Le Mans Cathedral
The Cathedral Saint-Julien du Mans is the holy Julian consecrated religious building and bishopric in Le Mans ( France ). The cultural monument was classified as a monument historique in 1862 .
The church is one of the few structures built in the tradition of Bourges Cathedral . Bourges had developed his own building school in competition with Chartres around 1195 , but only a few cathedrals followed. One of them is the Le Mans Grand Choir .
Gothic choir
The five-aisled choir with double aisles has an unusual buttress that at first glance looks like a highly complicated skeletal system. Here the individual buttresses are "split up" in the area of the choir head , i.e. H. two associated buttresses unite with their arches on the way to the top of the ship, so that at the end only one arch is attached to the wall. This elaborate and complicated construction enables lighting conditions inside the choir that are among the most fascinating in the entire Gothic period. Thanks to the splitting technique, the pillars could be pushed out much further than if they were each standing alone. This made it possible to move chapels between them , which let in additional light, and windows could also be inserted between these chapels in the remaining wall sections. This has resulted in an impressive “graduation of light layers”. The buttress at the choir of the cathedral of Le Mans is one of the most elaborate constructions of the Gothic and was mostly simplified in the basic structure in the later buildings, even if the decorations were made more and more rich.
The construction of the choir in St-Julien began in 1217. Since the construction went over the city wall to the east, a permit from the king had to be obtained. Several construction phases followed. First the chapel wreath was erected. The inner side aisle of the choir shows forms of the Norman Gothic, such openwork foliage rosettes as they appear in the cloister of Mont Saint-Michel . The upper storey, however, was designed by a Parisian architect from the vicinity of the royal court of Louis IX. Created around 1240. The staggered height of the five-aisle building goes from 11 m in the outer aisles to 22 m in the inner aisles, which have a triforium and a row of windows, to 35 m in the central nave. In contrast to Bourges, the wall system in the high choir is in two parts, as the arcades are drawn up to the windows, i.e. they are extraordinarily high. The ambulatory, on the other hand, is three-story with its own window zone and its own triforium, as is the Bourges system. The lead glass windows in the ambulatory date from around 1230/40 and still show influences from Chartres Cathedral , while the younger windows in the upper aisle are based on the model of the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris. The individual zones of the optical ground are distributed over different spatial layers, so that the first approach repeats the basilical motif of the core space in comparison to the second . The light intensity therefore increases upwards.
Romanesque nave
The Romanesque nave , to which the choir was built, was built between 1135 and 1158 and shows early Gothic forms in the vaults. A first building around 1100–1120 had a flat roof. The aisle walls with their small-format brown stone blocks made of granite and the round arches in the central nave masonry still come from this previous building. After several fires, a new central nave was built from large limestone blocks from 1137. Mighty pillars in the column alternation with round pillars support the new upper aisle with the early Gothic rib vault - created around the same year when the foundation stone of an early Gothic church was laid in St-Denis . The three-zone wall elevation has a faded-in triforium with small blind arcades, alternating through openings to the aisle roofs. Here in the Romanesque part of the nave, the emphasis is still on the volume of walls and pillars . The vault ribs rise far higher to the apex than the vault shield arches and thus form a domical vault , as is typical for the region.
The capitals in the nave are very rare and still have paint residues, which at least hint at the original condition when such components were painted throughout. In general, the three-dimensional furnishings of this English-influenced building are excellent. The zigzag band of the Normans, who were also represented in northern France, determines the design of cornices and arches. The nave south portal is an early Gothic portal in the succession of the west portal of Chartres Cathedral.
Transept
With the new construction of the eastern parts, the Romanesque nave is connected to the high Gothic architecture of the transept and the choir. Because of the lower nave, an additional window above is required to compensate for the 10 m higher vault height in the transept. After the choir was completed in 1245, it was initially connected to the existing Romanesque crossing, which was lower at the time. At the time of the new choir, there was a temporary wall that closed off the much higher new building to the west. This wall was torn down when the transept was completed and a new, narrow vault was drawn in instead of the wall. A trapezoidal vault was created.
The transept was built at the end of the 14th century as the last component. Of the Romanesque transept, only the right transept tower remained. The late Gothic transept consists of huge glass surfaces. The triforium is also glazed. The north transept shows stained glass windows with kneeling donors of the French royal family.
Pierre Saint-Julien
The menhir Pierre Saint-Julien (also called Pierre des Païens - dt. Heidenstein, or Pierre au Lait - dt. Milchstein) stands on the southeast corner of the west facade of the cathedral.
Furnishing
Stained glass window
The cathedral is famous for its exceptionally preserved stained glass from Romanesque and Gothic times. The depiction of the Ascension in the south aisle, around 1120, is the oldest window in the cathedral. The large window in the west facade, around 1165, restored in the 19th century, is based on legends from the life of St. Dedicated to Julian. The upper storey of the choir, which was completed in 1254, was given the well-preserved furnishings with colored glass paintings a little later.
Sculptures
- The tomb of Count Charles IV of Anjou (1414–1472) is by Francesco Laurana , that of Bishop Guilleaume Langey du Bellay (1491–1543) is attributed to Pierre Bontemps .
- The sacristy is a filigree Gothic building from around 1300. It is decorated with wall paneling from the late 16th century with reliefs from the life of Christ.
- In the first half of the 17th century, Le Mans was a center of terracotta production . It replaced the previously dominant wood and stone sculpture in the Maine and Sarthe region . The so-called "small entombment ", not originally intended for the cathedral, is attributed to Germain Pilon or his workshop. Gervais I. Delabarre modeled the "great entombment" in the Peter and Paul Chapel. This group from the Franciscan Church in Mans also came to the cathedral later. The altar of this chapel with the Resurrection was donated in 1564.
Wall painting
The painting of the vaults in the three-bay Marienkapelle in the apex of the choir is of the highest order and extremely rare. 47 singing and music-making angels with their instruments and notes float on the red background of the vaulted gussets. The representations, which are equally important in terms of music history and art history, were donated by Bishop Gontier de Baigneux (1337–1384). Her style is close to that of the painter Jan Bondol , who designed the famous Angers tapestries .
organ
The organ goes back to an instrument that was built between 1529 and 1535 by the organ builder Pierre Bert. The original parts of the prospectus from the same period show a cycle of virtue allegories, three-dimensional niche figures in richly ornamented Renaissance frames. The organ originally had 42 registers on three manuals and a pedal . It was expanded in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The listed instrument now has 52 stops on four manuals and pedal. The playing and stop actions are mechanical.
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literature
- Günther Binding : What is Gothic? An analysis of the Gothic churches in France, England and Germany 1140 - 1350. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 2000.
- Werner Schäfke : France's Gothic cathedrals. DuMont, Cologne 1994.
Individual evidence
Web links
Coordinates: 48 ° 0 ′ 33.2 ″ N , 0 ° 11 ′ 55.6 ″ E