The XI-century monks who built monastic churches cleared the path for the laymen builders of the Gothic cathedrals. With persistency, with courage, the monk architects went forward, seeking a way. And the way sought, the problem on which they concentrated their energies, was how to protect their churches by masonry vaulting without sacrificing amplitude or lighting.[4]
Out of their trials to solve that problem there emerged a new principle of construction, and Gothic architecture was then born. Thrust and counterthrust was the law of its being. Instead of the Romanesque idea of equilibrium by dead load, by sheer ma.s.s, which may be called a continuous counterb.u.t.ting of the vault"s thrust, there now was subst.i.tuted equilibrium by intermittent abutment. By means of diagonal-crossing ribs the vertical and lateral thrusts of the stone roof were collected at fixed points, which points alone had to be counterb.u.t.ted. Thick walls were a necessity in a Romanesque edifice, if it were to be stable, but in a Gothic building the walls could be made a mere sh.e.l.l, since all the work was done by an active skeleton, a bone structure of stone, consisting of piers, arches, and b.u.t.tresses.
To define shortly, Gothic architecture is the art of erecting buildings with vaults whose ribs intersect (concentration of load) and whose thrusts are stopped by b.u.t.tresses (the grounding of the thrusts). The never-ceasing downward and outward thrust of the vaulting is met by an equivalent resistance in pier and b.u.t.tress and solid earth. Equilibrium results from that well-adjusted opposition of forces.
Since the starting point in the development of Gothic was the vaulting, and how to subst.i.tute a stone vault for a wooden roof was the germinal idea of the Romanesque builder, it is no digression to turn to the earlier school, the chrysalis of Gothic. The name "Romanesque" is an affair of yesterday, employed by a French archaeologist about 1825.
Various local designations had hitherto been used, such as Lombard, or Norman, or Romano-Byzantine, but the term Romanesque for this architecture is as suitable as the name Romance is for the popular languages which, in that same period, were forming out of the corruption of Latin. A definition given by M. Camille Enlart is excellent: "Romanesque art was a product of Rome, animated by a new spirit, and combined with a certain number of elements of barbarian or Oriental origin."
Rome gave the basilica plan to western Europe, which for centuries continued to build its churches as oblong halls with a small apse at one end. The hall, or nave, consisted of a central vessel with side aisles that were divided from it by piers. In the treatment of vaulting and the method of stone laying Romanesque architecture also derived from Rome.
Byzantine influences certainly were important, but they affected the decoration more than the plan or the structure; the use of the Byzantine cupola was merely occasional. The Romanesque masters copied the ivories and miniatures of the Eastern Greeks till, in time, they turned to nature for their models, and then their work took on new life and evolved into the glory which is Gothic sculpture.
While some have laid stress on the Oriental influences, rather than those of Rome, in the formation of Romanesque art, others have overemphasized the personality and fantasy introduced into French architecture by the Barbarian invasions. No doubt the influx of new blood added new elements, but since knowledge of the invaders" art is fragmentary, there can be no scientific base for the theory. Composite, certainly, were the causes for the new spirit which animated architecture after the Carolingian day, but it is safe to say that the influence of Rome predominated.
In the course of the centuries the Roman basilica was modified by the Catholic liturgy. For catechumens, or penitents, was made the porch, or narthex, before the western end. Tribunes were built over the side aisles.[5] Increased church ceremonial brought about a development of the choir. The custom of burying the dead in crypts under the main altar originated the raised chancel. Between the choir and the nave the builders began to insert a transverse nave called a transept.[6] Such an enlargement enabled the congregation to approach closer to the altar ceremonies; only the bigger churches built transepts in the XI century.
Then the liturgical writers saw in a transept the extended arms of the Cross, and it was in that spirit the XIII-century transepts were made--their symbolism was posterior. The first ambulatories were no doubt built in churches which possessed some revered relic, to facilitate the pa.s.sage of the pilgrim crowd. (The term ambulatory will be used to designate the continuation of the choir aisle round the apse.) Before long that curving processional path, with radiating apsidal chapels opening from it, was taken to represent the crown of thorns about the Sacred Head. "All things as pertain to offices and matters ecclesiastical be full of divine signification and mysteries, and overflow with a celestial sweetness: if so be that a man be diligent in his study of them, and know how to draw honey from the rock and oil from the hardest stone." So wrote William Durandus, the XIII-century French bishop whose _Rationale_, or treatise on church symbolism, was an inspiration for centuries and, next to the Bible, the most frequently printed book of the older times.[7]
Despite a host of additions to the basilica of Rome--transept, ambulatory, a long choir, apse chapels, towers--despite the discarding of the cla.s.sic orders and of antiquity"s use of a veneer of finer stone (the Romanesque builder used the unadorned stone of his own region) the church of western Europe remained, in general plan, a Roman basilica.
Like Rome, they covered their main vessel by a flat wooden roof, although they knew how to build barrel and groin vaulting.[8]
Now a wooden roof is an easy prey for fire. Such roofs, a succession of long-continued invasions, and the faulty construction of Merovingian and Carolingian churches are accountable for the fact that in France to-day is no church that predates the year 1000. Some portions of ancient wall are embedded in later work, and some few early crypts are intact. But to speak with certainty of Merovingian and Carolingian architecture is impossible, though they formed the incubating phase of Romanesque art.
In France the IX and X centuries were periods of overwhelming disaster.
In the Midi were Saracen incursions. In northern and central France Norman pirates wiped out Charlemagne"s revival of art. As far as Poitiers and Clermont the Northmen"s path of destruction extended. "Look where you will," wrote Flodoard, the chronicler, "the sky is red with fires." To the litany was added a new invocation--_A furore Normannorum, libera nos, Domine_.
The falling to pieces of Charlemagne"s civilization and the general return of social disorders have led to an overdramatic contrasting of the year 1000, when mankind, in terror, antic.i.p.ated the ending of the world, with the rebirth of hope and of building energy, when the dread day had pa.s.sed. Whenever the gaunt horses--famine, pest, war, and death--are afoot, humanity is p.r.o.ne to look for the fulfillment of the apocalyptic prophecy. Previous to the X century the final day had been awaited, and the same superst.i.tion was to seize on the world"s imagination in following centuries.
The X century was certainly a desperate age. Fifty years of it were famine, and on the highroads people were killed for food. But the evils did not cease precisely with the year 1000; also it should be noted that a certain number of churches were begun before the XI century opened.
However, to mark the start of a new art life the year 1000 is a convenient date if we bear in mind that it was not a sharp division between Carolingian and Romanesque architecture, since a gradual evolution took place. All through the XI century the vital renewal of architecture went on, and churches were built which, to this day, are unrivaled for their profound religious spirit. They exist to tell us that in the harsh life whence they emerged there were enlightened cases.
They vindicate, by their grand simplicity and detachment of soul, the men who built them. Never was an art less one of routine than this of the so-called hidebound monks, an art of a people reborn, full of youth"s daring, an art that was never to have an old age, eager, untiring, experimental, an art that fitly generated the most scientifically sound of architectures--Gothic.
The heterogeneous races, Celtic and Gallo-Roman, Germanic, and Norse, whose conflicts long had held France in anarchy, were at last welding into one people. The advent of a vigorous third dynasty, under whose leadership social conditions improved, was another cause of art"s rebirth. Not long after 1000 the bishops formulated the _Treve de Dieu_, by which peace was enforced on the turbulent lords from Wednesday night to Monday morning. With interval of peace came commerce and wealth and the security necessary for works of the imagination. The rebuilding of churches was inevitable.
Invasions and wholesale conflagrations had impressed on the mediaeval mind the necessity of a church roof more durable than wood, but a masonry vault over a wide s.p.a.ce was a constructive feat too difficult to be achieved immediately. In fact, up to the very end of the XI century, though the builders had succeeded in vaulting with stone the crypt, the apse, and the side aisles, they continued generally to cover the wide central vessel in wood. However, the fecund idea was at work. From the time that it took possession of their imagination, to the day when Gothic, its fulfillment, was clearly enunciated, there was over a century of continuous effort--roughly speaking, from the year 1000 to the memorable day in 1144 when was dedicated the first truly Gothic monument of considerable size--the abbey church of St. Denis. Within that energetic span of years is embraced the Romanesque architecture of France.[9]
The monk, Raoul Glaber, wrote an account of the rebirth of architecture after the year 1000. It has been quoted to weariness, but is none the less a valuable contemporary record. The whole earth, he says, as of one accord seemed to throw off its tatters of old age and to reclothe itself in a white mantle of churches. The monastery in which lived monk Raoul, St. Benigne, at Dijon, was one of the first to inaugurate the new century, and its present crypt dates from the year 1001. Soon after 1017 the monks of Mont-Saint-Michel, in the far corner of Normandy, began a new church, to which belonged part of the present nave. At Chartres, Bishop Fulbert undertook to rebuild his cathedral after the fire of 1020, and the vast crypt which to-day astonishes every beholder was his work.
The chronicler, Raoul Glaber, lived under the rule of the most powerful monastic brotherhood ever organized, Benedictine Cluny, embracing several thousand houses scattered over Europe. Founded in 910, during the darkest years of the Middle Ages, Cluny kept alive the light of learning and art, "the solitary torchbearer that pa.s.sed on the flame from the spent glow of Charlemagne to the Gothic rekindling." Her monks were the pioneers of civilization. Cluny beat back barbarism with a pertinacity that should make hers an honored name in history. So established was her reputation as a civilizer that William the Conqueror wrote to the great Abbot Hugues, to beg from him Cluny monks for England, saying that he would pay their weight in bullion.
Cluny formed the savants who made the XII century memorable. Her fertile seed provided Europe with doctors, amba.s.sadors, bishops, and popes.
Gregory VII had pa.s.sed through her discipline, and in his giant task of reform, it was from Abbot Hugues that he solicited monks of Cluny. Urban II, who set in motion the First Crusade, had been a monk in the great Burgundian house. It is interesting to note that a generation of reforming pontiffs accompanied the expansion of the Romanesque movement.
This would seem to contradict the notion, which many hold, that the clergy profits by keeping the people in superst.i.tious ignorance. It is when religion is purified of its dross that man"s respiritualized faith out-flows in generous donations to the Church.
St. Benedict had taught his sons that work as well as prayer was a part of salvation. The monks of Cluny fostered agriculture, thus taking away its stigma as serf"s work. Thierry speaks of the mediaeval monastery as a model farm. In Cluny craftsmen of every kind were trained; its school of music was noted, and along the roads, as they traveled, the monks from Burgundy sang canticles. But the art of arts for Cluny was that of the builder, the supreme art that takes into its service all the others, to lead them to the glorification of G.o.d"s house. When, in bands of twelve, the monks of Cluny set out to colonize in Spain, in Germany, in Italy, in Poland, everywhere they carried with them the tool as well as the Book. As a rule they conformed in each province to the local building traditions. There was never a distinct Cluny school of Romanesque architecture.
By the end of the XI century the main provincial centers of France had each evolved its own special building characteristics. French Romanesque architecture has been divided into some six or seven regional schools--those of Normandy, Burgundy, Auvergne, Poitou, Languedoc, Provence, and a minor school, the Franco-Picard.[10]
In their efforts to protect their churches by masonry roofs, these various regional schools made use of the barrel vault or the groin vault. The latter was found too insecure to span a wide s.p.a.ce. Now, the thrust of a barrel vault was exerted along the whole length of the wall, which necessitated a continuous abutment--in other words, an enormously thick wall. Only small windows could be opened. Since the Romanesque architect had the ambition to light his church well, and not to enc.u.mber his floor surface by clumsy piers, a barrel vaulting could be but a temporary solution of the main problem.
The struggle for a satisfactory stone roof was pursued tenaciously. Many a clearstory wall was thrust apart by the vaulting"s pressure. Thus the abbey church of Bec, finished in the "forties of the XI century, was reconstructed in the "fifties, and three times, again, had to be rebuilt. No failure could daunt the courage of those old monastic builders. Already inherent in the newly amalgamated race was the creative genius of France. Perseverance and courage were to have their reward.
The theory long taught in the ecole des Chartes was that in the first part of the XI century, among a number of rural churches in the royal domain, there gradually came into use the member which was to revolutionize the science of building. The idea did not spring from one brain; it was a collective, not an individual, triumph. When, under some groin vault, no doubt at first to reinforce it, some obscure mason constructed the earliest intersecting stone ribs, the first step in Gothic architecture had been taken.[11]
From that essential organ, the other characteristics of Gothic art were deduced: flying b.u.t.tress, slender piers, expanse of windows. In a Gothic vault the infilling, or web, rested elastically on the diagonal ribs. As the load of the stone roof was thus concentrated at fixed junctures, it was necessary to reinforce only those given points. b.u.t.tresses became intermittent. All the disintegrating force of the heavy vaulting was gathered on the diagonally crossing arches. An arch never sleeps, said the old Arab proverb. Let us then, said the mediaeval architect, set a guard on it that also never sleeps; and from that idea he proceeded to develop the greatest architecture of all times. The force of expansion was counteracted by a proportionate force of compression. By means of a framework made up of vault ribs, of piers, of b.u.t.tresses, and flying b.u.t.tresses, the edifice became a living skeleton. The walls between the active members, when relieved of their load, served merely as screen inclosures and could be carved into fragile beauty and hung with transparent tapestries of colored gla.s.s. Because the flying b.u.t.tress transmitted a large part of the vault"s pressure to the exterior b.u.t.tress piles, the piers within the church could be lessened in diameter, and greater capacity be given to the interior.
Each new trial was a lesson learned. It was only with time that they adjusted precisely the sufficient counterpoise to the thrust of the vaults; it was only by degrees that the pier"s diameter was lessened, only with practice that was learned the placing of flying b.u.t.tresses neither too high nor too low. At first many a flying b.u.t.tress was made needlessly heavy. The solid wall in between the b.u.t.tresses was not discarded all at once. In the first Gothic churches windows continued to be single lights, then two or three lancets were placed side by side, subsequently each light was subdivided by mullions, and gradually an elaborate fenestration developed. For a time, too, the round arch continued in use, and the earliest vault ribs were semicircular. With the fusion of the equilateral arch and the counterb.u.t.ted intersecting ribs, the essence of Gothic architecture was achieved.
Lesser consequences of the new form of vaulting followed in logical succession. Obeying the law that it is the thing borne which commands the form of the thing that bears, the ribs may be said to have drawn out of the st.u.r.dy pier of Romanesque art the cl.u.s.tered columns of Gothic gracefulness.
Not a single beauty in a Gothic church but has a structural explanation. The soaring pinnacles that crown the b.u.t.tresses are apparently mere ornaments, but in reality those gallant little bits of decoration are of sound engineering usefulness. By weighting the b.u.t.tresses, they hasten to channel the transmitted lateral thrust of the vaulting into a vertical pressure, and they increase, too, the counterthrust of the flying b.u.t.tress against the side walls.
A clear comprehension of Gothic is impossible unless the fact be grasped that architecture is nothing if not structural, and that no decoration can veil a faulty skeleton. Ornamentation is the spontaneous blossoming of the structure, else it is meaningless--a principle many a modern architect might well digest. Too long has the most scientifically exact of architectures been judged by its embellishments, which often enough, in the hands of the copyist, do become a florid veneer without reason.
The Gothic master-of-works was right when he said that nothing which was inherently needed could be ugly. No longer were flying b.u.t.tresses hidden under the cover of wooden roofs. Proudly ranged about the church, those essential practical members became one of the distinctive beauties of the new science of building. Renan, with his treacherous half praise, has called the flying b.u.t.tress a crutch needed by an architecture which, from its start, nourished the seeds of decay, since it was based on no sound constructive formula. Its success was a prestidigitator"s trick, he said. Such criticism misunderstands the A B C of Gothic lore. Can a living limb be called a crutch? it has been aptly asked. The Gothic cathedral is not only the most complicated, but is also the most complete, organism ever conceived by man.
Where the first diagonal-crossing ribs are to be found will probably never be known. Various have been the claimants. The Rhenish claim is no longer taken seriously. Gothic made its first appearance in Germany as a fully developed French art, and its XIII-century name, there, was _opus francigenum_. In his Gothic work the Teuton showed a fondness for the _tour-de-force_ and his manual dexterity surprises more than it satisfies. The best German works in architecture are the sober Romanesque churches. Germany"s school was developed a century before the Romanesque of France; across the Rhine occurred no Norman invasion to sever art traditions from Charlemagne"s renaissance. The pre-Gothic art suited her ethnical temperament, and was long adhered to. While France was building Gothic, Germany was still erecting Romanesque cathedrals.
Not till the end of the XII century were churches along that "_rue des moines_," the Rhine, vaulted in the new manner.
The claim of Italy to be the first to use the diagonal ribs is denied by most French archaeologists, but is put forward by the Italian scholar Rivoira and by Mr. Arthur Kingsley Porter.[12] The latter cites the church of Sannazzaro Sesia as showing proofs that its high nave was Gothic vaulted by 1040. For a century, he says, the Lombard churches used diagonals, especially in Milan, where wood was scarce and it was easier to build permanent brick ribs under the groin vault than to mold the groin on a temporary substructure. Diagonal ribs were invented, he thinks, as a device to economize wood. That may be true of the Lombard churches, of which he has made an elaborate study. And it may be true that the use of such diagonals filtered into Provence and Languedoc, where appeared some early Gothic vaults sporadically before 1150, at Frejus, Ma.r.s.eilles, Maguelonne, and Moissac, all with the rectangular profile of the Lombard type. The theory he advocates does not prove why the Ile-de-France masons could not themselves, without hint from Lombardy, have stumbled on the new feature which was to revolutionize the builder"s art. Why should we prefer his explanation for the first use of diagonals--the desire to economize wood--to that advanced by the French scholars--the effort to brace a falling groin vault?
Mr. Porter acknowledges that not a single Lombard church was rib-vaulted throughout, that the Lombard architects never counterb.u.t.ted their diagonals properly, that their vaults proved unsatisfactory, so that after 1120 they returned to their groin and barrel vaulting, or used timber roofs, in those regions where wood abounded. The destruction of Milan through the German invasion, in 1162, was a fatal blow to Lombard architecture. We can only conjecture how northern Italy might have worked out the problem of stone roofs. The best definition of Gothic, thinks Mr. Porter, is Professor Moore"s, which concludes thus: "Wherever is wanting a framework maintained on the principle of thrust and counterthrust, there we have not Gothic." The Lombard churches never met the vault thrust with counterthrust of b.u.t.tress. Surely not in Lombardy was conceived the new system of construction?
S. Ambrogio at Milan was cited as l"oeuvre initiale, till it was proved that it was built not in the IX century, but after 1067; and as later disasters necessitated reconstructions, none of the present diagonals was extant before 1198. S. Abondio at Como, consecrated by Urban II, in 1095, has some very early intersecting ribs, but they are more a step toward the new system than a true Gothic vault, since the ribs merely reinforce and do not carry the cells.
M. Camille Enlart contends that the systematic use of Gothic in Italy was not earlier than the second quarter of the XIII century, and was brought across the Alps by French Cistercian monks. Though for centuries Italy used it, she apprehended its constructive principle imperfectly.
Because she possessed a Niccola Pisano, a Giotto, a family of Cosmati to veil the poverty of her Gothic skeleton with details of consummate beauty, criticism is silenced. Her best Gothic monument, the cathedral of Siena, was insecure because of technical errors. Always was Italy adverse to showing the mechanism by which an edifice stood; few flying b.u.t.tresses were ever built south of the Alps. She preferred the cla.s.sic wide s.p.a.cing of piers, an unenc.u.mbered interior, and small windows against her hot sun. Who remembers that he is in a Gothic church when in the somber cathedral of Florence? Its long nave is divided into four bays where a northern church would have used eight. For Italy the Renaissance was a whole-hearted return to a national art which she could fully understand.
No people outside of France better understood and developed Gothic art than the English. Their claim to priority is based on the date of the cathedral of Durham, whose choir-aisle diagonals Mr. John Bilson says are as early as 1093. Since those diagonals show no hesitation, they must have been preceded by others. Where in England are there to be found the earlier trials? The English claim is practically a Norman one, and Normandy"s experimental work in Gothic vaultings remains to be traced. Rivoira claims that Lombard influences predominated in the formation of Normandy"s Romanesque school. Can the Norman be said to have discerned in diagonals their immense possibilities any clearer than had the Lombard?
Those among the French archaeologists who have disputed the Norman claim to priority say that the princ.i.p.al span of Norman and English churches was covered with timber roofs far into the XII century. We know that the Gothic vaulting of the two abbey churches of Caen were XII-century additions, and M. de Lasteyrie thought the same was true of Durham, though Mr. Bilson has convinced MM. Enlart and Lefevre-Pontalis that Durham"s choir-aisle vaults are an original part of the cathedral begun in 1093. Not till 1174, when Guillaume de Sens began Canterbury Cathedral, did French Gothic architecture, in its plenitude, appear in England.
The question of priority remains an open one. It might almost be said that vaulting with intersecting ribs began to appear here and there simultaneously, that if it had not cropped out in the Ile-de-France, it would have appeared in Normandy, or vice versa. And not long after them, the builders in Burgundy and Anjou began to use it. Before 1150, isolated samples of the Gothic rib vault appeared at Vezelay, Poitiers, Bordeaux, Quimperle, Moissac, St. Gilles, Ma.r.s.eilles. The hour was ripe for the solution. Gothic architecture was the spontaneous invention of French builders at the dawn of the XII century, at a time when the poetry of France was imposing itself on the whole of Europe.
_L"oeuvre initiale_ will never be known. However, there was a region where the early use of the ogival vault was not accidental, but systematic, one spot in the heart of France where it immediately made a school, since there it found no strong earlier traditions to overcome, where it became a living organism and went through a succession of logical developments until it had taken on the main characteristics of the new art. There is one center from which Gothic architecture spread out with slow, sure march into the neighboring regions. In the Ile-de-France, all the trials were summed up and developed by Abbot Suger at St. Denis. From 1140 to 1144 he wedded definitely the pointed arch with the diagonal rib.
The French masters, who have contended that the Ile-de-France is the cradle of Gothic architecture, have had lesser controversies among themselves as to which special portion of the royal domain led in the evolution. M. Woillez, a pioneer, considered the environs of Beauvais the favored spot; M. Saint-Paul looked to the districts between Normandy and Paris; M. Enlart sought the nucleus in Amiens diocese in Picardy; and M. Lefevre-Pontalis chose the cla.s.sic diocese of Soissons. The two latter masters have modified their views since studying Durham"s vaults, and they may modify them further in regard to Lombardy"s early use of diagonals. The controversy is not closed.
The France of that day was more a feudal confederation than a united kingdom, and some of the king"s va.s.sals ruled territories larger than his own. If the feeling of nationality is created as much by great achievements in common, as by political boundaries and the ties of blood, if, as all now agree, the enthusiasm of the Crusades, those holy wars against a common foe, helped to weld the rival sections of France into one nation, surely that other enthusiasm of the day, those other _Gesta Dei_ per Francos, the building of the Gothic cathedrals, played an important part in forming the national soul. From end to end of France they were building when at the battle of Bouvines a French king united with the jealous barons, with clergy and with burgess and with villein in a common defense of their native land. King, clergy, lords, and people fought at Bouvines, and king, clergy, lords, and people built the big national churches. All the energies of the times went to their making, all the primitive strong purposes, all the newly stirred intellect of the schools. Science was as needed for them as inspiration, for without the long manual training of the guilds, the mystic glow had not sufficed.
There has crept into various architectural manuals, since first M.
Viollet-le-Duc voiced it, a theory which scarcely needs refuting, so disproved is it by modern research.[13] Gothic art is considered as the layman"s expression of revolt against the Romanesque art of the monks, an idea that denies the structural sequence of the two phases of the same art, and would present Gothic as a reaction against its predecessor, instead of its supreme development.
We read that a cathedral was built as a sort of a.s.sembly hall for the rising communes, and not _pour loger le bon Dieu_. Now in every known case it was the bishop who started the rebuilding of each cathedral, and the works usually began with the choir, the part of a church suitable only for the cult. Even when a bishop, in his character of proprietor of a city (as in the case of Rheims and Laon), opposed the communal claims, he and the people went on building their cathedral together. We have precious doc.u.ments to a.s.sure us in what spirit of piety the work was done. All cla.s.ses and all ages, women as well as men, gave their voluntary labor to the new works, after having confessed and communicated in pious confraternities; sometimes it was for an abbot that they dragged in the stones from the quarry, as at St. Denis and St.
Pierre-sur-Dives; sometimes it was to aid a bishop, as at Chartres and Rouen. To offset such irrefutable evidence there is not one contemporary reference to a laic, or communal purpose.
Also, when it is a.s.serted that the bishop helped the cathedrals because they were jealous of the monastic orders, there is not one historical record to confront a host of doc.u.ments which disprove the idea. Large numbers of the bishop-builders issued from monasteries, founded monasteries, and returned to monasteries to die. While Maurice de Sully was erecting Notre Dame, at Paris, he built four monasteries, in one of which he requested to be buried. The bishop who began Auxerre Cathedral chose Cistercian Pontigny for his tomb. The bishop-builders of Noyon, Laon, Senlis, Soissons, Rheims, Bourges, and Rouen were buried among the monks. That there should occasionally be friction between a bishop and an abbot over legal privileges is only characteristic of human nature in all times. As a cla.s.s the bishops were not opposed to the monks, nor the Orders to the secular clergy. The monks of St. Remi honored the archbishop of Rheims in their choir windows.
The cloister welcomed the new architecture. Transition Gothic churches were built by the monks of St. Germain-des-Pres and St.
Martin-des-Champs at Paris, and one could prolong the list into pages.
Where in Burgundy is found the earliest Gothic? In the Cistercian church of Pontigny, and in Benedictine Vezelay. Where in Champagne?--the abbatials of Notre Dame at Chalons-sur-Marne and St. Remi at Rheims. In Normandy? In the Midi?--again the answer is, in abbey churches. Indeed, monastic building energy seemed inexhaustible, for where the prime of Gothic arrived, it was still the monks who produced that masterpiece of the new art, the Merveille of Mont-Saint-Michel.