Sens Cathedral
The Saint-Étienne Cathedral ( St. Stephen's Cathedral ) in Sens in the French department of Yonne ( Burgundy region ) is the episcopal church of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Sens . It was built from 1140/45, making it the first Gothic cathedral. At about the same time, the choir of the Saint-Denis abbey church, 130 kilometers north-west, was built (consecrated in 1144).
Building history
Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis and the bishops Heinrich von Sens (Henri Sanglier) and Gottfried or Godefroi von Chartres were responsible for the first three early Gothic churches, the Abbey Church of Saint-Denis, the Cathedral of Sens and the predecessor building of the current Cathedral of Chartres. They were friends and shared the same beliefs.
Although the construction dates for the Cathedral of Sens are not as precise as those for St. Denis, St. Denis is occasionally denied its generally recognized status as the first Gothic building and the view is that the Choir of Sens was started a few years before St. Denis. In St. Denis, only the lower part of the choir dates from the early 12th century, while the Sens choir was built “in one go” from 1140/45 without interruption and in 1168 was almost completed. The nave and transept of Sens were built later. It is correct that St. Etienne in Sens is the first Gothic cathedral , because St. Denis was not a cathedral, but an abbey church.
Open triforium
At the end of Romanesque architecture, as a preliminary form of a triforium , a small arched column position on the wall strips above the arcade zone began to be faded out, i.e. not a proper walkway into the wall, but placed on the wall on top. Here Sens goes further and develops an "open triforium".
A triforium is a walkway in the wall that is open to the central nave. The fact that the Triforium of Sens does not have its own floor here and is therefore not a pure walkway only plays a subordinate role here. The triforium has a long history as an architectural form. In principle, it is about designing the area between the lower arched openings and the upper row of windows. For centuries there was the roof of the aisle on the other side of the wall, which leaned against it. In the early Christian churches, this wall strip was used inside to attach paintings or mosaics, as they are particularly still preserved in Ravenna .
A triforium could be used in many ways. As the name "gangway" suggests, you could walk along here and check the roofs of the aisles, for example. One could also accommodate children's choirs and the like for church celebrations and mystery plays.
Splitting the wall
The development of occidental architecture began with the simple scheme: an interior space is surrounded by a wall, and the visible surface is called a wall. At the beginning there was the arcade floor on the wall at the bottom, then a strip of wall was covered with mosaics or frescoes, and above was to light the window alleys. Here in the beginning Gothic in Sens from 1140 onwards, architecture begins to create something highly dramatic out of this simple wall, out of a room delimitation. It is gradually splitting the wall into two layers.
The result is something that Hans Jantzen called the “diaphanous structure” with a term that has become famous - this could be translated as “translucent wall”. Something similar is sought here as with the dissolution of the wall into huge window areas. The inner layer of the wall becomes a carrier of expression, similar to the one that was the case with the facade in St. Denis.
On the question of how this basic idea of the splitting up of the wall might have developed, there are various theories, all of which suffer from the fact that there are no documents on this matter and one inevitably has to rely on guesswork.
One theory relates to a tradition from shipbuilding: The Norman principle of splitting the wall could possibly be traced back to a special shipbuilding technique that the Vikings first mastered, namely splitting the tree trunk to obtain planks for the construction of the ship's wall. The experiences in this field, passed on orally over generations and centuries, could very well have provided the basis for ideas about coping with life, which was later also used in the construction of church rooms. The fact that one can - or must - split up a material in order to be able to work better with it, in order to achieve high performance with this technology in a completely different area, could well have given up the basic fantasy with which the Norman tradition "habitually" applied to material ideas for upcoming constructions. Why shouldn't they have “instinctively” thought of this division when they were faced with the task of constructing very high walls for Gothic churches? In Sens we have a germ of the splitting up of the wall before us.
“Primarily in northern France (Francien) the development takes place in the elevation of the basilical central nave and choir wall. Here, in the second half of the 12th century, attempts were made to place a structure in front of an increasingly dissolved wall. There is a structural endeavor to create an optical line structure in front of a differentiated space. ” Two-shell construction already existed in the Romanesque period.
With this division of the wall, the aim was to turn the central nave wall into a special pictorial surface by creating a kind of hollow layer behind it , which acts like a film. And the triforium here in Sens is a preliminary stage. The historically next cathedral in Noyon will greatly expand this principle.
Late Gothic transept
Sens was originally a three-aisled pillar basilica without a transept. The transept, which you can see today, was retracted in the beginning of the 14th century and afterwards (and at the turn of the century from the 15th to the 16th century), i.e. from the end of the Gothic period, when such huge tracery windows could be built.
A look directly into the window zone and the vault of the transept demonstrates the degree to which the wall has been dismantled in the late Gothic. The tracery has developed into its final style, the so-called flamboyant style , i.e. the flame-shaped style.
The pushing back of the wall in favor of ever larger windows was not without dangers and has also suffered several setbacks. It has happened that such giant windows could no longer absorb the pressure of the vault and collapsed. But such immense glass surfaces naturally offered the opportunity to let the light colored by the glass flow into the interior with a previously unknown intensity. The Gothic has not only reached the limit of what is technically possible here.
facade
The facades of Gothic cathedrals, like the towers, have been rebuilt frequently and not always to their advantage. Some have also been defaced by building accidents and poorly reconstructed. One such example is provided by Sens. In 1267 the south tower of the facade collapsed and damaged it. After that, the windows were not replaced true to the original, but in accordance with the high Gothic ideals that were now in force at the end of the 13th century. The large tracery windows in the middle and on the right are not from 1140. Only in the left part of the facade you can see a shape that comes from the original construction period.
inner space
And here in the interior, too, you have to imagine something different than it was built in 1140. In Sens in 1230 the vaults and the entire Lichtgaden were renewed and - just like with the facade - adapted to the then new building ideas. At the time the cathedral was built, there was no tracery . The first tracery window was made in Reims in 1215/20 . In your mind you have to replace these windows with simple pointed arch windows and then you have a fairly accurate impression of what an early Gothic cathedral looked like inside.
The builder of Sens, Archbishop Henri Sanglier, was close to the Reform Order of the time and ordered a relatively simple floor plan for his new cathedral , which, compared to the splendid Cluniac buildings of the time, did not want different parts of the room to be strung together, but rather a subdivided unitary room. The original state of the church had no transepts and no chapels.
Sens is still a long way from the graceful "skeleton construction" of high Gothic. Here we have to emphasize the weight of the wall, the surface of which remains undesigned in many places. The lower support system in Sens still has a resemblance to the Romanesque canon of forms. Some specialist authors therefore do not yet count Sens as Gothic.
It is Romanesque here, especially on the lower floor, that after each pair of columns there is a mighty so-called bundle pillar. Such a sequence of columns and pillars is called a column change . A bundle pillar is a pillar that is surrounded by half and three-quarter pillars . The so-called services rise above the capitals of the columns in between . The term service appears for the first time in the weekly accounts of the Prague cathedral building in 1372/78 as “dinst”. This designation was introduced into the architectural history literature by Georg Gottfried Kallenbach in 1843/45. And these services merge into the vault ribs at the very top , so that there is a continuous line from bottom to top: pillar - service - vault rib on the one hand and bundle pillar / half column - vault rib on the other. If you add the extension of this system to the outside with the buttresses and buttresses, we have the typical linear support system of the Gothic.
A special way in which the nave of the church is composed of individual departments is connected with the change of pillars. There are differences in the architecture of the time. There are Romanesque churches whose central nave is vaulted with a single so-called barrel , a round curved surface without subdivisions. Here in the early Gothic there will be a development from a six-part vault - as here in Sens - to a four-part. And that has to do with the fact that the rhythm of the room changes. In the high Gothic period there will no longer be a change of pillars, only uniform shapes - and the associated vaults will be four-part, the rhythm will be faster (Chartres Cathedral).
In Sens in the early Gothic period, work was still carried out with a column change and with six-part vaults - the rhythm here is even more grave, more measured. The six-part vaults are separated in the longitudinal direction by so-called belt arches or straps. A vault belt is nothing more than a particularly pronounced rib. The belts are only above the bundle pillars, in between are the pillars above which the services and the normal ribs rise, so that a total of six-part vault results.
In some aspects, Sens still has a “Romance” effect. The abundance of light did not become a principle here, the windows were small. This underlines once again the uniqueness of Sugers St. Denis.
organ
The large organ on the gallery was built in 1734 by the organ builder Mangrin, and was last restored by the organ builder Boisseau-Cattiaux. The instrument has 48 registers on four manuals and a pedal . The playing and stop actions are mechanical.
|
|
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The choir organ was built in 1855 by the organ builder Daublaine- Callinet . The instrument has 15 stops on two manuals and a pedal. The playing and stop actions are mechanical.
Bells
Four bells hang in the south tower , including the two Bourdons that were cast by Gaspard Mongin-Viard in Auxerre . Their names pay homage to the first two bishops of Sens, St. Savinien and St. Potentien . There are also three bells for the clock strike , which are permanently mounted in the bell tower above the tower. The largest one was donated by the king and strikes the full hours, the two smaller ones were donated by citizens of the city of Sens and indicate the quarter hours.
|
No. |
Surname |
Casting year |
Caster |
Diameter (mm) |
Mass (approx., Kg) |
Percussive ( HT - 1 / 16 ) |
| 1 | Savinienne (gros bourdon) | 1560 | Gaspard Mongin-Viard | 2,617 | 9,620 | d 0 +2 |
| 2 | Potentienne (petit bourdon) | 1560 | Gaspard Mongin-Viard | 2,358 | 7,690 | f 0 −4 |
| 3 | Louise-Thérèse, Cloche des morts (death knell) | 1819 | Lombard & Cochois | 1,136 | 775 | it 1 ± 0 |
| 4th | Cloche de l'angélus (angelus bell) | 14th century | Jean Jouvente | 817 | 360 | b 1 −8 |
| I. | Hour bell | 1376 | Jean Jouvente | 1,500 | d 1 | |
| II | Larger quarter-hour bell | 1377 | Jean Jouvente | 550 | g 2 | |
| III | Smaller quarter-hour bell | 1377 | Jean Jouvente | 400 | a 2 |
Dimensions of the church
- External length: 122 meters
- Inside length: 113.50 meters
- Height of the central nave: 24.4 meters
- Width of the central nave: 15.25 meters
Wilhelm of Sens
An architect, "Wilhelm von Sens", rebuilt the choir there in Canterbury in England around 1175 , thus introducing the first English phase of Gothic, the Early English . Thomas Becket was received in Sens with great hospitality, which is probably the reason for the appointment of the builder from Sens for the new Canterbury building. Under the supervision of Wilhelm von Sens, the monk Gervasius wrote one of the few surviving reports on the construction of Gothic cathedrals - besides Abbot Suger - the so-called "Gervasius Report".
See also
- Life of Thomas Becket (Sens Cathedral) , 13th century window
literature
- Günther Binding : What is Gothic? An analysis of the Gothic churches in France, England and Germany 1140–1350. Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 2000.
- Arno Borst : Forms of Life in the Middle Ages. Frankfurt et al. 1979, pp. 219–228 (contains, inter alia, a German translation of the famous “Gervasius” report).
- Nicolas-Marie-Joseph Chapuy: Cathédrales françaises. Vues pittoresques de la cathédrale de Sens . Paris 1828 ( digitized version )
- Norbert Nussbaum, Sabine Lepsky: The Gothic vault. The history of its shape and construction. Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 1999.
- Irene Plein: The early Gothic sculpture on the west facade of the Cathedral of Sens . Rhema-Verlag, Münster 2005, ISBN 978-3-930454-40-2 .
- Werner Schäfke : France's Gothic cathedrals. (= DuMont art travel guide). DuMonat, Cologne 1994, pp. 71-75, Fig. 4.5.
- Otto von Simson: The Gothic Cathedral. Darmstadt 1956, 3rd edition 1979.
- Rolf Toman (ed.): The art of the Gothic. Architecture - sculpture - painting. Cologne 1998.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Nussbaum, p. 50.
- ↑ Binding, p. 162.
- ↑ On the subject of "skeleton construction" s. Binding, p. 130.
- ↑ Binding, p. 227.
- ↑ Simson, p. 205.
- ↑ More information about the organ
- ↑ Full bells of Sens Cathedral (interior) on YouTube .
- ↑ La Savinienne et la Potentienne, cathédrale de Sens on YouTube .
- ↑ La Savinienne, cathédrale de Sens, volée de noël on YouTube .
- ↑ Sonnerie de la potentienne, "petit" bourdon de la cathédrale de Sens on YouTube .
Web links
Coordinates: 48 ° 11 ′ 52.4 " N , 3 ° 17 ′ 1.3" E