Pierre de Montreuil

Pierre de Montreuil or Pierre de Montereau (* around 1200; † March 17, 1267 ) is one of the few builders of his time known by name . He is considered a pioneer of high Gothic .

biography

Statue of Pierre de Montreuil on the facade of the Hôtel de Ville in Paris

Pierre de Montreuil is said to have been involved in the construction of the Saint-Denis abbey church from 1231 after his apprenticeship years in Champagne . Mentioned as a master in 1239, he closes the north side of the cloister with a refectory and builds it on the spacious grounds of the Benedictine Abbey of St. Germain-des-Prés under Abbot Simon (Abbot from 1239 to 1244), which was then still in front of the gates of Paris 1235 there, a little further east, the single-nave, 32 m long and 15 m high, light-flooded “Chapelle de la Vierge” (Lady Chapel). Of these buildings, which fell victim to the destructiveness of the revolutionaries, only the Childebert statue (Louvre) from the center pillar of the cloister portal remained of the refectory and only a few fragments of the chapel in the garden north of the former abbey church and a portal, which is preserved in the Musée national du Moyen Âge .

In the absence of evidence, it remains doubtful whether Pierre de Montreuil also the one that was often ascribed to him, commissioned by King Louis IX between 1235 and 1248 . The two-storey palace chapel Sainte-Chapelle (1235 to 1248) was built for the saint and was built as part of the former royal castle Palais de la Cité to store Christ's crown of thorns. Today, also without evidence, it is assumed that a master builder from the circle of Robert de Luzarches , the architect of the Amiens cathedral , worked here.

In the last years of his life, the master worked on the Notre Dame de Paris cathedral , where he completed the southern transept, the cornerstone of which was laid in 1258.

The palace chapels of the castles Vincennes and Saint-Germain-en-Laye (1230 to 1238) as well as the former refectory of the Abbey of St-Martin-des-Champs in Paris, today the library of the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers , are also attributed to him .

Pierre de Montreuil died in Paris on March 17, 1267. He was buried, like his wife Agnès, in the Abbey of St. Germain-des-Prés in the "Chapelle de la Vierge", which he himself had built. The tombstone, which was destroyed in 1794, showed the builder with a compass in his hands, the often quoted and reproduced inscription read "vivens doctor latomorum, Musterolo natus, jecet hic Petrus tumulatus".

A brother - or son - of Pierre de Montreuil named Eudes de Montreuil and his son Raoul de Montreuil both carried the title "maîtres des œuvres du roi".

literature

• Michel Fleury, Alain Erlande-Brandenburg and Jean-Pierre Babelon: Paris de Lutèce à Beaubourg . Paris 1979. ISBN 2-08-200177-6
• Klaus Bussmann: Paris and the Ile de France . Cologne 1982. ISBN 3-7701-1067-6

Web links

• Pierre de Montreuil and the Lady Chapel Page of the French National Archives (French)