre, ed. Jean-Marie Pérouse de Montclos, Paris 1988, pp. 547–548; and Carlo Pedretti, Leonardo da Vinci, the Royal Palace at Romorantin, Cambridge, Mass., 1972. For Chambord see below pp. 79–80. 18  Corrozet, Les Antiquitez… de Paris, 1586, fol. 160v. 19   Jean Jacquot, “Panorama des fêtes et cérémonies du règne”, in Les Fêtes de la Renaissance, vol. II: Fêtes et cérémonies au temps de Charles Quint, ed. Jean Jacquot, Paris 1960, pp. 437–438. 20  Babelon, Les Châteaux… de la Renaissance, p. 411. [Note of the Series Editor. André Chastel, “La demeure royale au XVIe siècle et le nouveau Louvre”, in Studies in Renaissance and Baroque Art Presented to Anthony Blunt, London 1967, pp. 78–82.]

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When Francis did actually see Parisian projects through to completion he often sought to amplify their actual significance. In 1534, for example, when he announced that the fausses portes would be demolished he gave as his two reasons for this action “l’embellissement et décoration de nostre ville” and “l’entencion, voulloir qu’avons de faire la plupart de nostre vye, nostre demeure et residence en nostre dicte ville de Paris”.21 It cannot be denied that the decision to tear down the fausses portes was a wise one. These portals in the right bank section of the old wall of Philippe Auguste had been encircled by and thus made redundant by the later mid-fourteenth-century walls of Fig. 10. Truschet and Hoyau plan of Paris, detail showing the Charles V. Furthermore, they were situated Hôtel de Ville in the first half of the sixteenth century. on major thoroughfares where their presence impeded circulation. But it is difficult to comprehend how the removal of traffic hazards would embellish and decorate the city or significantly contribute to its new found status as the declared residence of the king. At the same time, however, it is worth remarking that Francis is here essentially repeating the wording of his 1528 announcement. Lest the lapsed Louvre project and the Île-de-France châteaux suggest otherwise, he is eager to seize the opportunity to reaffirm his commitment to the capital. Francis’ ambivalent posture towards Paris helps to explain why he involved himself with the Hôtel de Ville and, I believe, with Saint-Eustache, two building projects that were not royal ones. These undertakings, whose responsibility would remain in the hands of others – in one case the city administrators and in the other the marguilliers – could, through royal pressure, be influenced in such a way that they would contribute to the cit’s reaffirmed stature as capital and seat of the officially declared royal residence, while leaving Francis free to concentrate his attentions and finances on his châteaux. This scenario is supported by the well-documented history of the Hôtel de Ville. Since the mid-fourteenth century the municipal government, led by the prévôt des marchands assisted by four échevins and a council of twenty-four notables, had been housed in a building on the place de Grève known as the Maison aux piliers.22 By the early sixteenth century this structure had become too small and it was decided that a new building was necessary. The first mention of what was to become the new Hôtel de Ville comes in 1529 when the échevins discuss the problem of acquiring properties adjacent to the Maison aux piliers that were “grandement nécessaires” if a new and larger building was to be constructed. Realizing they would be unable to acquire the many properties by themselves, the échevins decided to ask the king to step in and through his prerogative of eminent domain force the sale of the needed real-estate.23 Not only did Francis oblige by issuing the necessary lettres patentes,24 he also provided the services of his own architect,

 Cited in Le Roux de Lincy, L’Hôtel de Ville de Paris, Paris 1844, vol. I, p. 4. 22  Jean-Jacques Lévêque, L’Hôtel de Ville de Paris, une histoire, un musée, Paris 1983, pp. 44–46. 21

30

  Le Roux de Lincy, L’Hôtel de Ville, I, p. 4.  On the king’s right of eminent domain see Lavedan, Histoire de l’urbanisme, pp. 183–184.

23 24

A Royal Project: Saint-Eustache Unbound    Chapter 3 the Italian Domenico da Cortona.25 This additional act of benevolence was not regarded by the échevins as such, but rather as unwelcome interference.26 Nevertheless the king’s interest had been caught by their project, which he enthusiastically described as one which would contribute to “la décoration de notre bonne ville de Paris, ville cappitale de notre royaume”27 and the échevins had no choice but to accept the Italian’s aid and allow the king to thereby assume aesthetic control of the project.28 By compelling the échevins to use his architect Francis made sure that the new Hôtel de Ville would be built in a style closely identified with himself (Figs. 11, 12). It would, therefore, not only be a building worthy of the city’s new prestige but would also – as the seat of the municipal government – serve as a potent statement of the presence of the king in the capital after so many years of absence. In 1532 Domenico presented his designs for the new building and in the following year, with contributions from the king, the foundation stone of the new Hôtel de Ville was laid by the prévôt des marchands and the échevins. Despite Francis’ early enthusiasm, in 1536 when the king needed money for his war against the Emperor, he instructed the prévôt des marchands to stop work on the building “actendu que [nous] sommes en temps de paix” (construction was not completely suspended until 1541).29 The workshops at the royal châteaux, however, continued to operate throughout the war.30 Given Francis’ involvement at the Hôtel de Ville it seems reasonable to suggest that his relationship to the project for a new Saint-Eustache was more complex than has previously been thought. The anonymous early sixteenth-century author of the Journal d’un bourgeois à Paris sous le règne de François Premier, tells us that when construction was begun at Saint-Eustache there was a rumor that “le Roy y donna pour y faire commencer”.31 This statement, which appears in almost all the literature on Saint-Eustache, has quite reasonably been taken as meaning that Francis contributed financially to the building.32 What the evidence really suggests, however, is that the king’s involvement went deeper: that he was more than a mere benefactor to whom the parish turned only after the project had been designed and construction was about to begin; that in fact it was his intervention which caused the 1519 plan for enlargement to be set aside in favor of plans for a new, monumental church. This view is supported by the change in the parish’s real-estate prospects. As we have seen, for more than a hundred years the parish had sought to enlarge their small  The only study of this pupil of Giuliano da Sangallo’s who arrived in France in 1495 is that of Pierre Lesueur, Dominique de Cortone dit le Boccador, Paris 1928. The most important work attributed to Cortona is the château of Chambord, although it now seems that he probably collaborated with Leonardo who was the primary designer; Jean Guillaume, “Léonard de Vinci et l’architecture française”. 26  Babelon, Paris au XVIe siècle, pp. 120, 280. 27   Cited by Marius Vachon, L’ancien Hôtel de Ville de Paris, 1533–1871, Paris 1882, p. 199. 28  The project was so strongly controlled by the king’s tastes that in 1535, when Francis was on the battlefield, two alternate designs for the main staircase were sent to him for consideration. Ludovic Lalanne, “Une lettre inédite de François Ier relative à l’escalier de l’Hôtel de Ville, 1535, 11 juin”, Bulletin de la Société de l’histoire de Paris et de l’Île-de-France 2 (1884): 184–185. 25

  Cited in Le Roux de Lincy, L’Hôtel de Ville, I, p. 5, pièce justificative #10. This request was repeated in April of 1537. 30  Laborde, Comptes des bâtiments, passim. Also see the chart of expenditures in Chatenet, Le château de Madrid, p. 150. 31   Journal d’un bourgeois à Paris sous le règne de François Premier (1515–1536), new ed. by Ludovic Lalanne, Paris 1854, p. 431. 32  In some recent literature the amount provided by the king is given as 10,000 livres. The source of this information seems to be Amédée Boinet, Les églises Parisiennes, Paris 1958, vol. I, p. 461. Boinet, however, gives the Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris as his source, although no sum is in fact mentioned there. Although it is reasonable to assume, given the specificity of the amount, that Boinet did have a valid source and that the incorrect reference is simply a mistake, I have not been able to find this missing source. 29

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thirteenth-century structure. During this period the major impediment to any significant extension had been the difficulty of obtaining land, specifically land to the west of the church. But suddenly in 1532 terrain was no longer a problem: Corrozet’s statement telling us the new church would extend to the place de la Croix Neuve makes that quite clear. Although the properties were not actually acquired until they stood immediately in the path of the growing building, the parish had evidently obtained the right to purchase them as needed. Such a right can only have been granted by the king who, as we know from the history of the Hôtel de Ville, was quite willing to implement Fig. 11. Truschet and Hoyau plan of Paris, detail his prerogative of eminent domain. The few docushowing the Hôtel de Ville in the first half of the sixments we have concerning the acquisition of houses teenth century. reveals that when the properties were required the owners were obliged to turn them over to the parish; they could not refuse the demands of the marguilliers. The properties were either bought outright or exchanged for others.33 This corresponds to the way that land granted by eminent domain was normally acquired.34 In contrast, however, to the Hôtel de Ville, where the king was approached only after plans for a new and larger structure were already underway, it is difficult to imagine the parish making the decision to replace their church with a new one, particularly on the monumental scale of the present Saint-Eustache, without first having firm assurances that the needed land would be available. The marguilliers knew from experience what the échevins only had had to face in 1529: the difficulty of obtaining properties belonging to many well-entrenched and uncooperative individuals. In the past, architectural projects had been planned at Saint-Eustache only after the land needed to build them was owned by the church. The unlikelihood of plans for a new Saint-Eustache 33  From the early history of the church we have only one document concerning the acquisition of terrain. (The documentation of the early periods of construction is in general very scanty and it is only beginning in the 1580s that documentation of any kind becomes steadily available). In 1547 the marguilliers purchase property abutting the new construction (Archives Nationales, S 3328, 26 August 1547). It is only from the early seventeenth century, when work on the western facade is about to commence, that we find more detailed records of property transactions. In 1615 the marguilliers want to acquire a house on the rue du Jour belonging to the widow and heirs of a Nicolas de Grandfilz, and articulate the two options available: “[…] que la maison appartenant à ladite eglise assize […] rue du Four ou demeure à présent le sieur Royer […] sera baillée et transporté par lesdits […] marguilliers en contre-eschange de celle de ladite veuve et héritiers de Grandfilz, ou bien s’ils veullent en argent la somme a quoy elle sera estimée […] le tout selon que iceulx […] marguilliers trouveront plus advantageulx pour ladite église de Saint-Eustache […]” (Archives Nationales, Minutier Central, LIX,

32

51, fol. 116, 8 September 1615). The family of the “deffunct Nicolas de Grandfilz”, however, repeatedly refuse to accept either cash or the house on the rue du Four. The marguilliers are thus obliged to seek legal recourse and “après plusieurs procédures icelle veuve et sondit filz y auroient esté condampnéz […]” (Archives Nationales, Minutier Central, LIX, 51, fol. 122, 4 September 1616). Shortly thereafter the exchange of houses is effected; the widow and son also receive 300 livres for their old house and another 300 to repair the new one (Archives Nationales, Minutier Central, LIX, 51, fol. 281, 11 September 1616). What the records of this transaction pointedly reveal is that the right of the church to the land was absolute; the refusal of the widow and son to cooperate with the church only landed them in court. Other instances of less problematic purchase and exchange from this period are also documented (Archives Nationales, Minutier Central, LIX, 51, fol. 125v, 9 July 1617; fol. 129–130, 24 June 1618; and LXI, 136, fol. 402, 13 July 1619). 34  See Lavedan, Histoire de l’urbanisme, pp. 183– 184; and Le Roux de Lincy, Hôtel de Ville, p. 5.

A Royal Project: Saint-Eustache Unbound    Chapter 3 preceding royal involvement strongly suggests that Francis himself participated in the project’s genesis. This theory is reinforced by Corrozet’s account of the laying of the foundation stone at Saint-Eustache which tells us “la premiere pierre [fut] assisse par le provost de Paris”. The only significance that past scholarship has accorded to this statement is that it provides us with a name, for it is known that in 1532 the prévôt de Paris was Jean de La Barre.35 The implications of this information have not, however, been considered. The prévot de Paris, Fig. 12. Early seventeenth-century engraving of the Hôtel de Ville. a position dating back to the eleventh century, represented the authority of the king in the city36 (his counterpart was the prévôt des marchands who represented the citizenry, the bourgeoisie, of Paris). Whatever action the prévôt de Paris took was in the name of the king who in fact legally retained the position for himself as he only assigned to the prévôt the garde de la prévôté.37 Furthermore, Jean de La Barre, a close friend and advisor of the king who had fought alongside and been captured with him at Pavia,38 was directly involved with Francis’ building activities. Since 1528 La Barre had been responsible for contracting architects, masons, sculptors and other workmen for the royal châteaux that were being built or remodeled throughout the Île-de-France.39 If on the one hand La Barre was closely connected with the king and his architectural projects, on the other he was also more than familiar with the parish of SaintEustache. In c. 1530 he acquired a hôtel in the parish which abutted property belonging to the church upon which he wanted to build. He requested and was granted from the marguilliers the right to acquire this land.40 It would not be unreasonable to imagine that the marguilliers would have perceived La Barre as an ideal go-between, and that they eagerly seized this opportunity to inform such a politically well-connected individual of their long standing desire to enlarge the church and of the severe difficulties regarding the site that stood in their way. Unlike the échevins who had resented the king’s interference we can well imagine that the frustrated parish would have been only too happy to have royal attention come its way. Given the position of La Barre as the king’s representative in Paris, as an administrator who helped Francis to realize his architectural ambitions, and as a parishioner of Saint-Eustache, the fact that he laid the foundation stone at the church – a ceremonial action that would normally have been performed by the bishop of Paris or a visiting bishop – supports the hypothesis that the king was deeply involved

  Catalogue des prévostz de Paris depuis le roy S. Loys à Henry II, Paris 1555, fol. 17v. 36  Nicolas Delamarre, Traité de Police, Paris 1713, vol. I, pp. 97–108. 37   Ibid., pp. 99 and 108. 38   Journal d’un bourgeois, p. 231. See also Knecht, Francis I, p. 172. 35

 Laborde, Comptes, I, p. 1 passim.  The relevant documents are cited by and a summary of the transaction provided by Françoise Hamon in Boudon et al, Système de l’architecture, p. 235 n. 26. 39 40

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with, and even initiated, the project for a new Saint-Eustache.41 There are a number of arguments that La Barre and the marguilliers might have used to persuade Francis to intercede at Saint-Eustache. It is possible that in the 1520s some progress was being made on the northern enlargement of the church that was mentioned in 1519. There would thus have been available financial resources and possibly a workshop. But there were also several more personal appeals that could be made to the king. The patron of the church, Saint Eustache, was the patron saint of hunters among whom, as we know, Francis enthusiastically – indeed fanatically – counted himself.42 As has been seen, the lure of hunting was to a degree responsible for Francis’ ambivalent posture towards Paris which he had partly resolved by building hunting châteaux in its environs. But at SaintEustache he would have found a project that offered him an association with the sport even within the heart of the city.43 Another personal reason for Francis favoring Saint-Eustache was the fact that two of its chapels were ancestral ones: those of the Valois and the Duc d’Orléans. The first was one of the five private chapels established at Saint-Eustache in the early fourteenth century, founded in the 1320s by Philippe VI (1328–1350) in fulfillment of his father’s will.44 Philippe VI was the first Valois king, the dynasty to which Francis, his descendant, also belonged. The second chapel was the one founded in 1403 by Louis I duc d’Orléans,

 Another piece of evidence in this context is offered by the church itself. The tracery of the window above the south transept portal which is dated 1539–1540 (see below chapter 3, p. 90) at Saint-Eustache follows a distinctive pattern (Fig. 102). The only other place that I have found this strikingly unusual pattern of hexagons with richly decorated mullions is in a stained glass window in a north choir bay at Étampes which is known to have been added in the sixteenth century (Eugène Lefèvre-Pontalis, “Étampes: Église de Notre-Dame”, Congrès archéologique de France 82 (1919): 6–29). In 1526 as a reward for his fidelity during the Pavia debacle, as well as prévôt de Paris, Jean de La Barre was named count of Étampes by Francis (Knecht, Francis I, p. 194). After La Barre’s death the comté was given by the king to his mistress Anne de Pisseleu (officially of course given to her husband) and was elevated to a duché (Léon Guibourgé, Étampes, Ville royale, Étampes 1958, p. 15). I have not been able to find when exactly the Étampes window was commissioned, nor by whom. Yet that either La Barre or the Duchesse d’Étampes might have been the unknown patron of a window so obviously modeled on the prominent one of the south transept facade at Saint-Eustache is a tempting hypothesis that, if true, would reinforce the conclusion that the Parisian church was the result of royal involvement. 42  Known as Placidas before his conversion, Saint Eustace was a Roman general under Trajan and Hadrian who, while hunting one day, had a vision of the crucifix between the antlers of a stag (the 41

34

same vision was later visited upon Saint Hubert). He remained a general after he became a Christian and took the name Eustachius, but was martyred with his family by being roasted in a bronze bull after he refused to offer sacrifices to the pagan gods; Butler’s Lives of the Saints, ed. and rev. by Herbert J. Thurston and Donald Attwater, Westminster, Maryland, 1981, vol. III, pp. 606–607. Francis spent his childhood and early years of his reign at the château of Amboise whose chapel was dedicated to the other patron saint of hunters, Saint Hubert. 43   That such a connection with a saint would have been meaningful to a sixteenth-century patron is illustrated by a later episode in the history of Saint-Eustache. In 1578 the curé of Saint-Eustache sought to elicit funds from his then parishioner, Catherine de Medici (between 1572–1578 her hôtel de la Reine – later known as the hôtel de Soissons – was erected across the street from the church), by pointing out to her that like the two patron saints of Saint-Eustache (Saint Agnes was the secondary patron saint) she too was an Italian and a devout catholic (Émile Pasquier, Un Curé de Paris pendant les Guerres de Religion, René Benoist, le Pape des Halles (1515–1608), Paris 1913, p. 149). That this ploy may have met with success is supported by the fact that in this same year Nicolas Delisle was commissioned to build five piers at Saint-Eustache (which can be identified by inscriptions carved above their capitals, Figs. 115, 116), Archives Nationales, Minutier Central, LXI, 83, 3 April 1578; in Grodecki, Documents, I, no. 233. 44   See above chapter 2, p. 31, n. 40.

A Royal Project: Saint-Eustache Unbound    Chapter 3 Francis’ great grandfather.45 Like Philippe VI, Louis d’Orléans also was an ancestor who had a specific significance for Francis. Whereas the first had established the Valois as a royal house, the second, by his marriage to Valentina Visconti, had secured a dynastic claim to the Duchy of Milan, a claim which Francis had actively and, finally, disastrously pursued during the first ten years of his reign.46 Thus it would seem reasonable to assert that, drawn to Saint-Eustache because of his love of hunting and important ancestral ties, Francis was persuaded to include the church in his plans to revive the status of his capital city. How precisely did the new Saint-Eustache accommodate these plans? What aspect of the project was of greatest concern to Francis? At the Hôtel de Ville the king exerted his influence through the agent of his architect, but this was not the case at Saint-Eustache. Although the question of who designed Saint-Eustache will be taken up later, here it is enough to say that the architect, though certainly approved by the king, does not appear to have been a royal one. Rather Francis’ influence primarily concerned what we have already identified as being the most appreciable result of his intervention: the structure’s size and, by extension, its plan. The new project for Saint-Eustache envisioned the largest church planned in Paris since the twelfth-century cathedral. In fact its design is based on that of Notre-Dame: five aisles with non-projecting transepts, a hemicircular choir, and chapels opening onto the aisles and ambulatory (Figs. 13a, 13b). This correspondence has often been noted but has not been accorded any significance; instead, Saint-Eustache is ranked among the many Parisian churches dating to as late as the seventeenth century that reflect the plan of the cathedral. I would argue, however, that Saint-Eustache stands out from this series of reflexive allusions to the ur-church of Paris, including Saint-Etienne-du-Mont, with which it is often compared (Fig. 13c). No other church is as faithful to the model as is Saint-Eustache. In most cases the five-aisled plan was reduced to three;47 sometimes the line of chapels was continued through the transepts;48 in other churches the transepts are missing altogether;49 or the rounded hemicycle has been replaced by a flattened, squared-off east end.50 Only Saint-Eustache retains all the characteristics of the prototype, making it the truest copy of the cathedral plan in Paris. The single feature that distinguishes the plan of Saint-Eustache from that of Notre-Dame – its protruding central choir chapel – was added in 1640, three years after the church was consecrated, and was not part of the 1532 project which must have originally intended, as at Notre-Dame, for this axial chapel to be wider than one bay but flush with the curve of the exterior wall.51   See above chapter 2, p. 33. Both foundations were reincorporated in new chapels in the new church. These chapels can be identified by their coats of arms (Gaudreau, Notice descriptive, part 1, pp. 54, 81, part 2, pp. 179, 206). The Valois chapel is the fifth north ambulatory chapel and the Duc d’Orléans chapel is the seventh south ambulatory chapel. The latter, however, no longer functions as a chapel as it now contains the staircase leading to the sacristy. 46  Knecht, Francis I, chapters 3, 7, and 11. As Knecht has pointed out (p. 33), as valid as this dynastic connection may have been, it was also little more than an excuse to continue the Italian wars first begun by Charles VIII in 1494. 47   As at Saint-Gervais-Saint-Protais, Saint-Merry (four aisles in the nave), Saint-Étienne-du-Mont, Saint-Victor, SaintSulpice, Saint-Roch, and Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet. 48   As at Saint-Étienne-du-Mont and Saint-Victor. 49   As at Saint-Séverin and Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs. 45

  As at Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois.  In 1640 this chapel, whose interior is a clumsy adaptation of that of the side-aisle elevation, was added to the church which had been consecrated three years earlier (the relevant document, of 7 July 1640, is published in Joseph Grente, “Achèvement de l’église Saint-Eustache de Paris (1635–1637)”, Bulletin de la société d’histoire de Paris 29 (1902): 124). As well as the late date of the chapel, another fact arguing in favor of its being planned only in the seventeenth century is that at this period there was a vogue for such prominent axial chapels. Several older churches in Paris, such as Saint-Nicolas-desChamps and Saint-Étienne-du-Mont, had them added during this period; and many churches begun at the time, such as Saint-Sulpice and Saint-Nicolas-duChardonnet, included such chapels in their original designs (Dumolin, Les églises de France, pp. 88, 110, 166, 171).

50 51

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Fig. 13a. Saint-Eustache plan.

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Fig. 13b. Notre-Dame, plan.

Fig. 13c. Saint-Etienne-du-Mont, plan.

Furthermore, in marked distinction to all the earlier churches whose plans are based on that of the cathedral – indeed to any church built in Paris during the intervening centuries – Saint-Eustache is the only one which can rival it in terms of size.52 Saint-Eustache is 105 meters long, 44 meters wide and 34 meters high, against Notre-Dame which is 130 meters long, 48 meters wide and 35 meters high.53 The one significant discrepancy between the two monuments, the difference in lengths, is due to the fact that the rue Montmartre and the rue du Jour, as important thoroughfares, remained absolute boundaries which could not be crossed. That Saint-Eustache was intended to deliberately evoke the cathedral is most explicitly revealed in the design of its transept facades, which are closely modeled upon the south transept facade of Notre-Dame (Figs. 14, 15, 37). This correspondence has never been commented upon, yet is quite apparent. As at the cathedral the Saint-Eustache facades are framed by towers (which in each case first announce their presence above the level of the portal) and are divided into four zones: a portal, a level of fenestrated arcades (doubled at Saint-Eustache), a rose window above a balustraded cat-walk, and finally the gable enclosing a smaller rose window, also above a cat-walk. That the Notre-Dame facade was the model for Saint-Eustache is strikingly evident despite its translation into the modern Renaissance idiom, and its adaptation to Saint-Eustache’s elevation and circulation patterns (the functional reason for the portal, stair-case towers, arcades and cat-walks). Although both transept facades at Saint-Eustache are based on that of the cathedral the intended reference was probably calculated for the south facade. In contrast to the north facade, buried at the end of a narrow impasse, and the west facade, looming over the rue du Jour (Fig. 16), the south front has always been the most prominent of the   The one church whose plan is also derived from Notre-Dame that also approximates the cathedral’s 52

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monumentality is Saint-Sulpice, begun more than a century after Saint-Eustache, in 1646. 53  Dumolin, Les églises de France, pp. 26, 122.

A Royal Project: Saint-Eustache Unbound    Chapter 3

Fig. 14. Notre-Dame, south transept facade.

Fig. 15. Saint-Eustache, south transept facade.

Fig. 16. Saint-Eustache, west facade.

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Fig. 17. Jacques Androuet Ducerceau, design for the facade of Saint-Eustache.

Fig. 18. Early seventeenth-century engraving of Saint-Eustache and the Hôtel de Royaumont, detail.

church’s three facades. Indeed its whole south flank, running along the rue Trainée, is the view of the church most often reproduced (Fig. 19). Moreover, as the site dictated that construction should begin in the area around the old church, it was known that this facade would be the first visible manifestation in the city of the ambitious and monumental new undertaking – unlike the main west facade whose achievement was a long way off and for which there is evidence to suggest that the first architect did not even bother to provide a design.54 Perhaps even more pointedly than the plan and scale, the transept facade of Saint-Eustache confirms that the allusion to the cathedral was calculated and intentional.   The earliest known design proposed for the facade of Saint-Eustache is a highly ornate one by Jacques Androuet Du Cerceau, which probably dates to after 1545, and also includes plans for an atrium (Fig. 17). That Du Cerceau would have felt free to imagine a design for the facade, strongly indicates that no scheme had as yet been decided upon. (On the drawing see Henri de Geymuller, Les Du Cerceau: leur vie et leur œuvre, Paris 1887, p. 236. For an updated review of the career and life of Du Cerceau see Jacques Androuet du Cerceau, Les plus excellents bastiments de France, facs. ed. with commentary by David Thomson, Paris 1988, pp. 5–9, 310–315.) [Note of the Series Editor. See also Jacques Androuet Du Cerceau, les dessins des plus excellents bâtiments de 54

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France, ed. Françoise Boudon and Claude Mignot, Paris 2010; and Jacques Androuet du Cerceau, ‘un des plus grands architectes qui se soient jamais trouvés en France’, ed. Jean Guillaume, Paris 2010. – The façade drawing in Fig. 17 can no longer be attributed to Jacques Androuet I Du Cerceau without further study, since a significant group of drawings and prints, the latter corresponding to Geymüllers première manière of Du Cerceau’s early career, must now be given to an anonymous artist active in the Low Countries in the 1530s and close to Jean Mone, sculptor to Emperor Charles V. Du Cerceau borrowed a number of motifs and compositions from him, continuing to use them throughout his career. Krista De Jonge, “Le ‘Précurseur’. Du Cerceau

A Royal Project: Saint-Eustache Unbound    Chapter 3

Fig. 19. Saint-Eustache, exterior from south.

Notre-Dame had long been the most celebrated architectural monument of the city, not only providing the model for the plans of countless parish churches, but also serving as a potent symbol of the capital as can be seen in numerous graphic works, such as Fouquet’s Fall of the Rebel Angels where Paris is identified by the dominant image of the cathedral. But in Francis’s eyes Notre-Dame would have possessed a more precise significance, for in the sixteenth century the cathedral was specifically associated with the reign of Philippe Auguste and hence with a crucial turning point in Paris’ history, for it was this great Capetian monarch who first conferred upon the city its singular status. Previously Paris had been only one among many French cities that were visited and lived in by the kings. Under Philippe it became the preeminent city of the kingdom, its administrative center, and site of the official royal residence, in brief, the capital city. As a result of Philippe’s activity, Paris entered the most brilliant period of its medieval history, et les anciens Pays-Bas”, in Guillaume, Jacques Androuet du Cerceau, pp. 91–107.] After 1615, when work on the west facade finally began, the design, with its ultra-classical Doric Order, was one wholly in keeping with the tastes of the time. This facade, which was never completed, is known to us from a contemporary engraving (Fig. 18). When a new facade, by Mansart de Jouy, was begun in 1754 it was sloppily tacked onto the only partially demolished one of the seventeenth century, and the seventeenth-century southwest tower is still visible (Fig. 19). This eighteenth-century facade was never completed (Fig. 19). For the seventeenth-century facade see Archives Nationales, Minutier Central, LXI, 134, fol. 153, 15 March 1617 (concerning the

delivery of stone for the facade); LXI, 134, fol. 471, 14 August 1617 (excavations for foundations); LXI, 134, fol. 630, 16 September 1617 (delivery of stone); LXI, 135, fol. 500 bis, 4 August 1618 (Nicolas le Brun commissioned to do “six figures façon d’anges representant six Victoires” for the portal); LXI, 136, fol. 362, 19 June 1619 (David de Villiers and Pierre Collot promise to do four wooden panels for the portal depicting the life of Saint Eustache); LIX, 51, fol. 398, 27 July 1624 (François de La Val commissioned to complete the facade sculpture). For the eighteenth-century facade and a review of the façade’s history see Hélène Couzy in Boudon et al, Système de l’architecture, pp. 285–290.

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becoming not only the definitive capital of France, but also the leading cultural and intellectual capital of Europe.55 The importance of Philippe Auguste for Paris as well as his building activity there were well known in the sixteenth century, as can be seen in Gilles Corrozet’s La Fleur des antiquitez and his later Les Antiquitez […] de Paris, both of which give detailed and fairly accurate accounts of Philippe’s Parisian accomplishments which are characterized as “plusieurs haultz faictz dignes de memoire”.56 In the earlier volume, after enumerating Philippe’s various achievements, Corrozet was inspired to include a poem where he again recounts these deeds with great enthusiasm, if not commensurate literary ability: Philippe roy, par œuvre singuliere, Les Halles fit, aussy le cymetiere Sainct Innocent fit il clorre et fermer, Et comme on peult par escript affermer, Le parc du boys de Vincennes nomme Construyt ce roy, qui tant fut renomme. Il fit paver dedens Paris les rues Qui de beaulte estoient vuydes et nues, Les eschevins crea et establit Et celle ville en vertu ennoblit: Fermer la fit de maintz gros murs et portes, Puis apres fir pour resistence forte La grosse tour du Louvre tresparfaicte Qui a este puis peu de temps deffaicte. Semblalement pour tenir la Justice Du Chastellet fit faire lediffice.57 After this rare display of rhapsodic versification (Philippe Auguste being the only monarch singled out for such an effort) Corrozet continues: “Durant le regne dudict Philippe estoit Morice evsque de Paris, a la poursuyte duquel fut ediffiee leglise nostre Dame de Paris, de moult sumptueux ouvraige ainsi quon voit a lœil”.58 In the later volume Corrozet devotes eight pages of minutely observed description to the cathedral, and is even more explicit about Philippe’s involvement with the monument.59 It should be stressed that Corrozet is far from being an original historian or an arcane source. He is repeating well-known and widely accepted information, and thus is presenting a view of Philippe Auguste and his reign that would have been shared by his fellow citizens and by Francis and his advisors. By replicating the plan, scale and transept facade of the cathedral, Saint-Eustache became a deliberate evocation of that period when Paris first began to function as the capital city and official royal residence and had emerged as the administrative, cultural and intellectual heart of the kingdom, in other words the Paris that Francis sought to recreate – and to rival. If the medieval Notre-Dame was a potent symbol of the city’s great past, the Renaissance Saint-Eustache would rise as a monumental expression – and tangible  Baldwin, The Government of Philip Augustus, pp. 342–354; Robert-Henri Bautier, “Quand et comment Paris devint capitale”, Bulletin de la Société de l’histoire de Paris et de l’Île-de-France 105 (1978): 17–46; Boussard, De la fin du siège, pp. 227–259; Roland Mousnier, “Paris, capitale politique”, pp. 41–45; Willibald Sauerländer, “Medieval Paris, Center of European Taste”, in Paris, Center of Artistic 55

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Enlightenment, ed. George Mauner et al (Papers in Art History from the Pennsylvania State University, IV), University Park, Penn., 1988, pp. 13–45. 56  Corrozet, La Fleur des antiquitez, 1874 ed., p. 45. 57   Ibid., pp. 47–48. 58   Ibid., p. 48. 59  Corrozet, Les Antiquitez… de Paris, 1586 ed., pp. 60–64.

A Royal Project: Saint-Eustache Unbound    Chapter 3 affirmation – of Paris’ newly reendowed status bestowed upon her by Francis I. The other two monuments that the king was concerned with in Paris also recalled – to different degrees and in different ways – the period of Philippe Auguste. The Louvre traced its history back to this monarch who built it as a fortress on the banks of the Seine to strengthen a weak spot in the city walls.60 The building’s connection with Philippe Auguste would account, I believe, for Francis’ otherwise puzzling 1528 statement that he would reside in the Louvre because it was “le lieu le plus commode et à propos”.61 From the point of view of Fig. 20. Chambord, château. comfort, or as a place of ceremony, the Louvre was, as we have already noted, far from being either commode or à propos. Although it had briefly functioned as a residence for Charles V who refurbished it in the late fourteenth century, it had since fallen into a state of grave disrepair. In the early years of Francis’ reign it had only been employed as a prison.62 Other royal residences were available to Francis, for example the hôtel des Tournelles where he had in fact stayed on his visits to Paris before 1528.63 Yet the king recognized the symbolic importance his residence would now assume as a result of his decision to return the monarchy to the capital, and realized that the old fortress was uniquely suited to this purpose. As the following passage from Corrozet’s essay on Philippe Auguste indicates, the significance of the king’s decision would not have been lost on the Parisians: Semblablement fut par ledict roy [Philippe Auguste] ediffiee la grosse tour du Louvre, laquelle modernement a este abatue en Lan mil cinq cens vingt et neuf, par le commandement du roy Francoys, lequel a esleu en Paris celluy chasteau du Louvre pour sa commune residence.64 Thus already in his first Parisian undertaking – the dramatic destruction of Philippe’s grosse tour – Francis sought to evoke and rival the great medieval monarch. By razing the formidable tower, he made it quite clear at the same time that the historic weight and prominence of this site meant no other location in the city could reasonably be considered for the placement of his intended Renaissance palace. The Hôtel de Ville also possessed a meaning in this context of Philippe Auguste and the concept of Paris as the capital city, for although the municipal body represented by the prévôt des marchands and the échevins had been founded in the mid-thirteenth century by Louis IX,65 in the sixteenth century it was believed, as Corrozet wrote in his poem, that Philippe Auguste “Les eschevins crea et establit”. This might seem to be a fortuitous connection, but the singular and most meaningful aspect of the Hôtel de Ville was  On the excavations that have uncovered the foundations of Philippe’s massive donjon see Michel Fleury, “Les fouilles de la Cour Carrée du Louvre”; and Georges Duval, “Les cryptes archéologiques de la Cour Carrée”, Monuments historiques 136 (1984– 1985), Dec.-Jan.: 9–14 and 15–17. 61   See above n. 80. 60

  Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris sous François Ier: Le Livre de raison de Maître Nicolas Versoris, avocat au Parlement de Paris (1519–1530), ed. by Philippe Joutard, Paris 1963, pp. 33, 104. 63  Babelon, Paris au XVIe siècle, pp. 52–53. 64  Corrozet, La Fleur des antiquitez, 1532, 1874 ed., p. 47. 65  Lavedan, Histoire de l’urbanisme, p. 84. 62

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the institution it housed. Thus, each of the three Parisian monuments with which Francis was involved, through its form, site or function, provided a telling evocation of the time that had witnessed the birth of Paris as the capital of France and so served to articulate Francis’ intentions of effecting a rebirth. Unlike the Hôtel de Ville and the Louvre, however, where the symbolic association with Philippe Auguste was intrinsic, at Saint-Eustache the symbolism had to be imposed upon its design through its plan, scale and transept facade. The use of architectural imagery, specifically of a symbolically significant plan in combination with reference to an isolated and distinctive feature of a symbolically meaningful monument, has a precedent in the patronage of Francis, at the royal Loire valley château of Chambord (beg. 1519). The plan of Chambord, a square donjon with a tower at each corner, set in a rectangular precinct, is based on that of the fourteenth- century royal château of Vincennes. Furthermore its famed, distinctive roofline, where elements of the plan of the interior are continued in a decorative form (Fig. 20), has a precedent in the fourteenth-century châteaux of Saumur and Mehun-sur-Yèvre. It has been shown that the presence of these older sources at Chambord is meaningful, for these châteaux are linked with the world of chivalry, a romantic past which Francis and his court sought to nostalgically recreate in the early years of his reign.66 Considered together, the private hunting château of Chambord and the public, urban Saint-Eustache become eloquent and monumental emblems of two aspects of Francis’ reign (and character): one distinguished by a romantic, self-indulgent nostalgia and the other by a pragmatic and politically astute historicism”.

66   See Guillaume, “Léonard de Vinci et l’architecture française”, 74; and, for a detailed consideration of

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the iconographic significance of the referents, Prinz, Schloss Chambord.

Saint-Maclou, north nave wall.

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The interior of Saint-Eustache is a highly evolved and tightly conceived design that centers on the repetition of two elements: the pier and the wall elevation. The basic configuration of the pier occurs in the aisles where it is a multi-storied, four-sided, symmetrical form rising from a high octagonal socle (Fig. 21). At its lowest level the pier presents the simple plan of a square core with rounded bundles of moldings on each of its four sides. Approximately one third of the way up the square core is complicated and fragmented: Here a pseudo-entablature supports square corner piers that have their own entablatures, and these in turn support the pedestals for colonettes in the top story (Fig. 22, 23). The axial bundles of moldings, rising from the base, terminate in capitals that share an entablature with the corner colonettes; these elements act as responds for the ribs and arches of the vaults. This basic pier structure assumes several variations in the building; it occurs in its simplest form between the entrances to the nave and choir chapels as a half-pier version of the aisle pier format (Fig. 22). The main vessel pier (used in the nave, transepts and choir) is the most complex version and is developed in three ways: The side facing into the aisles again repeats the aisle pier formula (Fig. 23); the two sides that support the main vessel arcade have more elaborate molding bundles, which project further forward from the core and are crowned not by capitals but by masks (Fig. 24); the side facing into the main vessel repeats the basic composition of the aisle but on a colossal scale as it reaches up into the clerestory (Fig. 2). To attain this greater height two, instead of one, square corner piers are stacked below the now monumental colonettes. Thus three pier types occur at Saint-Eustache: half-pier, aisle pier, and main vessel pier; and three pier elevations are used: aisle (used for the half-piers, aisle piers and aisle side of the main vessel piers), arcade (used for the arcade sides of the main vessel piers), and main vessel (used for the main vessel side of these piers). The only piers which do not follow the format used elsewhere are the four crossing piers, which are cross-shaped in section and are adorned by two colossal pilasters on their outer sides that face into the crossing, and by two shorter ones on their inner sides, which act as supports for the main vessel arcade (Figs. 25, 26). In the main vessel the pier vocabulary is incorporated into the mural system of a three part elevation: the entablature blocks below the colonettes become part of a continuous entablature running beneath a triforium (Fig. 25). This composite elevation, minus the triforium but including the arcade and clerestory, is repeated on a smaller scale in the side-aisle elevation (Fig. 27). Here too the half-piers are woven into the wall through the shared entablature and through the lateral bundles of moldings that become the frames for the chapels. There is thus an organic and almost theatrical progression as the consistent vocabulary of the interior grows in volume and jumps in scale from the perimeters of the church, with its two-part elevation and half-piers, to the four-sided piers of the aisles, to the giant piers and three-part elevation of the central vessel (Figs. 27, 28). This system remains uniform throughout the nave, transepts and choir.

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Fig. 21. Saint-Eustache, south side-aisle.

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The exterior of the church is dominated by the buttressing system and is divided into three levels marked by the windows of the chapels, side-aisle and clerestory (Fig. 29). At the lowest level, the chapels are separated by pilasters supporting an entablature and balustrade. This arrangement of windows, pilasters, entablature and balustrade is adapted to the structures of the two superior zones. On the second level, the side-aisle windows are separated by piers that are ornamented with pilasters and a broken entablature, as if the low relief composition of the lower chapel zone has been projected forward into three dimensions. The pilaster-piers of the side-aisle window zone rise into the third zone where they are ornamented with a second level of pilasters and entablature. At this level the pilaster-piers do not project from the wall between clerestory windows; they are, however, linked to it by the flying buttresses. As on the lower two zones, a continuous entablature and balustrade runs above the windows. Thus a very simple composition has been lucidly adapted to the three varied zones and the buttressing system of the exterior of the church. Within the design of the interior, and to a lesser extent of the exterior, there is considerable stylistic disparity in the treatment of decorative details such as capitals and consoles. This heterogeneity is primarily due to the fact that the building campaigns spanned more than a century during which time the quixotic and spirited style of the early Renaissance gave way to the rigors of French classicism. In some instances the cumulative effect of many changes in detailing in one area of the church is quite conspicuous. This is true, for example, of the first two northern nave bays (counting, as throughout this study, from the crossing) and their corresponding aisle piers where bases, colonettes, square corner piers, etc. are more lavishly ornamented than elsewhere in the building (Figs. 30, Fig. 22. Saint-Eustache, half-pier between 31, 262). Yet despite such diversity in the stylistic detailing, the first and second north choir chapels. conceptual coherence and strength of the design is such that the overall impression is one of great uniformity. Indeed, this is one of the most frequently noted aspects of the building. Because of this degree of homogeneity the assumption that the executed design is faithful to the one presented by the architect in 1532 has never been questioned. Given the lengthy building history of Saint-Eustache this is a potentially troubling presupposition. Furthermore, there is evidence on the perimeter of the church that design changes were made during the course of construction. In some of the chapels banded colonettes, supported on high bases in the corners of the chapels, act as responds for the main ribs of complicated vault patterns (Fig. 32). In other chapels, however, the colonettes are replaced by piers and the vaults are quadripartite in format (Fig. 33). The tracery patterns of these two basic chapel types (of which there are variations) also differ. Such divergences may not be radical, yet they do represent design modifications rather than simple variations in detailing, and should alert us to the possibility that the seeming uniformity of the rest of the building may be deceptive. Here too changes may have occurred other than those

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Fig. 23. Saint-Eustache, northwest transept, intermediate pier, aisle side.

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which can be observed in decorative features; parts of the executed building may represent alterations of or even significant deviations from the original design that, perhaps, were effected when builders in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries reached the upper stories of the church. Thus if the design of SaintEustache is to be studied as a product of the early Renaissance, it should first be established if this is in fact the case. The First Building Campaign The extent to which Saint-Eustache reflects the scheme of the early Renaissance architect can be established through an examination of the first building campaign; it is here that one would expect the original plan to be most closely followed. Fortunately the building history is one aspect of the church that has been studied in some depth. In 1946 Michel Ranjard, an architect for Monuments Historiques, using documents and physical evidence within the church, posited a six-phase building chronology.1 For the early history of the church Ranjard had no documents, but he did observe six dated inscriptions carved in the fabric. Only one of these – the only one in the interior – is visible  Michel Ranjard, “Saint-Eustache”, 103–135. Ranjard’s work was partly based on the documentary evidence that had been uncovered by Charles Terrasse in his now lost thesis of 1920. (Terrasse’s conclusions, however, were summarized by him in “L’architecture religieuse”, pp. 65–78, and in his “Notes sur la construction”, 173–180. Dumolin also reprises Terrasse’s building chronology in Les églises de France, pp. 119–121.) Prior to Terrasse, In Le Roux de Lincy’s mid-nineteenth century monograph, for example, the only evidence available was that offered by earlier historians such as Corrozet and Dubreul, inscribed dates within the building, and a few documents, none of which concerned actual construction, however. The newly found documents, which begin in 1578, allowed Terrasse to fill in what had heretofore been a rather fuzzy chronology for the later building history. As he had neither documents nor any other sort of evidence for the years 1545–1578, however, Terrasse assumed that no work had been done during these years. Ranjard’s use of the documents in conjunction with an examination of the fabric allowed him to see that in fact the first work stoppage only occurred in 1

Fig. 24. Saint-Eustache, northwest transept, intermediate pier, arcade side.

the 1580s, and that much of the nave had been erected prior to 1578. He devised a six phase chronology for the building which he divided into three periods: 1532–1545 (for which he had no documents but did have dates inscribed in the fabric); 1545–1578 (the undocumented period of construction); and 1578 to 1637–1640 (the documented phase of construction). Although Ranjard is for the most part correct, it would probably be wiser to divide the building history into periods which correspond not to the presence or absence of documents but to what was actually built. Thus the first phase is that of 1532–c.  1545 when the transepts were largely erected (how much, is a question taken up in this chapter); the second dates to c. 1545–c. 1586 when the nave was built up to the base of the clerestory; and the third dates to 1618–1637/1640 when the facade and choir were erected, as well as the clerestory and high vaults of the entire church. That it took so long to erect the lower parts of the nave during the second period of building and that construction stopped entirely in c. 1586 is presumably due to the Wars of Religion which had a generally devastating effect on architectural projects of the period.

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Fig. 25. Saint-Eustache, north nave wall and north transept.

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Fig. 26. Saint-Eustache, southwest crossing pier, inner side.

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Fig. 27. Saint-Eustache, north ambulatory wall elevation.

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Fig. 28. Saint-Eustache, interior.

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Fig. 29. Saint-Eustache, exterior, buttresses. Photograph by Ralph Lieberman.

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Fig. 30. Saint-Eustache, first nave bay, north wall, triforium.

today, but Ranjard’s accuracy in recording the others is supported by earlier witnesses.2 The date 1534 appeared on the exterior pilaster between the second and third north choir chapels, 1537 on the northwest crossing pier (Fig. 34), 1539–1540 on the south transept portal, 1541 on the second north choir chapel, 1542 on the third chapel, and 1545 on the fourth chapel. Stylistic comparisons between the dated and undated parts of the building together with archeological observations led Ranjard to propose a first building campaign dated 1532–c. 1545 in which he included the first four north choir chapels and the corresponding side-aisle elevation up to the level of the window ledges, much of the first and part of the second north nave chapels, the first south nave chapel, the south transept portal, and the transepts to just below the triforium (Fig. 35).3 In this chapter I will present documentary evidence not available to Ranjard, and offer a second look at the archeological and stylistic material, all of which tend on the whole to confirm his conclusions. At the same time, however, his exclusion of so much of

  See for example Le Roux de Lincy, Saint-Eustache, p. 19; Gaudreau, Notice descriptive, part, p. 3; Inventaire général des richesses d’art de la France,

2

Paris 1901, vol. III, p. 359; and Terrasse, “Notes sur la construction”, 174. 3   Ranjard, “Saint-Eustache”, 104–115.

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Fig. 31. Saint-Eustache, first north nave pier, aisle side.

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Fig. 32. Saint-Eustache, first north nave chapel.

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Fig. 33. Saint-Eustache, third north nave chapel.

the main vessel elevation from the first campaign in the transepts is shown to be mistaken. As well as assessing Ranjard’s observations about the parameters of the first campaign, this chapter has two other aims: to establish an internal chronology for the first campaign, and to begin to examine the stylistic profile of the architect, neither of which were of interest to Ranjard. I will, therefore, be devoting much of the following pages to a much closer scrutiny of the details of the first campaign than did Ranjard whose efforts in this regard were quite cursory, being limited not only in his quantity of observation but especially in his dry, summary manner of description and comparison. North Choir Chapels With their dated inscriptions ranging from 1534 to 1545 the second, third and fourth north choir chapels clearly belong to the earliest period of the building’s history (Fig. 27). Each chapel adheres to the above outlined type employing corner colonettes and complex rib patterns (Figs. 37–40). The bases of the banded colonettes are distinctive: wide attic bases rest on thick round socles which are themselves supported by corner piers whose forward edges penetrate through the socles.4 The first chapel can be seen as adhering to the format of the others even though it was altered in 1778 century when a tribune was constructed in its upper half and   In two instances a different format is followed: On the right side of the second and third chapels the

4

bases are placed directly on top of the piers.

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its lower half was transformed into an entrance for the new sacristy (Fig. 22).5 The capitals of this chapel are no longer accessible, but below the tribune the lower parts of the colonettes are still visible, as is the original vault now in the tribune (Fig. 85). The colonettes (including bases) have the same shape and design as those in the other three chapels and the vault is identical in its pattern and rib profiles to that in the adjacent chapel (Fig. 40). Thus, although the first chapel is the only one of the four north choir chapels for which Ranjard did not have a dated inscription, his common sense inclusion of it in the same campaign as its three neighbors finds justificaFig. 34. Saint-Eustache, northwest crossing pier, inner side, upper tion on stylistic grounds. capitals, with date “1537” inscribed. As Ranjard correctly points out, the details of both the interiors and exteriors of the early north choir chapels conform to the style of the early Renaissance. This is particularly true of the capitals, although Ranjard’s description of the colonette capitals as Corinthian6 is neither accurate nor suggestive of their rich variety and imaginative conception (Figs. 41–44, 52–59). Of the twelve capitals in the second through fourth north choir chapels no two are identical; only one can be understood as an attempt to render a Corinthian format (Fig. 44). The others generally conform to the early French Renaissance, quattrocento-inspired capital type that characterizes the architecture of the reign of Francis I (Figs. 45–51).7 Rather than being Corinthian such capitals would more appropriately be termed figurated-foliate. The figurated-foliate capital – often loosely termed “quattrocentesque” or première Renaissance – is a very fluid type, difficult to describe comprehensively in its seemingly endless variety. Its essentials, however, can be generally defined, at least insofar as the format is employed at Saint-Eustache. The scheme is loosely derived from the closely interrelated Corinthian and Composite orders. The solid, supportive core almost always includes the calathus and abacus structures common to both Orders, and sometimes the echinus of the latter, or a reference to it in the way of an egg-and-dart molding at the crown of the calathus. The leafwork is generally reduced to a single row, with the attention focused on the upper area where Composite volutes are typically developed into fanciful variations and transformations, and often substituted by strange plant life, human, humanoid, or animal figures, as are the rosettes. Thus on one capital burst pea-pods curl and assume the function of volutes, while putti, tormented by  Boinet, Les églises Parisiennes, I, p. 484.   Ranjard, “Saint-Eustache”, 104. 7  On the development of the capital type in the Italian quattrocento see Martin Gosebruch, “Florentinische Kapitelle von Brunelleschi bis zum Tempio Malatestiano und der Eigenstil der Frührenaissance”, Römisches Jahrbuch für 5 6

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Kunstgeschichte 8 (1958): 63 passim. On the capitals of the early French Renaissance see Hautecœur, Histoire de l’architecture classique, I, part 1, pp. 452–457; Guillaume, “L’ornement Italien en France”, pp. 209–210; and Prinz, Das französische Schloss, pp. 300–308.

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salamanders or lizards, anxiously perch on the edge of the echinus (Fig. 41). On another, putti, like tiny Atlases, stagger under the burden of heavy garlands and birds positioned on the abacus peck at the garland’s fruits (Fig. 54). The heads of lions or other beasts appear below the corners of the abaci of several capitals where lush, bizarre plant forms or screaming human heads emerge from the center of the echini (Figs. 52, 55, 57). By intention the figurated-foliate format was extremely fluid and often blurred into or closely approximated the standard derivative Orders, without, however, being quite identical to them. Thus, although some of the capitals contain no figures (Figs. 43, 44, 59) or only tiny, barely visible ones (Fig. 42), they nevertheless belong to the figurated- Fig. 35. Ranjard’s view of the first campaign at Saint-Eustache. foliate type as it is here being defined: That is, although their compositions, like those of the capitals where figures do appear, adhere in a general way to a Composite or Corinthian structure, the plants and flowers which adorn them are as freely conceived and as open to imaginative variation as the figures which adorn the other capitals. Thus, while one of the capitals in the fourth chapel might at first glance seem to be a true Composite capital (Fig. 59), upon closer inspection we see that the corner elements are not true volutes, but rather spiral vegetative forms, and that its rosettes are much larger than those of a canonical Composite capital. Some of the motifs used at Saint-Eustache – putti, animal heads, garlands and birds – are familiar occupants of the quattrocento-inspired figurated-foliate capital, but others, such as the burst pea-pod (which also has its unripened counterpart, Fig. 56), seem to be completely original, or at least a rare realization in stone of a motif that may have been copied from an engraved image.8 Even where traditional motifs are used, they are combined in fresh and inventive ways, often displaying a sense of narrative that is rarely evident in the period.9 Although obtrusive mid-nineteenth-century gilding and painting makes it sometimes difficult to appreciate details of carving on these capitals, it is still possible to see that the variety apparent in their conception is also manifest in their execution.10 For example, on some capitals the leafwork is fleshy and rounded (Fig. 53), while on others it is stiff and  On the use of engraved images as models see René Schneider, “Note sur les livres à gravures et la décoration de la Renaissance en Normandie”, Archives de l’art français, n.s. 7 (1913): 127–141; Hautecœur, Histoire de l’architecture classique, I, part 1, pp. 134–139; Blunt, Art and Architecture, p. 16; and Henri Zerner, “Du mot à l’image: le rôle de la gravure sur cuivre”, in Les Traités d’architecture de la

8

Renaissance, ed. Jean Guillaume (De Architectura), Paris 1988, pp. 281–294. 9  One other building where capitals depict little dramas sometimes also involving putti and lizards is Chambord where such scenes appear on some of the center staircase capitals. 10  On the nineteenth-century gilding see Abbé Balthasar, “L’église Saint-Eustache de Paris”, Revue archéologique 11 (1855): 723.

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Fig. 36. Saint-Eustache, second north choir chapel.

Early French Renaissance

Fig. 37. Saint-Eustache, third north choir chapel.

schematic (Fig. 58), and yet on others it is naturalistic and approximates that of canonical acanthus leaves (Fig. 55). Differences in execution can also be observed in the structures of the capitals and their entablatures. The corners of the abaci vary between slim vertical slivers and broader squares. Further variations may be observed in the profiles of the necking, the moldings of the entablatures, the decoration of the abaci, etc. This two-fold diversity – of execution and design – is worth drawing attention to for we will come to recognize it as a trait peculiar to the decorative details of the first campaign and therefore useful as an aid in determining its parameters. Outside the chapels, figurated-foliate capitals are used for the square corner piers of the side-aisle elevation half-piers that stand between the first four chapels (Figs. 22, 60–65). Compared to those inside the chapels, these capitals are distinguished by a greater uniformity of conception. The calathus of each capital is now exclusively the domain of leafwork, and heads or flowers ornament the center of the abacus (similar compositions were also utilized for some of the colonette capitals, Figs. 56, 57, 59). Yet even within the more systematic design of these capitals there is diversity, in addition to that already noted in the abacus ornaments. One pair of capitals is distinguished by their egg-and-dart echini and dentilated abaci (Fig. 64). The volutes on these capitals are small tight curls which discretely emerge from under the abaci. On other capitals the volutes, in a more canonical (Corinthian) fashion, rise from the calathus (Fig. 63). Conversely some volutes sprout, not from the base of the calathus, but from its center where they are bound together (Fig. 60). Here and there

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Fig. 38. Saint-Eustache, fourth north choir chapel.

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Fig. 39. Saint-Eustache, transept pier to left of first north choir chapel.

the familiar Saint-Eustache pea-pod motif is recognizable (Figs. 61, 62). In one pair of capitals the volutes have been omitted; instead the corners are ornamented by heads (Fig. 65). Furthermore, as on the colonette capitals, variety in the treatment of the leafwork is readily observable. Thus, in their iconography, design, and variety of execution these capitals on the piers flanking the first four north choir chapels clearly belong to the same phase of construction as the chapels themselves. Also correct is Ranjard’s exclusion from this campaign of the fifth and subsequent choir chapels. As he observed, the colonettes on the left (west) side of the fifth chapel have the same socle and are of the same slender size and shape as those in the first four (Fig. 66). Those on the right wall, however, are stocky and have a cylindrical profile uninflected by any entasis.11 These same stocky colonettes are used in the sixth and other north choir chapels, which are documented, together with the rest of the choir, as dating to the early seventeenth century (Fig. 67).12 The capitals of the left-hand colonettes of the fifth chapel seem to be by the same hand as one that appears on the adjacent side of the fourth chapel (Figs. 59, 70, 71).13 The heavy Corinthian capitals on the right side of the fifth chapel, however, are identical to those used in the later choir chapels (Figs. 68, 69, 72). The four-part vault of the fifth chapel also conforms to what is found in the chapels of the later campaign. As has already been seen, the capitals of the square corner elements on the half-pier between the fourth and fifth north choir chapels belong to the early history of Saint-Eustache. The dry acanthus leaf capitals on the other side of the fifth chapel clearly belong to the same group as the Corinthian capitals of the seventeenth-century chapel interiors (Fig. 73). From the fourth to the fifth north choir chapels, not only do all the 11

  Ranjard, “Saint-Eustache”, 104–106.

  In a 1623 document concerning a meeting between the marguilliers and a group of consulting architects

12

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Fig. 41. Saint-Eustache, second north choir chapel, left rear colonette capital. Fig. 40. Saint-Eustache, second north choir chapel, vault.

Fig. 42. Saint-Eustache, second north choir chapel, left front ­colonette capital.

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Fig. 43. Saint-Eustache, second north choir chapel, right rear ­colonette capital.

Fig. 44. Saint-Eustache, second north choir chapel, right front colonette capital.

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Fig. 45. Azay-le-Rideau, château, facade capital.

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Fig. 46. Chambord, château, center staircase capital.

Fig. 47. Chambord, château, center staircase capital.

Fig. 48. Chambord, château, roof capital.

Fig. 50. Chenonceau, château, facade capital.

Fig. 51. Fontainebleau, Cour Ovale, capitals.

Fig. 49. Ussé, chapel, facade capital.

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Fig. 52. Saint-Eustache, third north choir chapel, left rear colonete capital.

Fig. 53. Saint-Eustache, third north choir chapel, left front colonette capital.

Fig. 54. Saint-Eustache, third north choir chapel, right rear colonette capital.

Fig. 55. Saint-Eustache, third north choir chapel, right front colonette capital.

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Fig. 56. Saint-Eustache, fourth north choir chapel, left rear colonette capital.

Fig. 57. Saint-Eustache, fourth north choir chapel, left front colonette capital.

Fig. 58. Saint-Eustache, fourth north choir chapel, right rear colonette capital.

Fig. 59. Saint-Eustache, fourth north choir chapel, right front colonette capital.

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Fig. 60. Saint-Eustache, half-pier left of first north choir chapel, capital.

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Fig. 61. Saint-Eustache, half-pier between second and third north choir chapels, capital.

Early French Renaissance

Fig. 62. Saint-Eustache, half-pier between second and third north choir chapels, capital.

Fig. 63.  Saint-Eustache, half-pier between third and fourth north choir chapels, capital.

details undergo a stylistic change, but the diversity of the first campaign also gives way to standardization: The same capital design is consistently followed and the execution is far more uniform. Thus Ranjard is correct when he concludes that the campaign of 1532– c. 1545 in the area of the north choir chapels included the left wall of the fifth chapel and

it is made clear that much of the old church was still standing and that the sixth north choir chapel of the new church had not yet been erected (Archives Nationales, Minutier Central, LIX, 51, fol. 148v, 11 February 1623 – also see above chapter 2, p. 36 n. 52). That most of the fifth and all of the sixth north choir chapels were not erected until after this meeting is also made clear by the Gaudreau who observed that the date 1626 was inscribed on the pilaster between these two chapels and above the side-aisle clerestory window above the sixth chapel (Notice descriptive, part 1, pp. 4, 81, 84). Documents and other inscribed dates recorded by Gaudreau inform us that most of the choir piers, choir chapels, and side aisle vaults were erected between 1624 and 1629 (Archives Nationales, Minutier Central, LIX, 51, fol. 388, 24 April 1624; LIX, 63, fol. 443, 24 March 1628; LIX, 51, fol. 538, 10 February 1629; LIX, 51, fol. 546v, 25 March 1629; LIX, 51, fol. 548–549, 7 April 1629; Gaudreau, Notice descriptive, part 1, pp. 4, 51); that the upper parts of the choir were

66

erected, the choir completed and those parts of the old church still standing demolished between 1629 and 1632 (Archives Nationales, Minutier Central, LIX, 51, fol.?, 11 August 1629; LIX, 51, fol. 643–646, 13 July 1630 [with a quittance of 15 May 1632]); and that the stained glass for the high windows were completed in 1631 (Archives Nationales, Minutier Central, LIX, 51, [folio # erased], 16 October 1631). See also Dubreul, Le Théatre des antiquités (1639 ed.), supplément, p. 55; Marguerite Charageat, “Notes sur cinq marchés passés par M. de Bullion surintendant des finances du roi Louis XIII”, Bulletin de la société de l’histoire de l’art français (1927): 197–205 (Claude de Bullion became a marguillier of Saint-Eustache in 1630, Archives Nationales, Minutier Central, LIX, 51, fol. 612, 18 March 1630); and Ranjard, “Saint-Eustache”, 130–132. 13  The same conclusion can be drawn from the bases of these colonettes which follow the format of the square pier penetrating the round socle that is found in the earlier chapels.

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then was broken off. A look at the building’s exterior offers further confirmation of this observation. The exteriors of the second through fourth north choir chapels have features in common with their interiors and display some of the stylistic preferences of the early Renaissance (the exterior of the first chapel is not accessible) (Fig. 74). Here the pilasters between the windows are framed by moldings and decorated with half lozenges (as are the square corner elements on the interior piers between the chapels). Enframed pilasters, similarly decorated, are commonly found in the architecture of the early French Renaissance; like figurated-foliate capitals, they also have quattrocento origins. Although lozenges are often left unadorned, Fig. 64. Saint-Eustache, half-pier between first and sechere, on the exterior of Saint-Eustache, they frame gri- ond north choir chapels, capitals. macing cherubs and other motifs. The capitals of these pilasters are of extraordinarily high quality and are strikingly imaginative examples of the figurated-foliate type (Figs. 75–77). Those flanking the third chapel share the same composition: luxuriant and exotic foliage grows from the bases of the capitals to cushion rectangular cartouches14 and, at the corners, to gently support curling, bursting pea-pods whose lush ripeness make them welcome recipients of the reinforcement (Figs. 75, 76). The abaci are similarly festooned with abundant vegetation in which pulpy flowers nestle. On one of these two capitals the flower draws its heavy petals together; on the other the same species of flower has flopped broadly open, its densely seeded stamen almost wantonly on display – a double treatment of a plant motif in terms of relative maturation that recalls the closed and opened pea-pods of the chapels’ interiors. Fig. 65. Saint-Eustache, half-pier between fourth and The capital between the fourth and fifth north fifth north choir chapels, capitals. choir chapels is of a different design, but it is also distinguished by its exceptional quality and opulence (Fig. 77). Here winged figures (half angel, half plant), a putto balancing a huge, over-laden fruit basket on his head, and tiny equine faces have been added to, and in fact eclipse the capital’s foliage in interest. Between the fifth and sixth north choir chapels the capital, like those in the remainder of the choir, is a dryly and “correctly” executed Corinthian form which again testifies to its seventeenthcentury date (Fig. 78). Above the capitals and windows of the second through fourth chapels is a remarkably early example (for France) of a Doric-inspired entablature complete with triglyphs, but also including fasciae which are not normally found in the Doric Order

 On the cartouche in the capital between the second and third chapels can still faintly be read the inscription: memento mori. Presumably it was here that the date 1534 could also at one time be seen.

14

The cartouche, as well as some of the leafwork immediately above it, of the capital between the third and fourth chapels seems to be a later restoration.

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Fig. 66. Saint-Eustache, fifth north choir chapel.

Fig. 67. Saint-Eustache, sixth and seventh north choir chapels.

(Figs. 79, 80).15 In the abbreviated cornice the only decoration is a series of roundheaded dentils. Dentils, both rounded and square, are also the only molding embellishment of the entablatures of the interior colonette and square corner pier capitals. This exclusive reliance on dentils for decorated moldings in entablatures, like the diversity of capital design and execution, can be recognized as a distinguishing trait of the first campaign. The most exceptional feature of the exterior entablature is that its (rather elongated) metopes contain consoles rather than some more conventional adornment.16 These consoles are either decorated with foliage or, in a singular fashion, with alternating half-fluting. Over the capitals the consoles gain in size and prominence; they are elaborately ornamented with the same kind of verdant foliage that appears on the capitals themselves (Figs. 74–77). Remarkably, though not surprisingly for this workshop, the treatment of these consoles continuously varies. None of the foliated minor versions are identical, nor are those over the capitals.   Prior to this time entablatures in French sixteenthcentury architecture were composed of a series of horizontal moldings that were vaguely suggestive of the three part configuration of a classical entablature. Such entablatures, where no reference to any recognizable Order can be seen, still appear on the Porte dorée and Cour ovale at Fontainebleau of 1528–1531. At the contemporary (c.  1527–1535) first story loggia at the château of Madrid, however, appeared an entablature somewhat similar to that

15

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at Saint-Eustache (Fig. 257). That is, it is Doric in inspiration but, as at Saint-Eustache has the nonDoric feature of fasciae. Chatenet (Le château de Madrid, p. 113) also stresses that the classicism of this entablature is without precedent in France. 16   At the second story loggia entablature of Madrid the metopes are also ornamented with unusual, un-Doric decoration, in this case floral motifs (Fig. 257).

A Revised Building History,

Fig. 68. Saint-Eustache, fifth north choir chapel, right rear colonette capital.

the

First Master,

Fig. 69. Saint-Eustache, sixth north choir chapel, right rear colonette capital.

Fig. 71. Saint-Eustache, fifth north choir chapel, left front colonette capital.

and

Serlio    Chapter 4

Fig. 70. Saint-Eustache, fifth north choir chapel, left rear colonette capital.

Fig. 72. Saint-Eustache, fifth north choir chapel, right rear colonette capital.

A particularly striking and novel variation occurs over the capital between the fourth and fifth chapels; the volutes screw outward as if the form was a tapered and wrapped sheet of stone. Finally, this inventive energy is extended to the closed balustrade above the entablature, which is composed of interlocking octagons between which lozenges and half lozenges act as frames for a host of small decorative motifs: heads, foliage and flowers

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and one tiny salamander; this last carving is a probable reference to Francis I (Fig. 79).17 Although the idiosyncratic entablature with alternating triglyphs and consoles is continued above the fifth and later choir chapels its character is simplified: The rounded dentils are eliminated, as are the half-fluted consoles; only foliated consoles of limited variety and having the same dry and hard execution as the capitals are used (Figs. 29, 81). At the fifth chapel the design of the balustrade changes in analogous fashion: Now balusters alternating with rectangular panels support a frieze of ornamented half-circles. Fig. 73. Saint-Eustache, half-pier between fifth and sixth north This analysis further confirms Ranjard’s choir chapels, capitals. conclusions about the boundaries of the first campaign with respect to the number of north choir chapels it included. But what of his exclusion from this campaign of the side-aisle elevation clerestory? Here too, in his finding that the bases of the exterior window moldings are in disalignment with the moldings themselves, Ranjard is correct.18 On the interior, the exact location of the parallel break on the half-piers between the early chapels can be determined by additional observations. The areas just below the bases of the colonettes are ornamented with tiny cherub heads or foliage (Figs. 22, 64, 65). In the later parts of the choir these small, discrete motifs are replaced by much larger cherub heads (Fig. 73). The colonettes on the piers between both the early and the late chapels, however, have stocky profiles lacking in entasis – like those in the seventeenth-century chapels. Thus the 1532–c. 1545 campaign included the half-piers up to the≈level of the colonette bases but did not include the colonettes themselves. The one exception is the pier to the left of the first chapel; its colonette has the ­slender p ­ rofile and entasis of the colonettes in the early chapels (Fig. 27). The capital of this colonette is also recognizably from the first campaign (Figs. 39, 117); those on the other colonettes (and adjacent molding bundles) differ. The explanation for the anomalous completeness of this pier is that it was built in its entirety as part of the transept which, as will soon be seen, was also under construction in the years 1532–c. 1545. North Nave Chapels Ranjard found no dated inscriptions for the first two north nave chapels (counting, again from the crossing) but he concluded that, except for the vault of the second chapel, they belonged entirely to the first campaign (Figs. 32, 35, 82).19 These chapels are distinguished from the subsequent north nave chapels where corner piers replace colonettes (Fig. 33). The only feature the first pair of chapels have in common with the later ones, other than their tracery patterns, is the four part vault of the second chapel – hence Ranjard’s exclusion of it. The vault in the first chapel is close in design to those in the first three north choir   This was also noted by Ranjard, “Saint-Eustache”, 107.   Ibid., 107. 19  Ibid., 104, 113–114. Ranjard describes these as the last north nave chapels, for he always begins counting bays from the west whereas I, to reflect the 17

18

70

actual direction construction took and following the examples of the documents, always count from the crossing. Hence we accord on the choir bays but not those of the nave.

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Fig. 74. Saint-Eustache, exterior second, third and fourth north choir chapels.

Fig. 75. Saint-Eustache, exterior pilaster capital between second and third north choir chapels.

Fig. 76. Saint-Eustache, exterior pilaster capital between third and fourth north choir chapels.

Fig. 77. Saint-Eustache, exterior pilaster capital between fourth and fifth north choir chapel.

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Fig. 78. Saint-Eustache, exterior pilaster capital between sixth and seventh north choir chapels.

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Fig. 79. Saint-Eustache, entablature over second north choir chapel.

chapels (Figs. 32, 40, 83). In other words, the basic features of the first two north nave chapels are very close to the choir chapels of 1532–1545. Such design similarities, however, can be misleading and in fact Ranjard’s inclusion of these chapels in the first campaign proves, on further analysis, to be incorrect. A close look at the style of execution of details in the chapels, together with information from several recently published docuFig. 80. Saint-Eustache, entablature over fourth north choir chapel. ments reveals that only the right (east) wall of the first chapel was built before c.  1545. In 1569 Nicolas Delisle receives a commission for “la continuacion du pan de mur et piliers” for the second and third north nave chapels.20 Thus the second chapel belongs to, or at least follows, this date and the first precedes it. Furthermore, the first chapel was only acquired as a private chapel in 1578, by Jacques Layner, at which point among the chapel embellishments Layner agrees to have executed 20   Archives Nationales, Minutier Central, LXI, 77, 24 December 1569, published by Grodecki, Documents, I, no. 230.

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at his expense are included “les deux coulonnes qui y restent à y mettre”.21 That these two coulonnes were the two colonettes of the left (west) side of the chapel is supported by a marché of the following year where Nicolas Delisle is commissioned to “couper deux chapiteaux qui sont […]22 et les retalé et canelé de mesme les entre deux des ymages qui sont dessus l’hostel” (“the same as those above the altar”, that is as those on the east wall of the chapel).23 This documentary evidence is borne out by the details of the first two nave chapels. The colonettes in the second chapel have classical bases posed on top of square corner supports. The capitals are Composite with deeply carved, heavy leaves, prominent echini and large, precisely cut ornamented volutes (Figs. 84, 85). Bearing no stylistic relation to those in the early choir chapels, these capitals are closer instead to those on the nearby first two north aisle piers and the aisle face of the corresponding nave piers (Figs. 31, 262). The capitals on the left wall of the first nave chapel, that is, those apparently carved in 1579 by Nicolas Delisle, also conform Fig. 81. Saint-Eustache, exterior area between fourth to this hard precise style and, like those in the and fifth north choir chapels, Lenoir? engraving. second chapel, carry simplified versions of the entablatures that are employed in the choir chapels (Figs. 87, 88). On the right wall of the first nave chapel, however, the capitals and entablatures – although perhaps similar in general design to those on the left – are much closer in detailing to the pre-1545 capitals of the fifth choir chapel (Figs. 70, 71, 86). The leafwork is also reminiscent of the fleshy, soft rounded leaves that were noted on some of the early capitals (Fig. 75). Furthermore, on the right wall of this nave chapel the colonette bases are supported by that unusual early form utilized in the choir: a heavy round socle penetrated by the edge of the pier below. The detailing of this distinctive motif on the right side of the first nave chapel and in the early choir chapels is identical. On the left wall of the nave chapel, however, this motif is executed differently: The socle is no longer heavy and prominent, but is barely discernible, encased within the square pier. This detail can be understood as part of the more refined, polished and hard style that dominates these western nave chapels (and the corresponding nave and aisle piers). Conversely, the detailing of the transept half-pier between the first nave chapel and the transept can also be included within the first campaign (Fig. 89). Thus, in summary, the document of 1569 removes the second chapel from the early phase of construction, while stylistic analysis and the 1579 document only allows for the wall on the eastern, transept side of the first chapel to be included. That the first

 Archives Nationales, Minutier Central, LXI, *84, fol. 519–522, 2 November 1578, Grodecki, Documents, I, no. 235.

21

  The document is torn here.   Archives Nationales, Minutier Central, LIX, 2, 28 March 1579, Grodecki, Documents, I, no. 237.

22 23

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Fig. 82. Saint-Eustache, second north nave chapel.

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Fig. 83. Saint-Eustache, first north choir chapel, vault.

chapel was not acquired as a private chapel until 1578 and the second one only in 158624 further supports these conclusions.25 A plausible chronology for the first two north nave chapels can now be suggested: As part of the transept construction, the east wall of the first chapel was built in c.  1532–c. 1545; sometime later, but before the work of 1569, therefore perhaps in the 1560s, this chapel was completed and vaulted,26 maybe by Nicolas Delisle.27 The second chapel (and part of the third chapel) was erected in or after 1569. The ornamentation of the two chapels was only completed at the time they were acquired as private burial chapels. Transepts: Piers and South Portal For the piers and portals of the Saint-Eustache transepts Ranjard’s arguments are persuasive. He had two inscribed dates to aid him: 1537, on a capital of one of the two lower inner pilasters of the northwest crossing pier; and 1539–1540, on the south transept portal.28 He noted that the dated capital of the crossing pier corresponded stylistically to those capitals on the exterior pilasters between the early choir chapels (Figs. 75–77, 247). Expanding his   “[…] ung aultre contract passé […] de la concession faite à Messire Scipion, conte de Fiesque, de la seconde chappelle neufve […] addossée contre celle de Jacques Lasnier […]”, Archives Nationales, LL 723, fol. 245v, 4 June 1586. 25  Ranjard might have correctly assigned these chapels to a later campaign had he been aware of their exteriors, which are difficult to see today and were presumably inaccessible to him (Figs. 146, 148). Here both a stylistic and compositional departure from the early choir chapels can be seen. Differences in the handling of details can be observed in the entablatures over the two chapels. The consoles are heavier and more precisely carved than those over the choir chapels and the triglyphs, now with seven guttae, differ in their design (Figs. 79, 80). That the 24

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nave chapels belong to a later phase of construction than the choir chapels is most apparent, however, in the very different balustrade design over the first north nave chapel. The second chapel has no ornamentation at this level, probably as it became apparent during the course of construction that this part of the church would not be visible. It is also presumably for this reason that the pilaster capitals between the north nave chapels were left unsculpted. 26  In the documents of 1578–1579 the chapel is described as “la premiere chappelle neuve voultée”. 27   According to Terrasse Nicolas Delisle was already mentioned in the Saint-Eustache documents in 1565, Terrasse, “Notes sur la construction”, 175. 28   Ranjard, “Saint-Eustache”, 108.

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Fig. 84. Saint-Eustache, second north nave chapel, right rear colonette capital.

Fig. 85. Saint-Eustache, second north nave chapel, right front colonette capital.

Fig. 86. Saint-Eustache, first north nave chapel, right front colonette capital.

Fig. 87. Saint-Eustache, first north nave chapel, left rear colonette capital.

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Fig. 88. Saint-Eustache, first north nave chapel, left front colonette capital.

Fig. 89. Saint-Eustache, northwest transept, half-pier right of first north nave chapel.

reading, we note that like the capitals flanking the third north choir chapel, the crossing capital, following the figurated-foliate type, is richly carved with abundant and luxuriant vegetation; the same type of rounded, soft leaves adorn the corners and a similar blowzy flower, now with an unabashedly preternatural stamen, drapes forward from the abacus. Two such flowers, one on the adjoining capital of a different type (which will be discussed shortly), threaten to smother the small capital of the central colonette. The capital and dentilated entablature of the square corner pier below the colonette also conform stylistically to the north choir detailing (Fig. 90). Ranjard observed that the capitals on the other three crossing piers were different from the dated capital on the northwest pier (Figs. 91–93). He characterized this difference only in terms of the leaf-work, which he described as dry on the three other crossing piers.29 To this we can add that they follow a different format: Corinthian rather than figurated-foliate. He was correct in noting that the “dry” leafwork on these capitals was very similar to that on the pilasters that flank the south transept facade whose portal was inscribed 1539–1540 (Figs. 97–99). He thus concluded that all four crossing piers, as well as the portal, were part of the early campaign.30 A closer look at the capitals of the transept facade and crossing piers allows us to strengthen Ranjard’s conclusions, and also permits us to make some additional observations about the stylistic mannerisms of the first campaign. In support of the inclusion of the “Corinthian” crossing piers in the first campaign, it can be observed that the capitals of the

29

 Ibid.

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 Ibid.

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corner piers below the colonettes on these three piers (Figs. 26, 100, 101), with their foliated calathi and prominent abaci ornamentation, conform to the style and format of the figurated-foliate type as it appears on the corresponding capitals on the half-piers between the north choir chapels and on the northwest crossing pier (Figs. 60–65, 90). Even more revealing, however, is that the capital adjoining the figurated-foliate example with the dated cartouche on the northwest crossing pier is Corinthian (Fig. 247). That both types of capitals, figurated-foliate and Corinthian, are not only present on the same pier, but are in fact physically joined by the carving of the pseudo-rosettes which half cover the center colonette capital, is compelling evidence that the two types of capitals belong to the same campaign. The implications of this variation in capital typology within what was by all evidence a single campaign will be considered below. It should also be noted that although the Corinthian and figurated-foliate capitals are

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Fig. 90. Saint-Eustache, northwest crossing pier, inner side, lower capital.

Fig. 91. Saint-Eustache, northeast crossing pier, inner side, upper capitals.

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Fig. 92. Saint-Eustache, southeast crossing pier, inner side, upper capitals.

Fig. 93. Saint-Eustache, southwest crossing pier, inner side, upper capitals.

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Fig. 94. Engraving of south transept portal of Saint-Eustache in 1887.

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Fig. 95. Saint-Eustache, south transept portal, detail.

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Fig. 96. Saint-Eustache, south transept portal, detail.

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Fig. 97. Saint-Eustache, south transept portal, detail, and first south choir chapels. Photograph by Ralph Lieberman.

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Fig. 98. Saint-Eustache, pilaster capital between first south nave chapel and south transept portal.

Fig. 99. Saint-Eustache, pilaster capital between first south choir chapel and south transept portal.

Fig. 100. Saint-Eustache, northeast crossing pier, inner side, lower capital.

Fig. 101. Saint-Eustache, southwest crossing pier, inner side, lower capital.

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Fig. 102. Saint-Eustache, south transept portal.

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different types, they do share certain similarities of design and execution. Not all of the acanthus leaves on the first campaign Corinthian capitals conform to Ranjard’s description of them as dry and timid. As is typical of the first campaign there is a great variety in the execution of their leafwork; and if we look at the capitals on the southeast crossing piers, for example, we see that differences in execution can be found even on one capital (Fig. 92). The main face of the capital on the left has flat, restrained leaves whereas the half face of the capital that abuts the colonette has full, fleshy leaf-work that seems to have been executed by a mason who had worked in the early north choir area of the building. As well as this correspondence, all of the Corinthian capitals in question employ, in place of normal rosettes, variations of that singular tousled and swollen flower used for the figurated-foliate capitals on the exterior of the north choir chapels and the northwest crossing pier (Figs 75–77, 91–93, 234). On several of the Corinthian crossing pier capitals the stamen of these pseudo-rosettes is of that tell-tale heavily seeded type used on the choir exterior (Figs. 91, 92). On all four crossing piers, not just the northwest one, these flowers seem blown away from the centers and nearly obscure the colonette capitals. A distinctive feature of the first campaign Corinthian capitals is their volute design: The outer volutes are broad and unadorned and widen noticeably as they curl, whereas the inner volutes are small, tentative, and sometimes of unequal size. These prominent outer volutes, as well as the unusual pseudo-rosettes, also appear on the capitals of the colossal pilasters that are carved out by a sequence of niches31 and frame the south transept portal (Figs. 95, 96, 102). These capitals are almost obscured by the architectural embellishments of the top niches, but the volutes and rosette motifs, as well as the few acanthus leaves that are visible, identify them as following the same format as appears on the interior crossing piers. I draw attention to these details for, although Ranjard states correctly that the capitals of the pilasters flanking the dated portal resemble some of the “Corinthian” crossing piers capitals, that the latter were part of the same campaign as the portal is more conclusively supported by evidence that capitals found on the portal itself, not just those flanking it, conform to the Corinthian format used on the undated interior piers. The novel features of the large and conspicuous outer volutes, timid inner volutes and pseudo-rosettes of the Corinthian capitals of the first campaign also reveal the design process that stands behind this peculiar Corinthian type: it can be understood as a canonical Corinthian form whose design has been modified through its fusion with the figuratedfoliate type – particularly as it appears on the exterior choir pilasters and northwest crossing pier (Figs. 75, 76, 90–92, 247). On this latter capital type, whose structure derives from a Composite model, the volutes are a dominant feature: hence, the unusual prominence accorded the expansive corner volutes of the Saint-Eustache Corinthian capital, and, conversely, the diminution and uncertain handling of the center volutes, a detail having no counterpart on the figurated-foliate type.32 Analogously, canonical Corinthian rosettes have been replaced by the strange flowers that adorn the figurated-foliate capitals. Ranjard argued that if the campaign of 1532–c.  1545 comprised the north choir chapels, the crossing piers and the south transept portal, common sense dictated that the transept piers in between should be included as well (Figs. 23, 35, 103). In support of this observation he noted that the capitals on the four intermediate transept piers, unlike those  The sculpture in these niches, like the rest of the figural sculpture on this portal and the north transept portal, date to the mid-nineteenth century. Inventaire général, pp. 362–363. See Fig. 150 which shows the portal in 1836 before any restoration was 31

done, and Fig. 94 which shows the portal in 1887 after the tracery had been restored. 32   Such timid inner volutes are found, however, on a minor figurated-foliate capital in the fourth north choir chapel (Fig. 58).

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Fig. 103. Saint-Eustache, transepts, north to south view.

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Fig. 104. Saint-Eustache, northeast transept, intermediate pier, aisle side, upper capitals.

Fig. 105. Saint-Eustache, northwest transept, intermediate pier, aisle side, upper capitals.

Fig. 106. Saint-Eustache, southeast transept, intermediate pier, aisle side, upper capitals.

Fig. 107. Saint-Eustache, southwest transept, intermediate pier, aisle side, upper capitals.

on the identically composed piers of the nave and choir, correspond to those on the crossing piers.33 Indeed, it may be further observed that all of the capitals of the transept piers – both of the free-standing intermediate piers and of the half-piers which abut the south and north walls of the transepts – either follow the figurated-foliate format or a Corinthian one (Figs. 23, 104-113). One capital in the former group, however, on the axial molding bundle of the northwest intermediate transept pier, can more appropriately be termed Composite (Fig. 105). In contrast to some deceptively similar capitals from the early chapels (Figs. 59, 63, 64), its volutes are now indeed true volutes, not some fanciful plant form, and its rosette is canonically scaled. While this capital is anomalous within the first campaign, its design, as will be seen, was of great consequence for the subsequent history of the church. The leafwork (which again varies from capital to capital) and shaping of the volutes on the Corinthian capitals of the transept piers (Figs. 104, 106, 107, 110, 113) clearly ties them to the same hands which executed the capitals of the “Corinthian” crossing piers (Figs. 90–92, 247). Unlike the crossing pier capitals, however, the format of the transept pier Corinthian capitals have more canonically scaled volutes and “normal” rosettes (as well as some tiny pseudo-rosettes) and so adhere to a truer Corinthian type. (This more correct Corinthian format is also used on the south transept portal: on the pilasters of the four sculpture 33

  Ranjard, “Saint-Eustache”, 110.

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Fig. 108. Saint-Eustache, northwest transept, intermediate pier, aisle side, lower capital.

Fig. 111. Saint-Eustache, northeast transept, intermediate pier, aisle side, lower capital.

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Fig. 110. Saint-Eustache, northFig. 109. Saint-Eustache, northeast transept, intermediate pier, west transept, intermediate pier, aisle side, lower capital. aisle side, lower capital.

Fig. 112. Saint-Eustache, southeast transept, intermediate pier, aisle side, lower capitals.

Fig. 113. Saint-Eustache, southwest transept, intermediate pier, aisle side, lower capital.

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niches which flank the portal and on the pilasters of the trumeau, Figs. 95, 114.)34 Thus the architect has created a major and minor version of the Corinthian capital as if he were trying to develop Corinthian equivalents for the figurated-foliate capitals whose larger and smaller versions are distinguished by the greater elaboration of the former. All the large capitals of the first campaign (which are found on the crossing pier pilasters, the exterior pilasters between the chapels, and on the south transept portal) follow either a major figurated-foliate or a major Corinthian type, and the smaller capitals (on the chapel colonettes, some of the portal supports, and on the paired colonettes, square corner piers, and axial molding groups of the transept piers and half-piers between the chapels) conform to either a minor figurated-foliate or a minor Corinthian type. Recognizing that an intelligent and thoughtful mind must stand behind such a treatment of details, we can begin to question the traditional view of the design according to which Renaissance details are mindlessly employed. Fig. 114. Saint-Eustache, south transept portal, detail. If we compare the transept capitals to Photograph by Ralph Lieberman. those in the nave and choir we see that Ranjard is correct when he observes a stylistic break between the transepts and the other two areas of the church. In the choir, which is documented as belonging to the seventeenth century,35 the capitals of the ambulatory and main vessel piers are all Corinthian, but, like those in the later choir chapels, are much heavier and far more uniform in their treatment than those in the transepts. In the nave, a Composite capital, modeled on the capital of the axial bundle of moldings on the northwest intermediate transept pier (Fig. 105), is used for the corresponding elements on the nave and aisle piers and also for the colonettes which flank them (Figs. 31, 115, 116, 262). Corinthian capitals are used for the lower square corner piers below the colonettes (Figs. 31, 115, 262). All these nave capitals, including those whose inscribed entablatures date them to 1578 and those of the first two northern nave bays which we have already linked to the post-1545 first north choir chapels, are much harder and more brittle in their execution than the transept capitals, and almost give the impression of being stamped out of a press rather than hand carved. In addition to the evidence of the capitals, numerous details on the transept, choir and nave piers indicate that the first was part of a different campaign than the last two, but I here want only to draw further attention to one such detail. Earlier it was pointed out that the arcade sides of the main vessel piers throughout the church are crowned by masks instead of capitals (Fig. 117); in the transept these represent a fantastical assemblage of creatures whose ram’s horns, winged ears, leaf beards, deep, seemingly empty

  The minor Corinthian is also used for many of the smaller capitals of the tempietto constructions that

34

appear on this portal (Figs. 95, 114). 35   See above n. 157.

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Fig. 115. Saint-Eustache, third south nave pier, aisle side.

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Fig. 116. Saint-Eustache, second south aisle pier, upper capitals.

Fig. 117. Saint-Eustache, north transept, east wall.

Fig. 118. Saint-Eustache, northwest transept, intermediate pier, north side, masks.

Fig. 119. Saint-Eustache, northeast transept, intermediate pier, north side, masks.

Fig. 120. Saint-Eustache, northeast transept, interemediate pier, south side, masks.

Fig. 121. Saint-Eustache, southeast transept, intermediate pier, south side, masks.

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Fig. 122. Saint-Eustache, southeast transept, intermediate pier, north side, masks.

Fig. 123. Saint-Eustache, southwest transept, intermediate pier, north side, masks.

Fig. 124. Saint-Eustache, southwest transept, intermediate pier, south side, masks.

Fig. 125. Saint-Eustache, first north nave pier, detail.

Fig. 126. Saint-Eustache, first south nave pier, detail.

Fig. 127. Saint-Eustache, first south nave pier, detail.

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eye-sockets, and tortured grimaces make them anything but human (Figs. 118–124).36 In the nave and choir the masks are drawn from more familiar realms: in the former they tend to be frankly human and seem almost to be portraits (Figs. 219–221),37 while in the latter they are all cherubs (Fig. 128). These differing species of masks used in the three main parts of the building; that the transept pier capitals differ from those in the nave and choir; and the presence of both the major and minor figurated capitals on the south transept portal are all additional confirmation of Ranjard’s observations that the first campaign included the south portal and the transepts but did not extend beyond them into the nave and choir.  orth Transept Portal and South Nave and N Choir Chapels Ranjard’s exclusion of the north transept portal and first south choir chapel is also well founded.38 The date of 1640 appears on the interior of the north wall of the transept (Fig. 130), and on the exterior it is evident that the portal has Fig. 128. Saint-Eustache, second north been cut and squeezed into place between the towers that choir pier, aisle and arcade sides. flank it (Figs. 129, 131–133). Furthermore, the heavy details of the portal, though modelled on those of the south entrance, clearly were executed in the early seventeenth century. If we look at the exterior of the first south choir chapel we see that details such as the entablature, balustrade and pilaster capital place it within the same period as the later-seventeenth-century north choir chapels (Fig. 97). Similar observations can be made about the interior of the chapel. More problematic, however, is Ranjard’s inclusion of the entire first south nave chapel in the early campaign (Fig. 136).39 He observed that the pilaster to the left of this chapel (Fig. 137) has a capital of the design and style already noted on the capital to the right of the chapel on the pilaster between it and the south transept portal (Fig. 99), and that the balustrade over this chapel is identical to that of the north choir chapels (Fig. 140). At the same time, however, the tracery pattern of the chapel window does not follow the type used in the early north choir chapels (Fig. 74), but instead adheres to the design used in the later north choir chapels and throughout all of the nave chapels – including the first two on the north (Figs. 67, 146). These and other details such as the heavy hanging bosses of the vaulting (Fig. 134), which also appear in the adjacent south nave chapel   Masks seem first to appear in French architecture in c. 1530, and are used in architecture as well as in decoration, notably, for example, in the stucco frames of the gallery of Francis I at Fontainebleau. Some of the Saint-Eustache masks, such as those with the leaf beards, are very similar to the nearly contemporary ones found on the fire place decoration at Madrid. On the use of masks in the period see Hautecœur, Histoire de l’architecture classique, I, part 2, pp. 643–747. On the dating of the chimneys at Madrid see Chatenet, Le château de Madrid, p. 117.

36

  The only exception to this are the masks on the first two piers on the north side of the nave. Here too are found imagined humanoid heads rather than portraits, although their execution certainly separates them from the first campaign. As is seen throughout this study the decoration of the first two nave bays on the north tends to differ from that of both the transepts and the rest of the nave. 38   Ranjard, “Saint-Eustache”, 111. 39   Ibid., 113. 37

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Fig. 129. Saint-Eustache, north transept portal, detail.

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Fig. 130. Saint-Eustache, north transept, end wall.

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Fig. 131. Saint-Eustache, north transept portal.

Fig. 132. Saint-Eustache, joint between north transept portal and east tower.

and in the first north nave chapel (Fig. 135), indicate that only the exterior wall of the first south nave chapel was erected during the first campaign. Chronology of First Campaign

Fig. 133. Saint-Eustache, joint between north transept portal and west tower.

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Before moving up into the superstructure of the transepts, I would first like to make some observations about the chronology of construction during the first campaign, which I believe began with the north choir chapels and gradually progressed southward across the transepts (Fig. 103). This building sequence is supported by several early documents, an analysis of the location of the different capital types that are employed in the early campaign, a consideration of the different capital formats in the context of early sixteenth-century architecture, and an examination of the site in 1532. The dates of 1534 through 1545 that were inscribed on the north choir chapels might suggest that they were under

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Fig. 134. Saint-Eustache, first south nave chapel.

Fig. 135. Saint-Eustache, second south nave chapel.

Fig. 136. Saint-Eustache, first south nave chapel, exterior.

Fig. 137. Saint-Eustache, pilaster capital between first and second south nave chapels.

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Fig. 138. Saint-Eustache, second north choir chapel, tracery.

Fig. 139. Saint-Eustache, fourth north choir chapel, tracery.

Fig. 140. Saint-Eustache, entablature over first south nave chapel.

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Fig. 141.  Diagram of capital placement in Saint-Eustache transepts.

construction during the course of the entire first campaign (as Ranjard seemed to believe). In 1534, however, two couples contracted with the marguilliers of Saint-Eustache to acquire “deux des chapelles neufves”.40 In this reference to two of the new chapels, the chapels in question can only concern those on the north choir, as it has been shown that no other chapels could have been built by such an early date. Thus, at least three new chapels had been completed by 1534, the date inscribed between the second and third chapels. The three other inscriptions of 1541, 1542 and 1545, which were not between but on individual chapels, are later than the actual period of building, for they correspond to the dates when perpetual masses were established by their patrons.41 Thus the north choir chapels represent the first efforts of the campaign of 1532–c. 1545. Within this group, it is possible that only the first three chapels were built by 1534 and that the fourth was completed shortly afterwards; slight yet perceptible differences between them support this suggestion. Certain features and details that are common to the first, second and third chapels do not appear in the fourth. As was noted above, the vaults of the first and second chapels are identical, having the same structural pattern of   Archives Nationales, LL 723, fol. 170, 14 July 1534.   In 1534 Jehan Boursier, Guillaume Rouillard and their wives acquire two chapels at Saint-Eustache (Archives Nationales, LL 723, fol. 170, 14 July 1534). In 1541 Rouillard and his wife found a perpetual mass in their chapel which is thus presumably the second one which was inscribed 1541 (Le Roux de Lincy, Saint-Eustache, p. 5). Boursier must have taken the first chapel because in 1538 Jean Brice

40 41

commissions painter to decorate the third chapel (Archives Nationales, Minutier Central, LXI, 7, 7 January 1538, Grodecki, Documents, II, p. 59 n. 1). Brice died in 1541 at which point a funerary monument was commissioned (Archives Nationales, Minutier Central, XX, 14, 14 July 1541, Grodecki, Documents, II, no. 545); in 1542, the date inscribed on the chapel, his wife had a perpetual mass established there (Archives Nationales, S 3328). The

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cross and ridge ribs ornamented with lozenges (Figs. 40, 83). In the third chapel the same elements of ribs and lozenges have been recombined into a more complex pattern in which the ribs themselves form diamond-shaped patterns (Fig. 37). The lozenge no longer appears, however, in the vault of the fourth chapel which is much simpler than the previous three (Fig. 38). The compositional variations within an underlying uniformity of type and execution of the exterior pilaster capitals of these chapels has already been examined; a corresponding treatment can be seen in their tracery patterns (Fig. 74). In all of them the mullions are conceived as classicizing supports on high socles, with minute, carefully carved capitals. But on the second and third chapels these are colonettes, whereas in the fourth they are square piers (Figs. 138, 139). Thus the fundamental classicizing conception is the same, but the realization is slightly different. Finally, certain details of the capitals within the second and third chapels do not reappear in the fourth. Given the variety of the capital detailing present in all the chapels it would be a mistake to insist too strongly on any such distinctions. Nevertheless, it can be pointed out that three of the capitals in the fourth chapel (Figs. 56, 57, 59) are of the more standardized and streamlined version of the figurated-foliate type that is used on the half-piers between the chapels (Figs. 60–65), on the transept piers (Figs. 90, 100, 101, 108–112) and in the partially erected fifth north choir chapel and first north nave chapel (Figs. 70, 71, 89). In these capitals large heads or flowers (all having approximately the same size) ornament the center of the abacus, the calathus is restricted to leafwork, and variety is allowed in the area of the volutes. None of the capitals in the earlier chapels conform to this type. From this analysis, an important point can perhaps be offered concerning the ongoing strategy of detailing in Saint-Eustache. It can be hypothesized that having completed the interiors of the first three north choir chapels, the designers realized that given the enormous number of capitals that would eventually have to be carved for SaintEustache it might be wise to introduce some measure of uniformity into their compositions (prominent capitals such as those on the pilasters on the exteriors of the chapels would still be individually and lavishly designed). The c.  1534 streamlining of the figurated-foliate capital may acknowledge some of the practicalities of the huge undertaking, but it does not mark any significant change in attitude towards the type of capital itself. Far more dramatic is the change that can be observed in the capitals of the transepts: between the crossing pier of 1537 and the south portal of 1539–1540 the figurated-foliate capital has been superseded altogether by the Corinthian type. That this shift in fact represents a definite change in design direction that occurred at a specific moment rather than being a case of two different capital types in simultaneous, interchangeable use is supported by the placement of the two types. For this discussion the capitals of the square corner piers on the crossing and transept supports will be referred to as the “lower” capitals while all the capitals above (on the colonettes, axial bundles of moldings, and crossing pier pilasters) will be the “upper” ones. In some cases the distinction between the Corinthian and figurated-foliate types may seem difficult to perceive, but the former can always be distinguished by the presence of both center and corner volutes and by a double row of acanthus leaves. Aided by a diagram which charts the placement of the capitals we can see that the figurated-foliate type predominates on memorial nature of the chapel probably accounts for the death head motifs that are found in the area of the third chapel (on the base of the pilaster between it and the fourth, on the gargoyle above, and as a small motif in the balustrade just to the left of the gargoyle) and the inscription memento mori on one

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of the pilasters (Figs. 74, 75). These motifs explain why the chapels were described as “en partie édiffiée” by their owners (Le Roux de Lincy, SaintEustache, p. 5). No documents have surfaced for the fourth chapel, but the date of 1545 probably also refers to the establishment of a perpetual mass.

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Fig. 142. Saint-Eustache, southwest crossing pier, base.

Fig. 143a. Serlio, Book IV, Doric frieze.

Fig. 143b. Serlio, Book IV, Composite base.

the lower capitals and on the north side of the transepts (Fig. 141). All of the lower capitals in the north transept and in the crossing are figurated-foliate; those on both of the south transept piers and the two adjacent half-piers are Corinthian.42 Figurated-foliate forms are used for the upper capitals on six piers: both colonette capitals of the two north transept half-piers; both of the colonette capitals of the northeast, northwest and southeast transept piers; and the west capital on the northwest crossing pier. As most of the figurated-foliate capitals are found in the area closest to the north choir chapels it seems reasonable to conclude that construction of the transept began on the north and that later, apparently in 1537, when all the lower capitals of the crossing and north transept piers and several of the upper ones on the north transept and northwest crossing piers had been sculpted, a

42  Although the lower capital of the north-east crossing pier is certainly Corinthian it is different from the Corinthian type used elsewhere in the transept and crossing; its volutes are ridged, its abacus dentilated and it adheres to the square shape of the pier. In the other lower and square transept pier Corinthian capitals the volutes and abaci are unadorned and the curve of the calathus is apparent. It should be remembered that even in the choir

chapels a Corinthian capital – again of a different type – was used along with the figurated-foliate ones (Fig. 100). Given the sharp differences between the north-east crossing capital and the others in the transept it seems reasonable to conclude that when it was designed the Corinthian was still regarded – as it had been in the choir – as but one possible variation in a seemingly endless range of classicizing forms.

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Fig. 143d. Serlio, Book IV, Corinthian capital.

Fig. 143c.  Serlio, Book IV, Corinthian capital.

decision was made to abandon the figurated-foliate capital – even mid-way on some piers – in favor of the Corinthian type. The Saint-Eustache Architect and Serlio’s Book IV This change is comprehensible within the broader context of developments in the period. The year 1540 has long been seen as one that heralds a change of direction in French Renaissance architecture marked by, among other things, an interest in employing canonically correct forms drawn from the Orders, with the architecture and theorists of antiquity and the High Renaissance rather than the quattrocento serving as models.43 This development, which has its first major expression in Lescot’s Louvre facade design of 1546, was already sporadically underway in the late 1530s, announced by events such as the publication in 1537 of the fourth book of Serlio’s architectural treatise, a copy of which Serlio sent to its patron, Francis I.44 It is telling that the northwest crossing pier at Saint-Eustache carries the same date as Book IV which dealt with the Orders (Fig. 97), for the moment of transition that marks the swan-song of quattrocento-inspired early French Renaissance  That 1540 has always been and continues to be perceived as a major watershed in French Renaissance architecture is amply testified to by a random survey of chapter headings: “The classical period of the sixteenth century: 1540–1565”, Blunt, Art and Architecture, p. 71; “L’architecture savante 1540–1560”, by Guillaume and James in Babelon, Le

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Château en France, p. 205; “1540–1559: L’invention de l’architecture à la française”, Pérouse de Montclos, Histoire de l’architecture française, p. 91; and “Vers une architecture nationale: 1540 à 1547”, Babelon, Les Châteaux… de la Renaissance, p. 313. 44   On Serlio’s career, his treatise and his role in the development of French Renaissance architecture

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Fig. 144.  Saint-Eustache, south nave chapels, exterior.

forms, such as the figurated-foliate capital, and the ascendance of more “correct” examples such as those illustrated by Serlio is poignantly captured on this pier where both the figurated-foliate and the Corinthian are present.45 This coincidence of dates is not fortuitous. There is strong evidence demonstrating that the architect of Saint-Eustache actually knew Serlio’s publication. The bases of the crossing piers are identical molding-for-molding to Serlio’s illustration of a Composite base; the Saint-Eustache bases even includes Serlio’s two-stepped socle (Figs. 142, 143b).46 This correspondence is so striking that there can be no doubt that Book IV lay before the see Blunt, Art and Architecture, pp. 73–78; William Bell Dinsmoor, “The Literary Remains of Sebastiano Serlio”, The Art Bulletin 24 (1942): 59–91, 115–154; Jean-Jacques Gloton, “Le traité de Serlio et son influence en France”, in Guillaume, Les Traités d’architecture, pp. 407–423; Guillaume, “Serlio est-il l’architecte d’Ancy-le-Franc?”, 9–18; Guillaume and James, “L’architecture savante 1540–1560”, 207–208; John Onians, Bearers of Meaning: The Classical Orders in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Princeton 1988, pp. 263–286; Myra Nan Rosenfeld, Sebastiano Serlio on Domestic Architecture, Cambridge, Mass., 1978; and Thomson, Renaissance Paris, passim. [Note of the Series Editor. On Serlio’s realizations as an architect in France, see Sabine Frommel, Sebastiano Serlio Architect,

Milan 2003; and on the treatise, see Sebastiano Serlio à Lyon: Architecture et Imprimerie, ed. Sylvie Deswarte-Rosa, vol. I: Le traité d’architecture de Sebastiano Serlio. Une grande entreprise éditoriale au XVIe siècle, Lyon 2004.] 45  A contemporary parallel where the transition from the quattrocento-inspired decorative details of the early Renaissance to those which signify the beginnings of French classicism can be seen in one monument during a single campaign is found on the exterior of the château of Madrid. Chatenet stresses that these different styles should not be interpreted as identifying different campaigns of construction, Chatenet, Le château de Madrid, pp. 112–116. 46   The same base design was used by Lescot on the Louvre facade.

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Saint-Eustache master as he designed his bases. Other details further confirm the influence of Serlio on the Saint-Eustache architect. On the right pilaster of the south transept portal trumeau, for example, the fifth square panel from the bottom represents a bull’s head of the type that is often found in Doric friezes but which was little known in France before Serlio so illustrated it in his 1537 publication (Figs. 114, 143a).47 That the Saint-Eustache architect thus had access to Book IV in the year that it was published is further evidence of the hypothesis advanced in the previous chapter that Francis I was involved with the plans for the new church. Certainly not many copies of the book can have been available in France in 1537, but one volume did rapidly make its way there, the one Serlio himself sent to the king. Although it can probably be assumed that the architect of Saint-Eustache wanted to keep up with the latest trends, it is likely that his natural interests had persuasive royal encouragement, given the character of Francis I who had time on the battlefield to consider alternate designs for features of the Hôtel de Ville.48 With the influence of Serlio established at Saint-Eustache, we may furtherobserve that the major and minor versions of the Corinthian capital can also be traced to Book IV where Serlio presents, on separate pages, two illustrations of a Corinthian capital. The capitals he renders are not identical: one, which occupies most of the page, has – particularly when Fig. 8 (repeated from p. 20). compared to ancient or Italian Renaissance examples – large and prominent volutes (Fig. 143c); the other capital, which takes up far less space Saint-Eustache plan. on its page, has volutes of more canonical dimensions (Fig. 143d). The relative size of the two capitals as published and the difference in their volute treatment is closely paralleled at Saint-Eustache where the larger major capitals of the crossing piers have big volutes and the smaller minor capitals on the transept piers display the proportionally smaller volutes (Figs 93, 104, 107). The architect was not completely slavish in working out these details, however. The minor Corinthian type at Saint-Eustache follows the Serlian example closely, but not so the major one. Instead of copying the large capital illustrated by Serlio, the Saint-Eustache master evidently used it as an inspiration for and a validation of his unorthodox design; the volutes of Serlio’s large capital legitimizes the architect’s translation of the Corinthian according to the format that had governed the composition of his earlier figurated-foliate capitals. The major Corinthian form also seems to draw upon Serlio’s small capital design where the corner volutes are larger than the center ones, therefore perhaps suggesting to our architect that variety was possible in this area, that the volutes need not adhere to any fixed size. The major capital design at Saint-Eustache; the very conception of a major and minor Corinthian type; the architect’s use of Serlio’s Composite base for the Corinthian crossing piers; and his abstracting of the bull’s head from the Doric entablature let us see that the architect approached Book IV not as a book of rules but primarily as a pattern book, rich in novel forms that could be copied or recombined, or simply serve as inspirational points of departure for new motifs. In his approach to Serlio’s illustrations, the SaintEustache architect exhibited the same invention of detailing, love of decorative variety, and  On the Doric Order and Serlio in France see Gloton, “Le traité de Serlio”, and Hautecœur, Histoire de l’architecture classique, I, part 2, pp. 661–667. 48  The project was so strongly controlled by the king’s tastes that in 1535, when Francis was on 47

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the battlefield, two alternate designs for the main staircase were sent to him for consideration. Lalanne, “Une lettre inédite”, 184–185.

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liberal approach to the canonical vocabulary of classicism that had already been evident in his idiosyncratic Doric entablature, fluted consoles, and figurated-foliate capital designs. Significantly, however, the two Corinthian capitals were not added to the repertoire of figurated-foliate capital types at Saint-Eustache but instead replaced them.49 This change can be interpreted as a response to the period’s growing attention to “correct” classical usage, but also, like the earlier shift of c. 1534, as one that may have resulted from a practical desire to further standardize the capital types. Furthermore, the major and minor versions of the Corinthian capitals are more easily distinguishable as two distinct examples of one type than are their figurated-foliate counterparts. Thus the capital change of 1537 may also have been motivated by a wish to more clearly articulate differences between the major and minor support types in the building.

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Fig. 9c. Saint-Eustache site in c. 1500.

The Chronology of Construction and the Site We have now established the building chronology of the lower level of the first campaign. Construction began with the first three north choir chapels, which were completed by or in 1534. Shortly thereafter, perhaps while work was beginning in the north transept, the fourth north choir chapel was completed. No further chapels were constructed and subsequent work centered instead on the transepts, gradually proceeding from the north towards the south transept portal. In 1537 the bases of the crossing piers were redesigned after Serlio, and sometime later, presumably while the south transept piers and portal were under construction and after several of the upper capitals in the north transept had been completed, the architect decided to also redesign his capital types. The south transept portal was completed in 1539–1540, and the transept piers were probably also finished around this time. The first south nave chapel was begun somewhat later.50 This chronology and the location of construction makes sense in terms of what is known about the site in 1532. Although they certainly did not anticipate that the building would take more than a century to complete, the marguilliers evidently did realize that construction would be lengthy and so decided to leave the old Saint-Eustache standing in order that normal liturgical activities could

  The solitary Composite capital, which apparently pre-dates 1537 and is clearly not derived from Serlio, on the northwest intermediate transept pier was also replaced by the Corinthian.

49

Fig. 145. Saint-Eustache site in c. 1670, after Boudon et al.

Fig. 146. Saint-Eustache, exterior from north.

 In addition to its incomplete state a number of stylistic details place the first south nave chapel at the end of the first campaign. Thus, for example, although the exterior entablature is closely modelled

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Fig. 147. Saint-Eustache, south nave chapels, from west.

Fig. 148. Saint-Eustache, north nave chapels, exterior.

continue unhindered for as long as possible.51 Thus construction began around and to the west of the thirteenth-century church. As Ranjard suggested, the irregular placement of the southeast crossing pier was probably the result of the east side of the crossing being built up against or near the facade of the old church whose axis did not align with that of the new one (Fig. 8).52 That work (above the foundation level) actually began, however, with the north choir chapels rather than with the transepts or crossing which would have upon that of the early north choir chapels certain features are handled in a slightly different way: The architrave is now more correctly composed of three fasciae instead of two, the dentils have been eliminated, and the consoles are exclusively foliated ones, executed in the style of the exterior Corinthian capitals (Figs. 79, 140). Like the north choir chapels, the molding framing the window is ornamented at intervals with foliate motifs, but whereas at the former they are small, relatively free-form elements, at the south nave chapel they are larger and frame a circle, itself ornamented with a flower (Figs. 74, 136). This version of the motif used on the south nave window molding also appears on the south transept portal, on the pilasters of the niches on either side of the door. This chapel does not appear to have been built along with the portal, but right afterwards: a break can be observed between the two in the area of the balustrade and entablature (Fig. 140). That the chapel details approximate those of the early choir chapels but adhere stylistically to forms found on the south portal and that it does not bond with the portal indicates that it was one of the last efforts of the first campaign. That work stopped

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at this point may have been due to the fact that there was some uncertainty as to the exact location of the boundary between the south side of the church and the rue Trainée. When the later chapels were executed they were pulled forward from the line of the first chapel which apparently had been pushed too far back from the street (Figs. 137, 144). 51   This same sentiment is repeated in 1623 when it is pointed out that if construction of the choir were to begin at its east end “les paroissiens ne pourroient aucunement demeurer audict endroict ne y célébrer le divin service qu’après l’entière perfection d’icelle église”, but that if work were to start on the north of the choir “ledit vieil coeur pourra tousjours estre habité et y célébrer le service divin […]” (Archives Nationales, Minutier Central, LIX, 51, fol. 148v, 11 February 1623). During the sixteenth century not only was the old church in use, the marguilliers also made sure that it was kept in good repair. In 1575 several windows in the old choir are repaired, Archives Nationales, Minutier Central, LXI, 81, 19 September 1575 and 24 September 1575, Grodecki, Documents, I, nos. 231 and 232. 52   Ranjard, “Saint-Eustache”, 108. Also see Figure 8.

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yielded more immediately impressive results, has to do, I believe, with the earlier history of the site. The 1519 project for expansion was, as has been shown, to be to the north of the church in the area of the deconsecrated cemetery. Though this plan was not realized, in 1532 the area in question was presumably one where work could immediately begin; it is even conceivable that foundation trenches or some form of preparation had already been made there as part of the aborted expansion campaign. Only four chapels were built at this time because it was in the region of the fifth chapel that the old and new churches would intersect.53 But why include these chapels in the first campaign? Given the magnitude of the project being undertaken, even if the land to the north of the old church was immedi- Fig. 149. Saint-Eustache, south transept portal ately buildable, why bother with such rela- seen down the rue des Prouvaires. tively minor parts of the building especially when the ambulatory providing access to them could not be erected at the same time? The twofold answer reveals motives as pragmatic as those behind the decision concerning where to begin construction. Although the marguilliers, thanks to Francis, were able to acquire properties needed for construction, there was one property on the block whose owners could and, as it turned out, would pose problems: the Hôtel de Royaumont, the Parisian residence of the abbots of the Cistercian abbey of Royaumont.54 One corner of the Royaumont parcel, which fronted on the rue du Jour, stood in the area of the future north transept portal and north nave chapels (Figs. 9c, 145). Perhaps because of the abbey’s own royal connections, the abbot of Royaumont was apparently not obliged, like the other property owners on the block, to accommodate himself to the project of his neighbor.55 In the end, the church was built according to plan, but the marguilliers never received additional requested land concessions from Royaumont that would have allowed the church to be free-standing on the northwest.56 Even today the north nave chapels are barely visible from the outside and the imposing north transept facade is approached by the small impasse Saint-Eustache (Figs. 1, 146, 148). In 1532 the marguilliers must have realized that the Hôtel de Royaumont would pose difficulties: because they would have stood in the   See above n. 157.   Abbé Duclos, Histoire de Royaumont, Paris 1862. 55  Marcel Aubert, L’Architecture Cistercienne en France, Paris 1943, vol. I, pp. 69 and 223. 56  In 1582 three outside architects and a carpenter are called in by the marguilliers to visit the church and the hôtel and to make to make recommendations about the site and the future building of the church. It is decided that: “pour l’accroissement et l’embellissement de ladicte église il est nécessaire de prendre et faire une rue dans ladicte maison [hôtel de Royaumont] tant allendroict de ladite croisée que des chapelles qui sont faictes et restent encores à 53 54

faire […] et tant pour donner jour et clarté audictes chapelles et croisées […] que pour faire la procession au pourtour d’icelle église […] Avons aussi trouvé qu’il est nécessaire de faire une aultre grande rue dans ladicte maison allendroict dudict portail [north transept portal] encommancé pour aller de ladicte rue Jean le Mire [rue du Jour] en ladicte église […] ” (Archives Nationales, S 3331III, 2, 30 June 1582). The proposed street, however, was never realized. On Royaumont and Saint-Eustache also see Françoise Hamon in Boudon et al, Système de l’architecture, pp. 199–200, 249–250.

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garden of the Hôtel, the north transept portal and its western tower could not be begun. But by erecting the north choir chapels and pushing the transept right up against the property line the marguilliers demonstrated their determination to squeeze their cathedral-sized project into the uncathedral-like setting of a small, irregularly shaped city block.57 Once the choir chapels and transepts were standing the full width of the five-aisled, chapel surrounded plan of the church was physically established, making it difficult for Royaumont – or anyone – to seek to alter it. Indeed, fifty years after the church was begun, a later generation of marguilliers supported their argument that Royaumont should allow their property to be penetrated by using as evidence the fact that church had to be continued along the lines of what was already standing.58 The other advantage presented by the building of chapels was financial. Whatever Francis donated towards the building fund was supple59 Fig. 150. Anonymous lithograph of south mented by the parish’s own wealth as well as other transept portal of Saint-Eustache in 1836. sources such as dispensation fees collected from parishioners that allowed them to continue to consume milk and butter during the Lenten season.60 The chapels brought in additional revenues, not only at the time when they were initially acquired by individuals, but also later when their patrons would deed to the church valuable real-estate in return for the low-cost service of memorial masses.61 Throughout the building history of Saint-Eustache the chapels would continue to provide a steady source of income for the fabric.62 Like the construction of the north choir chapels, the rapid completion of the south transept portal eight years after work had begun on the other side of the church (and perhaps before the south transept piers had been completed) reflects an awareness of practical and symbolic requirements. Eventually, before the west facade of the new building was reached, the portal (part of the Notre-Dame inspired transept facade) would serve   Other evidence of the determination to shoehorn their enormous project into the absolute legal limits of the site can be seen in the area of the south nave chapels. After it was presumably discovered that the first chapel had not extended all the way to the permitted boundary the subsequent chapels were realigned (Figs 137, 144). The last few chapels, however, are bare slivers that hardly function as independent spaces (Figs. 13a, 147). There was of course plenty of room on the site to allow for a church of slightly more modest dimensions that would not find its chapels compromised, but such a smaller project was not what the parish and presumably the king had in mind. 58   Archives Nationales, S 3331III, 2, 30 June 1582. 59   On the assets of the parish see Archives Nationales, S 3328 to 3341 (repertoire of revenues); Le Roux de Lincy, Saint-Eustache, p. 4; Mirot, “Inventaire” 57

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(for the fifteenth century); and Pasquier, Un Curé de Paris, p. 150. 60   Lebeuf found this permission granted in 1537 and again in 1552, Lebeuf, Histoire… de Paris, p. 121. This was not an unusual way of funding building programs; such Lenten fees were also used for construction at Saint-Etienne-du-Mont, Dumolin, Les églises de France, p. 110. 61  In 1541 Guillaume Roillart and his wife, Nicole Gomont, give a house on the rue Saint-Martin to the fabric in exchange for such a mass, and in 1542 the widow of Jean Brice deeds to the parish two houses on the rue de Coquillière for the foundation of a mass in her husband’s memory. Archives Nationales, S3328; and Le Roux de Lincy, Saint-Eustache, p. 5. 62  That the revenus generated by the concession of chapels was used for building is explicitly stated in November of 1578 when Jacques Layner,

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Fig. 151. Saint-Eustache, northeast transept, north bay.

as the main entrance to the church. It is doubtful, however, given the state of the transept as a building site, that the portal actually functioned as such as soon as it was completed.63 But with its elaborate Renaissance decoration, strategically located on the rue Trainée facing down the rue des Prouvaires – which extended all the way to the rue Saint-Honoré (Figs. 15, 149) – it immediately gave the ambitious and modern new building project a highly visible presence in the city. The date of the portal suggests that its completion may have been timed to coincide with the diplomatically important voyage through France of the Emperor Charles V in the winter of 1539–1540. Francis intended to impress the travelling emperor with the cultural and artistic achievements of his reign: Ceremonial entries were staged in several cities, and Charles was proudly shown many of the Renaissance châteaux in the Loire valley as who had several weeks earlier been granted the rights to the last north nave chapel, decided that he would rather have the first one and offers 200 écus in addition to the 110 he had already paid for the earlier foundation. The marguilliers accept “considerans que la somme qui seroit baillée par led. Lasnier pour lad. premiere chapelle neufve viendroit bien à propos pour ayder à subvenir à la despence du bastiment de l’accroissement de lad. eglise […]” (Archives Nationales, Minutier Central, LXI *84, fol. 519–522, 2 November 1578; Grodecki, Documents, I, no. 235). Other similar transactions

are also recorded, see Archives Nationales, LL 723, fol. 245v, 4 June 1586; LL 723, fol. 247, 25 January 1589; Minutier Central, LIX, 51, fol. 96, 15 April 1615; LL 723, fol. 255, 1 December 1602; LL 723, fol. 256v, 5 September 1604; Minutier Central, LXI, 138, fol. 196, 6 April 1621. 63  Access to the church may have been provided by a portal on the south side of the choir near the bell-tower, which is mentioned in 1629; Archives Nationales, Minutier Central, LIX, 51, fol. 546v, 25 March 1629.

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Fig. 152. Saint-Eustache, northwest transept, triforium.

Fig. 153. Saint-Eustache, joint between northwest crossing pier and north wall of first nave bay, detail.

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Fig. 154. Saint-Eustache, first nave bay, south wall, entablature below triforium.

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Fig. 155. Saint-Eustache, north nave wall, triforium and clerestory. Photograph by Ralph Lieberman.

Fig. 156. Saint-Eustache, nave pier between fourth and fifth bays north nave wall, upper square corner pier, capital.

Fig. 157. Saint-Eustache, first nave bay, south wall, triforium.

Fig. 158. Saint-Eustache, southwest transept, north bay, triforium (abuts southwest crossing pier).

well as the more recent ones under construction in the Île-de-France. In anticipation of the emperor’s November-through-January visit (which was only announced at the end of October) Rosso and Primaticcio made ready the splendidly decorated Pavillon des Poêles at Fontainebleau, while in Paris rooms in the decrepit Louvre were lavishly refurbished, at the Palais on the Île-de-la-Cité magnificent tapestries and other forms of decoration were installed, Girolamo della Robbia supervised the decorations for Charles’ entry into the city, and a gift of a magnificent silver statue of Hercules was prepared. All efforts were thus made to comply with Francis’ instructions that Paris make for the emperor “la plus magnifique entrée et la plus riche présent qu’il seroit possible”.64 The speed with which the intricate design of the Saint-Eustache transept portal was executed may also have been in  Cited in Jean Jacquart, Francois Ier, Paris 1981, p. 246. On the voyage of Charles through France also see André Castelot, François Ier, Paris 1983, pp. 399–415; Knecht, Francis I, pp. 295–297;

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V. L. Saulner, “Charles Quint traversant la France: ce qu’en dirent les poètes français”, in Jacquot, Les Fêtes de la Renaissance, II, pp. 207–233; and Jean Jacquot, “Panorama des fêtes”, pp. 433–439.

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Fig. 159. Saint-Eustache, northwest transept, south bay, triforium (abuts northwest transept pier).

Fig. 161. Saint-Eustache, first south nave bay, interior of triforium at joint with crossing pier.

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Fig. 160. Saint-Eustache, northwest transept, interior of triforium.

Fig. 162. Saint-Eustache, first north nave bay, interior of triforium, view towards crossing.

Fig. 163. Saint-Eustache, first north choir bay, interior of trifoium, view from crossing.

response to this general campaign of hurried sprucing-up. The desire to make a tangible statement of newness in the urban environment may thus have been prodded along by the particular circumstances of the years 1539–1540. Finally, like the north choir chapels, the completed south transept portal can be seen as part of the preemptive anti-Royaumont strategy: in 1582, the marguilliers were able to point to the south portal which was “parfait et

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Fig. 164. Saint-Eustache, northeast transept, north bay, triforium.

Fig. 165. Saint-Eustache, southeast transept, north triforium bay, detail.

Fig. 166. Saint-Eustache, northeast transept, south triforium bay, detail.

Fig. 167. Saint-Eustache, southwest transept, north triforium bay, detail.

parachevé” as evidence that if the original plans were to be respected a similar portal would have to be erected to the north on property belonging to their problematic neighbors.65 Thus prudent real-estate foresight, financial and liturgical needs, and royal ambition were all brought to bear on the decision-making processes concerning what and where to build during the first campaign. The attention that Ranjard and others pay to the eminent soundness of the resolution to leave the old church standing for as long as possible and to therefore begin work at the transepts has obscured the fact that other important considerations were involved. The implicit assumption that construction merely began at a predestined beginning and then proceeded surely if slowly towards inevitable completion neglects a host of motives – pecuniary, symbolic and pragmatic – that not only enlighten us about building practices during the period but also suggests that the new Saint-Eustache possessed meaning as a monument long before it took its final monumental form.

  Archives Nationales, S 3331III, 4, 30 June 1582.

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Fig. 168. Saint-Eustache, northeast transept, north triforium bay, detail.

Fig. 169. Saint-Eustache, northeast transept, south triforium bay, detail.

Fig. 170. Saint-Eustache, southwest transept, south triforium bay, detail.

Fig. 171. Saint-Eustache, exterior of northwest triforium.

The Triforium The early builders and marguilliers of Saint-Eustache were, of course, concerned with more than staking their claim and making symbolic statements: They wanted construction to proceed as quickly and as far as possible. This brings us to the only seriously erroneous part of Ranjard’s assessment of the parameters of the first campaign: his estimate of how much of the main vessel elevation was built in the transepts. He believed that the break between the first and subsequent building campaigns occurred at the level of the architrave of the entablature which runs below the triforium (Figs. 35, 150).66 This notion of a horizontal break in construction paradoxically relies on the presence of vertical breaks that distinguish the transepts from the nave and choir, and appear on the crossing piers which stand at the juncture between them. One such break involves the treatment of the capitals of the square   Ranjard, “Saint-Eustache”, 113.

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Fig. 172. Saint-Eustache, northeast transept, south triforium bay, pilaster capital.

Fig. 174. SaintEustache, northwest transept, south triforium bay, pilaster capital.

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Fig. 173. Saint-Eustache, northeast transept, north triforium bay, pilaster capital.

Fig. 175. Saint-Eustache, northwest transept, north triforium bay, pilaster capital.

Fig. 177. Saint-Eustache, southeast transept, south triforium bay, pilaster capital.

and

Fig. 176. Saint-Eustache, southeast transept, north triforium bay, pilaster capital.

Fig. 178. Saint-Eustache, southwest transept, south triforium bay, pilaster capital.

Fig. 179. Saint-Eustache, southwest transept, north triforium bay, pilaster capital.

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Fig. 180. Saint-Eustache, northwest transept, north triforium bay, exterior pilaster capital.

Fig. 181. Saint-Eustache, northeast transept, north-most 1/2 bay, exterior pilaster capital.

Fig. 182. Saint-Eustache, northeast transept, exterior triforium, intermediate pier capital.

Fig. 183. Saint-Eustache, southeast transept, exterior triforium, intermediate pier capital.

corner piers that flank the central bundles of moldings on the main vessel piers and support the architrave in question. Throughout the transepts an unusual capital type, best described as pseudo-Ionic, is used in this position (Figs. 151, 255). This element – composed of a double row of dentils, the lower dentils rounded and the upper, from which tiny volutes curl, square – also appears in the corresponding location on the crossing piers on the sides which face into the transepts as well as the nave and choir (Figs. 152–154). As Ranjard observed, in the rest of the nave, including the far (western) sides of the bays which abut the crossing piers, capitals which can more accurately be described as Ionic are used for the square corner piers (Figs. 155, 156) (The choir is not at issue here, as it is documented as belonging to the seventeenth century). Ranjard also noticed that, like the pseudo-Ionic capitals, a section of the architrave above them was built together with the crossing piers in the first bays of the nave and choir. If we look, for example, at details of the architrave on both the north and south walls of the first nave bay we see that the joint between the parts of the architrave built with the crossing pier and its later extension is a messy one (Figs. 153, 154). On the basis of this

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Fig. 184.  Serlio, Book IV, Ionic base and capital.

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Fig. 185.  Serlio, Book IV, Ionic capital.

evidence Ranjard concluded that it was at the level of the architrave that the first campaign in the transepts came to an end. But the change in capital types and the break in the architraves are not evidence of a horizontal disjunction within the construction of the transepts. Indeed, these breaks are only two in a series of vertical discontinuities that can be observed on the nave and choir sides of the crossing piers. I will here primarily focus on the breaks between the transepts and the undocumented first bay of the nave. Above the architrave of the entablature, breaks in masonry courses can also be seen in the frieze and cornice. This is most apparent in the lower molding of the frieze of the first south nave bay (Figs. 154). If we continue upwards in the section of this bay abutting the southwest crossing pier, we find that the treatment of forms such as the base of the clerestory columns, the springing of the first arch of the triforium arcade, and the floral motif in the spandrel above, differs from that of the corresponding forms in the rest of the bay (Fig. 157), but is identical to what is found nearby in the south transept bay that adjoins the southwest crossing pier (Fig. 158). Precisely analogous observations can be made about the first north nave bay and the adjacent north transept bay, both of which flank the northwest crossing pier (Figs. 30, 159). Another break between the transepts and the nave can be seen in the interior of the triforium. In the transepts the backs of the triforium arches and the section of wall above them are decorated with moldings (Fig. 160). These moldings continue only a short distance into the first nave and choir bays (Fig. 161–165).67   Although Ranjard also noticed this change in the treatment of the interior triforium moldings he did not see them as being part of a series with the lower

67

breaks, but only as evidence that the nave and choir were not built together with the transepts; Ranjard, “Saint-Eustache”, 116.

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Fig. 186.  Saint-Eustache, choir.

Although these details offer additional support for the exclusion of the nave and choir from the first campaign, they do not allow for any conclusion to be drawn about how high the transepts were built during that period. By examining the first bays of the nave and choir where they join the crossing piers it is not possible to deduce a horizontal break in construction that parallels one in the transepts. Instead we must look within the transepts themselves to find an interruption which may mark the termination of the first campaign. Such a break seems to appear several courses above the one posited by Ranjard, at the level of the bases of the triforium arcade supports (Figs. 152, 164). In all but one triforium bay of the transepts the bases of the supports to the right and left of the central Ionic pilasters were either carved as classical bases like those of the pilasters (Figs. 164– 168), or were simply left as uncarved blocks (Fig. 169). Furthermore, several of the bases are not aligned with their supports. In only one bay were the blocks carved down and the bases and supports seamlessly aligned (Fig. 170). The disjunction between the triforium bases and their supports indicates a change in design – although a comparatively minor one. As executed, in the center of each triforium bay a pilaster stands between and in front of the molded vertical supports of the arcade. The presence of the classical bases below the flanking intermediate supports indicates that originally these supports were intended to be similarly composed. The interior of the triforium would thus more closely have resembled its exterior (which would have been built first) where pilasters are uniformly used for all the arcade supports (Fig. 171). But unlike the exterior wall where all the pilasters have the same dimensions, the intermediate bases in the interior of the triforium are smaller than those of the center ones, indicating that the secondary supports were planned to be narrower than the major ones – as they are now (Fig. 164).

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Fig. 187.  Saint-Eustache, south transept, joint end and west wall.

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Fig. 188. Saint-Eustache, northeast transept, north bay, clerestory bases.

Fig. 190. Saint-Eustache, south transept facade, upper levels.

Fig. 192. Saint-Eustache, south transept, turret in corner between end and east wall, lower zone.

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Fig. 189. Saint-Eustache, northeast transept, south triforium bay, detail.

Fig. 191. Saint-Eustache, south transept, end wall (and west wall).

Fig. 193. Saint-Eustache, south transept, turret in corner between end and east wall, second zone.

A Revised Building History,

Fig. 194. Saint-Eustache, south transept, end wall, lower gallery, detail.

Fig. 196. Saint-Eustache, south transept facade, pilaster capital flanking upper gallery.

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First Master,

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Fig. 195. Saint-Eustache, south transept facade, lower gallery.

Fig. 197. Saint-Eustache, south transept, end wall, upper gallery.

Fig. 198. Saint-Eustache, south transept, end wall, upper gallery, detail.

Fig. 199. Saint-Eustache, south transept facade, upper gallery.

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Fig. 200. Saint-Eustache, north transept, joint end and east walls, detail.

Fig. 201. Saint-Eustache, north transept, joint end and west walls, detail.

Thus the overall original triforium design seems not to have been very different from what was actually built; the present triforium scheme represents not so much a new design as a modification of the old one with the intermediate supports having the pilasters removed from between the molded arcade supports. The elimination of the intermediate pilasters can be understood as an attempt to simplify the scheme. Whereas several of the intermediate bases are only slightly narrower than the center bases, others are considerably smaller, sometimes only one-fourth the size of the center bases (Figs. 167–170). These tiny bases would have supported pilasters of such narrow proportions that their detail would have been indistinguishable from the ground. Yet they are certainly comprehensible within the stylistic preferences of the first campaign: One design principle evident there was that every support be a classical one. Thus, as has been seen, even details such as the mullions of the chapel window tracery become miniature classicizing piers or colonettes, complete with capitals. But when was the design of the triforium supports altered? Does the disjunction between the bases and the supports mark the end of the first campaign in the transepts? There is strong evidence indicating that it does not and that the original architect, some of whose mannerisms have already been identified, was also responsible for the modified design of the triforium. Not surprisingly, this evidence is found in the decorative details of the triforium where the same variety of design and diversity of execution that has already been identified as characteristic of the first architect and workshop continues. With one exception, all of the fifty-four triforium capitals of both the interior and exterior of the transepts follow a single Ionic format in which the echinus is separated from the pilaster by a broad band (Figs. 172–183).68 This band is usually ornamented either with rosettes or with a frieze of dentils. These dentilated versions suggest that a familiar graphic source may stand behind the detailing: Serlio’s Book IV contains an illustration of an Ionic capital which is rendered together with the top of a fluted column (Fig. 184). Might not an architect with a decided fondness for dentils and with little first-hand experience of the Orders have interpreted the flutes in the two-dimensional image as dentils and the columnar remnant as the bottom section of the capital? One triforium capital in particular lends credence to such a scenario: the capital of the north bay on the east side of the 68  The exception is one of the exterior capitals of the north bay of the southeast transept where the

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lower band has been omitted.

A Revised Building History,

Fig. 202. Saint-Eustache, detail of Fig. 236.

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Fig. 203. Saint-Eustache, north transept, blind triforium bay, detail.

north transept (Fig. 173), like the Serlian example, is composed of a band decorated with rounded dentils (flutes); a bead-and-reel molding; an echinus displaying the egg-and-dart motif (in each case composed of three “eggs”); volutes which are undecorated on their front faces and ornamented on their sides with leaves, as Serlio illustrates on the following page (Fig. 185); and an abacus with a cyma profile. His Serlian type is freely adapted in the other triforium capitals: The bead-and-reel is usually dispensed with; the dentils may be square or replaced, as we have seen, by rosettes (themselves not always similar); the echinus may be left unadorned; the egg-and-dart reduced to two eggs or increased to four, and so forth. On one of the squat exterior pilasters standing between two triforium bays the Serlian type is stretched rather than re-proportioned to accommodate the greater breadth of this member (Fig. 182). As a final note it can be mentioned that the well-known motif of the blowzy pseudo-rosette also appears, in triplicate, in the triforium of the south transept where it has seemingly been thrown or blown against the lower band of an exterior Ionic capital (Fig. 183). The way that Serlio’s Ionic capital is mutated into an assortment of loosely related hybrids, thus serving as a model in only a general sense, suggests the workings of the same imagination that had earlier used Serlio’s Book IV as a mine of inspiration rather than as a book of rules and absolute types, an imagination which throughout the details of the first campaign exhibited a preference for variety and experimentation even within the more restricted formats of the post-1534 figurated-foliate and the Corinthian capital types. A designer who finds it appropriate to extend the rule of variety – which is generally, if not so inventively, present wherever figurated-foliate capitals are found (whether in the quattrocento or in the early French Renaissance) – to the Corinthian Order can certainly also transform the Ionic, which is likewise an Order that is not “normally” varied in one building. The same diversity of ornamental forms can also be found in the foliate motifs of the spandrels of the transepts’ triforium arcades (Figs. 172–179). In contrast, if we look at the triforia of the nave and choir we find that the detailing becomes standardized within individual campaigns. Indeed, in the areas of the nave and choir triforium three phases of construction can be easily identified by their internal uniformity: the first two north nave bays (with the exception of the east side of the first bay built together with the crossing pier); the rest of the nave; and the choir (Figs. 155, 186). It thus is apparent that the

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Fig. 204. Saint-Eustache, northeast transept, blind triforium bay, pilaster capital.

Fig. 205. Saint-Eustache, northwest transept, exterior wall.

Fig. 206. Saint-Eustache, west tower of north transept facade, detail at triforium level.

Fig. 207. Saint-Eustache, exterior of northeast blind triforium bay and east tower of north transept facade at level of triforium.

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Fig. 208. Paris, Saint-Merry, choir buttresses.

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Fig. 209. Mont Saint-Michel, buttresses.

triforium zone of the transepts was designed by and constructed under the supervision of the architect responsible for the lower parts of the transepts, that is by the first SaintEustache master.69 The break between the first and subsequent campaigns in the transepts occurs not, as Ranjard believed, at the architrave above the main arcade, nor does it occur at the level of the triforium bases. Instead the first campaign terminated at the level of the sills of the clerestory windows where the bases of the vertical members of the tracery (some of them formed like classical bases identical to those in the triforium, implying that the tracery mullions also were originally intended as classicizing forms) do not line up with the mullions themselves (Fig. 188). The clerestory itself was built, together with the transept vaults, in the 1630s as documents and dates on the stained-glass indicate.70 In the first campaign the molding bundles of the transept piers were built to the level of the window sills, but of the

 As for the disjunction between the bases and intermediate supports of the triforium an explanation other than that of an end of construction can be offered. Above the level of the main arcade construction did not proceed straight up in a single plane, instead the courses were laid in a U shaped section which comprised the floor of the triforium and its exterior and inner walls below the level of the pilaster and arcade supports (Figs. 160, 164, 182). Thus the triforia supports were built after the bases,

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not because they were part of some later campaign, but because they were part of a subsequent phase within the first campaign that only began after the U shaped section was completely laid out and presumably after the erection of the exterior arcades (where the break between the courses of the lower wall and upper arcade are quite apparent). 70  Archives Nationales, Minutier Central, LIX, 51, fol. 785, 2 March 1633. See also Ranjard, “SaintEustache”, 130.

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Fig. 210. Saint-Eustache, vaults.

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Fig. 211. Saint-Eustache, choir vault detail.

paired flanking en délit colonettes only the socle blocks – which are coursed together with the triforium bays – were executed (Figs. 168, 189). The south transept facade was built to the same height as the triforium – that is, up through the two galleries above the portal – during the course of the first campaign (Figs. 103, 190). The masonry courses of the two side walls and the end wall bond at the corners occupied by the interior turrets (Figs. 187, 191–193). The detailing of the end wall and turrets, however, may perhaps have been executed at a slightly later date, for some of it is more uniform and correctly classical than the details of the rest of the first campaign (Figs. 192–196). Other details, however, are consistent with the first campaign, such as the Ionic capitals of the upper gallery, yet their uniformity is not a feature we noted earlier (Figs. 197–199). Although we can continue to exclude the north transept portal from the early period of construction, we should include the tower which flanks this portal to the east. On the interior, at the corner where the northern end wall of the transept joins the east wall, two corner pilasters meet which have the same pseudo-Ionic capital as those that appear in the rest of the transepts (Fig. 200). On the opposite corner, however, where the north and west walls meet (Fig. 130), the capitals conform to the type that are found in the seventeenth-century choir triforium (Figs. 201, 202). A similar observation may be made about the two blind triforium half-bays that abut the north transept wall on the east and west: the Ionic capital on the east is completely consistent with the capitals of the transept triforium (Fig. 204), while that on the west again follows the model of the seventeenth-century choir (Fig. 203). Thus it seems that the half-bay on the east, behind which the eastern tower stands, was constructed during the first campaign while on the west construction included the northern most half-pier of the transept elevation but did not include the adjoining half-bay nor, therefore, the western tower (Figs. 1, 146). This conclusion is supported by archeological evidence. A vertical break in the masonry courses runs from the ground to just below the western blind triforia bay (Fig. 130): This break is very apparent on the exterior (Fig. 205). Furthermore, the exterior Ionic pilasters of the blind triforium bay and the heavy Corinthian capital of the nearby column on the western tower correspond closely to those that have already been shown to belong to

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Fig. 212. Saint-Eustache, crossing vault detail.

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Fig. 213. Saint-Eustache, detail of buttresses.

the seventeenth century (Fig. 206). In the corresponding area on the eastern tower and adjoining triforium, however, the capitals are of the types that have been identified as particular to the first campaign (Fig. 207). Thus the first campaign at Saint-Eustache included the four north choir chapels, the exterior of the first south nave chapel, the transepts up through the triforium to the base of the clerestory, the south transept facade up to the same level, and only the eastern tower of the north front (Figs. 27, 103). The major difference between this assessment of the early campaign and Ranjard’s is my inclusion of the triforium. Although this represents a significant amount of additional construction, it is not so great as to disallow c. 1545 as the campaign’s terminus ante quem. The uncanonical conception of the triforium details, particularly of the Ionic capitals, and their sometimes awkward execution is still comprehensible within the mid 1540s but would become far less so if we were to push the campaign to the end of the decade when the quirkiness of the early Renaissance is no longer encountered (even at Saint-Eustache if we accept a later date for the details of the upper levels of the south transept facade). The date of c. 1545 also makes sense in terms of quantity of construction. If in the space of about eight years between 1532 and c. 1540 the four north choir chapels, all the transept and crossing piers and the south transept portal could be achieved, it certainly seems plausible that within the next five years or so the triforium and corresponding levels of the south facade could also have been completed, particularly as no further terrain had to be cleared or any foundations laid. Furthermore, in 1547 the marguilliers acquired property “joignant le bastiment neuf encommencé à faire en icelle église”.71 This purchase may indicate that the transept triforium was nearing completion or had already been completed and that attention was now being directed towards the further westward extension of the building. The transepts would have presumably been roofed with a temporary covering as was done later in the nave when this same level of construction was achieved.72   Archives Nationales, S 3328, 26 August 1547.  Archives Nationales, Minutier Central, LXI, 100, fol. 324, 17 May 1586.

71 72

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We can now evaluate the extent to which the executed building adheres to the early Renaissance design of the original architect, who will be called the Saint-Eustache master. Although not every feature of the building was erected during the first period of construction, enough was built for us to conclude that the interior as it stands today conforms in its essentials to the scheme conceived and pursued in the years 1532–c. 1545. Four main components of the interior design were not built during the first campaign: the aisle pier type; the main vessel Fig. 214. Saint-Eustache, northwest transept, interclerestory and the upper part of the main vessel pier mediate pier, capitals of lower square corner pier. elevation; the side aisle clerestory and the upper part of the half-pier elevation; and the main vessel and aisle vaults. That later builders executed these parts as they were originally planned, however, can be deduced from an examination of what was built during the first campaign. Since the aisle pier elevation was executed in its entirety on the aisle side of the transept piers and partially executed on the half-piers between the chapels, there is every reason to believe that the aisle piers themselves were intended to have the same elevation, particularly since we would expect that all the supports of the aisle vaults would have an identical format, as is almost always the case in both medieval and Renaissance church architecture. We have already seen that the lower sills and Fig. 215. Saint-Eustache, nave pier between first mullions of the ambulatory and transept clerestories and second bays north nave wall, lower square were included in the first campaign, as were the socle corner pier, capital. blocks of the larger paired colonettes of the half-piers and transept piers. The unexecuted clerestories and colonettes above – and of course the continuation of the molding bundles between the colonettes – are thus clearly anticipated in the area that marks the termination of the first campaign in these elevations. I agree, however, with Ranjard that the monolithic colonettes in the main vessel clerestory were probably originally intended to be more slender.73 The way the massive bases have been squeezed onto the socle blocks in the transepts (Fig. 189), as well as the relative dimensions of the colonettes of the aisle pier elevations support this observation (compare Figs. 23 and 155). The upper elevation of the aisle and main vessel piers (an axial element flanked by two smaller forms) reveals that the piers were indeed intended to act as supports for quadripartite vaulting. But whether the elaborate patterns of the main vessel vaults were planned by the Saint-Eustache master cannot be determined with any certainty on the basis of evidence within the fabric (Figs. 210–212). In the following chapter external evidence will be presented that strongly suggests that the aisle vaulting, however, does conform to the original scheme. Thus, it is fair to say that, with the possible exception of the high vaulting patterns, the overall design of the Saint-Eustache interior was established during the period   Ranjard, “Saint-Eustache”, 134.

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A Revised Building History, 1532–c. 1545. Despite the lengthy period of construction the original design was always respected in its essentials; the interior’s impression of uniformity results, nor from an absolute fidelity to the early style of detailing, but rather mainly from adherence to a single, conceptually coherent scheme. Furthermore, there is every reason to believe that the same holds true for the exterior since its configuration is both structurally and formally integral with and dependent upon that of the interior. The elliptical profiling of the flying buttresses, though unusual, is found in French architecture of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, suggesting that these structures were designed in the early history of the building (Figs. 29, 213).74

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Fig. 216. Saint-Eustache, third nave bay, north nave wall, triforium, detail.

Later Campaigns and the Original Design One means used by later architects and masons to ensure fidelity to the original design were drawings, presumably made by the first architect. In 1582, shortly after documentation for Saint-Eustache finally becomes steadily available, reference is made to “ce qui reste encores à faire suyvant les desseings et plans”;75 this discloses not only that plans existed but also the intention to adhere to them.76 The previously realized parts of the building were also used as examples of how subsequent construction should be executed: A ubiquitous requirement found in the building’s documentation, and already present in a rare early document of the 1560s, is that new work should conform to “les ouvraiges jà faictz”.77 These instructions were often quite precise, and usually specified that the model was to be whatever earlier construction was immediately adjacent or most recently built.78 Yet this stricture to conform to what had been executed, this emphasis on the authority of the first campaign, caused a dilemma for later builders in so far as the decorative details were concerned. What model was to be followed given the apparent inconsistency  Compare, for example, to Saint-Merry in Paris, and Mont Saint-Michel (Figs. 326, 326a). On the design of the flying buttress in general and also for specifics on its development in Flamboyant architecture see Robert de Lasteyrie, L’architecture religieuse en France à l’époque gothique, vol. II, Paris 1927, pp. 357–371. 75   Archives Nationales, S 3331III, 2, 30 June 1582. 76  See below, chapter 5, pp. 196–197 for other evidence that drawings existed. 77   Archives Nationales, Minutier Central, LXI, 77, 24 December 1569, in Grodecki, Documents, I, no. 230. 78  Such instructions occur in the nave documents (Archives Nationales, Minutier Central, LXI, 83, 3 April 1578, Grodecki, Documents, I, no. 233; Archives Nationales, Minutier Central, LXI, 87, 4 April 1579, Grodecki, Documents, I, no. 238; 74

Archives Nationales, Minutier Central, LIX, 5, 7 February 1584, Grodecki, Documents, I, no. 240); those of the choir (Archives Nationales, Minutier Central, LIX, 51, fol. 388, 24 April 1624; Archives Nationales, Minutier Central, LIX, 63, fol. 443, 24 March 1628; Archives Nationales, Minutier Central, LIX, 51, fol. 538, 10 February 1629; Archives Nationales, Minutier Central, LIX, 51, fol. 548–549, 7 April 1629; Archives Nationales, Minutier Central, LIX, 51, 1629 11 August; Archives Nationales, Minutier Central, LIX, 51, fol. 643–646, 13 July 1630) and those for the clerestory and vaults of the transept (Archives Nationales, Minutier Central, LIX, 51, fol. 785, 2 March 1633) and of the nave (19 May 1635 published by Grente, “Achèvement de l’église Saint-Eustache”, 125–128).

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Fig. 217. Saint-Eustache, choir.

Fig. 218. Saint-Eustache, north ambulatory.

of details within the first campaign? And how should such obviously “incorrect” aspects of the design like the pseudo-Ionic capitals be dealt with, or such obviously anachronistic ones like the figurated-foliate capitals? In both the nave (executed up through the triforium between c. 1550–1586)79 and in the choir (1624–1632)80 there is an effort to standardize the details of the first campaign, yet also to adhere to examples established in the earlier transepts.   Although the earliest known document concerning construction in the nave dates to 1569, there is other evidence that work in this part of the church was underway in the 1550s. In 1552 the church is granted permission to use Lenten alms for the salaries of the workers (Lebeuf, Histoire… de Paris, p. 121). According to Charles Terrasse, Nicolas Delisle, who appears in all the nave documents, was already working for the fabric in 1565 (Terrasse, “Notes sur la construction”, 175). At this point the documentation begins. In 1569 Delisle is commissioned to erect part of the second and third north nave chapels: Archives Nationales, Minutier Central, LXI, 77, 24 December 1569; in Grodecki, Documents, I, no. 230 (see the above analysis on pp. 104–109). In 1578 he is commissioned to erect the last three south side aisle piers and the last two south nave piers – the document makes it quite clear that the other piers

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on this side of the church were already standing: Archives Nationales, Minutier Central, LXI, 83, 3 April 1578; in Grodecki, Documents, I, no. 233. In 1579 he erects three south nave chapels – again it is clear that other chapels are already standing: Archives Nationales, Minutier Central, LXI, 87, 4 April 1579; in Grodecki, Documents, I, no. 234. In 1584 Delisle, his son Gilles and his son-in-law Benjamin Bardie are commissioned to complete the nave elevation – on both the north and south – up through the base of the sills of the clerestory: Archives Nationales, Minutier Central, LIX, 5, 7 February 1584; in Grodecki, Documents, I, no. 240. In 1586 the nave is given a temporary wooden roof: Archives Nationales, Minutier Central, LXI, 100, fol. 324, 17 May 1586. 80   See above n. 157.

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Although this process effected all aspects of the detailing, I will here primarily consider only the capitals, which are indicators of the general transformation. In the nave, as has been seen, the early pseudoIonic capital of the square corner piers below the colonettes of the main vessel elevation becomes a more accurate Ionic capital, although the double-band structure of the original model is maintained (Figs. 156, 255). Similarly the capitals of the lower square corner piers, which in the transepts could be described as pseudo-Doric (in both a plain and dentilated version, Fig. 214), are transformed in the nave into identifiably Doric capitals which, however, in their general contour and size approximate those in the transept (Fig. 215). A rather gruesome Fig. 219. Saint-Eustache, pier between first and second north result of the intention to remain faithful to choir bays, upper square corner pier, capital. the general structure of the original capital types yet to improve upon their design, occurs in the nave triforium where the Ionic capitals are awkward, reductive renderings of the egg-and-dart Ionic that predominates in the transepts (Figs. 173–179, 216). The unusual structure of the capital with its broad lower band is maintained; the two ways this band is decorated were each, however, apparently too obviously incorrect. Thus the peculiar dentils, ambiguously evocative of fluting, and the rosettes, which suggest that a Doric capital (where this ornamentation is often found) has been inserted into the composition, were omitted. A happier and also more complex modification of the transept capitals occurs in the aisles of the nave. With one exception, either Corinthian or figurated-foliate types were used for all of the upper capitals (that is those of the axial molding bundles and of the paired colonettes) on the aisle sides of the transept piers (Fig. 141). Yet it is the exceptional capital – the one Composite example that was used for the molding bundle on the northwest intermediate transept pier (Fig. 105) – that becomes the model for all of the upper capitals of the aisle piers, half-piers, and aisle side of the main vessel piers in the nave (Figs. 31, 115, 116, 262). It is understandable that later sixteenth- century builders rejected the outdated figurated-foliate capital, but why not use the Corinthian which was the format used for six of the seven non-figurated-foliate upper transept pier capitals? That the solitary Composite example was seized upon is probably due to the fact that the first construction in the nave comprised the piers of the first two bays on the north, including the aisle piers, that is, the piers immediately adjacent to the northwest intermediate transept pier (Fig. 13a). Presumably the mason in charge of the new piers was given the usual instructions to make his work accord with what was already standing and proximate. He thus utilized the only capital on the earlier transept pier that can be termed “correct”. For the square corner piers below, however, Corinthian capitals, which do not appear on the northwest transept pier but which are found on other transept piers, now are used (Figs. 31, 115, 262). Was the mason trying to evoke a correct Vitruvian hierarchy of capital types? Was he seeking to effect a compromise between the format of the northwest transept pier and that on the southwest? Or should the decision to vary the upper and lower capitals be understood in the context of the lavish decorative complexity which generally

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characterizes the detailing of the first two nave bays on the north? Whatever the motives, the capital detailing of the earlier nave and aisle piers, became the model for all of the later piers on both the north and south side of the nave (Figs. 21, 28). In contrast to the nave, in the seventeenth-century choir there is an attempt to return as closely as possible to the by now historicist detailing of the transepts (Figs. 217, 218). Thus the corrected capital designs of the nave are restored to their original pseudo-Ionic and pseudo-Doric format (Fig. 264). As in the nave the unusual format of the triforium pilaster capital is maintained, and the lower band is stripped of ornament; but now the model for the upper detailing of this capital is not the egg-and-dart version which occurs in the majority of the transept bays, but rather the unique version found in the bay which abuts the choir on the northeast (Figs. 172, 202). This transept capital, with its undecorated echinus, was more in keeping with the strict classical tastes of the seventeenth century and thus provided a happy solution to the requirement that the choir detailing should conform to that of the early Renaissance.81 The intentions of the seventeenth-century marguilliers and builders are also tellingly revealed in the building’s documentation. In 1624 when the sculptor Nicolas Le Brun is commissioned to execute detailing for a number of aisle piers on the south side of the choir he promises that “lesquels pilliers il rendra faictz et parfaictz de tout ornement comme sont les anciens pilliers estant en ladicte eglise […]”.82 If we look at the ornamentation of the choir piers it becomes quite apparent that the “anciens pilliers” are understood to be those of the almost century old transepts, for many early sixteenth-century features that had been “corrected” in the nave are now restored. For example the square corner piers on the aisle pier elevation return to the early Renaissance format of being enframed by moldings and decorated by lozenges, an archaizing treatment which had been abandoned in the nave (Figs. 28, 218). The aisle pier elevation capitals are now all Corinthian, which is consistent with the majority of the transept piers (Figs. 128). At the same time, however, we can speculate that the Corinthian example of the transepts also validated the usage of what was in fact the favored capital type for seventeenth-century ecclesiastical construction. Furthermore, in contrast to other less prominent details, the Corinthian capitals of the choir cannot be mistaken for those of the early sixteenth century. Indeed, in 1628 when more piers for the choir are commissioned the sculptors are instructed that the capitals should be executed “sellon l’ordre corinthienne […] suivant le plan et façon semblables à ceulx qui sont a present faictz […]”.83 In other words, the capitals of Nicolas Le Brun, which are the models for these later sculptors, are described in terms of an external canonical norm: “the Corinthian Order”. Although the transept piers may have provided the scheme of upper and lower Corinthian capitals, Le Brun had interpreted these types in up to date terms. In both the nave and choir there is a conflict between the intention to follow the original detailing on the one hand and, on the other, the desire to remain true to contemporary architectural principles. In the late sixteenth-century nave this tension manifests itself primarily in the desire to correct and adjust the earlier detailing, whereas in the seventeenth-century choir a more literal fidelity to the original design had itself become a principle to be valued over that of strict modernity – although the latter sometimes triumphed over the former. Despite these greater and lesser attempts at remaining faithful  In the choir the bases of the triforium supports follows the one apparently finished example of the transepts where the blocks were carved. By contrast, in the nave, the masons rather foolishly followed the majority of transept bays where the blocks were left unfinished (Fig. 155). 81

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 Archives fol. 388, 24 83  Archives fol. 443, 24 82

Nationales, Minutier Central, LIX, 51, April 1624. Nationales, Minutier Central, LIX, 63, March 1628.

A Revised Building History,

the

First Master,

and

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to the original detailing, and despite the absolute fidelity to the original overall scheme of the interior, the cumulative effect of the changes in design, type, and execution results in a building that in reality is far from being simply an early Renaissance fabric. The hardedged execution and the overelaborate decorative preciousness of the nave details (especially of the aisle piers); the self-conscious historicism of some of the choir details; the pompous, overbearing correctness of the seventeenth-century Corinthian capitals (in the choir and the clerestory throughout the church), together with the over-scaled clerestory colonettes, significantly undermined the enduring efforts to complete the building as originally planned. We must realize that there was an integral connection between the original tectonic composition and the early Renaissance details (however much they were modified during the first campaign and however flawed some of these details might be) which the later changes, no matter how they were intended, could only rupture. The resulting conflict may seem negligible because it is so forcibly absorbed by the overriding conceptual coherence of the tectonic schema, yet it is a very real one. To appreciate the truth of this, we need only try to imagine, for example, that the fantastic roof-line of Chambord had been executed following the architectural precepts of the seventeenth century; that perhaps François Mansart with his chilly, obsessively correct, mathematically calculated classicism had bled from this ravishing sixteenth-century creation all its wit, charm, and intensely romantic beauty. Thus there are in effect many Saint-Eustaches: the church first conceived in 1532 and executed with its pre-Serlian detailing of 1532–1537; the post-1537 design which we have identified as the “ideal” one as it seems to most closely resemble the final thoughts of the original architect; the evolving design of the years 1532–c. 1545; the retrospective ideal to which later sixteenth-century architects sought to adhere despite its many incorrect and inconsistent features; the retrospective ideal which early seventeenth-century builders sought to follow; the real fabric of the nave with its various interpretations, adjustments and embellishments of the transept details; the real fabric of the choir with its self-conscious historicist modifications; and, of course, finally the building as a whole where all these real and ideal designs coexist, together with subsequent modifications and additions such as the nineteenth-century painting of the choir chapels. Although the subject of the following pages will be only the first three of these Saint-Eustaches, the overall complexity of the building’s evolving character should be borne in mind. Saint-Eustache may have been imagined in one relatively circumscribed moment, but it was realized over the course of a century during which time the aspirations of Francis I, the early marguilliers, the first architect and his shop could only be forgotten and replaced by an overlapping sequence of new and fundamentally different visions.

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Gisors, Saint-Gervais-Saint-Protais, south side aisle.

Chapter 5 Toward

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Architect (Jean Delamarre?)

Who was the Saint-Eustache master? In the late nineteenth century two architects – one French and one Italian – were proposed by scholars, but the arguments supporting these attributions were subsequently found to be flawed or inconclusive. Thereafter the question of the identity of the architect entered a kind of limbo; no new attributions were suggested, and scholars either ignored the problem or dismissed the earlier attributions on the grounds of insufficient evidence. By the 1920s the question was considered a dead, unresolvable issue; Ranjard, for example, did not address it in any way. As an unfortunate consequence, other problems, particularly those concerning the monument as a work of art, also fell by the wayside: Although the design of Saint-Eustache is highly evolved, it was permitted to emerge seemingly from nowhere. The only monumental church of the period, Saint-Eustache is far more complex than the other, more limited examples of contemporary ecclesiastical architecture, with which it is thus difficult to draw connections. The only real link that can be established between Saint-Eustache and secular monuments, such as the great early Renaissance châteaux, is on the level of decorative details. In other words, without having another (preferably earlier) building that is demonstrably by the same hand the conceptual processes that led to the design of Saint-Eustache are very difficult to reconstruct, and the links that tie it to other monuments and let us understand it as an early Renaissance work are obscure. For these reasons the question of the architect deserves to be revived. What is important, however, is not to hang a name on the first master of Saint-Eustache, but rather to tie the church to other works by the same hand, to establish a stylistic profile for the architect, and to comprehend his work, Saint-Eustache in particular, in the context of French Renaissance architecture. The Problem of the Architect: Historiography The best place to begin to search for the missing master mason is in the arguments surrounding the two earlier attributions. In 1850 Le Roux de Lincy, in his monograph on Saint-Eustache, suggested that the church’s first architect was Domenico da Cortona, designer of the Hôtel de Ville.1 He noted that the town hall and the church, the first two examples of Renaissance architecture in Paris, were begun within a year of each other and therefore reasoned that the architect of one important project might well have been responsible for the other. His conclusion was thus based on circumstantial coincidence rather than on any demonstrable connection. A more serious and lengthier consideration of the question was presented in 1881 by Léon Palustre who gave Saint-Eustache to the French master mason, Pierre Lemercier, founder of the famed dynasty of architects.2 This attribution was based on another attribution of Palustre to Lemercier: The first phase of the Renaissance remodelling of Saint-Maclou in the architect’s hometown of Pontoise (approximately 35 kilometers to the west of Paris).3   Le Roux de Lincy, Saint-Eustache, p. 18.  Palustre, La Renaissance, II, pp. 129–133. On the Le Mercier dynasty see Marius Vachon, La Renaissance Française: L’architecture nationale, les

1 2

grands maîtres maçons, Paris 1910, pp. 143–148, also see Maurice Lotte, “L’église d’Ennery”, Bulletin Monumental 81 (1922): 118–143. 3  Palustre, La Renaissance, II, pp. 9–11.

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Between c. 1525–1583 this twelfth-century church was extensively enlarged (Figs. 220, 221).4 The first phase of work, dated c. 1525–c. 1540 on evidence which does not provide the name of the architect, comprised the construction of the two northern side-aisles with an adjacent row of chapels and an adjoining portal, and the partial dismantling and rebuilding of the north side of the nave below the clerestory (Figs. 222, 223).5 In 1552 Pierre Lemercier was commissioned to construct the dome of the west facade tower (Figs. 224, 225).6 Palustre believed there were stylistic similarities between Lemercier’s tower crowning and the anonymous work of c. 1525–c. 1540, and imagined that the marguilliers of Saint-Maclou would have continued to use the same architect during the years 1525–1552. Thus he concluded that the first master of Saint-Maclou, responsible for the north side of the church, was Pierre Lemercier. Palustre further observed that the exterior of the north chapels of Saint-Maclou were very similar to the dated north choir chapel exteriors at Saint-Eustache (Figs. 74, 226).7 He saw that in both buildings large pilasters occupy the locations normally occupied by buttresses and that these pilasters are of similar design. Ornamented with half lozenges that frame decorative motifs, they have richly sculpted capitals, which, he stated, in their design and high quality, indicate familiarity with the architecture of the Loire valley. Palustre thus concluded that “Seul il [Pierre Lemercier] a pu répéter à Paris ces grands pilastres si élégamment ornés […]”.8 What clinched the argument for Palustre was the fact that in Saint-Eustache the epitaph of Charles David, an architect who worked at Saint-Eustache in the seventeenth century, identifies David’s wife as Anne Lemercier.9 Palustre believed the epitaph was evidence of a not uncommon phenomenon in the period: a dynasty of architects working on the same building. He devised a scenario in which Pierre Lemercier must have had a son who also worked at Saint-Eustache and that this son was the father of Anne Lemercier, whose husband, Charles David, was brought into the family enterprise.10 Palustre’s attribution of the design of Saint-Eustache to Pierre Lemercier began to unravel in 1888 when Eugène Lefèvre-Pontalis, in a monograph on Saint-Maclou, took away from Pierre Lemercier the first phase of the church’s Renaissance remodeling. Much of Palustre’s argument assigning this undocumented work to Lemercier was based on the assumption that although he is only documented at Pontoise in 1552, he probably had worked there earlier. But Lefèvre-Pontalis found documents indicating that beginning in 1541 another master mason, Jean Delamarre, had been employed at Pontoise and suggested that it was more likely that Delamarre was the architect of the northern parts of the church, particularly since that work ended in c. 1540 – about the same time Delamarre’s name first appears in preserved documents.11 Lefèvre-Pontalis did not specifically address the implications of his conclusions as they pertained to Palustre’s attribution of SaintEustache to Pierre Lemercier, but clearly if this architect was not responsible for those  For the building history of Saint-Maclou see Lefèvre-Pontalis, Monographie de l’église SaintMaclou; and Idem, “Saint-Maclou de Pontoise”, Congrès archéologique de France 82 (1919): 76–99. 5  Lefèvre-Pontalis, Monographie de l’église SaintMaclou, pp. 18–20. 6  Lefèvre-Pontalis, Monographie de l’église SaintMaclou, pp. 20, 152. 7  Although he does not specifically mention that he is making the comparison with the four north choir chapels of Saint-Eustache his description of the Parisian chapels makes it clear that this was the case; he probably noted their dated inscriptions. 4

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 Palustre, La Renaissance, II, p. 130.  The epitaph read “Cy devant gist le corps d’honorable homme Charles David, vivant juré du roy et bourgeois de Paris, architecte et conducteur du bâtiment de l’église de céans, lequel, après avoir vécu avec Anne Lemercier, sa femme, l’espace de cinquante-trois ans, est décédé le 4e jour de décembre 1650, âgé de quatre-vingt-dix-huit ans”. Palustre, La Renaissance, II, p. 132. 10  Palustre, La Renaissance, II, p. 132. 11  Lefèvre-Pontalis, Monographie de l’église SaintMaclou, pp. 20–23, 29, 147–150. 8 9

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the Identity of the

Fig. 220. Saint-Maclou, Pontoise, twelfth-century plan, after Lefèvre-Pontalis.

Architect (Jean Delamarre?)    Chapter 5

Fig. 221. Saint-Maclou, plan.

Fig. 222. Saint-Maclou, north nave wall.

Fig. 223. Saint-Maclou, north side-aisles.

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parts of Saint-Maclou that most resembled the Parisian church the argument that he was responsible for the latter is considerably weakened.12 In 1901, Palustre’s argument was further assailed by Heinrich von Geymüller, who seems to have been unaware of Lefèvre-Pontalis’ findings. Nevertheless, primarily on the basis of stylistic evidence, Geymüller arrived at the same conclusions. Like Lefèvre-Pontalis he saw no resemblance between the 1552 dome and the work of c. 1525–c. 1540. Furthermore, he claimed that the north side of Saint-Maclou was of higher quality than Saint-Eustache and could not have been by the same architect.13 Rejecting Pierre Lemercier, Geymüller returned to the old idea that the first architect of Saint-Eustache was Domenico da Cortona. He loosely compared the piers of the staircases of Blois and Chambord, believed at the time to be by Domenico, to the piers of Saint-Eustache and tentatively suggested that the compositions, where classical forms are stacked one atop the other, may derive from the stylistic tendencies of a single artistic personality (Figs. 19–21 (on pp. 152–153), 25). He also pointed out that Domenico seems to have been in Paris for about eight months before he is heard of at the Hôtel de Ville; since the Italian was one of the few people Fig. 224. Saint-Maclou, exterior from northwest. in Paris at the time known to be familiar with the new style he might have spent those eight months involved with the project for a new Saint-Eustache.14 Geymüller recognized that the grounds in favor of Domenico as first architect of Saint-Eustache were not solid, but felt that they were more convincing than those in support of Pierre Lemercier.   Lefèvre-Pontalis did, however, see correspondences between the side-aisles of the two churches and, like Palustre used the epitaph of Charles David to suggest that Nicolas Lemercier, son of Pierre, was responsible for both churches in the later part of sixteenth century; Lefèvre-Pontalis, Monographie de l’église Saint-Maclou, pp. 29–30. As we know, however, the only mason documented at Saint-Eustache from 1569–1584 is Nicolas Delisle. For some reason the myth of the Lemercier dynasty at Saint-Eustache has persisted. Anthony Blunt claimed that Jacques Lemercier’s father, Nicolas, had worked at SaintEustache; Blunt, Art and Architecture, p. 195. Jacques 12

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himself does appear in the Saint-Eustache documents, but only as one of the consultants brought in 1623 to help the marguilliers decide how to proceed with the construction in the choir; Archives Nationales, Minutier Central, LIX, 51, fol. 148v. Martin Lemercier who is documented at Saint-Eustache beginning in 1628 is not a member of the Pontoise family. 13  Heinrich von Geymüller, Die Baukunst der Renaissance in Frankreich, Stuttgart 1901, vol. II, pp. 529–534. 14  Heinrich von Geymüller, Die Baukunst der Renaissance in Frankreich, Stuttgart 1901, vol. II, pp. 534–535.

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The attributions of these early scholars fell into decline after World War I. In 1920 Charles Terrasse, primarily working with documentary rather than with stylistic evidence, concluded that there was no proof to support either Pierre Lemercier or Domenico da Cortona as first architects of Saint-Eustache.15 Subsequent scholarship further weakened the arguments of both Geymüller and Palustre; it was often pointed out that the only evidence in favor of the Italian was the coincidence of dates between the Hôtel de Ville and Saint-Eustache.16 In 1960 Édouard-Jacques Ciprut dealt the final blow to Palustre’s attribution when he discovered that the Lemercier family into which Charles David had married were silversmiths and not architects.17 Saint-Maclou and Saint-Eustache Since Terrasse no effort has been made to discover the identity of the first master of SaintEustache, and in the absence of documents that might solve the problem, the building has simply been given over to an anonymous architect without known connections to another building. But if the early attributions are reconsidered, a previously unexamined, possible solution to the problem becomes apparent. Although all of Palustre’s arguments for Pierre Lemercier as first architect at Saint-Maclou have proven to be without substance, the fact remains (Geymüller’s Fig. 225. Saint-Maclou, dome of west facade tower. skepticism aside) that the close connection between the chapel exteriors of the Pontoise and Parisian churches, first observed by this scholar, is a very real and compelling point about which important additional observations can be made. The general format of the chapel exteriors in both cases consists of classicizing pilasters, placed beneath gargoyles, framing traceried chapel windows, all set above a high dado zone (Figs. 74, 226). This configuration is an adaptation of an arrangement commonly found in Late Gothic architecture, examples of which can be seen in a the Parisian churches of Saint-Merry and Saint-Gervais-Saint-Protais (Fig. 229). The task of translating this ubiquitous Late Gothic scheme into a Renaissance version might appear relatively simple: The pointed arches of the windows are now rounded, the bands between the chapels become pilasters, and so forth. Yet this theoretical simplicity of translation could actually have taken a great variety of forms and thus does not diminish the strikingly close   Terrasse, “Notes sur la construction”, 174.  For example Leseur, Dominique de Cortone, pp. 170–171. 17  Édouard-Jacques Ciprut, “Documents inédits sur les Lemercier, architectes pontoisiens”, Mémoires 15 16

de la société historique et archéologique de l’arrondissement de Pontoise et du Vexin 57 (1960): 48–50.

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Fig. 226 . Saint-Maclou, north nave chapels, exterior.

correspondence between Saint-Maclou and Saint-Eustache. Several other churches where chapels were added in the early Renaissance conform to a similar format, yet none presents the specific configuration that is found at Pontoise and in Paris. An extreme example of how differently the type could be interpreted is found at the church of Saint-Pierre in Caen in Hector Sohier’s ambulatory and choir chapels (1518–1545).18 Here, in the most imaginative and noteworthy example of ecclesiastical architecture in Renaissance France prior to Saint-Eustache, the pilasters are nearly hidden by angled piers that support an accretion of candelabra motifs, while the spandrels above the windows and the balustradeentablature are encrusted with lavish ornamentation and the windows are framed by a multitude of moldings (Figs. 230–231). Compared with Saint-Pierre, both Saint-Maclou and Saint-Eustache are distinguished by a shared preference for comparatively simple forms that articulate rather than obscure the tectonic lines of the composition. But the similarities between the two buildings are also apparent when they are compared to a work that more closely approximates them: the exterior of the church of the Madeleine in Montargis. Rebuilt after a fire of 1525,19 its choir interior is a remarkable example of pure Flamboyant architecture, but on its exterior classical forms have been introduced into the Late Gothic scheme (Fig. 232). As at Saint-Maclou and Saint-Eustache the pilasters at Montargis have figurated-foliate capitals and, as at Saint-Maclou, support a simple entablature. Unlike Saint-Maclou and Saint-Eustache, however, the (pointed) windows are widely separated from the pilasters by expanses of broad wall, and the pilasters are neither framed nor ornamented with lozenges, but serve instead as a backdrop for canopied sculpture niches. In 18   Dictionnaire des églises de France, ed. Jacques Brosse, Paris 1966–1969, vol. IV, B, pp. 32–33.

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  See entry on Montargis, Église de la Madeleine, in Pérouse de Montclos, Architecture en région Centre, pp. 451–453.

19

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Fig. 228. Chambord, château, exterior staircase, view up.

Fig. 227. Chambord, château, exterior staircase.

two later examples, the choir of Triel, completed in c. 1554 (Fig. 233),20 and the side-aisle chapels at Notre-Dame in Le Grand Andely of 1555–1570 (Fig. 234),21 the same general format is repeated, but now the pilasters have been pushed forward on the front of buttresses (as is done in the second zone at Saint-Eustache), and, as a testament to their later dates, Ionic and Doric Orders are used instead of figurated-foliate detailing. These comparisons permit us to affirm and refine Palustre’s initial observation. Saint-Maclou and Saint-Eustache share the feature of embellished, figurated-foliate pilasters; at both the same relative proportions are employed; broad, round-arched windows framed by simple moldings and having similar or identical tracery patterns appear between the pilasters; and the frames of the windows at both churches are decorated at regular intervals with small floral motifs (those used at Saint-Maclou are nearly identical to ones that appear on the south transept portal at Saint-Eustache (Figs. 74, 226). Thus it may be suggested that the first Renaissance master at Saint-Maclou, perhaps Jean Delamarre as Palustre speculated, was also the Saint-Eustache master. This possibility is supported by the relative chronology of the two buildings. If it were not known that Saint-Eustache was begun shortly after Saint-Maclou it would probably be assumed that the Parisian church merely influenced the smaller provincial work. But given their relative dates it is reasonable to posit that the similarities between the comparatively modest enlargement project and the later monumental church resulted from the presence of the same architect. This possibility is further evidenced by a closer examination of the first building campaigns at Saint-Eustache and Saint-Maclou, which reveals correspondences of form and  Eugène Lefèvre-Pontalis, L’église de Triel, Paris 1921.

20

21

  Dictionnaire des églises de France, IV, B, p. 5.

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Fig. 229. Paris, Saint-Merry, exterior.

design in addition to those noted on their exteriors. At Saint-Maclou the early Renaissance exterior vocabulary (which we have seen in Saint-Eustache) is also used on the interior and includes pilasters and piers framed by moldings and sometimes decorated with lozenges and half lozenges, banded colonettes, and figurated-foliate capitals (Figs. 222, 223, 235– 243, 280). It might be argued that these churches are simply employing forms ubiquitous to the period and that, therefore, no particular meaning should be attached to these similarities of detail. This argument weakens, however, when we realize what is absent from each building. Both have suppressed the rich decorative language of grotesques, candelabra, and other purely ornamental motifs that ran rampant in much early French Renaissance architecture – particularly church architecture. We can, for example, look again at the contemporary choir of Saint-Pierre in Caen where such ornamental forms are the only Italianate elements that are employed – profusely – in the ambulatory and radiating chapels (Figs. 244–246). Both Saint-Eustache and Saint-Maclou forgo the fantastic array of available Renaissance motifs in favor of forms that are ultimately derived from the Orders, generally confining their imaginative playfulness of the capitals.22 Furthermore – and of perhaps greater significance – the decorative idiosyncracies that we noted as typical of the first campaign vocabulary at Saint-Eustache also appear at Saint-Maclou. The substitution of pea-pods for volutes seen at the former building occurs on several of the latter’s capitals where the motif, realized in its “unripened” state, is nearly identical (allowing for different hands in execution) to those found at Saint-Eustache 22  On the formal vocabulary of the early French Renaissance see Hautecœur, Histoire de l’architecture

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classique, I, part 1, pp. 409–494.

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(Figs. 56, 235). The pulpy pseudo-rosette that adorns many of the capitals of the first campaign in Paris also appears at Saint-Maclou where, as in Paris, it assumes both closed and open variations, the latter prominently displaying, like some of its counterparts at Saint-Eustache, a heavily seeded, quasi-tropical stamen (Figs. 75, 76, 237–240, 247). Other similarities between the figurated-foliate capitals of the two churches can be noted in the leafwork, as well as in the overall appearance and design of some examples. But perhaps the strongest evidence linking the capital designs of the two churches is that at Saint-Maclou Corinthian capitals are included that are strikingly similar to the major Corinthian capitals at Saint-Eustache: In fact the design of the upper north-west crossing pier capitals at Saint-Maclou (Figs. 248, 249) are virtually identical to the those on the crossing piers at Saint-Eustache (Figs. 91–93 [on p. 152–153]). The columnar aisle-pier capital next to the crossing pier Fig. 230. Caen, Saint-Pierre, choir at Pontoise adapts the major Corinthian type we exterior. have so far only seen on a pilaster (Fig. 240), but its characteristic features are again instantly recognizable: the large outer volutes which widen as they curve, the tiny inner volutes, and the pseudo-rosettes. Furthermore, the dentilated abacus of the Saint-Maclou crossing capitals and the ridged volutes of the aisle-pier capital are additional design details that appear in the first Saint-Eustache campaign. The lower capitals of the Saint-Maclou north-west crossing pier are Ionic, and follow the Serlian format, complete with the idiosyncratic “flutes”, found in the transept triforium at Saint-Eustache (Figs. 173, 252). As on one of the exterior capitals at Saint-Eustache, the design is “stretched” to accommodate the width and now also the height of the SaintMaclou capitals (Fig. 182), and, with the exception of the circular disks ornamenting the volutes, it is identical in all its aspects to the Saint-Eustache composition. In the entablature of Saint-Maclou Ionic capitals we find another Saint-Eustache hallmark: dentils both rounded and square. Given the terminal position of the two Saint-Maclou piers with Ionic and Corinthian capitals in the fabric of the c. 1525–c. 1540 remodeling of the north side of the church (Fig. 221), it can be conjectured that they were executed in a late phase of this campaign and follow the same c.  1537 change in capital types currently underway at Saint-Eustache. It is difficult to find any other hypothesis to explain the remarkable formal parallelism, other than the one which sees the same architect behind the two church projects. It is certainly more sensible to see an individual making these choices, than to accept the only possible alternative, that the same group of workmen was running back and forth between Paris and Pontoise – particulary since the close similarities in the design of the capitals is not matched in their execution. In addition to the persuasive evidence of the capitals, other correspondences between the two churches support the idea that one architect was responsible for both designs. The east portal (adjacent to the row of chapels) at Saint-Maclou is framed by a pair of intricate pilasters that are conceptually very similar to those flanking the south transept portal at SaintEustache (Figs. 102, 250). In each case the plinth, base and outline of the pilasters are visible but

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Fig. 231. Caen, Saint-Pierre, choir exterior, detail.

Fig. 232. Montargis, chuch of the Madeleine, choir exterior.

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Fig. 233. Triel, Saint-Martin, exterior (Gothic nave and sixteenth-century choir).

Fig. 234. Grand Andely, Notre Dame, nave chapel exterior.

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Fig. 235. Saint-Maclou, north nave capital.

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Fig. 236. Saint-Maclou, north nave pier, aisle side.

their interiors are hollowed out and occupied by elements meant to contain sculpture; classicizing tempiettos jut through the capitals allowing only the volutes to be visible. Within the buildings, the rib pattern of the chapel vaults at Saint-Maclou can be understood as a simpler, earlier version of the distinctive vaults of the first two north choir chapels at Saint-Eustache (Figs. 83, 281). Like the Saint-Eustache vaults those at Pontoise include flattened ridge ribs and cross ribs whose profiles build up to a small torus, the former elaborated with lozenges that enclose masks or, as at SaintEustache, floral motifs. The quadripartite format and the profiling of the diagonal and transverse ribs of the aisle vaults at Saint-Maclou are also

Fig. 237. Saint-Maclou, pier between north chapels.

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very close to those at Saint-Eustache (Figs. 251, 280). As we will see below, however, such vault and rib design, unlike that of the chapel vaults, were not uncommon in the period. This correspondence is nevertheless of interest to us for no aisle vaults were erected during the first campaign in Paris. If we accept that the same master was responsible for both churches, this evidence would confirm the

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Fig. 238. Saint-Maclou, aisle pier capital.

Fig. 239. Saint-Maclou, aisle pier capital.

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Fig. 240. Saint-Maclou, aisle pier capital.

hypothesis that later parts of Saint-Eustache (i.e. the aisle vaults) were built according to drawings provided by the original master. A final point of connecting evidence is found at the chapel entrances at Pontoise, which are framed by classical moldings: a torus framed by two cymas and two ovolos (Fig. 253). The identical set of moldings, having the same relative proportions, is employed at Saint-Eustache for the axial element on the front face of the main vessel pier (Figs. 254, 255). This last connection is of singular importance. A particular configuration of moldings is the fingerprint of an architect, a clue that is generally so personal and unique that it inevitably reveals its designer. For this reason studies of medieval and Renaissance architecture often depend on the analysis of molding details to answer questions of authorship. The molding group here identified is, as far as I have been able to determine, unique to SaintMaclou and Saint-Eustache. Its presence in both buildings, together with the evidence of the capitals, the vault patterns, the portal pilasters and the composition and vocabulary of the chapel exteriors, confirms the idea that the first architect of the Renaissance remodelling of Saint-Maclou was the Saint-Eustache master. Differences between the two works can be accounted for. The greater simplicity of some of the Saint-Maclou elements, such as the portal pilasters and chapel vaults, can be understood as resulting from its more modest setting and its earlier date. Thus, for example, at Saint-Maclou the banded colonettes of the side-aisle elevation, which are skinny, without entasis, and fluted on their bottom halves (Fig. 237), recall forms that can be found in the Loire valley architecture of the first decades of the sixteenth century such as the chapel of Champigny-sur-Veude (Fig. 256).23 But at Saint-Eustache, begun after the 23  See entry on Champigny-sur-Veude, la chapelle, in Pérouse de Montclos, Architecture en région

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Centre, pp. 258–260.

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Fig. 241. Saint-Maclou, pier between north chapels, base.

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Fig. 242. Saint-Maclou, pier between north chapels, capitals.

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Fig. 243. Saint-Maclou, pier between north chapels, capitals.

Fig. 244. Caen, Saint-Pierre, choir chapel vault.

Fig. 245. Caen, Saint-Pierre, choir chapel vault.

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Fig. 246. Caen, Saint-Pierre, ambulatory and chapels.

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Fig. 247. Saint-Eustache, northwest crossing pier, inner side, upper capitals.

quattrocento-inspired Loire valley architecture was transplanted wholesale to the Île-deFrance where it began to develop towards a more classicizing style, the colonettes have more canonical dimensions like those at the contemporary château of Madrid (Figs. 23, 257). Furthermore, if we move from our search for shared details to a deeper comparison of the designs of the two undertakings, we find that Saint-Maclou can, on several levels, be understood as an early and rough blueprint for many of the ideas that are later developed and refined in the far more complex design of Saint-Eustache. Thus, for example, the classically profiled molding group that frames the chapels at Saint-Maclou and serves as the nave respond at Saint-Eustache is more than a piece of evidence for attribution. A closer look at its structure and an analysis of its subsequent formal and functional development at Saint-Eustache will help us penetrate the architect’s approach to the problem of adapting the new Renaissance style to a monumental ecclesiastical setting. Despite the classical profiling of this molding group, in its overall configuration it recalls Late Gothic piers whose geometrically complex profiles were generated by intersecting arcs and circles. Examples of such piers can be seen in the Parisian Late Gothic churches of Saint-Séverin, Saint-Médard, and Saint-Merry (Figs. 258, 259). In these Flamboyant piers clusters of moldings separate themselves from the larger whole and variously become nave responds and supports for the arches of chapel entrances, nave arcades, and the ribs of aisle vaults. If we compare the Saint-Eustache architect’s molding group to typical examples of such Late Gothic clusters – the nave responds at SaintMerry and Saint-Médard – we find that in every case the forms have a similar symmetrical, wedge-shaped profile comprising a vertical projection, a concave arc and a flat horizontal

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Fig. 248. Saint-Maclou, northwest crossing pier, upper capitals.

Fig. 91 (repeated from page 77). Saint-Eustache, northeast crossing pier, inner side, upper capitals.

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Fig. 92 (repeated from page 78). Saint-Eustache, southeast crossing pier, inner side, upper capitals.

Fig. 93 (repeated from page 78). Saint-Eustache, southwest crossing pier, inner side, upper capitals.

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Fig. 249. Saint-Maclou, northwest crossing pier.

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Fig. 250. Saint-Maclou, portal leading to north nave chapels on the east.

molding (Figs. 254, 260). At Saint-Maclou and Saint-Eustache the reductive Late Gothic profile has been elaborated by a classical vocabulary that allows for greater refinement of details. Thus the concave arc is replaced by two moldings, the ovolo and cyma, and the flat terminal molding is embellished with a torus. Paradoxically, however, the precedent for this greater complexity, is already generally present in the intricate geometry of Flamboyant piers. The Saint-Eustache master originally developed his classical molding bundle for the chapel frames at Pontoise, then reused it for the main vessel responds of SaintEustache (two functions consonant with those of his Late Gothic models). The form was further classicized at Saint-Eustache through the addition of a Corinthian capital which transformed the respond into a hyper-attenuated pseudo-column (Figs. 25, 261). In the corresponding elements of the arcade and aisle pier elevations in Paris this process of mutation continued; the concept of a bundle of moldings as the main vertical and axial element of the pier remains and the same restricted repertoire of classical moldings is employed, but the classicism of the forms is more thorough. It now determines not only the vocabulary of the elements, but also, as we will see, their syntax, so that the tie to the Late Gothic origins of the form (only obscured at Saint-Maclou) is dissolved. On the Saint-Eustache aisle pier elevation we find that ovolo, cyma and torus moldings are again used for the axial molding bundle; but here are are arranged to suggest the presence of a semi-circular core (the two ovolos) to which the cyma and torus moldings have been applied (Fig. 262). Whereas the main vessel molding group was conceived as a Gothic respond, a taut linear bundle stretching to the nave vaults, the compounded moldings of the aisle piers instead were planned as solid and static half-columnar supports, that is as quasi Renaissance forms.

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Fig. 251. Saint-Eustache, aisle vaults.

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Fig. 252. Saint-Maclou, northwest crossing pier, lower capital.

Fig. 254. Saint-Eustache, main vessel pier, main vessel respond, plan.

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Fig. 253. Saint-Maclou, view up north chapel frame.

But perhaps the most subtle and sophisticated treatment of this element occurs in the supports of the arches of the main arcade, whose finesse is not obvious and requires a rather extended analysis. Here the familiar three classical moldings are used and a semi-circular core is again present, although it is now more deeply embedded in its enframing moldings (Fig. 24). The detailing of this half-column is handled so that its dual role in the pier and wall system is clearly articulated. Both the torus molding that frame the edge of the half-circle and the adjoining stepped molding that projects forward from the core of the pier continue above the entablature from which the arcade arches spring (Fig. 117). The torus becomes one of the moldings of the arches and the step bleeds up into the wall area. Furthermore, the group of moldings is not terminated by a capital but is only ornamented with pairs of

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Fig. 255. Saint-Eustache, northeast transept, intermediate pier, capitals of upper sqaure corner piers.

Fig. 256. Champigny-sur-Veude, chapel, choir elevation, detail.

Fig. 257. Jean Marot engraving of the château of Madrid, ground and first story loggias.

Fig. 258. Paris, Saint-Médard, interior.

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Fig. 259. Paris, Saint-Merry, interior.

Fig. 260. Saint-Merry, nave pier, plan, detail.

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masks. The vertical molding group is thus conceived as both a discrete element, a half-column supporting the arches of the arcade, and also, because of its outer torus-step profile and lack of capital, as a form that is integral with and woven into the mural systems of the elevation which seems to pass in back of those parts of the pier that extend to the vaults. This same group of moldings (minus the step) is repeated for that element of the side-aisle half-piers which corresponds to the nave elevation arcade supports and arches: the chapel frames (Fig. 27). Here, however, where the molding group merely serves to embellish a series of wall openings rather than as a tectonic system of supports, it is not interrupted by an entablature, capital or masks. Thus the architect’s handling of the arcade supports and chapel frames recognizes and articulates the fact that although they occupy the same relative position in their pier elevations (and thus are identically profiled), they are not identical in function. The same observation can be made about the three main variations of the molding group on the main vessel, aisle and arcade pier elevations. The molding group plays the same role in the composition of the three pier elevations, but the architect has in each case manipulated the individual classical moldings so that their special functions within the design – nave respond, columnar aisle vault support, columnar arcade support and wall member – are elucidated. Although the aisle and arcade half-columns of SaintEustache can thus be largely understood as evolving from the molding group first created for the Saint-Maclou chapels, their genesis also involved two other forms which the architect had previously utilized at Pontoise: the column and the pilaster framed by moldings. These two Renaissance elements functioned as the principal supports in the redesign and expansion of the north side of Saint-Maclou. The framed pilasters are used in the nave where they extend from the bases of the piers to the vaults, and they also appear on a smaller scale in the side-aisle elevation where they support the transverse arches of the aisle vaults (Figs. 222, 237). Columns are used in the side-aisles. For the arcade and aisle piers of Saint-Eustache, the architect appears to have fused three sources: the concept, initiated at Saint-Maclou of a bundle of classical moldings functioning as a vertical support; a version of the column (the half-column, whose general contour is, like the original molding bundle, semicircular); and the decorative scheme provided by the early Renaissance pilaster, of using moldings to frame a support. In other words the framed pilaster, a standard motif in early French Renaissance architecture, seems to have suggested to the architect that other classical supports – such as a

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Fig. 261. Saint-Eustache, interior.

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Fig. 262. Saint-Eustache, first north aisle pier.

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half-column – could likewise be embellished by moldings. The additional ornamental element of the center torus molding is in turn taken from the original Saint-Maclou chapel frame/Saint-Eustache nave respond molding group. The architect, in addition, created another hybrid support at Saint-Eustache. On the main sides of the crossing piers colossal versions of the otherwise ubiquitous framed pilaster rise to the vaults (Fig. 25), but on the secondary faces of these piers the framed pilasters (whose capitals we analyzed in the last chapter), like the aisle and arcade half-columns which they face, are distinctively embellished in the center with a raised torus molding, like the framed column a detail not previously seen in Renaissance architecture (Fig. 2). Thus the architect has created a flexible pseudo-Order whose half-columns and pilasters are unique and innovative forms of great elegance and refinement. They are conceptually united through the use of a consistently classical vocabulary, but are formally and functionally distinguished by their syntax, which draws upon and fuses sources from both the Late Gothic and Renaissance traditions. The inventive intelligence that sought variety within uniformity in details such as the major and minor Corinthian capital types is also evident in this group of forms where the Renaissance language is manipulated with great subtlety, sophistication and confident authority. Not only were the most prominent elements of the Saint-Eustache piers developed from shapes originally utilized by the architect at Saint-Maclou, but the larger compositional concept of the pier also occurs in embryonic form at Pontoise. The grouping of elements between the Saint-Maclou chapels can be understood as a loosely structured pier whose forms are rearranged and more tautly organized at Saint-Eustache (Figs. 23, 237). At Saint-Maclou, in addition to the classical molding group of the chapel frames, all the basic elements of the Saint-Eustache pier are present. The colonettes supporting the cross ribs are repeated at Saint-Eustache, and the framed pilaster is fleshed out there into the square corner piers which are now inserted below the colonettes. The classical molding group, in its various guises, is now applied to all sides of the pier, resulting in greater symmetry and formal coherence, while allowing each pier elevation to adapt to its particular role in the Saint-Eustache design, and also allowing for the same basic structure to be used as a freestanding support, as it is in the aisles, or as an element that is woven into the elevations of the main vessel and side-aisle. The invention of the varied Saint-Eustache pier type also allowed the architect to correct a conceptual and design problem at Saint-Maclou which is evident in the way the different areas of the northern remodelling were integrated. The pier between the chapels, where the framed pilaster is the dominant motif, and the two other Saint-Maclou supports (the aisle column and the nave pilaster) all belong to the same early Renaissance figurated-foliate “Order”; they thus may be said to participate in a system that seeks to establish formal unity in the different parts of the building. This aim is strongly undermined, however, by the extreme diversity of these forms in scale, shape and composition. In the Saint-Eustache piers these problems are resolved in a design that can to a large extent be understood as a critique of Saint-Maclou. Displaying a great deal of critical self-awareness, the architect dissected the design of his early (and ongoing) project, probing it to discover additional possibilities and permutations of the forms he had used and the compositions he had developed there. As a result, at Saint-Eustache he was able to fuse the three diverse Saint-Maclou supports into single, highly complex, fully integrated and functionally flexible pier structure that is used consistently throughout the various parts of the building and therefore helps to impose a rigorous and lucid order upon this complex and monumental interior. The other sources the architect drew upon in his reconceptualization of the Saint-Maclou supports will be considered in a later chapter.

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Jean Delamarre The shared details and formal vocabulary of the two churches and the evolution of the Saint-Eustache pier structure unquestionably affirms the presence of the same hand in each work. But was this architect in fact Jean Delamarre as Palustre’s findings about SaintMaclou seems to suggest? Not much can be discovered about Delamarre’s career, but his name emerges in connection with two other endeavors: the Late Gothic abbey church of Saint-Victor in Paris, and the Renaissance remodeling of the church at Villiers-le-Bel. An examination of these two works should, therefore, help to determine whether Delamarre is the Saint-Eustache master. In c. 1546 the marguilliers of the church of Villiers-le-Bel, a small town to the north of Paris, undertook a rebuilding of the nave and side aisles of their church. Three master masons, including Delamarre, were asked to give advice on this project and a fourth, local, mason was put in charge of the enterprise.24 Details of the nave elevation present strong parallels with Saint-Eustache (Fig. 263). On the front face of each nave pier is a Corinthian half-column framed by moldings and also accented with moldings in its center. As we have seen, this columnar variation of the framed pilaster, with an added center molding, is distinctive: The only other place that it occurs is at Saint-Eustache on the aisle piers.25 At Villiers-le-Bel several of the half-columns have the capital type of the Saint-Eustache main vessel pier: a Corinthian capital above two cherub heads (Figs. 155, 264, 265). This also is a motif that is unique to these two churches. Unlike Saint-Eustache, however, where the clerestory capitals appear below a frieze of dentils, at Villiers-le-Bel the capitals support a complete three-part entablature. Therefore, at this level the design of the nave respond returns to the Saint-Eustache aisle pier format where similar entablatures appear (Fig. 116). The frieze of the Villiers-le-Bel entablature is wider than that at Saint-Eustache, and the moldings, like those of the half-columns below are not identical. Nevertheless, they do share a feature that is the hallmark of entablatures and friezes throughout Saint-Eustache: the use of dentils as the only decorative motif. Furthermore, the overall scheme of the Villiers-le-Bel nave elevation seems to draw upon both Saint-Eustache and Saint-Maclou. Like Pontoise, Villiers-le-Bel has a twopart elevation in which the major architectural features are elongated Renaissance forms applied to the front of widely spaced piers that otherwise adhere to a Late Gothic type (Fig. 222, 263). At Villiers-le-Bel the nave responds are incorporated into a design that seeks to echo that of Saint-Eustache (Fig. 25). An entablature runs above the nave arcade, as at Saint-Eustache, and the wide expanse of wall separating the arcade and the clerestory creates the illusion of a three-part elevation and a proportional system close to that of Saint-Eustache. Thus the Villiers-le-Bel elevation can be understood as an adaptation of the Saint-Eustache design that has been radically simplified to conform to the general format of Saint-Maclou – a format more appropriate for a structure of the relatively modest scale of Villiers-le-Bel. It should be pointed out, however, that the Saint-Maclou nave elevation format is not particular to that church: Several provincial Late Gothic interiors present a similar aspect

 See Terrasse, “L’architecture religieuse”, 70; and Idem, “La Renaissance en Parisis: l’église de Villiersle-Bel”, Revue de l’histoire de Versailles et de Seineet-Oise (1921): 15–28. 25  Terrasse also noted that the Villiers-le-Bel piers recalled Saint-Eustache, but he had not analyzed 24

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the unusual evolution of the half-columns at SaintEustache and did not realize, therefore, that the correspondence between the two churches was a quite specific one; “Villiers-le-Bel”, 21.

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of vertical responds applied to the front of simple piers rising up an otherwise blank wall.26 The parallels between Villiersle-Bel and Saint-Maclou are meaningful only if the Saint-Eustache master was directly involved with the design of Villiers-le-Bel. This is, however, the conclusion towards which the evidence seems to point. The correspondences between Villiers-le-Bel and Saint-Eustache, particularly the molded half-columns and the cherub-head capitals, demonstrate that the master responsible for the design of the Villiers-le-Bel elevation at the very least knew the Parisian church in detail. The way in which elements from Saint-Eustache have been imaginatively reworked at Villiers-le-Bel, instead of being literally copied, reveals a degree of familiarity with the Parisian church that only someone intimately conversant with the Saint-Eustache design could reasonably have had. The most persuasive evidence of this is the cherub-head-cum-Corinthian Fig. 263. Villiers-le-Bel, north nave wall. capital motif. At Villiers-le-Bel this form was clearly derived from the Parisian church, yet none of the Saint-Eustache cherub-head capitals were executed until the seventeenth century when the clerestory zone of the church finally was built. Furthermore, one of the clerestory capitals at Villiers-le-Bel include, not the heads of angels, but those of bearded men (Fig. 266). his variation of a motif is completely ­consistent with the stylistic mannerisms we have identified as being typical of the first campaign at SaintEustache. The fact that the executed capitals there are uniform is consonant with the way later campaigns sought to standardize the details of the original design. In any case, whoever planned VilliersFig. 264. Saint-Eustache, clerestroy capital in choir. le-Bel knew the Saint-Eustache designs thoroughly and was even able to recall a relatively minor decorative detail. There is good reason to believe that this person was someone closely involved with the first campaign at Saint-Eustache. It is difficult to imagine  This is especially true for churches outside of Paris. See, for example, Fontenay-sur-Bois, where a stringcourse, instead of an entablature, also runs

26

above the nave arcade. Dumolin, Les églises de France, p. 322.

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that anyone else – even if they were allowed access to the drawings in the possession of the church (the only way the as yet unexecuted capital design could be known) – would have noticed or bothered with, let alone copied, the unique but nevertheless unremarkable motif of the cherub-head capital.27 These are important considerations to bear in mind as we examine the additional information available about Delamarre. Neither Lefèvre-Pontalis, who discovered Delamarre’s name in the Pontoise archives, nor Terrasse, who found it again in the Villiers-le-Bel documents, were aware of a third work associated with Delamarre, the Parisian abbey church of Saint-Victor. Indeed, this building has never received much art historical attention, an indifference which is due to a combination of circumstances: The church was never completed, is no longer standing, and was a Late Gothic structure built in a period when this style (itself little-studied) was already being overshadowed by experiments with Italian classicism. But if Delamarre were to prove to be the Saint-Eustache master, Saint-Victor would assume a greater importance as an early pre-Renaissance oeuvre of the architect. In 1517 Jean Delamarre received the important commission for a new church to replace the decrepit twelfth-century structure belonging to the venerable left-bank abbey of Saint-Victor.28 After an initial period of fairly rapid construction, with most of the choir apparently completed by c. 1540,29 work seems to have preceded most slowly, for in 1760, although the transepts had been completed, the nave remained unfinished with only two bays standing, at which point a facade was built in front of the truncated structure.30 The church was destroyed along with the rest of the abbey in 1811–1813.31 Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century views of the exterior of Saint-Victor show that it was a three aisled church ringed by a perimeter of chapels which continued unbroken across the non-projecting transepts (Figs. 267–270). I have not been able to find a reliable rendering of the Saint-Victor interior,32

  The evidence of these capitals also confirms that drawings of the SaintEustache design were made by the first architect and followed by later ones. 28  See Paul and Marie-Louise Biver, Abbayes, monastères et couvents de Paris, Paris 1970, p. 151; Fourier Bonnard, Histoire de l’Abbaye royale et de l’ordre des chanoines réguliers de Saint-Victor de Paris, Paris n.d., vol. II, pp. 23–27; and Yvan Christ, Églises Parisiennes, actuelles et Fig. 266. Villiers-le-Bel, north disparues, Paris 1947, p. 23. A 1524 nave wall, capital. entry in the journal of a member of the abbey reads: “Le lundi […] fut veue et visité la maçonnerie encommencée à l’esglise et conduicte par Jehan de la Mare, nostre voyer, lequel fut contenté de tout ce qui estoit faict jusques audict jour, pour sçavoir sy ladicte maçonnerie estoit bonne, bien faicte et suffisante pour porter l’exaulcement et parachèvement d’icelle, qui fut 27

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trouvé très bien faicte et bien conduicte par dix des plus grandz ouvriers […]”. Chronique Parisienne de Pierre Driart, chambrier de Saint-Victor (1522– 1535), ed. by Fernand Bournon in Mémoires de la société de l’histoire de Paris et de l’Île de France 22 (1895): 89. 29   In 1538 the choir was decorated with statues of the apostles and in 1542 the jubé was completed, Bonnard, Histoire de… Saint-Victor, p. 26. Also see Chronique Parisienne, 90–156. 30   Biver and Biver, Abbayes, p. 152. 31  Jean-Pierre Willesme, “L’Abbaye Saint-Victor de Paris sous la Révolution et la dispersion de son patrimoine”, Bulletin de la société de l’histoire de Paris et de l’Île de France 106 (1979): 133–153. 32   The view published by the Bivers as representing the interior is clearly incorrect (Biver and Biver, Abbayes, fig. 143d). The interior they illustrate is twelve bays long whereas all the exterior views of Saint-Victor and the reconstructed plan show that the church was only nine bays long (two nave bays, two transept bays, and five choir bays). More

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but descriptions of the church before it was demolished confirm that it was a Gothic structure,33 and it is possible to extrapolate the overall configuration of its elevation from the exterior views (Fig. 271). The resultant schematic rendering shows that the nave arcade was relatively steep and tall and that the clerestory was high and small.34 Saint-Victor’s elevation was not unusual in Late Gothic architecture where the use of steep nave arcades together with side-aisle clerestories, even when windowed chapels were part of the plan, seems to be due to the influence of the hall-church – a building type often found in this period – where such fenestration was a necessary part of the design since the nave, being the same height as the aisles, could not accommodate a clerestory (Fig. 272).35 Indeed, many of the structures which employ a side-aisle clerestory could be considered pseudo-hall-churches because of their often very steep nave arcades which had to be high in order to clear the aisle windows. A good example of this type is the church of Saint-Etienne-du-Mont, which shared the same neighborhood with the abbey of S­ aint-Victor (Fig. 274). In fact there are many parallels between these two Parisian churches, and the former may give us a good idea of what the destroyed abbey church might have actually looked like. In each case the ratio of the height of the clerestory to the rest of the elevation is approximately 1:4, and the identical three aisled plan with non-projecting transepts and a continuous circuit of chapels is employed (Figs. 13c, 267).36 The major differences between the two churches seem to be that at Saint-Etienne-du-Mont the windows of the side-aisle clerestory are considerably larger than those of the nave, whereas at Saint-Victor they were smaller. It is perhaps significant that the side-aisle clerestory is shared by Saint-Eustache where the proportions of the elevation, however, are not as extreme as Saint-Victor; in the later church the arcade is not as high and the clerestory windows are comparatively larger (Fig. 25, 273). But since the pseudo-hall church type with side-aisle clerestory was not unique to importantly, however, the 1:1 ratio of arcade to clerestory shown in the Biver illustration does not correspond with the elevation of the church as it can be securely deduced from the exterior views (Fig. 271). Furthermore details such as crocket capitals which the supposed interior view illustrates are not features commonly found in Late Gothic architecture, certainly not in Paris. 33  For example Brice, Description de la ville de Paris, p. 361; and Sauval, Histoire et recherches, I, pp. 408–409. Nevertheless, a capital that was saved from the church and is now in the Louvre is in the early Renaissance figurated-foliate style. Indeed, it has been dated to the early sixteenth century because it so closely resembles the capitals of Saint-Maclou. This was, however, an isolated detail. At some point, perhaps already in the early sixteenth century, but, even if later, still when it was at Saint-Victor, the top of the capital was hollowed out and it functioned as a holy-water basin. This suggests that it may never have had a true architectural function. See Michèle Beaulieu, Description raisonnée des sculptures du Musée du Louvre, vol. II: Renaissance française, Paris 1978, pp. 62–63.

34   The dimensions of the church have been calculated and confirm that the main vessel was very tall being c. 35 meters high. Its length was 65 m. and its width 27 m. 85. Henri Lemoine, “Essai archéologique et artistique sur l’Abbaye de Saint-Victor de Paris”, in Positions des thèses de l’École des Chartes, 1911, p. 81. 35  See Lasteyrie, L’architecture… gothique, II, p. 30; and Eugène Lefèvre-Pontalis, “Les nefs sans fenêtres dans les églises romanes et gothiques”, Bulletin Monumental 81(1922): 290–306. 36  The Bivers have also drawn attention to the similarities between the two churches which, according to them were “bâties […] pour la même congrégation”. Biver and Biver, Abbayes, pp. 151–152. Given the similarities between the two buildings, their geographic proximity, that they may have been built for the same congregation, and that Saint-Etienne was already under construction (begun in 1495) when Saint-Victor was begun, we may reasonably wonder if the earlier church did not serve the architect as a model for the later one. For Saint-Etienne see Dumolin, Les églises de France, pp. 109–119; and Boinet, Les églises Parisiennes, I, pp. 425–458.

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Fig. 267. Saint-Victor, Paris, reconstructed plan of lost abbey.

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Fig. 268. Saint-Victor, seventeenth-century engraving of exterior.

Fig. 269. Saint-Victor, eighteenth-century(?) engraving of exterior.

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Fig. 270. Saint-Victor in early eighteenth-century Turgot plan of Paris.

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Fig. 271. Saint-Victor, reconstruction of interior elevation scheme.

Architect (Jean Delamarre?)    Chapter 5

Fig. 272. Montargis, church of the Madeleine, choir.

Saint-Victor, that it was adapted to the Renaissance interior of Saint-Eustache is not evidence of any necessary connection between the two buildings. Nevertheless, it does offer another instance where a work connected with Jean Delamarre presents features that also appear at Saint-Eustache. A career for Delamarre might now be tentatively postulated: Trained in the Late Gothic tradition he provided a design in that style for Saint-Victor. Despite its dating well into the second decade of the century when the Italianate style had already had a considerable impact on French architecture, Saint-Victor was not singular in its adherence to the Flamboyant. Prior to Francis’ move to the capital, Île-de-France architects and patrons – particularly of ecclesiastical monuments – displayed virtually no cognizance of the transalpine influences that were beginning to transform French architecture in the Loire valley and in Normandy. Thus in 1517 Delamarre would have been one of many architects active in the Île-de-France who continued to work in the Late Gothic mode. But sometime between 1517 and c. 1525, when the Renaissance enlargement of SaintMaclou was begun, Delamarre set himself apart from his colleagues, travelling to the Loire where he gained the first-hand experience of the architecture there that is so evident at Pontoise. Indeed, such a trip is quite plausible since in 1524 Pierre Driart records in his chronicle that work at Saint-Victor had been suspended for some time in the 1520s

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Fig. 273. Saint-Eustache, exterior view from the south. A. Lenoir engraving.

and had only recently been taken up again.37 Thus when it came time to find an architect for Saint-Eustache Delamarre would have been doubly and perhaps uniquely qualified. Both Saint-Victor and Saint-Maclou would have been valuable credentials; the one because it was a prestigious undertaking in the capital which demonstrated his ability to design a church on a large-scale, and the other because it represented the new Italianate style in an ecclesiastical monument. In c.  1546 Delamarre was called in to consult at Villiers-le-Bel – perhaps on the recommendation of the abbey of Saint-Victor upon whom the church was dependent38 – where he provided the marguilliers with a design for the nave elevation that was then executed by provincial workmen under the supervision of a local master mason. As attractive as this scenario might be it assumes a great deal – the role Delamarre, only one of four masons involved, played as advisor to the Villiers-le-Bel project; and a fairly rapid and sophisticated education in the early Renaissance style. Furthermore, the evidence presented by his documented work at Pontoise, though slight, does seem to argue against his being the Saint-Eustache master.

37  “Le lundi, XIe jour dudict moys [April?] fut recommencée la massonnerye de nostre eglise, laquelle avoit esté discontinuée au moyen des guerres et des gros deniers qu’il avoit fallu avancer au Roy […] montans à la somme de mille livres

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tournois, dont nous avons les descharges, deux ans et demy environ […]”, Chronique Parisienne, 90. 38  Bonnard, Histoire de… Saint-Victor, I, p. 43 passim, and II, p. 35 passim.

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Fig. 274. Paris, Saint-Etienne-du-Mont, choir.

Architect (Jean Delamarre?)    Chapter 5

Fig. 275. Saint-Maclou, south chapels.

Unfortunately the original 1541 contract is lost, but in an eighteenth-century inventory of the church a summary of it appears which informs us: “Jean Delamarre, maitre masson” was commissioned to do “les voûtes du choeur et clocher de l’église étant sur icelles qui tomboient faute d’avoir été bien soutenues et autres malfacons à réparer aux croisées et doubleaux de la nef […] ”.39 Of this superstructure restoration the only work that can be securely analyzed as belonging to Delamarre are the choir vaults and clerestory (Figs. 278, 279).40 None of the detailing in this area in any way resembles that of the north side-aisles and chapels. The profiles of Delamarre’s rib and window moldings are large, simple and hard edged (Fig. 279) whereas those of the north aisles and chapels are rounded and often are built up of many small moldings (Figs. 236, 280,  Lefèvre-Pontalis, Monographie de l’église SaintMaclou, pp. 147–148. Delamarre is also mentioned at Pontoise in a document of 1543 which does not refer to construction but rather to plans to deconsecrate the cemetery of Saint-Maclou so that the town’s market place might be expanded; ibid., pp. 148–150. 40   Lefèvre-Pontalis sought to expand the reference to the reparation of the transepts (croisées) to include the entire vaulting of this area, including that of the crossing. He is clearly in error, however, about the crossing vault, and the evidence for the transept 39

vaults is shaky. The way the ribs of the crossing vault are inset with flat, decorative panels is completely consistent with the style of the south nave chapels whose interior and exterior pilasters are similarly ornamented and which inscribed dates securely place in the 1570s (Figs. 275, 278). Furthermore, the southwest crossing pier capital carries an inscribed date of 1585 (Fig. 277); it is difficult to believe that the vault would have been erected earlier than this support. Lefèvre-Pontalis included the transept vaults in the work done by Delamarre in the 1540s because he observed that a keystone in these vaults

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Fig. 276. Saint-Maclou, interior.

Fig. 277. Saint-Maclou, southwest crossing pier, upper capitals.

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Fig. 278. Saint-Maclou, crossing, transept, and choir vaults.

Fig. 279. Saint-Maclou, choir vault, detail.

281). We have, of course, already seen that the Saint-Eustache architect is quite capable of sudden changes in direction: The shift in capital types is ample evidence of this at both churches. But the difference between the molding profiles in the lower northern parts of Saint-Maclou and those in its choir is not analogous to the difference between the figurated-foliate capitals and the Ionic and Corinthian ones of the two buildings. The capital change was a progressive evolution within the context of contemporary developments in French Renaissance architecture; it indicated a desire to keep abreast of the growing interest in canonical classical forms, manifest in the use of Serlio’s Book IV. But the change between the profiles of the c. 1525–c. 1540 work at Saint-Maclou and those

carried the initials F and H. He interpreted these as references to Francis I and Henry II and so posited a date of 1547 as terminus ante quem for Delamarre’s work – 1547 being the year when Henry succeeded to his father’s throne. In contrast to the evidence of the keystone (which, although I have looked, I have not been able to confirm) the evidence of the transept ribs argues against their belonging to the 1540s. Their profiling is far more complex than those of the choir ribs, which the document of 1541 clearly informs us are by Delamarre (Fig. 279). Instead, they are nearly identical to those of the nave, which Lefèvre-Pontalis (who did not comment upon the similar profiles of the vaulting in the two areas of the church) persuasively dates to the 1570s (Figs. 253, 276). During that decade the south side of the nave

was entirely rebuilt (unlike the north side where the old twelfth-century clerestory was kept). The nave vaults must, therefore, date to the later sixteenth century. But whether the transept vaults must so date is unclear. Yes, the profiling of the transept and nave ribs is virtually identical, but Lefèvre-Pontalis’ observation about the initials in the keystone cannot be dismissed. Given this confusion, it is safer to focus on the choir vaults, whose attribution to Delamarre is non-problematic. As for the bell-tower mentioned in the 1541 marché, it is no longer standing. For LefèvrePontalis’ inclusion of the transept and crossing vaults and for the bell-tower see his Monographie de l’église Saint-Maclou, pp. 21–22; for the dates of the south nave chapels, the south nave wall, and the nave vaults see pp. 26–27.

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Fig. 280 Saint-Maclou, north side-aisle, vault.

of the 1541 ff. construction is a backwards step, a move away from the vocabulary of classicism and back towards that of the Late Gothic. The rib and molding profiles of the north extension (like that of the chapel entrance) are entirely composed of classical elements, primarily cyma, torus and fasciae. They are thus consistent with the rest of the classicizing vocabulary used in the construction of c. 1525–c. 1540; and, like the pilasters and capitals, these ribs can be compared to forms found in the architecture of the early Renaissance in both the Loire valley and the Île-de-France. The aisle and chapel cross-ribs, which are composed of small cymas and closely spaced fasciae terminating in small torus moldings, correspond with the composition of many other early Renaissance ribs where a sequence of small classical moldings builds towards a torus (Figs. 282–284). Similarly the design of the large arcade arches and transverse aisle ribs with their broad unmolded intrados and large archivolt moldings (which, in the arcade arch, include a prominent torus) is a format that is used for many other early Renaissance arches (Figs. 257, 285). This classicism of the moldings does not extend, however, to the Saint-Maclou choir where Delamarre’s ribs and window frames with their sharp edges and comparatively simple profiles are entirely Late Gothic in conception (Fig. 279); they can be compared, for example, to the profiles of the cross ribs that were part of the documented late fifteenth-century restoration

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of the Saint-Maclou choir (Fig. 286).41 And they can be compared to the ribs found in the vaults of the contemporary, Late Gothic church at Gisors, which is also in the Île-deFrance (Fig. 287).42 Similarly, the keystone of the choir vault, with its intersecting pointed arches, compares with the similarly conceived, though more elaborate keystones of Gisors, whereas those in the north chapels of SaintMaclou are composed of Italianate motifs. It is difficult to believe that the SaintEustache master, who was so obviously Fig. 281. Saint-Maclou, north chapel vault. devoted to exploring as far as possible the new language of classicism and who so thoroughly enjoyed doing so, would have suddenly reverted to the vocabulary of the Late Gothic. The profiles devised for the work of c. 1525–c. 1540 could have easily been reused in the choir, which presented no obstacles, contextual or structural, to Renaissance detailing. Furthermore, if anything should be seen as an example of the later, post c.  1540, work of the Saint-Eustache master at Saint-Maclou, it is the interior of the large chapel of the Passion which adjoins the other northern chapels on the west and was completed by 1545 (Figs. 221, 288).43 To the familiar format and vocabulary of the other chapels have been added new features which are evidence that – if indeed designed by the Saint-Eustache master – his style was continuing to develop in the direction of greater, not lesser classicism. The early Renaissance figurated-foliate capitals used for the supports in the north aisles and nave are now replaced by a Doric pier and the ribs spring, not from candelabra motifs as they do in the other chapels (Fig. 237) but from severe console brackets (similar to ones that can be seen in the last phase of the first campaign on the exterior of the north-east transept tower at Saint-Eustache, Fig. 289). Thus the one piece of solid physical evidence that we have throws doubts on the possibility that Jean Delamarre and the Saint-Eustache master were the same person. It would, of course, be excessively positivistic to claim that the detailing of the choir proves that Delamarre was  Lefèvre-Pontalis, Monographie de l’église SaintMaclou, pp. 18, 147. 42   Dictionnaire des églises de France, IV, B, pp. 79–80. 41

  The date 1545 is inscribed in one of its windows, Lefèvre-Pontalis, Monographie de l’église SaintMaclou, p. 19. 43

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Fig. 282. Azay-le-Rideau, château, staircase landing vault.

Fig. 284. Bury, château, vault detail.

Early French Renaissance

Fig. 283. Valmont, abbey, Lady chapel, vault.

Fig. 285. Fontainebleau, château, the Porte Dorée, detail.

not the Saint-Eustache master; any number of scenarios could be imagined that would explain the seemingly incongruous Late Gothic choir rib profiling. But lacking proof to substantiate any such possible explanation, and since the other evidence linking Delamarre to Saint-Eustache is purely circumstantial, it would be prudent to simply suggest that Delamarre may be the Saint-Eustache master. The above discussion also allows another previously posited attribution to be reconsidered. Geymüller and Lefèvre-Pontalis were both quite correct when, in opposition to Palustre, they said that the work documented as Lemercier’s, the 1552 dome of the west tower at Saint-Maclou, bore no stylistic relationship to the work of the c. 1525–c. 1540 campaign. But if we look at the dome again we see that its Doric Order is almost identical to that which appears in the chapel of the Passion, which may perhaps be by the same architect who designed the earlier chapels (Fig. 225). Furthermore the buttresses of the dome

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Fig. 286. Saint-Maclou, arch leading into north side of ambulatory from transept.

Architect (Jean Delamarre?)    Chapter 5

Fig. 287. Gisors, Saint-Gervais-Saint-Protai, chapel vault.

with their elliptical arches are similar to the flying buttresses at Saint-Eustache where the same unusual non-circular form appears (although it cannot be claimed that such buttresses – though rare – are unique to the two churches, Fig. 213).44 We have seen that the style of the Saint-Eustache master was not static but constantly evolving and open to revision and refinement, and that the architect was eager to keep up with current trends – so much so that he was willing to change the design of his capitals in the middle of the north-west crossing pier at Saint-Eustache. Furthermore, we have also seen evidence of the fact – to be explored further – that the architect was originally trained in the Late Gothic tradition and so had already made quite a stylistic leap by the time he designed the remodeling of SaintMaclou. In other words it is certainly possible that by 1552 he would have been working in a style distant from the one he had been exploring in the 1520s and 30s. This possibility might conceivably lead to the conclusion that the architect of the earlier projects was Pierre Lemercier, i.e. that the architect of the 1552 dome was also the author of the northern remodelling of Saint-Maclou and the Saint-Eustache design. Yet here too several assumptions are made, not the least of which being that the architect who was responsible for the first phase of the Renaissance restoration of Saint-Maclou also altered its design in the way that has been described in the chapel of the Passion. Thus both Jean Delamarre and Pierre Lemercier emerge as likely candidates for the Saint-Eustache master, but we have pushed the stylistic and scant documentary evidence as far as we can; in the absence of additional evidence and given the fate of earlier attributions it would be wisest at this point to refrain from coming down in favor of either architect. This is not to say that the efforts of these last pages have been wasted. To the contrary, it has been established beyond all reasonable doubt that the Saint-Eustache master was also the first Renaissance master at Saint-Maclou. This discovery not only allows the controversy of whether the architect was French or Italian to be laid to rest, but also has permitted us to begin to deepen our understanding of the evolution of the Saint-Eustache design, which is proving to be far more complex, inventive, and rational than the traditional view of the building has been able to concede, let alone perceive. The explorations of Villiers-le-Bel and Saint-Victor have also proven to be of value. The fundamental conclusions drawn from the analysis of the nave elevation at Villiers-le-Bel remains tenable – certainly someone very well acquainted with Saint-Eustache participated in the redesign of the smaller church. Moreover, the way the Saint-Eustache elevation was distilled and adapted 44

  See above chapter 4, p. 156.

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Fig. 288. Saint-Maclou, chapel of the Passion.

Fig. 289. Saint-Eustache, exterior wall of northeast transept and east tower of north transept facade at level of side-aisle clerestory looking up.

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in the small interior is significant as it reveals what someone well acquainted with SaintEustache perceived as being its essential features: its unusual embellished half-columns and its three part elevation, the latter simply paraphrased at Villiers-le-Bel. And the discussion of Saint-Victor, where it was seen that the side-aisle clerestory of this Late Gothic church was shared by Saint-Eustache, has brought to the foreground an issue of paramount importance: the role that the medieval, specifically the Late Gothic tradition played at SaintEustache – something which has not as yet directly been confronted but will be a major preoccupation of the following chapters.

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Autun cathedral, interior view.

Chapter 6 The Presence

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Cluny

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Pavia

We have seen the extent to which the design of Saint-Eustache, specifically of its piers, evolved from the vocabulary first developed by the architect in his Renaissance extension of Saint-Maclou. But the entire design of Saint-Eustache cannot be extrapolated from the smaller earlier work. Saint-Maclou is not the only factor to be taken into account in understanding the design of Saint-Eustache; other influences and sources came into play. These enabled the architect, on the one hand, to adapt the Saint-Maclou vocabulary to the monumental project of Saint-Eustache and, on the other, to resolve the conceptual problems evident in the earlier work which was awkward and fragmented where Saint-Eustache was lucid and integrated. The resolution of design problems in the Parisian structure cannot be described as one that resulted only from the internal cogitation of the architect as he critically evaluated his first effort at accommodating the Italianate vocabulary to an ecclesiastical setting. Indeed, it has already been shown that an important feature of the overall compositional format of Saint-Eustache seems to have been borrowed from contemporary Late Gothic architecture: the side-aisle clerestory which also appears at Saint-Etienne-du-Mont and Saint-Victor. In the earlier description of the design of Saint-Eustache it was seen that an important element in the coherence and drama of the interior resulted from the repetition of the main vessel elevation on a smaller scale in the side-aisles. The Late Gothic, which provided the secondary clerestory, thus made a crucial contribution to the interior. As the Saint-Eustache master was either Pierre Lemercier, Jean Delamarre or perhaps some third unknown, yet certainly French master mason, this connection with the Late Gothic is not surprising since it was in this style that he had received his training. At the same time, however, the design of Saint-Eustache departs in many major ways from the format and style of Flamboyant churches. That this has not previously been perceived has as much to do with the problematic historiography of Late Gothic scholarship as it does with that of Saint-Eustache. Although this final phase of French Gothic architecture was imaginative, sophisticated and often capable of producing monuments of great originality and beauty, it has not been the object of much study, particularly in contrast to the vast literature devoted to earlier medieval architecture. Consequently it is poorly understood, traditionally characterized in reductive terms by its use of the reverse curve “flame” motif in its tracery and other superficial features.1 Thus a more substantive, though necessarily brief, evaluation of certain relevant aspects of the French Late Gothic is in order before its relative absence or presence at Saint-Eustache can be evaluated. 1  See for example the still standard works on the Late Gothic such as Camille Enlart, “Origine anglaise du style flamboyant”, Bulletin monumental 70 (1906): 38–81, 511–525; and 74 (1910): 125–147; Lasteyrie, L’architecture… gothique, I, pp. 160–191; II, pp. 21–32; Anthyme Saint-Paul, “Les origines du gothique flamboyant en France”, Bulletin monumental 70 (1906): 483–510; and Idem, “L’architecture française et la guerre de cent ans”, Bulletin monumental 72 (1908): 5–40, 209–302. In 1968 Jan Białostocki, recognizing that the understanding of the Flamboyant was unsatisfactory,

considered the problem of the international Late Gothic from a methodological point of view and raised many important and provocative questions, particularly about periodization, that still remain unaddressed (Jan Białostocki, “Le gothique tardif: désaccords sur le concept”, L’Information d’histoire de l’art 13 (1968): 106–128, with excellent bibliography). A few years later Roland Sanfaçon sought to arrive at a redefinition of the French Late Gothic, but while he makes interesting points about the social background of the period, his formal analysis tends to be somewhat superficial and impressionistic

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Fig. 290. Rue, Saint-Esprit, exterior.

Fig. 291. Vendôme, La Trinité, facade.

The Late Gothic and Saint-Eustache Recognizing that the Flamboyant of the early fifteenth century differs from that of a century later and that it manifested itself in a number of regional variants, an attempt can nevertheless be made to broadly define some of its underlying and characteristics. The qualities that are usually associated with Flamboyant architecture – extravagant decorative complexity, the overlapping and piling up of rotating forms – are typically found on church exteriors, as at Rue (Fig. 290), and most notably on facades such as those of La Trinité in Vendôme, Saint-Maclou in Rouen or even the more modest sixteenth-century facade of Saint-Merry in Paris (Figs. 291–293). By contrast Late Gothic interiors are often quite severe, exhibiting a stark and rigorously compelling, geometrically generated purity; the aesthetic preference that is generally present in all periods of Gothic architecture for thin stretched surfaces animated by linear effects is pushed to the limit. The elevations are often exceedingly reductive and abstract, being composed of thin membrane-like planes of glass and masonry that are cut only by the nave arcade and enlivened by the complexity introduced by the facetted moldings of the piers and ribs (Fig. 259, 294, 295). Triforia – which would force a reading of the wall as having depth – are not a common feature of Flamboyant elevations. When they do occur they tend to follow (Roland Sanfaçon, L’architecture flamboyante en France, Québec 1971). What Sanfaçon’s study pointedly underscores is that a scholarly revisionism of the Late Gothic cannot precede a searching new analysis of the monuments in question. In recent years some first efforts in this direction have been made. See, for example, Stephen Murray, Building Troyes Cathedral. The Late Gothic Campaigns, Bloomington 1986; Idem, Beauvais Cathedral. Architecture of Transcendence, Princeton 1989; Linda Elaine Neagley, “The Flamboyant Architecture

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of St.-Maclou, Rouen, and the Development of a Style”, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 47 (1988): 374–396; Robert J. Nelson, “Martin Chambiges and the development of French Flamboyant Architecture”, Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins 1974; and William Steinke, “The Flamboyant Church of Caudebec-en-Caux; A Neglected Masterpiece of French Medieval Architecture”, Ph.D. diss., Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 1982. It is to be hoped that from such studies a deeper and more sati­ sfactory account of the Late Gothic will emerge.

The Presence

of the

Past

Fig. 292. Rouen, Saint-Maclou, facade.

at

Saint-Eustache

from

Cluny

to

Pavia    Chapter 6

Fig. 293. Paris, Saint-Merry, facade.

the earlier Rayonnant solution whereby the triforium is visually linked to the clerestory through screen-like tracery patterns and often through glazing, both of which heightened the illusion of planarity as the wall’s substance is denied by a layering of a thin, pierced surface in front of a thin glass plane (Figs. 296, 298). In some Flamboyant interiors the triforium is omitted thus giving a true rather than fictive two-part elevation. In such cases there is often a broad span of wall between the arcade and clerestory that is ornamented with blind tracery, as if the triforium has been literally reduced to a twodimensional feature (Fig. 297). In related interiors where a wide expanse of wall appears above the nave arcade, even this illusionary triforium is abandoned and the planar unadorned murality is frankly asserted (Figs. 294, 295). Conversely, in other Flamboyant elevations, the wall itself seems entirely suppressed – residuals of it appearing in the arcade spandrels – and the only surface planes are composed of broad expanses of glass (Figs. 295, 299). But whether of glass or of stone the surfaces of Flamboyant interiors tend predominantly to be sheer planes of uncompromising, almost Spartan, flatness and attenuation. In many interiors the breadth and thinness of the surfaces are dramatically emphasized by the contrast provided by the elements which visually constitute the structure of the interior: the piers, arches and ribs. Complex and often prismatic accretions of closely spaced convex, concave and hard edged planar moldings emerge from staggered bases to form the nave piers and then diverge again – as if imbued with propulsive energy – to continue beyond the pier, without interruption, becoming the arches of the arcade, aisle

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Fig. 294. Clery, Notre-Dame, interior.

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Fig. 295. Paris, Saint-Gervais-SaintProtais, interior.

ribs, linear nave responds and finally the ribs of the main vessel vaults. Thus a sequence of calculated counterpoints is established between the flat surface and the structural moldings of the interior: large versus small, plane versus line, simplicity versus complexity. At the same time, however, the varied elements of such a Flamboyant interior are not allowed to merely become a strident and obvious juxtaposition of opposites but are tightly woven together – often a group of pier moldings will pierce right up into the wall above, and horizontal stringcourses typically penetrate vertical members (Figs. 259, 298). Thus just as the surfaces are conceived as single unbroken planes and just as the piers, arches and ribs are fused into continuous linear elements so too are all the parts of the elevation knit together with the demarcations between them obscured. In some interiors instead of geometrically complex piers simple cylindrical supports are used as, for example at the choir of Saint-Etienne-du-Mont (Fig. 274). In such elevations the principle of fusion is also strongly evident: The unadorned piers and walls seem stretched and molded from a single sheet of stone, and the ribs and arches emanate from within the piers like branches on a tree. There are of course Late Gothic interiors that do not conform to the above outlined schema, and which present alternatives not just in detailing but also in their fundamental conception. To some extent the above description is of an ideal French Late Gothic and stresses those aspects that are novel and unique to it, and which distinguish it from earlier phases of Gothic architecture. But the churches that necessarily concern us the most and that presumably form the background of our architect (whether Pierre Lemercier or Jean Delamarre) – those from the mid-fifteenth to early sixteenth centuries in and around Paris – do adhere to the description here presented. If we look at the Parisian Late

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Fig. 296. Vendôme, La Trinitê, nave wall.

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Fig. 297. Gisors, Saint-Gervais-Saint-Protais, interior.

Gothic interiors of Saint-Médard,2 Saint-Etienne-du-Mont,3 ­Saint-Gervais-Saint-Protais,4 Saint-Laurent,5 and Saint-Merry,6 or at buildings outside the city such as Saint-Gervais-SaintProtais in Gisors,7 we find that each is a paradigmatic example of the Flamboyant as it has here been defined (Figs. 258, 259, 274, 297–299).8 If any one of these Parisian or Île-de-France interiors is compared to Saint-Eustache it becomes strikingly apparent that our architect rejected the contemporary Flamboyant tradition as a possible framework for adapting a Renaissance vocabulary to a church interior (Fig. 103). At Saint-Eustache, instead of stretched planarity there is built up mural substantiality; and instead of fusion there is clear separation of zones, the arcade from the triforium, the triforium from the clerestory and so forth. With its frankly three-part elevation, its arcaded triforium, rich and varied ornamentation, and its piers conceived as massings of forms drawn from the Orders, Saint-Eustache represents a radical and conscious departure from the Flamboyant tradition, not a modernized, classicized translation of it. Unlike, for example, the  The nave dates to second half of the fifteenth century. Dumolin, Les églises de France, pp. 83–87; Boinet, Les églises Parisiennes, I, pp. 348–362. 3  Begun in 1492. Dumolin, Les églises de France, pp. 109–119; Boinet, Les églises Parisiennes, pp. 425–458. 4  Begun in 1494. Dumolin, Les églises de France, pp. 94–104; Boinet, Les églises Parisiennes, pp. 363–398. 5  The nave was begun in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century. Dumolin, Les églises de France, pp. 79–83; Boinet, Les églises Parisiennes, pp. 310–319. 6  Begun in c.  1510. Dumolin, Les églises de France, pp. 104–109; Boinet, Les églises Parisiennes, pp. 399–422. 2

  Begun in 1497. Dictionnaire des églises de France, IV, B, pp. 79–80. 8  The same also holds true for earlier fifteenthcentury architecture in Paris such as the first seven north nave bays of Saint-Nicolas des Champs, dating to after 1420, and the nave of Saint-Germainl’Auxerrois of 1420–1425. For Saint-Nicolas see Dumolin, Les églises de France, pp. 87–93; Boinet, Les églises Parisiennes, pp. 320–336; and Michel Dargaud, “L’église de Saint-Nicolas des Champs”, in Positions des thèses de l’École des Chartes, 1975, pp. 59–65. For Saint-Germain see Dumolin, Les églises de France, pp. 65–73; Boinet, Les églises Parisiennes, pp. 264–296. 7

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Fig. 298. Rouen, Saint-Maclou, interior.

Fig. 299. Paris, Saint-Laurent, interior.

ambulatory of Saint-Pierre in Caen where prismatic piers and arches of the Late Gothic are continued (Fig. 246), a Late Gothic model cannot be perceived as forming the structural core or aesthetic point of departure for the design of Saint-Eustache. Instead the architect turned to historicist French sources which he perceived as inherently more compatible to his goals. Historicism and Saint-Eustache9 One such historicist model allowed the Saint-Eustache master to develop the pier vocabulary and compositions first utilized at Saint-Maclou into the larger and more complicated structures of Saint-Eustache. If the Saint-Eustache piers are reduced to their basic geometric scheme, we see that they comprise square cores with engaged half-columns on their four sides; only at the top level is this plan complicated by the corner colonettes (Figs. 21, 300). This is a format familiar to medievalists for it recalls the compound piers of Romanesque architecture where simple geometric shapes are applied to square or cross shaped cores (Fig. 301). As in the Romanesque model, the members applied to the core of the pier function as the primary supports of the nave arcade and of the vaulting. Within the French Romanesque there is one building of such overt classicism that it may well have persuaded the architect of the appropriateness of modelling his piers on a type that had been abandoned for centuries: the Burgundian third abbey church of Cluny (Fig. 302).10 The architect would have seen in the majestic late eleventh-century nave   Much of the material in this section was presented at the annual meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians in April 1988, as “The Presence of the Past at Saint-Eustache”, in the session “Tradition and

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Innovation in Renaissance Architecture Outside of Italy” chaired by Alice T. Friedman. 10   Kenneth J. Conant, Cluny: Les églises et la maison du chef d’Ordre, Mâcon 1968.

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Fig. 300. Saint-Eustache, main vessel pier, plan.

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Fig. 301. Cluny III, base of a nave pier.

of Cluny III a unique earlier attempt at incorporating a classical repertoire of forms – in this case fluted pilasters, columns, classical cornices, egg-and-dart friezes and Corinthian capitals, all derived from local antique structures – into a monumental French church interior. In plan the Cluny pier reveals the simple geometric structure of a Romanesque compound pier, while its elevation, where classical forms are stacked one atop the other, exhibits a complexity that sets a precedent for Saint-Eustache (Fig. 302). At Cluny the nave respond stacks up a fluted pilaster, a shorter, unadorned pilaster and a Corinthian half-column; while the corners of the square core of the pier support colonettes that flank the plain pilasters at the level of the arcade arches. In the similarly conceived piers of Saint-Eustache, the architect has confined the stacking of forms to the pier’s corner elements, which extend to the vaults alongside the continuous central responds. It is interesting to note that the architect has thereby created a composition that is suggestively close in structure to the early twelfth century, Cluny-inspired pier of Autun (Fig. 303). In both churches the pier core – square at Saint-Eustache and cross-shaped at Autun – rises with the attached central classicizing element and supports a pair of high colonettes. In the Romanesque church, however, the corner element is not, as at Saint-Eustache, transformed into a sequence of classical supports. But can a common source be posited for both Autun and Saint-Eustache? Can it be reasonably suggested that the Saint-Eustache architect would have known Cluny III? On two counts the evidence strongly supports such a conclusion. Cluny was certainly one of the most impressive and renowned ecclesiastical monuments of the European Middle Ages. Until the completion of the new Saint-Peter’s in the seventeenth century Cluny was the largest church in the Christian West, famous not only for its imposing size but also for its rich decoration.11 Its status in post-Romanesque Europe is sometimes overlooked today because its tragic destruction during the French Revolution, which spared but a fragment of a transept, only allows it to be known second-hand through archeology and drawings; without direct experience of the monument its true impact is psychologically difficult to 11

 Conant, Cluny, p. 23 passim and p. 80.

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Fig. 302. Cluny III, reconstructed view of nave.

Fig. 303. Autun cathedral, interior view.

reconstruct. Moreover, if any group of churches is typically understood as being the archetypal embodiment of the “medieval spirit” in monumental form, it is the cathedrals of the High Gothic, rather than any buildings of the Romanesque period. But while Cluny was still standing – even well into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – it was one of the most visited and extolled monuments in France.12 It is as unreasonable to imagine that our architect would not have known Cluny as it is to suggest that an Italian architect would not have known the Florence Duomo or a Byzantine builder Hagia Sophia. Secondly, in addition to its fame, the intense classicism of Cluny is unrivaled in French church architecture prior to Saint-Eustache: If our architect did not have first-hand experience of it before he received the important Parisian commission, we can well imagine that he would have made a point of seeing it once he was faced with the parallel task of accommodating a classical vocabulary to a monumental ecclesiastical setting. So much becomes clear to us if we accept the great Burgundian abbey church as the model that allowed the Saint-Eustache master to resolve some of the problems posed by his unique commission. Cluny, with its Romanesque conception of the pier as an essentially mural element, let the architect appreciate that the embellished mural structures between the Saint-Maclou chapels could be developed into a ­free-standing, four-sided monumental figure with individuated classicizing supports for the nave arcade, main vessel and  It is for this reason that the building is known today, preserved in the sketches of many of these 12

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visitors. Conant, Cluny, plates XIII-XXIV.

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side-aisle vaults. The Romanesque example thus allowed the architect to reconcile the classical concept of a system of autonomous elements from the Orders to be used as supports – which he sought to adhere to in the Saint-Maclou nave pilasters and side-aisle columns – with the more complex structure of the Saint-Maclou side-aisle elevation pier. As at Saint-Eustache, the Cluny version of the Romanesque compound pier emphasizes classicizing half-columnar forms as the primary supports of the nave and aisle elevations and subordinates the secondary elements of the cross rib responds. Thus Cluny can be understood as an important intermediary that enabled the architect to transform the disparate forms and embryonic compositional concepts of Saint-Maclou into the single, conceptually coherent and functionally adaptable form of the Saint-Eustache pier and employ it in a monumental setting. It is important to stress that Cluny provides much more than a precedent for the device of attaining greater height through the stacking of half-columns and pilasters, that it also provides the model for the symmetrical composition that could function as both a pier and part of the wall elevation.13 Another feature shared by Saint-Eustache and Cluny is the triforium (Fig. 302). As in the Burgundian elevation, at Saint-Eustache the original conception of the triforium with pilasters planned between all the openings, was very close to a classical arcade, an authentic example of which – on the Roman gates of Autun – had been the source for the Romanesque interior.14 The two triforia are also similarly proportioned with the height of each bay being roughly half its length. Unlike the Cluniac example, however, at SaintEustache the triforium is not merely a blind arcade, but is a true triforium functioning as a passageway. This does not mark a return to more contemporary sources, however, for, as has been seen, when this feature did occur in Flamboyant interiors it was given a radically unclassical appearance. Instead the Saint-Eustache triforium finds its closest parallel in many Early and High Gothic triforia (Figs. 304–307) whose proportions and four-part openings are close to those of both Saint-Eustache and Cluny. Unlike Cluny, these Gothic features are true triforia; and unlike those that appear in later Gothic interiors, they have  For this reason the Saint-Eustache pier cannot be convincingly related to something like the piers of the exterior staircases at Chambord to which Geymüller tentatively compared them. Unlike the rigorously conceived Romanesque-inspired piers of Saint-Eustache, the composition of the château piers is a loosely related sequence of distinct planes – the innermost plane of the actual mural supports of the openings at each level, the intermediate plane of the en délit colonettes and the outermost plane of the free-standing columns (Figs. 227, 228). 14  In the Burgundian elevation the motif was inspired by the arcades of the two Roman gates of Autun. Not surprisingly, during the sixteenth century French patrons and architects developed an interest in the antiquities of Burgundy and Provence, which even became, in some cases, the object of restoration projects. When Francis I visited Nîmes in 1533 he was so impressed by the Maison Carrée that he ordered the demolition of later building that was obscuring the temple’s interior (Vachon, La Renaissance Française, p. 16). And in 1548 Anne de Montmorency issued the following ordonance in his capacity as lieutenant général du roi: “Comme en passant par la dicte ville [Nîmes], nous avons veue de 13

beaux et grandz édiffices antiques, de grand artifice et architecture faitz par les anciens, dont plussieurs et la plus grande part à ce cognoissans aujourd’huy non seulement en prenent délectation, mais encores beacoup de profit pour l’art d’architecture, là où toutes proportions dudit art soit gardées, observées, et enseignées […]”. He goes on to deplore later building that “cachent, ruynent et démolissent icelles antiquités, en manyère que en peu de temps ilz auront si bien entrepris sur icelles que le tout sera ruyné, destruit et gasté”, and continues “Nous, à ces causes, et désirans que telles choses soient conservées et gardées en leur, entier, vous mandons, commandons, et expressement enjoignons de faire défense de par nous, sur certaines et grandes peines à appliquer au Roy, à tous les possesseurs des dictes maisons anticques et autres qu’il soit faict aucun bastimens de nouveau qui puissent couvrir ou cacher icelles antiquités […]”, cited in Vachon, La Renaissance Française, p. 17. [Note of the Series Editor. On this point, see Frédérique Lemerle, “Jean Poldo d’Albenas (1512–1563), un antiquaire ‘studieux d’architecture’”, Bulletin monumental 160 (2002): 163–172; and Idem, La Renaissance et les antiquités de la Gaule, Turnhout 2005.]

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Fig. 304. Laon cathedral, view nave wall.

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Fig. 305. Chartres cathedral, interior.

Fig. 306. Amiens cathedral, interior.

arcaded openings unobscured by tracery and are conceived as horizontal zones clearly separate from the arcade and clerestory. Also, the division of each triforium bay at SaintEustache in half (by the a-b-a rhythm of two minor lateral and single major central supports – which occurred also in the original all pilaster design) recalls Early and High Gothic triforia that are sometimes similarly divided in two parts per bay (Fig. 306).15 If we pull back from the triforium and look at the whole Saint-Eustache nave elevation, we discover that its proportions also indicate the architect’s familiarity with earlier Gothic architecture, in particular the High Gothic cathedral.16 At Saint-Eustache the distance from the base of the pier elevation to the crown of the arcade arches equals the distance from the arcade arches to the top of the elevation. Similar one-to-one correspondences organize the similarly three-part interiors of High Gothic cathedrals such as Reims and Amiens (Figs. 306, 307). Unlike the architect’s manifest debt to Cluny, however, it is difficult to establish a direct connection between Saint-Eustache and any specific Early or High Gothic monuments. Nevertheless, the one-to-one system of proportions used to organize a three-part elevation, like the true triforium, are features that indicate his awareness of the architecture of that period as a factor that played a definite role in the design of Saint-Eustache. That the proportions of its elevation and the form of the triforium are closest to those found in High Gothic monuments, and that the scale of the building is also close to that of the great cathedrals suggests that the Saint-Eustache master may have been looking at works from that period. As was the case with Cluny we hardly need to point out that he would have known the monuments of the earlier  It can also be speculated that the architect also knew the Early Gothic Burgundian cathedral of SaintMammès at Langres – an important and prominent diocese in the sixteenth century. This church, whose classicizing triforium reflects knowledge of Cluny III and possibly Autun, has been suggested as the inspiration for the classical interior of an engraved rather than real sixteenth-century interior: that of 15

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The Annunciation in the Church by Jean Duvet; see Colin Eisler, The Master of the Unicorn: The Life and Work of Jean Duvet, New York 1979, p. 180. 16  Blunt made somewhat the same observation, stating that the proportions of Saint-Eustache “are nearer to High Gothic than Flamboyant”, Blunt, Art and Architecture, p. 60.

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Fig. 307. Reims cathedral, interior.

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Fig. 308. Bourges cathedral, interior.

Gothic – particularly since the exemplary models of both the Early and High Gothic are found in and around the Île-de-France. As general as the possible Early or, more likely, High Gothic sources for SaintEustache were with respect to its three part elevation and triforium, one ­thirteenth-century cathedral can plausibly be suggested as being the specific source for another aspect of the Saint-Eustache composition. In the interior of Bourges the three-part nave elevation is anticipated in the side-aisles with great dramatic effect; as one moves from the subordinate spaces to the center vessel of this cathedral the architecture, in particular the piers, seem to leap upwards (Fig. 308). This is, of course, strikingly similar to what occurs at Saint-Eustache (Fig. 261). While the Late Gothic may have provided the motif of the aisle clerestory, Bourges was an example of how this motif could be incorporated into a an elevation that would anticipate and echo the monumental design of the main vessel, and thus impose a rigorous conceptual order upon the overall interior design as well as create a stunning architectural effect. French Medieval Architecture and the Classical Tradition The eclectic range of sources used at Saint-Eustache may come as a surprise, in particular the role played by Gothic models, given the architect’s rejection of the Late Gothic. In a sense the pronounced medieval character of Saint-Eustache was more comprehensible when it was simply understood to be an unconscious and reflexive ­continuation of contemporary, local traditions. But once it becomes clear that the architect deliberately turned away from the Flamboyant, it naturally follows that intentionality is equally involved with what does appear in the design. It is readily understandable why Cluny, where so much of the vocabulary was derived from antiquity, had such a strong influence at Saint-Eustache when one realizes that the architect had no model within the early French Renaissance to which he could turn as he faced the

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Fig. 309. Amiens cathedral, pier base.

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Fig. 310. Reims cathedral, capital.

challenge of adapting the Renaissance vocabulary and forms first developed at SaintMaclou to a monumental church interior. Indeed, the strong role of the classical tradition is generally evident throughout Romanesque architecture, as the nineteenth century recognized when it first defined this period as one separate from the Gothic and gave it the name we still use today. Having noted the anti-Flamboyant yet the undeniably medieval character of Saint-Eustache, that the classicizing Romanesque largely accounts for the medievalism seems plausible, particularly when we remember that in the Italian quattrocento, in Florence, Rome, Lombardy and the Veneto, architects had also turned to local classicizing medieval architecture as models for dealing with the language of classicism in church interiors – for which the architecture of antiquity itself offered little guidance. It may seem paradoxical, however, that the Saint-Eustache master would have rejected the forms of the contemporary Late Gothic while turning to those of the earlier Gothic for we, again like the nineteenth century, make sharp distinctions between the Gothic and the Romanesque – distinctions that have much to do with the relative presence or absence of the classical tradition. But to a French architect of the early sixteenth century with no firsthand knowledge of Renaissance Italy, looking back from the point of view of his Late Gothic training, the monuments of the eleventh through thirteenth centuries would have been distinguished more by their common ground than by their divergences. To him the classical legacy would have been apparent not only in Romanesque but also in Gothic architecture of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and purged only from its most recent phase; he would have perceived a strong classical presence in the monuments of France’s more distant past and its virtual absence in those of the Flamboyant. In Gothic interiors of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the piers and their scholastic subtypes of colonettes and formerets are ultimately derived from classical columns; their water-holding bases are descendants of attic bases; and their crocket capitals have Corinthian models as their ultimate source (Figs. 309, 310). And as our discussion of the triforium indicated Gothic triforia – often proportioned similarly to that of Cluny, inspired directly by the antique – would also have seemed to retain links to classical arcades. Indeed, the openness of a High Gothic triforium might have made it appear even more

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classical than that of Cluny – or at least to manifest, in a different way, an equally classical aspect. Even in the subsequent monuments of the Rayonnant some debt to the antique can still be perceived, for the colonettes – attenuated and multiplied though they are – still have attic-inspired bases and crocket capitals. But in Late Gothic architecture, particularly in Paris, with its prismatic, undulating pier forms stripped of capitals and rising from abstractly conceived bases that have nothing to do with the Orders, where the triforium is forsaken or given a radically unclassical appearance, the tenuous connection with the language of antiquity was finally broken. Unlike the piers of the cathedrals of Paris or Reims we would never think to describe the cylindrical supports of an interior such as Saint-Etienne-du-Mont as columns. While we tend to stress the way the classical language has been distorted in the Early and especially in the High Gothic – if we discuss it in such terms at all – the Saint-Eustache architect, more familiar with the abstract forms of the Flamboyant, would have recognized the classical heritage of the High Gothic vocabulary – would have perceived it despite its distortion. Here attention should be drawn to our terminology – the “language” of classicism versus the “abstraction” of the Late Gothic. In an absolute sense the forms of the Orders are abstract: a configuration of lines and volumes with only the stylized capitals in a very schematic way bearing reference to anything outside the realm of pure imagined form. But in more specific terms, in terms of western culture and history, the classical language is just that – a resonant language that communicates great meaning; indeed, a recent study of the Orders is entitled Bearers of Meaning.17 The repertoire of forms used in a Late Gothic interior, however, is abstract in a truer sense: These forms can best be described in terms of geometry – lines, planes, circles, arcs and cylinders. In short they participate in a system that is entirely self-referential. Thus whereas a Gothic colonette may suggest a linear form, a Late Gothic respond or molding is a line.18 To an architect trained in the abstract complexities of the Late Gothic the correspondences between the formal  Onians, Bearers of Meaning.  The distinctions that can be observed between the earlier Gothic periods and the Late Gothic in terms of classicism are more profound than those concerning their formal vocabulary. In Gothic interiors of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries the success of the visionary illusion depends on our apprehension of the piers as columnar supports which seem to be supernaturally stretched. Of course the columnar pier is a virtually negligible aspect of the real structural system, it participates in an illusionistic system, which includes the arches and rib vaults, while the brunt of the load is deflected to the hidden (from the interior) flying buttresses. Thus, like the Romanesque, the High Gothic engages in the same type of structural illusionism that also occurs in antiquity. That is, like buildings such as the Pantheon, the Colosseum and Cluny III, the interiors of Reims and Amiens also practice a deception where members from the Orders seem to perform a primary load bearing function, while this role is in fact assumed by a hidden or disguised true structure. The great Gothic invention – the flying buttress – allowed the medieval builders to go two steps further: By assuming the thrusts of the structure the buttresses freed the wall, which had previously disguised or contained the structure, from 17 18

this function so it could literally become thinner and higher than it had ever been before. Furthermore, not only could the actual support system of the building be hidden, but the very principles of statics could also be illusionistically disguised for in a High Gothic interior the forces of energy seem to have been reversed, moving up rather than down – or at least this is how such interiors are often interpreted. It can be noted, however, that there is a conflict between this supposed intention (of forces going up not down) and the impossibility of the rhetorical device used – the column, which is always read as a support – to fully express the desired meaning. It is telling that when scholars are anxious to stress this interpretation of the Gothic they illustrate it with a worm’s eye view of an interior, rather than a “straight” view which gives a very different impression. No such photographic equivocation is necessary with a Late Gothic interior. This is not to say that the Late Gothic is somehow “more Gothic” or “better Gothic” than the architecture of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but rather that, freed from the column, a Late Gothic interior presents a fundamental break with the structural deception based on the Orders that had existed since antiquity; and that perhaps the motives of earlier Gothic architects have been misinterpreted.

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vocabulary of the Early and High Gothic to that of the Renaissance must have been an astounding revelation. It is thus reasonable to conclude that it was because of the unclassical, indeed, even anticlassical nature of Flamboyant architecture that this most recent phase of Gothic had so little direct influence on Saint-Eustache and that the architect instead turned not only to Cluny but also to the later architecture of the twelfth through thirteenth centuries which he perceived as also successfully accommodating a classicizing vocabulary to a monumental church interior and therefore as an appropriate model for his Renaissance undertaking. It should be stressed that the architect would have conceived of his sources as belonging to a continuous past wherein he would not have perceived the stylistic divisions of Romanesque, Early Gothic and High Gothic, nor may he have been precisely aware of the relative chronology of the earlier monuments (or even interested in it). Paradoxically, the Saint-Eustache architect may have found that his revival of the French medieval tradition was legitimized by what little he knew of contemporary Italian architecture. The Renaissance monuments of Northern Italy, in particular of Pavia, Fig. 311. Pavia cathedral, interior. had made a great impression on the French during the military campaigns of Francis I and his two predecessors. One of the king’s compatriots, Philippe de Commines, was so taken with the Certosa that he enthusiastically described it as “the finest church I ever saw, and all of fine marble”.19 The 1490s facade of the Certosa, with its profusion of color and pattern, where every surface is richly ornamented with classicizing motifs and candelabra, has long been acknowledged as an important source of decorative ornament for early French Renaissance architects.20 And the tomb of Gian Galeazzo Visconti in the Certosa served Francis I – preoccupied as he was in the early years of his reign with the conquest of Milan – as a model for the tomb of his predecessor, Louis XII, in Saint-Denis.21 We can thus well imagine that the cathedral of Pavia, certainly the most ambitious architectural project in Northern Italy in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, also drew the attention of the French (Fig. 311).22 Here we find a parallel for the steepness of the Saint-Eustache nave arcade, its round headed arches, and its four-part classicizing triforium bays (Fig. 25). Also, like Pavia, and unlike any of its possible French medieval sources, the floor of the triforium at Saint-Eustache is not at the level of the bases of the triforium supports; instead in each case the bases rise from a parapet. This is a minor detail yet one which may affirm that Pavia was known by the Saint-Eustache architect.23 It is doubtful that this knowledge  Blunt, Art and Architecture, p. 17.  Hautecœur, Histoire de l’architecture classique, I, part 1, pp. 413–419. 21  Kathleen Cohen, Metamorphosis of a Death Symbol: the Transi Tomb in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance, Berkeley 1973, pp. 133–156. 19 20

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  On Pavia see Arnaldo Bruschi, Bramante, London 1977, pp. 46–52. 23  Such arcades with parapets also occur on the facade of the Certosa. 22

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Fig. 312. Saint-Maclou, ambulatory capitals.

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Fig. 313. Saint-Maclou, ambulatory capital.

would have been first-hand, but we can quite plausibly suggest that he was made aware of this monument, maybe through his contacts with members of the royal entourage who had travelled to Northern Italy (such as Jean de La Barre) that the Saint-Eustache commission brought. Like the French Romanesque and Gothic monuments the architect consulted, Pavia is a classicizing architecture with a strong medieval character: Antique inspired forms (massive piers embellished by Corinthian pilasters, a highly classicizing triforium, and oculi in the clerestory) are arranged in a medievalizing three-part elevation divided into vertical bays in a lofty vaulted interior. The north Italian cathedral presents a parallel, not only for Saint-Eustache directly, but also to the revived French sources of the Parisian church – at least as they were probably perceived by the architect. Thus Pavia, perhaps understood by the architect to be the dernier cri in Italian ecclesiastical construction, may have opened his eyes further to and even validated the possibilities offered by France’s own architectural past as a source for developing a classicizing church architecture. Historicism and French Renaissance Church Architecture Although the architect went beyond Saint-Maclou for his historicizing formal solution, the method employed at Saint-Eustache was one he had already brought to bear at SaintMaclou; moreover, the very nature of each commission advocated, in different ways, the exploration of a historicizing approach. A reconsideration of the Saint-Maclou interior reveals that the Flamboyant forms are a decidedly muted presence, unmistakably apparent only in the uncapitaled nave piers from which the moldings of the arcade arches seamlessly emerge as they do in so many Late Gothic interiors (Figs. 222, 236). As for the chapel frames, which we identified as classical translations of sections of Late Gothic piers, that the Late Gothic tradition played a role in their formation is not at all conspicuous and has to be ferreted out. Instead, as at Saint-Eustache, the medieval demeanor of Saint-Maclou – particularly of the side-aisle – owes much more to earlier French sources. But whereas for Saint-Eustache the architect had cast a wide net, pulling in geographically and stylistically disparate sources of inspiration from France’s medieval past (and perhaps North Italy), for Saint-Maclou his medieval model was closer to home: its own early twelfth-century choir.

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Fig. 314. Saint-Maclou, ambulatory colonettes.

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Fig. 315. Saint-Maclou, north aisle.

In the ambulatory at Pontoise are found a repertoire of quasi-classical forms that includes colonettes and columns all having attic bases and capitals that are either foliated, and thus ultimately dependent on classical models, or are versions of what might be termed medieval figurated-foliate types (Figs. 312–315). The composition of the ambulatory closely resembles that of the northernmost side-aisle and seems to have served as its model (Figs. 315, 316). The disposition of the three rib responds in the center of the nascent side-aisle pier structures reflects that of the stepped colonettes that appear between the twelfth-century chapels (Figs. 237, 314): In each case a larger central element and two smaller flanking colonettes act as responds for the transverse and cross ribs of the vaults. Of course the architect’s placement of classical supports below the ribs was a natural and obvious way to accommodate the Renaissance vocabulary to a church interior; he was not the only sixteenth-century architect to have found this solution and it might be argued that he did not need a model to discover it. That the choir did serve as an example, however, is supported by the fact that his free-standing aisle columns also mirror their corresponding elements in the ambulatory: Like the hemicycle piers they are somewhat squat in their proportions, the shafts having the same rather heavy 3.5:1 ratio of height with their capitals. Further parallels can be observed between the early Renaissance work at SaintMaclou and the Early Gothic choir in their ribs and arches. The moldings that appear in the Renaissance extension – the cross ribs of the chapel and aisle vaults with their buildup of small moldings terminating in a torus, and the transverse ribs and arcade arches with their wide intrados (Figs. 236, 280, 281) – are analogous to the twelfth-century cross and

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Fig. 221 (repeated from p. 137) Saint-Maclou, plan.

Fig. 316. Saint-Maclou, ambulatory.

transverse ribs and arcade arches (Figs. 286, 316).24 Particularly striking is the correspon­ dence between the arcade arches of the two periods that share not only a broad intrados but also correspondingly placed prominent torus moldings. As has been seen, similar arches were part of the general vocabulary of early French Renaissance architecture, which suggests that the twelfth-century arcade arches, like the classicizing ambulatory supports, would have validated the choir as an appropriate model for the Renaissance work. Thus already in his remodeling and expansion of the north side of Saint-Maclou the architect had turned to a historicizing, in this case, Early Gothic model. But his decision to do so was not solely motivated by a desire to develop an ecclesiastical Renaissance architecture. To a great extent the correspondence between the twelfth- and early sixteenth-century parts of the building – which communicated with each other across the north transept (Fig. 221 [on p. 195]) – was probably evoked as the architect sought to stylistically integrate his Renaissance addition to the older structure. The formal character of the extension was partly conditioned by the earlier, Gothic parts of the church to which it had to adapt.25 At the same time, however, the twelfth-century choir proved to be an affirmative model that showed him that the vocabulary of the early Renaissance could be adapted to a French ecclesiastical setting in a manner that was inherently  In the ambulatory there are ribs from two periods: the original twelfth-century ones, which are distinguished by their heavy torus moldings, and those that belong to the late fifteenth-century restoration of the ambulatory vaults, which were noted in the previous chapter.

24

  This sense of accommodation to the earlier fabric was completely lost on the south side of the church where the early Renaissance design is radically altered (Fig. 275).

25

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Fig. 317. Triel, Saint-Martin, choir.

congruous with that vocabulary’s classicism and, conversely, let him perceive that the Flamboyant was inimical to it. By requiring him to take into account the twelfth-century choir, the Saint-Maclou commission forced the architect to break away from Late Gothic forms and allowed him to see that the architecture of the past offered viable solutions for dealing with the new vocabulary – specifically the tectonic vocabulary of the Orders – in an ecclesiastical setting. How fully all of this was understood while the architect was engaged at Saint-Maclou and how much only became clear to him once he was involved with designing Saint-Eustache is not as important as realizing that the basic strategy of turning away from the present and back to the past that was so critical to the design of Saint-Eustache had already been employed by the architect in the earlier work. This architect’s experience was not unique. Much ecclesiastical construction of the period consisted of extensions or remodelings of older pre-Flamboyant churches, and often the architects’ solutions hinged on the perception of the shared antique heritage of the new Renaissance vocabulary and the earlier medieval forms of the building. Thus, for example, when a new choir was added in the 1540s to the thirteenth-century Île-de-France church of Triel, the format of Gothic columns grouped below colonettes which appears in the nave and which probably appeared in the original choir elevation, provided a model that was easily translated into Renaissance forms (Figs. 317, 318).26 Similarly the gathering of Renaissance pilasters, colonettes and half columns into the complex pier structures of the ambulatory can be compared to stepped colonettes in Early Gothic ambulatories (Figs. 319, 320). Such an arrangement was presumably also present in the original east end of Triel. That the classicism of the piers there owes much to the French Gothic is tellingly

  On Triel see Lefèvre-Pontalis, L’église de Triel.

26

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Fig. 318. Triel, Saint-Martin, nave.

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Fig. 319. Saint Denis, ambulatory pier.

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Pavia    Chapter 6

Fig. 320. Triel, Saint-Martin, ambulatory pier.

revealed by the bases of the half-columns which, though they may seem at first glance to be classical attic ones, are in fact, as the tell-tale griffes reveal, copies of medieval attic bases (Fig. 321).27 Triel, and other reconstructions of Early Gothic churches, form the background of church additions where the classicizing medieval character of the architecture cannot be linked to pre-existing structure on the site. Thus at the (now-ruined) abbey of Valmont in Normandy (Fig. 322), although the 1530s ambulatory is Flamboyant (Fig. 323), when construction of the choir proper was begun in the 1540s, the Late Gothic was abandoned in favor of an architecture that represents a fusion of the Italianate and the High Gothic (Figs. 324, 325).28 This is most apparent in the feature it shares with Saint-Eustache: The revived motif of the triforium which now follows the French medieval mode of extending the supports to the triforium base. The strategy of turning to classicizing French medieval models was not confined to the first half of the century. In the late 1550s reconstruction of the c. 1200 church at Goussainville, the north nave elevation repeats the historicist composition that had previously been used in the choir of Triel: heavy columnar piers supporting pilasters that act as responds for the vault ribs (Figs. 326, 327).29 Here again are found the medievalizing

 That such bases were revived in the sixteenth century has been studied by Coutan, who also noted their presence at Triel; Docteur Coutan, “Emploi des bases à griffes dans quelques édifices de la Renaissance”, Bulletin de la Commission des Antiquités de la Seine-Inférieure 18 (1927): 37–39.

27

 On the building of Valmont see Jean ValleryRadot, “Valmont”, Congrès archéologique de France 89 (1926): 387–404. 29   For Goussainville see Charles Terrasse, “Goussainville”, Congrès archéologique de France 103 (1944): 86–90. 28

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version of an attic base: the base à griffes, whose condition, more worn than those of the shafts they support, and whose messy joint with the shafts, suggest that they may have been spoils from the earlier building (Fig. 328). On the south side of the nave the columnar supports have been replaced by massive compound piers, whose section, a square core with engaged half-columns, is clearly derived from earlier medieval architecture. Similarly, as late as the 1580s, we find in the works of Nicolas de Saint-Michel, such as the choir at Mesnil Aubry (like Goussainville to the north of Paris),30 Serlian Doric engaged halfcolumns configured in the early medieval format of a compound pier (Fig. 329). Thus for French church architecture, particularly that around Paris, the Renaissance played a dual role: Italianate forms were, of course, used on their own accord, but they also served as a catalyst that allowed architects to perceive an inherent classicism in the architecture of the French medieval past, and showed them, therefore, that within their own tradition existed viable solutions to the problem of introducing the classical Orders into ecclesiastical settings. Yet if the solution of formal challenges, and the perception of a shared classicism between the new Italianate and the local French traditions, were specific to this sixteenth-century historicism, revivalism had existed already in the fifteenth century, although of a fundamentally different kind. A brief summary of this earlier trend will help to illuminate the singularly complex syncreticism of historicist sources at Saint-Eustache. Fifteenth-Century Historicism Not all fifteenth-century French church architecture is, strictly speaking, “pure” Flamboyant. In a number of regions in France during this period isolated aspects or entire compositional arrangements from twelfth- and thirteenth-century monuments were often appropriated for new church projects. Thus the otherwise “contemporary” elevation of Alençon, begun in c. 1477, reposes upon massive cylindrical piers with engaged responds and half columns that recall the similarly heavy and articulated supports of local thirteenth-century Norman architecture (Fig. 330).31 Sometimes a historicist motif is profoundly altered by the Late Gothic aesthetic, as at Rodez where, in the mid-fifteenth century, the Flamboyant technique of fusion transformed the additive concept of a classic High Gothic pilier ­cantonné into a single undulating form (Fig. 331).32 In other interiors, however, the revivalist borrowing is more encompassing and the Late Gothic presence less intrusive: Only by examining the molding profiles and recognizing the distinctive Flamboyant bases in the nave of Saint-Serge in Angers can this interior be identified as one from the second half of the fifteenth century, rather than the thirteenth century like the town cathedral which it so closely resembles.33 And in one remarkable early fifteenth-century example, Notre-Dame in Épine, the east side of the nave is such a close (if small scale) copy of the nearby cathedral of Reims, that were this building’s history not known its dating would surely be one of the more thornier issues of medieval scholarship (Figs. 307, 332).34 This strain of fifteenth-century revivalism was long described as typifying the lateness of Late Gothic, an exhausted style that was unable to offer any truly original solutions  On the architecture of Nicolas de Saint-Michel and for Mesnil-Aubry see Charles Terrasse, “Les œuvres de l’architecte Nicolas de Saint-Michel”, Bulletin monumental 81 (1922): 165–188; and Idem, “Le Mesnil-Aubry”, Congrès archéologique de France 103 (1944): 94–101. 31  This was observed by Sanfaçon, L’architecture flamboyante, p. 62. 30

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  Dictionnaire des églises de France, III, B, pp. 127–131. 33  Sanfaçon, L’architecture flamboyante, p. 77. 34  Luc Benoist, Notre-Dame de l’Épine, Paris 1933; and Dictionnaire des églises de France, V, B, pp. 57–58. 32

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Fig. 321. Triel, Saint-Martin, ambulatory pier base.

Fig. 323. Valmont, view into ambulatory.

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Fig. 322. Valmont, view of ruined abbey.

Fig. 324. Valmont, choir.

Fig. 325. Valmont, choir elevation, detail.

Fig. 326. Goussainville, interior.

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Fig. 327. Goussainville, interior.

Fig. 328. Goussainville, nave pier base.

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Fig. 329. Mesnil-Aubry, choir.

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Fig. 330. Alençon, Notre-Dame, interior.

and simply reworked older ones, inserting “flame” tracery and other decorative refinements into well-worn Gothic settings. In 1971, however, Roland Sanfaçon positively (and convincingly) described this fifteenth-century historicism as the result of deliberate “renaissances régionales”.35 He drew attention to the fact that in this period the greatest number of churches built were parish churches, whose largely bourgeois patrons were not desirous of building in the international court style, which mainstream Gothic had become, but of reaffirming the individuality of their local architectural traditions. At the same time he noted several instances of inter-regional historicism, such as the mid-fifteenth century facades of the cathedrals of Tours and Nantes, whose compositions, particularly in the lower portal zone, were deliberately meant to recall and rival the magnificent facades of Reims and Amiens (Fig. 333).36 Since Sanfaçon, the two motives for fifteenth-century historicism to which he drew attention – local bourgeois pride and the desire to recall the outstanding monuments of the great national past – have been identified as jointly informing the 1430s construction of the stylistically innovative Flamboyant church of Saint-Maclou in Rouen.37 (Interestingly the same motives can be ascribed to much contemporary “revivalist” architecture in quattrocento Italy.) Despite its small scale and status as a parish church the plan and other aspects of Saint-Maclou evoke those of monumental building types such as cathedrals and abbey churches, while other features, such as its interior elevation, specifically recall the Rayonnant parts of the city’s cathedral, that is those parts of the cathedral whose style was associated with Louis IX (Fig. 298). It has been suggested, therefore, that the historicism of Saint-Maclou, built during the English occupation of Rouen, does more than reflect the parvenu ambitions and civic pride of its bourgeois patron, but that it may also have

35 36

 Sanfaçon, L’architecture flamboyante, pp. 59–83.   Ibid., pp. 73–75.

  Neagley, “The St.-Maclou”.

37

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Fig. 331. Rodez, cathedral, choir piers.

Fig. 332. Epine, Notre Dame, interior.

been meant to recall “the prestige of Saint Louis and the preeminence of Paris and the French court”.38 More recently an intriguing case, not of revival, but of analogously motivated preservation has been proposed: Beginning in 1497 the church of Gisors was completely rebuilt in the Late Gothic style, with the exception, however, of its thirteenth-century choir which was left intact.39 It has been suggested that this part of the church was preserved because it had originally been built for Blanche de Castille (the mother of Saint Louis and also a long revered member in the pantheon of medieval French royalty) and so was a work of great historic resonance.40 Thus in the fifteenth century, there was a strong symbolic content in much church building that had as its touchstone the architecture of earlier centuries. This historicist revivalism had a variety of ideological motives and a wide range of formal manifestations from outright copies of the past (Épine), to complete transformations of the iconographic model into the formal vocabulary of the Late Gothic (Saint-Maclou in Rouen), to the literal preservation of a hallowed monument within a new project (Gisors). Similarly varied was the specificity of the historicist referent which could be quite precise, such as the evocation of Rouen cathedral at Saint-Maclou, or suggest a broader association with a group of monuments that generally recall the golden age of French building and monarchy, such as the High Gothic inspired facades of Tours and Nantes.

  Ibid., p. 396.   Dictionnaire des églises de France, pp. 79–80. 38 39

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  Henri Zerner, “Gothique et Renaissance dans les églises françaises du XVIe siècle”, at the colloque on “L’église dans l’architecture de la Renaissance”, Tours, May 1990. 40

IV,

B,

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 istoricism: Form and Symbol at H Saint-Eustache There is no apparent connection between the historicism that informs fifteenth-century church projects and the Renaissance revivalism of the sixteenth century. Whereas the retrospection of the former was motivated by a desire to create meaningful links with the past, the latter was driven by the need to find a French model that could accommodate the new modern Italianate vocabulary. For one the appeal of the French medieval tradition was primarily its symbolic content, for the other it was its perceived formal classicism. This is not to say that the revivalist experiences of the fifteenth century were subsequently irrelevant, for they demonstrated to later builders that the architecture of the past was not inaccessible. At Saint-Eustache, however, the two revivalist trends, the symbolic and the formal, come together with tremendous, mutually sustaining force. As much as the Romanesque and Gothic models employed by the architect helped him to develop formal solutions, his fundamental approach was also deeply compatible with the ambitions of Francis I. In its plan and transept facades which were intended to deliberately evoke the cathedral, Fig. 333. Tours cathedral, facade. Saint-Eustache was to be a resonant symbol of the king’s desire to link his reign to that of Philippe Auguste.41 So far we have not discussed the Notre-Dame inspired features of Saint-Eustache in terms of the architect’s contribution to the building. In fact the decision to copy the plan and scale of the cathedral was probably not an idea initiated by the architect for its symbolic implication was the very raison d’être of the project. Yet as specific as this requirement may have been, the remainder of the instructions given to the architect were presumably as general as those often given to architects by their patrons. He was to erect over a five-aisled Notre-Dame inspired plan a structure in the new Renaissance style. He was thus told, like countless other architects have been told: “Make it big, make it modern”. Yet the historicist reference to the cathedral that lay at the core of the commission evidently sanctioned the further exploration of the historicist approach with which the architect had had some experience at Saint-Maclou; the king’s symbolic demands thus contributed in a positive way to the architect’s stylistic development. Indeed, the architect may have been specifically encouraged to engage in formal historicism, for although the composition of the transept facade must be credited to him, we may reasonably wonder how much the idea of making the transept exterior be a visible reference to the cathedral was also predetermined for him and how much it was his own invention. In other words, the evolution of the design process cannot be laid out in a simple narrative sequence: First the architect was told to do this, which led him to think of that, which made him aware of this and so forth. The causal relationship between the  In this context it can be noted that Sanfaçon described the many fifteenth-century Parisian churches that were built on the plan of Notre-Dame

41

as that city’s manifestation of the “renaissance régionales” phenomena; Sanfaçon, L’architecture flamboyante, pp. 59–61.

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intent and ambitions of the king on the one hand and those of the architect on the other cannot be precisely defined because they were so mutually sympathetic. Structures such as Reims, Amiens, Cluny and Bourges would probably have been as meaningful for Francis on a symbolic level as they were for the architect on a formal one. The great monastic churches and cathedrals of the High Middle Ages all belonged to the same brilliant epoch of France’s history which included Notre-Dame and the reign of Philippe Auguste. Thus the architect’s eclectic design successfully dealt with the formal challenge posed by the project at the same time that it enhanced and extended the building’s symbolic meaning. The candid specificity of the Notre-Dame references were embedded in a complex historicist aura evocative of France’s near mythic past. Although the expressed wishes of the patron may have been vague his implied desires probably would have been immediately understood by the architect, for whom historicist sources provided the means to fulfill the dual requirement that Saint-Eustache be both a quintessentially French and a modern Renaissance monument.

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Champigny-sur-Veude, chapel, choir elevation, detail.

Chapter 7 Gothic

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Architectural Composition

In the previous chapters various aspects of the formal vocabulary of Saint-Eustache were studied, from the most overtly Renaissance forms of the decorative details, to the invented classicizing repertoire of engaged half columns, to the historicist configurations of the piers and nave elevation.1 But the building as a whole was only given meaning and defined historically from a symbolic point of view. So far the analysis has not let us appreciate how or why the building is fundamentally different as a work of art from other classicizing medieval or medievalizing Renaissance structures such as the eleventh-century Burgundian Cluny, thirteenth-century Île-de-France Amiens, or the sixteenth-century North Italian Pavia. The formal eclecticism of Saint-Eustache based on the common thread of classicism running through the various sources is only part of the stylistic basis of the building; it does not represent the essential aesthetic methodology of the design. I thus want to now examine the design methods or principles according to which the capitals, colonettes, triforium, piers, major and minor elevations of the church, that is all its elements – big and small, individual and composite, medievalizing or classicizing – were given their placement within the overall design, related to each other and ordered. This analysis of the theoretical dimension of the design, in conjunction with the formal analysis of the previous chapters, will enable us to arrive at a historical understanding that goes beyond the unsophisticated and usual ­reading according to which Saint-Eustache in particular, and early French Renaissance church architecture in general, is defined in terms of two styles that it seems to uneasily straddle rather than the one to which it belongs. Two basic principles or methods of organization can be perceived at Saint-Eustache, each of which has already been alluded to but neither of which has been directly considered. The first principle operative in the building is the repetition of the same form at a varied scale and proportions. We have already seen that the major compositions of the SaintEustache design – the pier and the elevation – are repeated in different sizes in the building: the two-part side-aisle elevation being a smaller and less complete version of the three-part main vessel elevation (Figs. 25, 27 [on p. 208, 209]); the aisle pier elevation being smaller than that of the main vessel pier (Fig. 28 [on p. 210]); and the pier between the chapels a reduced half-pier version of the aisle pier format (Figs. 21, 27 [on p. 210, 211]). The relative scale naturally extends to the component parts of the pier and the elevation – the colonettes of the aisle piers are smaller than those in the nave, for example. This method also stands behind another feature we have noted in the original design of Saint-Eustache: that each vertical member in the building, from the soaring nave responds and crossing pier pilasters to the much smaller tracery mullions and intermediate triforium supports, be designed as classicizing supports with capitals or classicizing capital stand-ins (the masks of the arcade supports). This correspondence of individual forms and larger compositions throughout the building gives Saint-Eustache a great conceptual coherence. Furthermore the method invests each element with equal intensity and “meaning”. The triforium pilasters may be   Much of the material in this chapter was presented in a talk on “The problem of church architecture in the early French Renaissance”, at the colloque on “L’église dans l’architecture de la Renaissance”, Tours, May 1990, organized by Jean Guillaume.

1

[Note of the Series Editor. Later published as AnneMarie Sankovitch, “A Reconsideration of French Renaissance Church Architecture”, in L’église dans l’architecture de la Renaissance, ed. Jean Guillaume, Paris 1995, pp. 161–180.]

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Fig. 25 (repeated from p. 50). Saint-Eustache, north nave wall and north transept.

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Fig. 27 (repeated from p. 52). Saint-Eustache, north ambulatory wall elevation.

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Fig. 28 (repeated from p. 53). Saint-Eustache, interior.

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Fig. 21 (repeated from p. 46). Saint-Eustache, south side-aisle.

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physically smaller and differently proportioned than those of the crossing piers, yet what is the comparative relationship between them? Which is the norm? Is the triforium support a shrunken version of the crossing pier pilaster or is the latter a colossal and distended version of the triforium element? Similarly, is the relationship between the main vessel elevation and that of the side-aisle the one I have just described – the latter a reduced and less complete version of the former – or is the main vessel elevation a larger expanded version of that found in the side-aisle? In fact the design posits no proportional norms. The relative size and relative completeness of each form is determined by its place in the composition and while it gains resonance in comparison with like elements of different sizes and completeness it is not engaged in a normative relationship with them. This method is at odds with the principles of the classical Orders where proportional norms are everywhere present, particularly in the theoretical codifications of the Renaissance. Instead, the repetition of the same forms – particularly of supports – at varied scales and proportions is a fundamental design method in medieval architecture and can be understood as an alternative solution to the problem of combining diversity and unity that was addressed in classical architecture by the Orders. The method was rigorously developed and ubiquitous in medieval architecture and is not unique to any one period although it was most deeply explored in Early and High Gothic architecture. Thus in the mid-twelfth-century elevation of Laon the same columnar motif is used for the largest to the smallest members of the building: the nave piers, the bundles of attenuated colonettes which act as nave responds, the gallery supports and the formerets are all similarly designed with attic bases and crocket capitals (Fig. 304). In the cathedrals of Reims or Amiens this same principle is found in High Gothic interiors (Figs. 306, 307). This principle received perhaps its highest development, however, at the cathedral of Bourges (Fig. 308). Here, not only is the crocket-capitaled columnar form repeated throughout the interior, but, as we have seen, in what may have been a precedent for Saint-Eustache, the entire nave elevation is also duplicated on a smaller scale in the side-aisles. Although the method of varied scale and proportion continued to be employed into the Late Gothic it no longer was a major organizing principle of interiors. The logic of the method depended upon the presence of a single well-defined element used prominently throughout the building. In the Late Gothic, however, the colonette is no longer the standard format for the various elements of the pier and structural system and thus the method could not be sustained. The principle of varied scale was instead primarily used, and in fact developed vigorously, in non-architectonic decorative forms and assemblages. At the early sixteenth-century church of Brou,2 for example, the same bent pipe motif is used throughout the building as an occasional, rather witty accent, from a minute version on the tomb sculptures to a substantial scale variation on the facade (Figs. 334, 335). Thus the appearance of the column-based method at Saint-Eustache, where it appears in full-blown architectonic form, is to be understood as part of that historicist revival that stands behind so many other aspects of the building – only being here a revival of method rather than form. There is a significant difference, however, between the way the system of repetition and varied scale is realized at Saint-Eustache and its treatment in a High medieval interior. In medieval architecture the same elementary motif, the same medieval columnar “Order” is used consistently throughout the building. Whatever formal

  Dictionnaire des églises de France, II, A, pp. 31–37.

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variation appears is generally confined to the capitals and is loose and non-systematic. At Bourges, at Reims, at Laon, as at countless other Gothic structures the crocket capitals are treated with a great deal of imaginative variety; but this diversity is not meaningful. On the contrary, at Saint-Eustache, although the repeated elements have the same basic format they are purposefully varied in their articulation and details. This difference between medieval architecture and SaintEustache brings us to the second method employed at SaintEustache, which establishes systematic and articulate decorative variety within the same or similar forms. That is, while according to the first method repeated forms of differing scales have the same general cross-referential composition or appearance, the second allows groups of elements to be more precisely individualized. While the first method is all encompassing, the second allows for finer distinctions to be made and for systems within the larger scheme to be articulated. Although each vertical member may be a classicizing support it can be variously articulated as a pier, a pilaster, a half-columnar bundle of classical moldings, or a colonette, depending on its function within a sub-group in the composition. Thus, all the Fig. 334. Brou, tomb detail. crossing pier elements are framed pilasters; all the cross-ribs in the church have banded colonettes as their responds; and the engaged half-columnar axial forms of the three pier elevation types are all bundles of classical moldings. And within some of these support sub-groups the forms are given more particular individualization as is evident in the tripartite group of engaged half-columnar responds. All three occupy the same position in their respective elevations and each performs the same related function of acting as a respond or support for the transverse vault ribs or arcade arches; but through the manipulation of the classical moldings of their profiles each is distinguished – not capriciously, but in response to its specific placement and unique function (visually and structurally) within the overall design of the building (Fig. 28 [on p. 210]). Furthermore, the detailing and form of an ­element can indicate a dual role or function. Thus the lower inner pilasters on the crossing piers are identified as belonging to the crossing, for like the major outer elements which rise to the center vault they are framed pilasters (Figs. 25, 26 [on p. 208, 214]). At the same time these lower pilasters are part of the system of arcade supports and so like them they are embellished with a center group of moldings (Figs. 24, 26 [on p. 214]). The implementation of the second method which elucidates differences and correspondences through the systematic Fig. 335. Brou, facade detail. variation of the formal vocabulary initially only involved the support types. Gradually, in the years between 1532 and 1537, the Saint-Eustache master came to see that the capitals could also serve to explicate his design. From the earliest phase of detailing, that is, the pre-1534 phase before the streamlined figurated-foliate

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Fig. 26 (repeated from page 51). Saint-Eustache, southwest crossing pier, inner side.

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capital was introduced, only a few chapels were erected. Even so there is good reason to assume that at the time the architect intended that every capital in the building was to be a non-systematic variant of the figurated-foliate type. This would certainly accord with the common treatment of such capitals in the period; the architect himself followed this convention in his earlier design for Saint-Maclou. Even in the first phase of construction at Saint-Eustache, however, we have seen that the architect already sought to differentiate between the capitals of the large pilasters on the chapel exteriors and those of the interior colonettes through the greater decorative elaboration and somewhat different format of the former (Figs. 59, 77). In the subsequent period from c. 1534–1537, if the few pier elevations that were completed are examined, a possibly meaningful diversity or sequence of capital types can perhaps be perceived within the restricted format of the new figurated-foliate type (Fig. 141 [on p. 216]). Both of the square corner pilasters flanking the center respond on the north-west transept pier have heads as their central abacus motif (Figs. 108, 109). The same is true for the corresponding capital on the adjacent north-west crossing pier (Fig. 90). All of the upper level capitals of these two piers, however, have floral motifs, not heads, in the rosette position (Figs. 105, 247). Within these upper capitals three further types can be distinguished. The colonette capitals are freer in their format than the capital of the half-columnar element with its row of acanthus leaves strictly confined to the calathus, its volutes which do not intrude into the zone below and its symmetrical rosette; indeed this capital is now a true Composite one. The crossing pier pilaster capital posits yet another variant, for with its comparatively greater lavishness and its large prominent volutes and tropical rosette, it continues the major type of the figurated-foliate capital that the architect had earlier developed. To this group of forms can be added the paired masks of the arcade supports, for although they are not capitals they have a capital-like function, marking the termination of the classicizing support. But while some capitals of the c. 1534–1537 phase of construction conform to this system others do not. For example, not all of the square corner piers whose capitals belong to the streamlined figurated-foliate type have heads as their abacus motif (Figs. 101, 111, 112). It might be possible, by noting the placement of “deviating” and “conforming” capitals, to chart a gradual evolution towards the system that is uniformly employed in the north-west transept and crossing piers. But on the basis of only a few piers it would probably be more prudent not to insist too strongly that the architect had definitely evolved a comprehensive, hierarchical repertoire of capital types at this time but rather to allow that the concept was one with which he was experimenting. In the final, post-1537 Serlian-inspired phase of detailing, however, the architect consistently employed a unified and expressive formal system that takes into account not only the supports (pilaster, half-columns, etc.) but also the capital types, as is inventoried in the list on the following page.

  It is not clear whether the major or minor Corinthian was intended, although the Saint-Eustache-derived

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capitals of Villiers-le-Bel suggest that the minor version was planned.

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Fig. 141 (repeated from p. 99). Diagram of capital placement in SaintEustache transepts.

Engaged half-columns (Fig. 23) Main vessel elevation: bundle type 1, paired cherub heads with Corinthian3 Arcade support: bundle type 2, paired masks Aisle elevation: bundle type 3, minor Corinthian

Square corner piers (Fig. 23) Main vessel elevation, lower pier: plain pier, pseudo-Doric Main vessel elevation, upper pier: framed pier, pseudo-Ionic Aisle elevation: framed pier, minor Corinthian

Crossing piers (Figs. 25, 93) Crossing vault supports: framed pilaster, major Corinthian4 Arcade supports: framed pilaster with center molding, major Corinthian

Cross rib responds (Fig. 23) Main vessel, aisle and chapel vaults: banded colonettes, minor Corinthian5

Triforium center support: framed pilaster, Ionic (Fig. 164) Triforium intermediate supports: molding bundle, impost block (no capital, Fig. 164)6 On an elementary level the method of systematic decorative variety which underlines the invention and placement of this repertoire of forms is sympathetic to principles governing the use of the classical Orders. I will here be describing the classical Orders (as developed by the Romans and in the Renaissance) in the most obvious way because it is at the level of  As the lower capitals of the crossing piers were distinguished from the capitals on the same level that occur on the aisle and nave piers by their major format, it can be assumed that the upper capitals were to be similarly differentiated from those of the main vessel piers in the clerestory. 5   It cannot be deduced whether or not the colonettes in the main vessel elevation were originally intended to be half fluted. 4

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 As will soon be seen, the systematization of details became even more explicit in the post 1537 period of construction. This may explain why the intermediate triforium supports, originally planned as pilasters like the center triforium supports, were replaced by molding clusters: Rather than make the intermediate supports smaller versions of the center support the architect decided to give them their own distinct form.

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fundamentals that Saint-Eustache can be correlated with the classical tradition. Each of the Orders is composed of the same elements: a column comprising a base, shaft and capital; and an entablature comprising an architrave, frieze and cornice. The decorative detailing and proportions of these individual components varies from Order to Order and the support can take various modes as column, pilaster or square pier, all of which, in some Orders, can be either smooth or fluted. In much of Roman and Italian Renaissance architecture, harmony and clarity are often established through the exploitation of the sameness and differentness offered by the Orders. Each level of the Palazzo Rucellai elevation and the three major stories of the Colosseum (the two most commonly cited examples of this treatment) carries an Order of the same support type (pilaster and half-column) yet each is distinguished by the use of a different Order. More complex use is also often made of the Orders. Bramante’s cloister at Santa Maria della Pace, for example, is highly articulated using four Orders on two levels and employing three types of support: column, pilaster and pier. This summary analysis of the Orders, of which the reader is certainly capable of supplying more and varied examples, lets us appreciate that the second method employed at Saint-Eustache parallels the method that underlines the system of the classical Orders. Each approach provides for the systematic differentiation of functions and levels through formal individualization. The similarities between the Saint-Eustache method and the classical formula is not surprising given the historical connection between them. And at least one aspect of the Saint-Eustache scheme offers a specific instance where the architect directly emulated classical examples: the Vitruvian hierarchy that appears on the main vessel pier elevation of pseudo-Doric (on the lower square pier), pseudo-Ionic (on the upper square pier) and Corinthian (the banded colonettes and engaged half-column, Fig. 23). Although the first two capitals in the sequence are meager evocations of their classical models, their schematic shaping and their correct placement in the hierarchy (and that later builders interpreted them to be Doric and Ionic) can hardly be regarded as fortuitous, thus suggesting knowledge of Italian Renaissance architecture.7 Such knowledge might well have been gleaned from the same volume of Serlio that we have established was available to the Saint-Eustache master in 1537. But if the second method deployed at Saint-Eustache is sympathetic to – and in one aspect identical to – principles posited in classical architecture and theory, at the same time certain crucial aspects of classicism are ignored, indeed denied by the French architect. In the first place the architect’s conception of what constitutes an Order is not the classical one; it is for this reason that in this discussion I have so far refrained from using the word “Order” to describe the system of supports and capitals used at Saint-Eustache. In the use of a given classical Order essentially two variables are ideally allowed in a single building: that of scale (not proportions) and that of the support type. The relative proportions of an Order remain relatively constant, as does the detailing of the capital, base and entablature (at least within any one building). Thus at the Pantheon Corinthian fluted piers, fluted and smooth columns, small smooth pilasters and large fluted ones are used and read as part of one Order.8 In contrast, at Saint-Eustache the support types are the only constant that  At about the same time at Saint-Maclou the architect used Ionic and Corinthian capitals in the correct sequence on his crossing pier (Fig. 249). 8  Superficially this varied use of one Order in a classical building parallels the medieval method of varied scale, with the significant difference, however, that in antiquity the proportions remain constant and the support mode varies, whereas in French medieval architecture (where only cylindrical 7

supports are used) the situation is the reverse. On this classical type of variation of the Orders, in contrast to the Colosseum-Rucellai type where a sequence of different Orders is used, see Marvin Trachtenberg, “Brunelleschi, ‘Giotto’ and Rome”, in Renaissance Studies in Honor of Craig Hugh Smyth, ed. Andrew Morrogh, Fiorella Superbi Gioffredi, Piero Morselli, and Eve Borsook, Florence 1985, vol. II, pp. 675–686.

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unites forms into an Order while the capital type and the particular detailing of the support (framed or unframed pilaster, molding bundle 1, 2, or 3) are the variables (because of the implementation of the medieval method of varied scale, proportions are not a factor). Thus if we reexamine the above list of elements we see that six Orders corresponding to six types of support functions are employed at Saint-Eustache (engaged half-column, square corner pilaster, center triforium support, and so forth). Since, unlike the classical system, however, the two variables of the Saint-Eustache Orders are the two essential decorative aspects of each Order, the Orders are much more highly individualized at Saint-Eustache than they are in a classical system; and what the architect in fact does is devise a series of Orders which can be divided into as many sub-Orders as are needed. For example, within the major Order of square corner piers three sub-Orders are created each of which is distinguished by being a unique combination of a particular version of a square corner pier and a capital. This aspect of the Saint-Eustache Orders is flexible and adaptable: The creation of sub-Orders is an option, not an imperative, and while two Orders have three sub-Orders, one Order only has two, and three have none (see above list). The method employed at Saint-Eustache is thus very open ended: The architect allows himself the freedom to devise as many different combinations of supports and capitals grouped into Orders and sub-Orders as he feels are necessary to explicate the design. That his method theoretically allows for a limitless number of Orders is another feature that distinguishes it from classical architecture. In antique and Renaissance architecture the number of Orders is limited: The Renaissance added only one, the Tuscan, to the Roman repertoire of Doric, Ionic, Corinthian and Composite. Even when an architect working within the classical tradition invents new variations he allows himself to be restrained by this decorum. Thus, for example, Michelangelo, Borromini and Philibert De l’Orme (with his French Orders), while otherwise taking liberties with the classical language never breach this quantitative norm in any given design. At Saint-Eustache, however, this norm never enters into the picture. The architect is not thinking in terms of a predetermined finite repertoire which he must work within but rather devises ad hoc as many major Orders and sub-Orders as he requires. The open-endedness of the Saint-Eustache method allows for relationships between related forms to be much more finely described than does the classical method which would find the creation of something like the tripartite Order of engaged half-columns or the major and minor Corinthian capitals incomprehensible or at least unnecessary. This unclassical hyper-rationality of the Saint-Eustache method is not restricted to the creation of sub-Orders within Orders but is also manifest in the expression of inter-Order relationships. For example, as was described earlier, the shaping of the lower inner crossing pilaster signals its dual role as a crossing pier element and as an arcade support. Such cross-referencing can also be found in the capitals. The paired cherub-head/Corinthian capital of the main vessel nave respond participates in the inter-Order Vitruvian hierarchy of Doric-Ionic-Corinthian, while its detailing interlocks the Vitruvian sequence with another set that includes the two other capital types of the engaged half-columnar Order. For (as the discussion of the capitals of Villiers-le-Bel let us deduce) the Saint-Eustache master probably intended a variety of paired heads or masks to be used with the Corinthian capital of the main vessel engaged half-column rather than the uniform angel heads executed in the seventeenth century; in other words, this capital was designed as a conflation of the Corinthian capital used for the aisle half-column and the paired masks used for the arcade half-column. Surprisingly the features that distinguish the Saint-Eustache method from the classical system of the Orders – the concept of an Order as being primarily defined by its support type, the theoretically limitlessness number of Orders and sub-Orders, the very concept of sub-Orders, and the extreme explicitness of the method – can be understood in terms of the architect’s Late Gothic background: I say surprisingly, because so far it has

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been demonstrated that on a formal level Saint-Eustache is profoundly anti-Late Gothic. Furthermore, the method concerns the development of a precise repertoire of determinate forms, which was not a dominant concern of Flamboyant architecture where the classically derived colonette had been rejected as the exclusive format which the various elements of the real and illusionistic structural system of the interior could take. It is, however, the extraordinary freedom of invention which this rejection both encouraged and symbolizes that stands behind the non-classical aspects of the Saint-Eustache design which now concerns us. To understand this apparent paradox it would be useful first to briefly review the development of the Flamboyant bundle pier. This pier type is often described as the final and inevitable product in the evolution of the Gothic support which had had two earlier manifestations: the High Gothic pilier cantonné with its massive columnar core and four engaged members, and the Rayonnant compound pier where the sense of the core is lost as the number of engaged colonettes proliferates. The driving impetus behind the development has often been described as the desire to establish a “rational” visual correspondence between the elements of the pier and the ribs and arches of the vaults and nave arcade. In the High Gothic pilier cantonné the four engaged colonettes correspond to the arcades and to the transverse ribs of the aisle and nave vaults (Fig. 307). This type reconciles the earlier Gothic preoccupation with the simple columnar pier (seen at Notre-Dame, for example) with the Romanesque and also Early Gothic compound pier where the four sides of the support were similarly distinguished. The impulse to greater articulation is then seen as engendering the Rayonnant compound pier where the now more numerous colonettes are no longer of uniform size (as in the pilier cantonné) and the correspondence between the pier elements and the linear moldings of the ribs and arches was more completely realized and precisely defined (Fig. 336). Eventually, in what has generally described as a key turning point to the Flamboyant, the capitals of the colonettes were abandoned as was the notion that the engaged elements have a circular section (which had previously resulted in a disjunction with the non-circular rib profiles). Thus the schematic continuity of load and support elements became an actual one (Fig. 298). To a certain extent there is some validity to this analysis in terms of a growing prioritization of one aspect of the Gothic pier and vault system, i.e. the subordination of the pier to the forms of the vaulting. But to understand the shedding of the last vestiges of the colonette only in these terms overlooks the fact that the development of the Late Gothic bundle pier was actually more complicated and varied. The final breakdown of the idea of a predetermined formal vocabulary represented by the Gothic colonette initiated a new design freedom wherein almost every aspect of the pier and of the interior tectonic system is opened to exploration and invention. The very idea of uniform continuity between the profiles of the pier and those of the ribs and arches that seems to stand behind the creation of the uncapitaled Late Gothic pier itself became an option and was no longer categorically necessary. Thus while many architects into the early sixteenth century designed interiors where every molding of the pier continued upward to become a rib or arch profile (Fig. 337), others designed piers of discontinuity where the complex moldings of the arches and ribs only emerge at their springing point (Fig. 295, 299). Another important variable was the pier plan, which could now take virtually any configuration and could be of greater or lesser complexity or of a looser or more apparent symmetry in its profiling. Moldings could be many or few, and their shape take a wide variety of profiles. At the same time, the bundle pier type was not the only possibility, for cylindrical as well as historically inspired pier types and elevations are also found, as we have seen. Late Gothic architects were no longer obliged to work with a preordained form but rather were free to explore the abstract possibilities of a purely geometric repertoire of elements and equally free (or sometimes required) to work with historicist forms (which were also now open to

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reinterpretation, for example the pilier cantonné at Rodez, Fig. 331). In almost every new building they invented original and unique compositions with the result that the period presented no one classic solution in terms of pier type, elevation or interior structural system the way the High Gothic did. Even in buildings that were related geographically and temporally, a variety of possibilities were explored as can be seen in a comparison of the nearly contemporary designs of the Parisian Saint-Merry, Saint-Gervais, and the choir of Saint-Etienne-du-Mont (Figs. 259, 274, 295). In a general sense the possibility of a limitless number of Orders used at Saint-Eustache and the unique uncanonical character of the components of many of the sub-Orders – the minor and major Corinthian capitals, the engaged half-columnar molding bundles – should be understood against this Late Gothic background of extreme variability and freedom of design invention. That is, the Saint-Eustache architect can be understood as continuing to operate within the great conceptual and formal latitude offered to him by his training where virtually no canonical norms or limits are posited. The Flamboyant conception of forms as abstract and malleable allowed the Saint-Eustache architect to perceive the new classical repertoire not as Fig. 336. Saint Denis abbey church, interior. fixed and finite but as open to novel exploration. But a more specific link can also be established between the highly articulate use of the Orders at Saint-Eustache and the Late Gothic. In three important Parisian interiors dating from the mid-fifteenth to early sixteenth centuries are found a variant of the bundle pier which is shaped according to an approach that suggestively parallels the method of the Orders used at Saint-Eustache. At Saint-Séverin, Saint-Médard and Saint-Merry the moldings of the naves piers are grouped into four clusters which correspond to the four main sides of the pier (Figs. 258, 259, 338).9 At SaintMédard and Saint-Merry two configurations of molding clusters occur, one used for the arcade sides of the pier and the other on the nave and aisle sides. At Saint-Séverin three different configurations are used, one for the arcade supports, one for the nave and one for the aisle. What makes these piers of special significance for us is that they are of the type of discontinuity, that is the intricate profiling of the clusters does not correspond to that of the ribs and arches above, unlike piers of uniform continuity whose profiling is seamlessly absorbed into the system of arches and ribs with no transition between load and support indicated (Figs. 298, 337). In the three Parisian interiors the pier detailing is thus designed independently from that of the superstructure while of course at the same time the pier is related to it in its four sided organization. That is, in the most general way, the pier follows the vaulting arrangement but in its detailing it is detached and  As has been noted above the nave of SaintMédard dates to the second half of the fifteenth century and Saint-Merry was begun in c. 1510 and the nave finished in c.  1520. The building history of Saint-Séverin is somewhat complicated. In brief, the western bays of the nave date to the thirteenth

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century, while the eastern bays, whose upper elevation follows that of the earlier bays, date to the second half of the fifteenth century. The choir was begun in 1489. For Saint-Séverin see Dumolin, Les églises de France, pp. 54–61; and Boinet, Les églises Parisiennes, pp. 217–233.

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Fig. 338. Saint-Eustache, nave pier plan compared to Saint-Séverin, nave pier plan.

autonomous, and this detailing is highly articulate, allowing the different support functions of the pier to be individuated by their unique molding configurations. Saint-Séverin with its three different clusters corresponding to the three main functions of the pier is the most articulate example of this Parisian type. Conceptually it also presents a Late Gothic counterpart to the main vessel piers of Saint-Eustache where the three support functions are similarly distinguished through their molding configurations (Fig. 338). In other words the method developed by the Saint-Eustache master where very fine distinctions are made between closely related forms was already an approach taken by some architects in the Parisian Late Gothic. It should also be remembered that, of course, both Jean Delamarre, architect of Saint-Victor, and Pierre Lemercier, native of the nearby town of Pontoise, would have been exposed to this particular Parisian approach. That the method of systematic and articulate diversity of detailing was in fact already consciously employed in the Late Gothic is supported by the evidence that it can also be observed in piers other than of the bundle type, not coincidentally found in the ambulatory of Saint-Séverin. At the entrance to the ambulatory, on both the north and south, stand cylindrical piers rising from octagonal bases. These are succeeded by plain octagonal piers, which in turn are followed by octagonal piers embellished with tracery. This sequence culminates in the center of the ambulatory, where an octagonal pier decorated by tracery is twisted into an astonishing spiral form (Fig. 339). Thus the approach of making fine and expressive distinctions between related support forms, which had been applied to the shaping of the complex, bundle piers of the nave, was subsequently extended to the simpler individual supports of the ambulatory in an ingenious and imaginative, serial manner. Furthermore, the principle underlying the invention of the Saint-Séverin ambulatory

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Fig. 339. Paris, Saint-Séverin, ambulatory.

sequence is markedly similar to the method that stands behind the development of an Order and its sub-Orders at Saint-Eustache. In each case a similarly formed group of supports is meaningfully and imaginatively varied in detailing, and there is the potential for the group, Order, or series to be expanded by as many variants or sub-Orders as are needed. Thus the architect inherited from his Flamboyant training an approach that depended upon the establishment of differences and similarities between supports which, even in the case of the bundle pier, are identifiable as comparatively autonomous; and – what is perhaps most important – he recognized that this approach could be successfully transposed to the Renaissance vocabulary which offered a new and varied repertoire of determinate support elements and types. He perceived that, in fact, the explicitness of articulation that the bundle pier could evoke through its malleable shaping could be even better achieved by the forms of the classical Orders, because they are truly autonomous and, moreover, provide the combining of supports and capitals, both of which, as the architect came to realize, could participate in his method of systematic and articulate diversity. The second method at Saint-Eustache thus represents a fusion of the conceptual possibilities of a Late Gothic approach and the formal potential of the classical vocabulary. These observations, which ultimately concern the mobility of imagination of the architect, open a still deeper perspective on the question of his underlying design methodology and the fundamental stylistic character of the building as a whole. Here we discover a methodological substratum that runs beneath the twin methods that has concerned this chapter so far and also the formal analysis of previous discussion. As a result of his training in and attachment to the Late Gothic, the architect was not limited to any set formal vocabulary, iconography, or syntax. Like his peers and predecessors, he tended rather to conceive

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form in an abstract way and at a very high conceptual level, and to subject all received architectural detail to this process and to an exceptionally sophisticated design methodology. He thus had both the tendency and the ability not only to develop the second method but also to adapt it to the historicist first method, and thus to deal with a complex range of formal sources; to take pier plans from the Romanesque and the Late Gothic, details from medieval and Renaissance architecture, elevations from contemporary and historicist France and Italy, and integrate them in a complex composition in which all the various originally distinct styles were mutually absorbed and transformed by the others. In other words, the Late Gothic, although providing for only relatively minor aspects of the explicit formal vocabulary of Saint-Eustache, is omnipresent in the building at the most basic level of design. One remaining aspect of this design process in which diverse formal languages are reduced to a single, syncretistic form of expression, concerns a specific Late Gothic technique used to achieve this end: namely, what might best be called the technique of fusion. In classical architecture each form within a composition – whether the comparatively modest composition of a column or the more complex design of an elevation or an interior – is distinguishable as a discreet entity. In Flamboyant architecture we have seen that, to the contrary, such principles of autonomy are often thwarted as forms fuse together and the distinctions between them blur. Thus, for example at Saint-Merry, the stringcourse beneath the clerestory penetrates the vertical nave responds, the pier and arcade moldings interpenetrate each other and the pier moldings emerge gradually from the pier base (Fig. 259). At Saint-Eustache this phenomenon is also present and is most clearly evident in the pier structures where the horizontal moldings of the entablatures of the square corner pilasters, their capitals, and the bases of the colonettes seem to disappear into the vertical members which flank them (Figs. 23, 31, 155). Where the corner elements are paired and frame the responds, the horizontal moldings seem to not simply disappear into the center element (as they do on the crossing piers) but to pass through it. Furthermore, at the lowest levels of the piers the engaged half-columns and square core do not rise from bases but emerge, at an angle, from the octagonal plinth which they thus seem to penetrate and bond with. In this manner of interknitting forms the comparatively simple concept of a Romanesque pier – already transformed through its conceptual fusion with the articulate section of a Late Gothic bundle pier, its Italianate detailing, and its placement in a High Gothic elevation scheme – is further transformed into a sleeker and more polished structure. A striking manifestation of the technique of fusion occurs on the crossing piers where the capitals are interlinked into a serial structure with indeterminate boundaries: The central capital of the banded colonette is either obscured by or largely composed of the two pseudo-rosettes of the flanking pilaster capitals (Fig. 91). Thereby what might “normally” have been read as three distinct, autonomous forms are merged and their reading becomes unresolvedly ambiguous, the classical boundaries between them broken by the shared rosettes. What is particularly noteworthy about this detail is that unlike those cited above it does not concern the interpenetration of linear moldings; in other words, the architect was able to re-conceptualize the Late Gothic technique and adapt it to forms which, unlike moldings, have no counterpart in Late Gothic architecture. Thus the key to the stylistic concept and character of Saint-Eustache is the Late Gothic. At the same time, however, the building is by no means a Late Gothic one. This seeming paradox is resolved when we realize that the Late Gothic ability to abstract and absorb all architectural material is ultimately turned on itself at Saint-Eustache so that Late Gothic forms, concepts and techniques become part of a syncretistic fusion with historicist and Renaissance counterparts. And it is this fusion, which is made possible by and encompasses the Late Gothic, that constitutes the stylistic and methodological core of Saint-Eustache.

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Fig. 340. Brou, nave pier base.

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Fig. 341. Triel, Saint-Martin, choir pier capital.

This understanding of the building opens up a new perspective on early French Renaissance church architecture as a whole. It might be said that, unlike contemporary châteaux architecture, church building in the early sixteenth century never developed a unified formal solution, and that the works involved cannot be comprehended in terms of a coherent point of view. But if we reexamine the seemingly disparate range of solutions that were produced we will find that they are all comprehensible in the conceptual terms that we have established for Saint-Eustache. Compared to Saint-Eustache – the only monumental ecclesiastical project designed in the period – in none of the following examples of church extensions and re-modellings do the various medieval and Renaissance traditions join in quite such a complex process of mutual transformation on so many conceptual and formal levels. Yet in all of them the formal and theoretical agility that can be credited to the unique and versatile training of French architects of the period emerges as a common unifying thread, and in some works several of the strategies employed at Saint-Eustache reappear. Indeed, one of these, the use of classicizing historicist models, has already been discussed. Two other approaches that reoccur are the technique of fusion and the principle of systematic and articulate decorative variety. Not surprisingly both of these are anticipated at Saint-Maclou in the nascent pier structures between the chapels. This grouping was earlier described as a Renaissance translation of the historicist composition between the chapels of the twelfth-century ambulatory (Fig. 237). In the ambulatory the central colonette is only slightly distinguished by its somewhat broader diameter. In the Renaissance grouping, however, the Late Gothic method of articulate differentiation results in this central element becoming an altogether different support type – a pilaster – from the subordinate colonettes which flank it. The pilaster is also distinguished by its greater height. This group of elements is further mutated through the technique of fusion which unsettles the determinacy and autonomy of individual elements that is apparent in both the Early Gothic colonettes and the Renaissance Orders. Thus, analogous to what occurs at Saint-Eustache, the entablatures of the Saint-Maclou colonettes pierce the center pilaster, fusing the three elements together (Fig. 242).10 More extraordinary, however, is the lower elevation of the pier (Fig. 241). The pilaster descends through what should be the common base of all three elements, seeming to shove the center section of the base down through the socle on to the top of the plinth. The pilaster continues to weave through the plinth finally emerging as an ambiguous protruberant form. This interweaving and transformation of elements and the staggering of levels – which also 10

  This also occurs at Villiers-le-Bel (Fig. 265).

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Fig. 342. Triel, Saint-Martin, ambulatory pier base.

Architectural Composition    Chapter 7

Fig. 343. Triel, Saint-Martin, ambulatory pier capitals.

includes the base of the moldings framing the chapels – can be compared to a Late Gothic base, as can be found, for example, at Brou where polymorphous vertical members engage in the same complex three dimensional interpenetration as they descend (Fig. 340). Thus at Saint-Maclou, both the Early Gothic model and the Renaissance forms in which the Gothic format are realized are transformed by sophisticated Late Gothic design techniques into something that is neither Early Gothic nor Renaissance, nor, of course, Late Gothic. A similar metamorphosis of interplaying sources occurs in historicist designs of other architects as well. At Valmont, for example, in a manner analogous to the interlocking crossing pier capitals of Saint-Eustache, the paired Ionic capitals of the triforium are joined together; instead of each capital having two volutes, they share a common center volute (Fig. 325). It is far more usual, however, to find this technique applied to linear forms. In the historicist choir of Triel, for example, the moldings of the intrados of the arcade arches weave through and finally disappear into the entablatures of the columnar piers (Fig. 341). And in the more complex structures of the ambulatory piers, the base of the colonettes disappears into the center pilaster which descends to a lower level (Fig. 342). Here we see too that the Late Gothic method of articulate differentiation is employed, resulting in the use of three different support types – fluted pilaster, small colonettes and column – for three different support functions – transverse rib respond, cross rib respond and chapel arch support (Figs. 320, 343). Furthermore, as at SaintEustache, the capital types also serve to articulate relationships between elements. Thus the two “minor” cross rib supports have Corinthian capitals and the two “major” supports have Ionic ones. Again the resultant composition is comprehensible, not at as a naive layering of Renaissance form on top of a generic Gothic structure, but rather as a deliberate and sophisticated fusion of an eclectic range of sources. Similar observations can be made about projects where historicist models are not employed. The Loire valley chapel at the château of Champigny-sur-Veude, like many chapels of the early Renaissance, with its reductive elevation and unitary space, adheres to a type commonly used for chapels through the Late Gothic period (Fig. 344).11 But even though the architect was compelled to adhere to this traditional format, within the limited area available to him in the clusters of rib responds, he created a highly imaginative  For example, the fifteenth-century chapel at Châteaudun, and the early sixteenth-century chapels at Ussé, Oiron, Thouars and Montresor. See Babelon, Les Châteaux… de la Renaissance,

11

pp. 63–70, 133–135, 361–362; and Pérouse de Montclos, Architecture en région Centre, pp. 258– 260, 291–293, 456–458, 640–641.

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Fig. 344. Champigny-sur-Veude, chapel interior.

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Early French Renaissance

Fig. 345. Champigny-sur-Veude, chapel, wall respond.

Fig. 346. Champigny-sur-Veude, chapel, base.

composition where Renaissance forms are reinterpreted through techniques and methods drawn from both High and Late Gothic architecture (Fig. 345). The separate elements that will eventually become vault and wall ribs are united in a base of Late Gothic complexity to which they are bonded through the technique of fusion (Fig. 346). As the composition rises there is a constant ambiguous play between the autonomy of the individual pilasters and colonettes on the one hand and that of the fused composition as a whole on the other. At the level below the sculpture niches the separate elements are united by an entablature through which the colonettes pass and in which the colonette capitals are embedded; the pilasters, however, simply pass behind the entablature and rise through the niche where they are temporarily terminated by capitals (Fig. 347). All five vertical elements then reemerge at the top level where they are pulled together one last time by capitals fused into a continuous band (Fig. 348). Conceptually this composition, which alternately subdivides into discreet Renaissance forms and rigorously coalesces as a unified structure, can be understood in terms of the principle underlying the Late Gothic technique of fusion. At the same time, however, the way this technique is brought to bear at Champigny-sur-Veude makes it clear that the architect had also studied the High Gothic pilier cantonné, as seen for example at Reims (Fig. 310), with its grouping of colonettes around a massive core as well as the High Gothic capital which both terminates the arcade pier and allows the responds to pass through it. In other words, already in this comparatively early work the Late Gothic ability to reduce all forms and ideas to a common language allows the architect to employ a historicist formula to realize a Late Gothic technique in Renaissance forms. This virtuoso concatenation of eclectic sources is entirely comprehensible in terms of the way we have characterized the fundamental stylistic methodology of Saint-Eustache. So far, in all the buildings that have been considered, the formal vocabulary has been dominated by elements taken from the Orders – either in pure Renaissance guise or that of medieval classicism – and the anti-classical forms of the Flamboyant are rejected. Although most church architecture of the period can be understood in these terms, different

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Architectural Composition    Chapter 7

Fig. 347. Champigny-sur-Veude, chapel, wall respond, detail.

solutions are also evident. At Saint-Pierre at Caen and Saint-Etienne-du-Mont, Late Gothic forms are a frank and obvious presence – in one case by design, in the other by necessity – but it would be a mistake to see these two major works as resulting from a less evolved or sophisticated design process than is evident at Champigny-sur-Veude or Saint-Eustache. In the ambulatory and radiating chapels of Saint-Pierre in Caen the architect Hector Sohier, faced with the incompatibility of a Late Gothic pier and the Renaissance Orders, unlike his contemporaries, does not reject the Late Gothic element – instead he rejects the Orders and employs a different non-tectonic classicizing vocabulary of decorative forms (Figs. 244–246). The Late Gothic bundle pier of the type of uniform continuity, where moldings flow upward without interruption to become arches and ribs, here functions as an elegant scaffolding upon which is hung a fantastic assemblage of rib-crawling grotesques and piled-up candelabra motifs – a brilliantly imaginative Renaissance extension of the Late Gothic system of openwork ribs and hanging bosses. Furthermore the detailing of the interior is uniformly classical, for the profiling of the piers and ribs consists of dense accretions of classical moldings. This solution was fundamentally different from a historicist treatment, but it was as conceptually logical. Whereas at Saint-Eustache, Saint-Maclou or Triel forms derived from the Orders are reconciled to the French tradition through the intermediary of historicist sources that provide a shared basis of tectonic classicism, Sohier established what could be called a common ground of exuberant complexity: The seemingly limitless abundance of intricate moldings on a Late Gothic pier are matched to the equally limitless range of fantastic possibilities available in the language of grotesques. Thus from the thinnest of possible connecting

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conceptual threads the architect spins forth a highly developed design of great stylistic and aesthetic unity. At Saint-Etienne-du-Mont in Paris the Renaissance builders did not choose the Late Gothic but had it thrust upon them in the form of the soaring hemicycle of the choir, begun in 1492 (Figs. 274, 349). This preexisting project limited their options, for the proportions and elevation of the medieval structure would have to be maintained for the sake of formal unity. The Renaissance architects were somewhat fortunate, however, in that the piers that they inherited were not of the bundle type but rather followed another Late Gothic format of simple cylinders from which the moldings of the ribs and arches only emerge at the top. It is upon these more neutral pier forms that the two-phase Renaissance extension literally hangs. The first phase, which is the one that concerns us, dates from c. 1530–1545 when the choir was completed with the erection of the straight bays. Several changes were planned at this time. The first was a brilliant stroke. The soaring cylindrical supports were divided into two more classically proportioned elements through the creation of a lower range of arches supporting a balustrade which wraps around the piers. It has long been known that the balustrade itself was begun in 1545, but it has always been assumed that Fig. 348. Champigny-sur-Veude, chapel, wall the pseudo-two part elevation was part of the original Late respond, detail. Gothic hemicycle scheme which was continued in the later straight bays and on top of which was added the balustrade. A careful examination of the fabric – facilitated by the recent cleaning of the building – reveals otherwise, however. This range of arches, built together with the 1530s piers of the straight bays, was cut into and added to the hemicycle piers through skillful suturing of old and new masonry.12 Thus both the balustrade and the arcade, which together form a gallery, were part of the c. 1530–1545 campaign. This composition of a free-standing arcade which includes a balustrade turning around the piers is a historicist one, perhaps the best known example of which is found in the thirteenth-century cathedral of Rouen (Fig. 350). At Saint-Etienne the new scheme for the choir was conceived together with a Renaissance choir screen and the famous jubé whose spiral stairs give access to the balustraded gallery (Figs. 351, 352). The extravagant, visually compelling jubé, as seen from the nave, was made the dominant Renaissance focus of the building, playing resonantly against the 12  In the upper range of arches of the fifteenthcentury hemicycle the masonry courses of the cylindrical piers bond with those of the arches and arch moldings; the area where the moldings seem to disappear into the piers are carved from one block. In the lower range of arches in the hemicycle, however, no such bonding occurs, instead it is quite clear that the arches have been cut into and added to the piers. In the later straight bays the coursing

228

is once again uniform. Such complex masonry work was well within the capabilities of French masons whose talents in this area were unsurpassed. We need only remember the intricate bonding of twelfth-, fifteenth, early and late sixteenth-century fabric at Saint-Maclou in Pontoise to realize just how skilled French masons were. On French masonry technique see Jean-Marie Pérouse de Montclos, L’architecture à la française, XVIe, XVIIe, XVIIIe siècles, Paris 1982.

Gothic

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Late-Gothic Strategies

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Architectural Composition    Chapter 7

reconceived choir rising behind it. Conversely the elliptical central arch of the jubé, echoing those of the arcade of the straight bays, and its other Gothic features are deliberately calculated to further visually integrate the jubé with the modified choir. The splendid jubé should not blind us, however, to the subtle effect worked on the choir piers. The builders of Saint-Etienne rejected the simplistic conversion of a Late Gothic pier into a Renaissance one by sheathing it in Italianate decoction – as was done on one of the side-aisle piers of Gisors which dates to 1526 (Figs. 353, 354). Instead, in Paris the look of the entire choir was subtly reconfigured. The Late Gothic ability to abstract and reconceive on both a conceptual and formal level allowed the architect to appropriate the historicist motif of the gallery and employ it as a device to visually divide the hyper-attenuated Late Gothic piers into two sections each suggesting the proportions of classical columns.13 Throughout this discussion I have used the terms historicist medieval, Late Gothic, and classicizing or Renaissance – meaning Italianate – to describe the various formal sources, techniques and design principles used in early sixteenth-century French church projects, and I have stressed how all of these were mutually Fig. 349. Paris, Saint-Etienne-du-Mont, ambulatory. transformed into something that was neither High Medieval, Late Gothic, nor Renaissance. Furthermore, I have shown that the sophisticated conceptual and formal mobility of the Late Gothic was the catalyst that permitted, was itself embraced and finally transformed by, this syncretistic design methodology. But I have not called the resulting synthesis, which in various forms unites all the works discussed, by a name. I would propose that in fact this profound synthesis is really what is meant by the phrase “early French Renaissance  Given the choir, the nave elevation, begun a generation later in 1580, is not difficult to understand (Fig. 351). The scheme is precisely the same but every detail is changed except for the cylindricality of the piers, already a classicizing shape. The forms of the choir were given a more contemporary appearance through the introduction of consoles and classicizing capitals and through the substitution of round arches for pointed ones and classical moldings for Gothic ones. The changes, however, remain sympathetic to the original character of the building. What is most interesting

13

about the modifications is the progressive lessening of classicism in detail as the elevation rises. This allowed for the forms nearest the beholder to be most correctly classical – in keeping with the taste of the late sixteenth century – but at the same time kept the new elevation as a whole within the visual style of the early building. Interestingly, the only decorative ornament in the upper elevation – the capital – is not a classical one but is a classicized translation of a Late Gothic impost ring (as can be seen, for example at Saint-Nicolas-de-Port) through which the pier passes without interruption.

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Fig. 350. Rouen cathedral, side aisle.

Fig. 352. Paris, Saint-Etienne-du-Mont, jubé.

230

Fig. 351. Paris, Saint-Etienne-du-Mont, nave.

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Fig. 353. Gisors, Saint-Gervais-SaintProtais, south side aisle.

of

Architectural Composition    Chapter 7

Fig. 354. Gisors, Saint-Gervais-SaintProtais, detail of south side aisle pier.

church architecture”. That is, the term, rather than nominally denoting the time frame and geographic location of the works involved, can now be used as a positive designation of a theoretically unified and stylistically distinct group of buildings. As the most developed, most complex and monumental expression of this style Saint-Eustache emerges, not as the anomalous and quirky white elephant of a transitional period, but rather as the most brilliant and lucid embodiment of an architecture firmly in possession of its own self-affirming logic and integrity.

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Le Pogam, Pierre-Yves*. “Le paysage artistique vers 1500: les mots et les choses”, in France 1500. Entre Moyen Âge et Renaissance, ed. Elisabeth Taburet-Delahaye, Geneviève BrescBautier, and Thierry Crépin-Leblond, Paris 2012, pp. 31–37.

Lévêque, Jean-Jacques. L’Hôtel de Ville de Paris, une histoire, un musée, Paris 1983.

Le Roux de Lincy, Adrien and Victor Calliat. Église Saint-Eustache à Paris, Paris 1850.

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Lebeuf, Abbé Jean. Histoire de la Ville et de tout le diocèse de Paris, Paris 1754. New annotated ed. by Hippolyte Cocheris, 4 vols, Paris, 1863–1870. Lefèvre-Pontalis, Eugène. “Étampes: Église de Notre-Dame”, Congrès archéologique de France 82 (1919): 6–29. ———. L’église de Triel, Paris 1921. ———. “Les nefs sans fenêtres dans les églises romanes et gothiques”, Bulletin Monumental 81(1922): 290–306.

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origines à 1789. Évolution matérielle, juridique et économique, Paris 1960. Meunier, Florian*. “Martin Chambiges, architecte des cathédrales flamboyantes”, un-published summary in École des Chartes, Positions des thèses, 1999, pp. 297–304. Mirot, Leon. “Un inventaire des fondations de la paroisse Saint-Eustache au XVe siècle”,

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Credits The photographs in this book were taken by the author, except for those credited to Ralph Lieberman and the material taken from the public domain, including the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris. The cover image is due to Marvin Trachtenberg and Dorothy Ko. The author did her utmost to contact copyright holders of illustration material; claimants are invited to contact the editor, Marvin Trachtenberg, if necessary.

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Author’s Acknowledgments

Generous fellowships which allowed me to pursue my work in Europe and in New York were provided by the Institute of Fine Arts, the American Society of the French Legion of Honor, and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. I express to all these organizations a deep gratitude. But it would be remiss of me if the only thanks I offered to the Institute was for its liberal financial support: the superb training I received there stands behind every word on these pages. Since my first class with him on the art of the Florentine quattrocento, I have always admired the brilliance and erudition of my official dissertation advisor, Colin Eisler; I thank him for graciously undertaking this role, and for his encouragement and wise advice. Chief among the people who facilitated my research abroad was Charlotte Lacaze of the American College in Paris. It was she who set many wheels in motion, putting me in touch with people and institutions crucial to the successful completion of my work. Even more meaningful, however, was the friendship she offered, which I regard as one of the greatest benefits of my time in Paris. A fundamental source for my research were the building documents. Until the 1920 thesis of Charles Terrasse (“L’Architecture religieuse de la Renaissance à Paris, dans le Parisis et le Vexin,” for the Ecole Nationale des Chartes) the known documentation on the building chiefly consisted of material relating to the pre-Renaissance history of the parish. Terrasse discovered a number of documents, primarily concerning the later phases of the building history. Upon his death the only copy of the unpublished thesis apparently was lost. I would like to thank his son, Antoine Terrasse, for his kind and diligent, if ultimately fruitless, search for the manuscript. Fortunately, however, before the thesis was mislaid it had been consulted by other scholars. Dominique Hervier and François-Charles James, working with and significantly augmenting Terrasse’s material, assembled a group of about 50 documents – either fully or partially transcribed. I owe a great debt to Françoise Boudon of the Centre de Recherches sur l’Histoire de l’Architecture Moderne (C.N.R.S., Université de Paris IV) for allowing me to consult this material. Michelle Bimbenet of the Archives Nationales aided me in completing the transcriptions of the partially recorded documents, and also transcribed a number of previously unknown documents for me. Bernard Barbiche of the Ecole Nationale des Chartes was also helpful in this enterprise. I am also indebted to Catherine Grodecki of the Archives Nationales for providing me with the transcription of a Saint-Eustache document prior to her publication of it. If the documents were a crucial source for me, far more fundamental was the physical evidence of the building itself. I wish to express my appreciation to Père Henri Delatouche, curé of Saint-Eustache, for allowing me (and my tripod) unlimited access to the church. The hours I spent in Saint-Eustache were often enlivened by the charming companionship of Père Joseph de Tinguy who freely shared his observations and knowledge about the church and parish, and who made me feel at home in that immense structure. I am also appreciative of the assistance offered by the staffs of the following libraries and research institutions: the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, the Bibliothèque Doucet, the Archives Nationales, the Bibliothèque de la Direction de la Patrimoine, the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, the Villa I Tatti of Harvard University, the Bibliotheca

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Hertziana, the Library of the Institute of Fine Arts, the New York Public Library, and Avery Library of Columbia University. Jean Guillaume of the Université de Paris-Sorbonne and of the Centre d’Etudes Supérieures de la Renaissance, Université François-Rabelais, Tours, was involved with this dissertation since nearly the beginning. Professor Guillaume’s encouragement, counsel, and criticism have been invaluable; I greatly appreciate his becoming an official reader of the thesis, and his participation in my defense. My other non-I.F.A. reader, Henri Zerner of Harvard University, kindly read the thesis while on sabbatical in France. His enthusiasm and carefully considered comments are much appreciated. My work further benefitted from conversations with Monique Chatenet, Claude Mignot, Naomi Miller, Jean-Marie Pérouse de Montclos, Anne Prache, Myra Nan Rosenfeld, Catherine Wilkinson, and my good friend and fellow student Denise Allen. Ralph Lieberman generously provided me with copies of his exquisite photographs of Saint-Eustache. For their help in patiently guiding me through the labyrinth of N.Y.U. bureaucracy I thank Keith Kelly and Karen Lamberti of the Institute of Fine Arts. It is difficult to imagine a less sociable creature than a dissertating graduate student. I gratefully acknowledge the forbearance of all my friends, in particular that of Mark Dubois, Parker Hodges, Sasha Newman, George Romney, Julie Saul, the late, profoundly missed, Greg Whittington; and of my sisters Natasha and Nina Sankovitch. No thanks or acknowledgment could begin to express what I owe my parents, Anatole and Tilde Sankovitch, for I owe them so much. To use conventional phrases would be misleading, for my parents have continuously redefined and deepened the meaning of words such as “encouragement” and “faith,” “support” and “patience,” “intelligence” and “humor.” Finally I thank Marvin Trachtenberg who first taught me how to think about architecture and who realized what a fascinating topic Saint-Eustache was before I did. Much of what is found in this dissertation arose from hours of discussion with him and from his meticulous reading of my manuscript. But if I was privileged to have this gifted architectural historian to help me develop my ideas, I am even more grateful that this extraordinary man was my companion these past seven – sometimes trying – years, and nevertheless intends to remain so.

New York, March 1991

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