The Monastic Church in La Charité-Sur-Loire the Testimony of the Bas-Relief Tympana

MASARYKOVA UNIVERZITA FILOZOFICKÁ FAKULTA Semin|ř dějin umění The Monastic Church in La Charité-sur-Loire The Testimony of the Bas-relief Tympana Tereza Kučerov| Magistersk| diplomov| pr|ce Vedoucí práce: doc. Ivan Foletti, MA 2018 2 Prohlašuji, že jsem diplomovou práci vypracovala samostatně s využitím uvedených pramenů a literatury. ..……………………………………………………… Tereza Kučerová 3 4 I would like to express my gratitude to everyone who has supported me and helped me during the last few years. I owe a profound debt of gratitude to all friends, colleagues, teachers, library employees and people, I have met “on the way” so far. This thesis would not exist without your various kinds of support, assistance, generosity and time, which you have shared with me. I would also like to honestly thank to my family for their never-ending help and support. Special acknowledgement goes to Sarah and Tereza, for their time and patience with correcting of this text. I am also very grateful to Ondřej Jakubec, head of the Department of Art History, for his patience. At the end, I would like to express my great gratitude to my advisor, Ivan Foletti, for his kind guidance, great help, innumerable advices and admirable patience. Thank you! 5 6 Content Introduction 9 1. Statement of Research…………………………………………………………………………………………..……..…..11 1.1. The Nineteenth Century: The First Studies and Examinations……………………….………….12 1.2. Studies about Tympana during the First Half of the Twentieth Century: First Comparative and Iconographic Interpretations……………………………………..…………19 1.3. Recent Researches and Last Conclusions: From the Half of the Twentieth Century up to These Days…………………………….…………..28 2. The Monastery and Tympana La Charité-sur-Loire From Preserved Manuscripts up to the Twenty-First Century………………………………….…40 2.1. From Legendary Origins to the French Revolution: The Construction of the Monastic Church…………………………………………………….…………...41 2.2. The Liminal Zone of La Charité-sur-Loire: Could There Be a Narthex Once?!.........................................................................................49 2.3. Preserved Bas-relief Portals in Their Visual and Iconographic Context……………………...56 3. “Through the Eyes of the Time”: The Possible Interpretations of Bas-reliefs Portals from La Charité-sur-Loire………………...…66 3.1. The Perception and Reception of the Bas-reliefs in the Twelfth Century………………..…..67 3.2. Between liturgical dramas and relief representation: a statue of Virgin Mary….............78 3.3. The Bas-reliefs of La Charité-sur-Loire in a Contemporary Context…………………………..95 Conclusion 109 Bibliography 112 Illustrations 131 7 8 Introduction On an endless way, during a pilgrimage to very far destinations, quotidian contact with unknown environs put wayfarers on geographical, cultural and religious crossroads every day, where, especially in the twelfth century, a familiar and safe catholic place was good to find. At one of these crossroads we could still see a one of these great meeting points, placed on a road alongside the river Loire, the one of the greatest French Romanesque monasteries, La Charité-sur-Loire. This priory was generally famous for its legendary charity of local monks, promoted also by its name and widely known rumors. On the other hand, this monastery was famous for its power, wealth and its important status in the order of Cluny, promoted also by its nickname La Fille aînée de Cluny, the “Eldest Daughter of Cluny”. Unfortunately, only monumental debris of monastic buildings and a church can demonstrate us today a faded glimmer of the primal greatness and beauty of this medieval ambitious project whose merits were not obviously a work of chance and luck, at all. This priory was strategically and probably also intentionally founded at one of the most advantageous locations in France, on the crossroad of the river and two ancient well-known roads from Decize to Orléans and from Avallon via Vézelay to Bourges. All of them were generally highly used also by pilgrims to Santiago, Rome or Jerusalem. Moreover, the short distance from Paris, Cluny, Vézelay, Bourges, Tours, Sauvigny and Nevers gave La Charité-sur-Loire very close bureaucratic, political, religious, commercial, and artistic-cultural relationships and connections. Besides, the river embodied a highly frequented way used for the trade and travelling in that time which could have helped the monastery to become an important religious, cultural and even commercial center of the area and even surroundings. That made from a small village in an ancient diocese of Auxerre (todays’ region of Nièvre), the meeting point that a majority of pilgrims, merchants, shipmen and even local inhabitants repeatedly visited and that is even today on pilgrims’ itinerary. What a magnificent and a strategically placed Cluniac daughterly abbey! An extraordinary dominant position of the monastic complex is still perceptible in this town. Monastic towers, the most striking signs of this town from roads and the river as well, are protectively rising above roofs around. Proud local inhabitants and patriotic community "Les Amis de La Charité-sur-Loire" truly take care of this historical site and make it still living by many cultural and religious occasions constantly holding there. Many archaeological, historical and (a bit less) art-historical studies have been already written about the recent discoveries and architecture of the whole priory, its monastic church and sculptural decorations. Despite the fact, that the most studied issue of local sculpted decorations represents two bas-relief portals, probably, from the beginning of the twelfth century, there are still left many questions to investigate about them. Because of that, this diploma thesis will be focused chiefly at these questions, which have not been studied, yet. These two bas-relief portals are well-known for their ambiguous iconography of the main scenes: the Assumption of Virgin Mary and the Transfiguration of Christ, 9 accompanied by lintels showing the scenes from the life of Virgin Mary (the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Nativity, the Annunciation to Shepherds) and the childhood of Christ (the Adoration of Magi and the Presentation in Temple). Since there are not preserved documents speaking about tympana till the nineteenth century, the next examination will consider in which light and how they were studied so far and what is known about the history of the monastic church of La Charité-sur-Loire. Furthermore, based on existing art historical and archaeological studies, this thesis will be occupied by the questions considering not just stylistic or iconographic context of these bas-relief scenes, but also by the asking of where these bas- relief tympana could be primarily located. This question touching their architectonic background is focused chiefly on the reconstruction, at least partial, of their wider context, enabling to basically comprehend the way of perception of these sculpted portals in the twelfth century. By the asking for their possible meanings, which they could had for their medieval spectators, the thesis will continue with the considerations about the possible interconnection of these tympana with the liturgical performances including dramas, the visual and sensorial mediations, the rising cult of the Mother of God or the period doctrine of the ninth Cluniac abbot Peter the Venerable (1122-1156). What could tympana really manifest, where could their primal location be and what could mediate the subliminal message of their visual rhetoric embodied by their absolutely unusual iconographic compositions in their period? And could it be even possible to answer all these questions with some satisfying results nowadays?! Following chapters will put a great effort to obtain at least basic explanations. Nevertheless, for that is necessary to step out of classical field of study, on which these bas-relief portals have been studied up to nowadays and take a new look at this topic. Due to its subject, this work does not deal with a deep analysis of the monastic architecture and its church in detail or other rich sculptural decorations of this monastic church. There will be not dealing with the historiographical uncertainties about dating of these bas-relief portals, as well. Either all these questions had been sufficiently examined, yet or these study areas and questions could be yielded to more qualified archaeological researches. “We will never understand the language and the message of Romanesque sculpture if we fail to take note of the different audiences to which it was addressed.” Saueländer 1992 10 I. Statement of Research 11 1.1. The Nineteenth Century: The First Studies and Examinations It was not until the mid-nineteenth century that there were written records and published testimonies about the existence of bas-relief tympana in the monastery of La Charité-sur-Loire. Although there are references and texts about its history and architecture, that have existed in publications since the eighteenth century.1 Surviving only as a magnificent and breathtaking reminiscence of its former monumental architecture of majestic Cluniac monasteries, La Charité often represented one of the main reasons for scholars of those times to be upset and outraged by the conditions and the way decaying historical monuments were treated in France. The call for their systematic preservation and for a discontinuation of the punishable actions of inhabitants in regard to the national heritage caused a public and private outcry.2 The famous novelist and playwright,

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