Abbaye Saint-Martin du Canigou
The Abbey of Saint-Martin-du-Canigou ( Catalan Sant Martí del Canigó ) is located 1094 meters high on the western slope, almost halfway up the 2785 meter high Pic du Canigou in the French Pyrenees in Roussillon , about 55 kilometers west of Perpignan . The facility is located on a plateau surrounded by steep cliffs. It can only be reached via a fairly steep footpath from the small town of Casteil (Arrondissement Prades).
The early Romanesque art of the Mediterranean does not appear for the first time in Roussillon in the buildings of Abbot Oliba in Cuxa, but in Saint-Martin du Canigou, founded by the lords of the County of Cerdanya . Since one is dealing with the earliest beginnings of a style, this building still shows all the typical characteristics of searching and experimenting.
The monastery now houses a convent of the Community of Beatitudes .
history
On 14 July 1007 gave Guifred cabretas , Count of Conflent and Cerdanya , and his wife Guisla one situated on the slopes of Mount Canigou oratorio Saint-Martin (at the latest documented since 996) different Allode , free goods from the Conflent and the Roussillon so “This place will be built in honor of our Lord Jesus Christ, so that militant monks will be assigned to it who are under the rule of the order of St. Benedict, and that according to the will and the privileges of the Roman pontiff and the Bishop of Elne and according to the institution of the King of the Franks serve here Almighty God for all eternity ”. Count Guifred was a grandson of Wilfried the Hairy , founder of the county of Barcelona .
Today it seems to be certain that the construction of this church began around 997. At any rate, it was first mentioned in a document at this time. Thanks to a series of donations in the years 998 and 1005, building could continue on a regular basis. On November 10, 1009, Oliba, the bishop of Elne and younger brother of Count Cabreta, came to the place called Canigou, “to consecrate the church in honor of St. Martin, which is in the place called the Monastery of Canigou and was built on this mountain by a priest and monk named Sclua. "
The document confirms that the monastery was built on behalf of Count Guifred and his wife Guisla, who wanted to be buried here themselves. The count's couple enriched the monastery treasure with consecration vessels and priestly robes and furnished it with various estates. Numerous landowners who took part in the solemn consecration also donated parts of their property and thus increased the monastery’s assets. The protocol written by the consecration priest determined that the monks were subordinate to the Bishop of Elne.
This relationship of dependency is restricted in a bull of Pope Sergius IV of November 1011. The city library of Perpignan keeps the papyrus original. This confirms the property of the monastery, but at the same time an exception to the usual customs is granted in that the abbots could be freely chosen by the monastic community.
Secular power continued to exercise its guardianship as usual. In 1014, Abbot Oliba of Cuxa and several other clergymen, including Count Guifred and his brother Bernard, the Count of Besalu, declared to Bishop Oliba of Elne that they had decided to put an abbot at the head of the monastery came from their own ranks. The church is now consecrated, has ample income and has a sufficient number of monks. They therefore asked the bishop to appoint the monk Sclua, who had built the monastery, as abbot, who held this task from 1014 to 1044.
Around 1012/13 there were also relics in the monastery. The remains of St. Gauderique (Gauderich) had been bought from the Diocese of Toulouse. They were to play an important role in the history of the monastery and of all of Roussillon.
Further donations made it possible to begin a new phase of construction of the church, which was crowned with a second solemn consecration, which various sources date to 1014 or 1026.
Count Guifred, who was very concerned with the mystery of death, decided, following the example of his brother Count Oliba-Cabreta, who had died a Benedictine in the monastery of Monte Cassino, to give up worldly life. He separated from his wife to become a monk on the Canigou. On November 8, 1035 he drew up his will and distributed his inheritance among his seven children and his second wife Elisabeth. On the day of his death, July 31, 1049, a messenger set out to deliver the news to the abbeys attached to Saint-Martin. He reached Fleury-sur-Loire on his way. The count's retreat into the seclusion of monastic life gave the people the opportunity to form many legends.
The influence of Saint-Martin du Canigou declined sharply as a result. This abbey was founded at a time when Christians were taking refuge from Islam here in the mountains and as a result the area was densely populated. Towards the end of the 11th century, and especially then in the 12th century, the situation changed fundamentally. From the Catalan Pyrenees there was a migration of peoples to the countries that had been recaptured from the hands of the Arabs. At the same time, the monastery on Canigou lost its importance. In 1114 it was even subordinated to the Sainte-Marie de Lagrasse Abbey . However, resolute protests against this submission ultimately led to independence being regained.
In 1428 the monastery was badly damaged in an earthquake. The upper part of the bell tower collapsed, the church was damaged and part of the monastery buildings were destroyed. On July 14, 1433, the Bishop of Elne promised indulgences to those believers who helped with the repair work. The restoration took a long time and was still not completed in 1438, ten years after the natural disaster.
Saint-Martin du Canigou embarked on the path of irrevocable decline. The introduction of the Coming and the creation of high monastery offices with different incomes meant the end of communal monastic life. A confiscation on the part of the king, which was justified with the binding of the monastery to the Spanish congregation of Tarragona, meant that it no longer existed between 1649 and 1698. The material restoration with the reconstruction of the monastery buildings and the abbot's house, which was carried out by the abbots Dom Pierre Pouderoux (1698–1714) and Dom Augustin Llaby (1714–1728), was not accompanied by a spiritual reform.
King and Pope tried to force a return to the rules of the order, one by an edict of 1768, the other by a bull of July 13, 1772. The Bishop of Elne, for his part, considered this to be impracticable. The few remaining monks felt lost in their loneliness, the food supply was poor and they were at the mercy of smugglers, deserters and robbers. So they longed for nothing other than secularization . Political and ecclesiastical authorities finally agreed on this solution: in 1781 a papal bull abolished the abbey, and a royal brevet confirmed this decision on June 6 of the same year. At the same time, the friars were granted a pension of 1,400 livres. Finally, in August 1782, the Archbishop of Narbonne ordered that the monks should be released from their vows and secularized and that the community should be dissolved . Jean-François Galinier reported that five monks and the abbot left the monastery on September 3, 1783. A list of the furnishings and vestments is drawn up, the crypt is walled up, the door of the upper church is locked, the abbey archive is moved to Perpignan, the relics of St. Gauderuique are brought to Villefranche and from there to Perpignan. The cult device ended up in various places in the diocese. On August 7, 1786, the bells were removed from the tower, and on November 11, the mausoleum of Count Guifred was moved to Casteil. The abandoned abbey soon served the surrounding villages as a quarry .
The picturesque ruin into which the monastery was now transformed naturally had to attract the attention of the romantics in the following century, in particular it became famous for copper engravings. With six illustrations, it occupies an outstanding place in the Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l'ancienne France by Baron Taylor. Finally, it even found its way into the Catalan national epic Canigó by Jacint Verdaguer (1886):
- What became of you, splendid abbeys
- Marcevol, Serrabone and Saint-Michel
- and from you, Saint-Martin, that you filled
- the earth with angels and the ranks of heaven with saints.
- There was no trace of the Romanesque altars.
- we had nothing left of the Byzantine cloisters,
- On the earth lie the marble statues
- and its light is closed like a star
- which will never rise above the Canigou.
Shaken by the heartbreaking song, the Bishop of Perpignan, Monseigneur de Carsalade du Pont, decided to accept the challenge of this magical fate and bring the holy mountain back to life.
On March 16, 1902, he bought the ruins. Accompanied by two thousand pilgrims from Catalonia and Roussillon, he solemnly took possession of the premises again on November 11 of the same year. This ceremony marked the beginning of restoration work on the church, which was understood as “pious work, full of feeling and with a practical sense”, as Jean-François Galinier aptly described it. Although the building was classified as a historic monument, the prelate acted at first completely free and unauthorized. He rebuilt a few houses, restored the vaults that had collapsed over part of the main nave and the south aisle, and renewed the roof of the bell tower. It was not until 1916 that the preservation authorities participated in the financing of the work, which they also supervised from then on. During the restoration work that was now beginning, the slate roofing over the church was first restored and then the reconstruction of the tower turned to. In 1922 the problem arose of adequately presenting a large number of capitals and columns from the former cloister, which Monseigneur de Carsalade had acquired in a villa in Vernet. Since the original location was unknown, it was decided to incorporate it into a gallery at ground level. This originally formed the end of the south wing of the cloister, in which the library and the nurse's apartment were located. Since this wing was not rebuilt, the gallery opens directly onto the gorge today. This type of arrangement now allows you to enjoy the magnificent mountain landscape from there, but it does away with the old order with its strict isolation from the outside. That protected both from the hustle and bustle of the world, as well as from the forces of nature. A decision was made with equal freedom about the structural integration of the residential buildings and their window and door openings. Two of these residential buildings now form the eastern and western ends of the cloister, a third is located outside the original complex, in a northerly direction at the edge of the gorge.
Monseigneur de Carsalade had already received permission from Pope Pius X in 1912 to establish a retreat in Saint Martin du Canigou in honor of Notre Dame de Cénacle. The work enjoyed great popularity. In 1952 Dom Bernard de Chabannes, a Benedictine monk from En-Calcat Abbey , settled here and took over the management. In order to create more space for the participants in the retreat, he built a new three-story residential wing on the northeast corner of the rock plateau. Finally, in 1971/72, a large reception hall was built apart from the other buildings.
The statue of the Virgin Mary from the 14th century, made of different colored wood and venerated in the crypt, was stolen on the night of May 12th to 13th, 1976. A copy has existed since 1981.
Art-historical significance of the Saint-Martin du Canigou church
The most important contribution of the early Romanesque architecture in the Catalan region to the Western Romanesque consisted in the consistent realization of the stone vaulting of larger rooms. Again, the initiative came from Cuxa, even if only in a branch of the mother monastery. The master builder-monk Sclua, who was trained in Cuxa and influenced by Oliba's ideas and was abbot of Saint-Martin from 1014 to 1044, built one of the first Romanesque churches in the West. Its bell tower, set up in isolation from the church, may have been the first of its kind in Catalonia. His greatest art-historical achievement, however, lay in the construction of the two churches, one above the other. Sclua extended the presumably three-bay pre-Romanesque Martian oratorio to the west by seven short bays to form a three-aisled lower church. The original Martins sanctuary was vaulted in the traditional crypt design by a heavy stone barrel that rested on massive, compact granite columns. The conception of the lower church connected by Sclua reveals that the upper church was planned from the beginning: the three naves have the same apex heights, so that a cave-like dark hall church resulted. The arcades of the vaults are accompanied by bulky beams, which are continued on the actual vault supports, so that these receive the tectonically and aesthetically ingenious shape of archaic cross-shaped pillars very early on. The stone vault and cross shape of the pillars are only part of Sclua's inventiveness.
In the upper church, also a three-aisled hall, with a slight elevation of the heavier central nave, he combined the already classic column arrangement of the three-aisled wood-covered basilica with a continuous stone barrel. Only between the third and fourth yoke does a strong belt curve outline the escape of the otherwise compact space. The originality of this master builder is also evident in the expansive capitals above the granite columns set without a base. The capital body, for whose shape neither ancient, Carolingian nor Byzantine models can be cited, shows archaic, highly schematized vegetal and occasionally zoomorphic forms. On the east side, the three naves each end without a transition into semicircular apses.
Location and ascent
To this day there is no road that has been developed for car traffic up to the abbey. The visitor owes a walk of 30 to 40 minutes, which leads steeply uphill over a winding asphalt path, initially in the sun, accompanied by diverse scents and the roar of the torrent in the deeply cut gorge. The moving panorama of the surrounding mountains inspires the hiker. After a bend in the path that leads away from the torrent around a rock, you cross a shady forest of oaks, ash trees, chestnuts and hazelnut bushes.
The building of a small Romanesque church appears on the left, which Dom Chabannes had rebuilt from the collapsed walls in 1978/79. The old Romanesque church was known as Saint-Martin le vieux. It had a nave with a semicircular choir apse and two side extensions that form a kind of fake transept. Similar to the abbey church, this has a square bell tower leaning on the side of the nave, with two arched sound hatches on two opposite sides and a crenellated wreath of one whole and two half pointed crenellations on each side of the tower. Perhaps this church was originally intended as a burial place for the monks, as there was hardly any space on the rocky plateau on which the abbey rose to bury their dead.
A little further away, on the right side of the path, the freshwater spring La Font del Comte reminds of the monastery founder, Count Guifred, who had given up worldly life in favor of a monastery life. The words with which the monks communicated his passing to the other monasteries with which they had fraternal relations sound like gratitude and compassion:
“ He who once shone as the prince of our homeland, known to Italy, Gaul and Spain, gave up the worldly honors, his wife and children, in order to become lay brothers in our midst and be poor with us in Christ. He lived such an active life among us that it cannot be expressed in word and in writing how much good he has done for us. Because he was our savior in need and stood by us as far as he could. To the old he was like a staff to lean on, to the young he was like a father to his sons. "
Saint-Martin le vieux, view from SE
Saint-Martin le vieux, west side of SW
Saint-Martin le vieux, north side with extension
Saint-Martin du Canigou, panorama on the ascent and descent
Saint-Martin du Canigou, panorama on the ascent and descent
Saint-Martin du Canigou, panorama on the ascent and descent
Buildings and sculptures today
Abbey church
Dimensions
Upper Church:
- Total length (outside): 26.00 m
- Length of the ship (inside): 24.00 m
- Width of central nave: 3.00 to 3.40 m
- Width aisles: 2.00 to 3.30 m
- Height of central nave: 6.10 m
- Height of aisles: 4.70 m
- Wall thickness: 0.85 m
Lower Church:
- Total length (outside): 21.60 m
- Overall width (outside): 9.20 to 9.60 m
- Width of the central nave (western area): 3.10 m
- Width aisles (western area): 2.20 m
- Height of the ships: 3.00 m
- Depth of the apses: 1.00 m
In Saint-Martin du Canigou one encounters the rare layout of two superimposed churches of equal importance. The lower church, about halfway below the ground level, was dedicated to the Virgin Mary, while the upper church venerated the patron of the monastery and apostle of the Gauls, St. Martin. Symbolic considerations may have played a role in this division of the church, because Our Lady, who was called "the underground" at Canigou, often reigns in the twilight of the crypts, as can also be seen in Cuxa. In addition to the Virgin Mary and St. Martin, the ordination certificate of November 10, 1009 mentions a third consecrated name, that of St. Michael. A chapel in the bell tower is actually dedicated to the archangel, who was often assigned high places.
The church building extends over a total of 24 meters from west to east and has an average width of 7.50 meters.
The entire church building is made of simple stone from the region in regular layers, including irregular layers, using mortar. The three apses of the choir head are decorated with arched friezes just below the eaves. This decoration is not continued on the sides of the church. There are also no pilaster strips that usually appear on the buildings of the premier art roman´méridional . The entire length of the upper church is covered by a gable roof with a pitch of almost 30 degrees. It is covered by gray slate. The eaves and verges of the church and its apses end on cantilevered masonry cornices.
Lower church
The Church of the Virgin Mary consists of two sections, which are separated from each other by massive pillars with belt arches. This can be seen as an indication that there were two consecutive construction phases. The older eastern section with its three small and low naves of the same size is covered by groin vaults, as is often the case in crypts. There are still traces of the wooden formwork on them, on which the vaulted stones were piled with a bed of mortar. The same can be found in the ring barrel of the chapel of the Vierge de la Crèche in Cuxa. The vaults are supported by short, compact granite columns with entasis , some of which are set into the ground. It is therefore difficult to tell whether they have bases. A single fully visible pillar gives rise to this assumption. The fact that the astragalus, the neck ring, is fused with the column is considered archaic: from the Romanesque era onwards, it is usually attached to the capitals. These are very voluminous and widen towards the top. As a result, they offer space for large sculptures, which can also be found in the older parts of the upper church. Some of these capitals, as well as the columns belonging to them, were encased in masonry for reinforcement before the addition. Some of them have recently been exposed in order to be able to examine them more closely.
The younger western part of the lower church is divided by pillar arcades into three unequal aisles with a total of six bays. Its three barrel vaults are reinforced by belt arches that stand on pillars that are cross-shaped in cross-section. This change in the structure of the supporting elements, that is, the transition from the round column to the angular pillar with templates, testifies to the progress that Romanesque architecture experienced at the beginning of the 11th century.
Lower church, central nave to the choir
Lower church, south aisle Ostend
Lower church, south aisle
Lower church, south aisle
Lower church, choir with column
Lower church, nave and choir
Lower church, choir with altar
Lower church, walled pillar
Lower church, walled pillar
Lower church, cross-shaped pillar
Upper Church
Today it is all the more surprising to find out that in the upper church the pillar was held on throughout, although this supporting element seemed to have become superfluous with the appearance of the pillar.
The three-aisled church, consecrated to St. Martin, protrudes over the lower church at its east end, where it stands directly on the rock, and does not end with it at its west end. It is vaulted with three tons of quarry stone and is divided by a single belt arch on pillars with a cross section. The large arched arcades between the naves, which are covered by a series of long, narrow and sharp-edged wedge stones, stand on monolithic columns with entasis , the bases of which are set into the floor.
The entire church building is made of simple stone from the region in regular layers, including irregular layers, using mortar. The three apses of the choir head are decorated with arched friezes just below the eaves. This decoration is not continued on the sides of the church. There are also no pilaster strips that usually appear on the buildings of the premier art roman´méridional .
Windowing through the church walls is extremely economical and leads to extremely weak light in the church interior, even on sunny days. In the apses of the four apses on the east side, very small round-arched windows have been cut out, with walls widened on both sides. More can be found centrally above the apses. There are just such windows, one in the north and three in the south outer wall of the aisles of the western section. The choir area is illuminated by a large, arched window arranged high up in the south wall of the aisle, which is externally framed by a dormer window. A window of roughly the same size is cut out in the south wall of the chapel below. The church is accessed from a main portal in the middle of the facade and from a side portal in the third yoke of the south aisle wall. In the wall of the southern aisle of the eastern section there are two passages, one into the southern chapel and another to the adjoining eastern wing of the monastery.
Upper church, central nave
Upper church, central nave, partition wall
Upper church, central nave from western section
Upper church, nave from the western section
Upper church, baptismal font
Chronology of the Church
Based on the above observations, the following chronology is proposed for the church of Saint-Martin du Canigou. The eastern part of both storeys already existed when it was first consecrated in 1009. After that, construction work ceased, as evidenced by the provisional facade, the existence of which can be ascertained in the crypt. The interruption was short-lived, however, and the western half was added before 1014, but no later than 1026. For aesthetic reasons and because there was no absolute necessity, the technical innovations that had been tried out in the crypt were dispensed with in the upper church: the barrel vaults were simply extended to the east and west via columns. After the church was built, a narrow chapel was added on its southern flank in the east, in which the relics of St. Gaudérique were venerated. Your choir forms a fourth apse, which is aligned with the other apses. Your masonry is unadorned.
Capitals of the upper church
The stonemasons of the upper church initially used the rough and unpolished style of the crypt. For example, on a capital in the eastern section of the upper church you can see a very simple chiseled figure with a huge head and small body, which is lost in a confusing tangle of lines. Very soon, however, two decorative elements emerged, which prevailed in the course of the construction phase. It is the finial and the palmette , the latter being nothing more than the combination of two finials. Both decorative elements, which come from the legacy of the ancient Mediterranean cultures, were so frequently used in the Christian West as well as in Islamic countries during the 11th century that it is impossible to say how they got to Saint-Martin du Canigou.
Here, this decoration is on granite capitals, which have the shape of inverted, strongly widening truncated pyramids, a design that can also be found in the cloister of Moissac. The decorations are designed as bas-reliefs, which means that the artist first drew the pattern on the stone and then raised the surface around it to create a flat two to three millimeter deep background. The composition of the motifs is simple, the size modest. Sometimes the flowers decorate winding stems, sometimes they appear individually or close together to form palmettes. These can also be framed by a kind of heart made up of two narrow, elongated petals. Animals are depicted twice in bas-relief, a lion and a wolf. Both are only indicated very schematically.
Bell tower
In the far north of the complex, the almost square bell tower rises like an Italian campanile , where it leans against its northern side wall at the east end of the church. The masonry of the tower is made of stone material similar to that of the church. On the ground floor, the tower is crossed like a tunnel by a wide passage from east to west, which opens on both sides with arched portal openings, one of the original gates of the monastery. It was an old custom, especially in the Carolingian monasteries, to dedicate towers to the archangels and to place gates under the protection of this "militia" of heaven. On the first floor of this tower there is a chapel dedicated to the Archangel Michael. An apsidiole, the choir of this chapel, only protrudes slightly above the eastern portal, belongs to it. On the west side of the tower, off-center to the south, there is a large round arched window that illuminates the chapel. Inside you can still find remains of old wall paintings. The stairs of the tower and this chapel can be reached directly from the east yoke of the north aisle.
The lower part of the tower, without any decoration, remains well below half its current height, undoubtedly already existed in 1009, because the dedication to the archangel is mentioned in the consecration document from that year. As was the case with the church, further construction was interrupted for a while. When it was resumed, the other wall surfaces were set back slightly and these were decorated with various measures in the Lombard style, as was common in the area of circulation of the premier art roman méridional . A little above the aforementioned recess, on each side there are two elongated wall niches at a shallow depth, which are bordered on the top by a triple arched frieze and on the sides by pilaster strips, on the building edges by wider ones, in the middle by a narrow one. In the upper area of these niches there is a large round arched sound hatch. On the north and south sides of the tower, between the arched friezes and the battlements, sound hatches are recessed, in the same shape and size and exactly above the hatches below. Their opening edges have angular setbacks. On the east side, two open twin arcades are recessed at this point in the width of the wall niches below and as high as the other sound hatches. They are separated by columns with simple capitals. The edges of the opening have angular setbacks. On the opposite west side, instead of the sound openings, there are two flat wall niches, about the same size as the twin arcades. They are closed on the top by a basket arch. In each of the niche backgrounds there is a small rectangular opening, under one of which there is an additional narrow loopholes. On the same side, just above the setback separating the building sections, there is a small, slender, round-arched window in the middle of the tower, with heavily expanded walls. In 1026 the tower should be completely completed.
The uppermost section of the tower lacks any wall decoration, but is crowned on all sides without a caesura by three full and two half battlements, which are pointed at an angle of about 45 degrees, the side slopes of which are stepped layer by layer. The lack of decoration suggests that the top floor was rebuilt after the earthquake of 1428 without these decorations. If you look at the proportions of the tower today, it seems quite possible that the tower was originally higher. Perhaps, similar to the Tower of Cuxa, it had an additional floor with twin openings and a few oculi above. Like this one, too, the tower probably did not originally have a crenellated crown, which was added later.
Graves
The two graves, which are under a pent roof near the tower, are the grave of the Count of Cerdagne Guifred Cabreta and that of his wife Countess Elisabeth. According to a legend, the count, who became a Benedictine monk, is said to have carved the graves in stone himself.
Abbaye Saint-Martin du Canigou, Guifred tombs, canopy
Abbaye Saint-Martin du Canigou, Guifred tombs
Abbaye Saint-Martin du Canigou, Guifred tombs
Cloister
It is difficult to imagine the cloister in its original state before it was very liberally restored at the instigation of Monseigneur de Carsalade du Pont at the beginning of the 20th century. Accordingly, descriptions from the time before this restoration, as well as old photographs, give us information about its original appearance. The irregular square had an average side length of 14 meters on the east, north and south sides. The length of the west side was only ten meters, because like all other buildings the cloister had to be adapted to the limited space. It consisted of two floors that were built at different times. The lower vaulted galleries opened onto the inner courtyard in simple arched arcatures. Unfortunately, the arches that have survived have not been adequately restored: they date from the early beginnings of the abbey and are reminiscent of other early Catalan cloisters.
Later, following a custom in the region, the upper galleries were built. They were not vaulted, but only covered with pent roofs. Before the restoration, one could see the holes in the outer walls of the church and the abbot's house on the west side of the cloister, in which the beams of the wooden roof had been anchored. Since many parts of the cloister, including the entire south wing, no longer existed, it seemed impossible to rebuild it in its original layout. The restoration was limited to re-erecting some of the capitals and column bases that had been found in the surrounding villages of Casteil and Vernet-les-Bains. For this purpose, a new gallery was built on the side of the courtyard opposite the mountain. The carved capitals belong to two different groups stylistically and historically.
Abbaye Saint-Martin du Canigou, cloister, east gallery
Abbaye Saint-Martin du Canigou, cloister, west and north gallery
Abbaye Saint-Martin du Canigou, cloister courtyard, north-west corner
Abbaye Saint-Martin du Canigou, cloister courtyard, north and east gallery
Abbaye Saint-Martin du Canigou, cloister, south gallery from the outside
Abbaye Saint-Martin du Canigou, cloister, upper floor,
Abbaye Saint-Martin du Canigou, cloister upper floor, stairs down
Abbaye Saint-Martin du Canigou, cloister, south gallery, relief
Abbaye Saint-Martin du Canigou, cloister, south gallery, relief
Abbaye Saint-Martin du Canigou, cloister, south gallery relief
The older capitals: the first group has six capitals. Five of them, as well as "two very beautiful cover plates adorned with palmettes, are made of a white-gray speckled marble that can be found near Saint-Martin". Only two of these capitals have been put back in the gallery. If you enter this gallery, you first see a capital with four mighty lions. Their heads are under the corner volutes , the tails are led through the hind legs and curl under the bellies. The huge wide-open show roughly chiseled teeth. The manes are braided into stiff braids. Diagonal stripes in weak relief run across the base of the capital ; the shaft ring is designed as a cord. Elongated faces with protruding cheekbones stare out from between the corner volutes. The last capital of the gallery belongs to the small group, on which the heads of birds facing each other come together at the corners. Their wings are only indicated schematically by parallel stripes and run out in narrow, pointed tail feathers. Your claws look a bit clumsy.
Pierre Ponsich pointed out that a small series of capitals and bases made of the gray-veined white marble by Céret are executed in the same way. It is a capital and a column each from the churches of Saint-Genis-des-Fontaines and Saint-André-de-Sorède (there is also a base there). Five further capitals, four columns, two bases and two cover plates are located in the partly pre-Romanesque, partly Romanesque chapel of Sainte-Colombe-de-Cabanes, a small priory of Saint-André-de-Sorède. Abbot Mathias Delcor suggested linking the first group of Romanesque capitals in Saint-Martin du Canigou to a tragic episode in the history of the monastery:
In 1114, Bernard Guillaume, the last Count de Cerdagne, united the abbey with that of Lagrasse. This decision was never properly accepted by the monks, and in 1159 they decided to get rid of guardianship and choose their own abbot. They were banned for this, and in 1162 the brothers from Lagrasse even resorted to violent means to force the monks of Saint-Martin to obey.
“ They go out in the company of a crowd of armed men, their personal guards or vassals, and break into the Saint-Martin monastery out of nowhere. On their way they shatter and destroy everything; they injure several monks in front of the altars and even kill one; they pierce the image of Jesus Christ crucified with their javelins. They chase the learned religious out of the house, shower them with insults and beat them up. They only hold back a small number of monks whom they almost starve to death. They seize the monastery's goods and possessions, which they sell or, if they cannot get rid of them, squander them as gifts. "
These excesses, perhaps deliberately exaggerated, prompted the Count of Barcelona, Raimund Berenger IV, who had succeeded the Counts of Cerdagne, to intervene. He caused Pope Alexander III to place the Abbey on Canigou under his protection, as Sergius IV had already done. According to Abbot Delcor's thesis, the marble capitals would have been created in the course of a restoration of the monastery after these unrest around the year 1170.
The late Romanesque workshop: four capitals in the south gallery belonged to a later and very characteristic group that includes a total of 12 works of art within the monastery. They are no longer made from the local white marble like the previous ones, but from marble from Villefranche-de-Conflent, "which is particularly varied due to its pink and green spots and has only been used in Villefranche and Cuxa since the 13th century", as Pierre Ponsich noted. A change can also be seen in the dimensions and proportions. While the capitals of the first group are always higher than they are wide - 37 to 38 centimeters high, 33 centimeters wide - the capitals of the second group are smaller and wider than they are high: 30 to 33 centimeters high and 34 to 35 centimeters wide. The stonemason in this series sometimes made use of the iconographic models that were common in the 12th century, but set the figures more clearly from the background and interspersed the fantastic representations with real elements. One capital shows winged pairs of lions, whose heads, which are disproportionately large compared to their bodies, meet in the corners. They have huge ears. The tips of the stiff triangular wings cross each other and enclose the chin of a mask protruding in the middle.
Capital south gallery, winged quadrupeds
Capital south gallery, winged quadrupeds
Capital south gallery, animals crouch between the ears of corn
Capital south gallery, abbot with acolytes and monks
Capital south gallery, dancing woman, unchastity
In other places, winged rams occupy the same position, as do some completely mutilated animals today, which may be rats. In this latter case, the viewer's attention is particularly drawn to the large, expressive human heads located below the top plate on each of the four sides in the center of the capital. The grotesque or satirical motifs, which suggest a changed mindset, are new. A hermaphrodite being, abbot with miter and animal at the same time, throws lascivious looks around and pulls a hideously grinning grimace. It is surrounded by demonic figures with horns, including a dog with a huge tongue hanging out of its mouth. The animal life of man is revealed in vice.
On another capital nearby, another dog is shown shaking its paw to a hooded figure, perhaps a monk. A snake and two great danes watching at the corners can also be seen here. A woman, naked to the waist, is in the center of another capital. As a dancer, she symbolizes unchastity. In the corners are figures that may symbolize other vices. This is certainly the case with the figure that opens its mouth wide. As a symbol of gluttony, she holds a bottle in one hand and a bowl in the other. One of her companions swinging a stick could represent the anger. A viola player accompanies the dancer on his instrument.
After the stonemason has scourged in this way, he now praises the orderly life in the monastery. An abbot, followed by his monks, stands between two altar servers holding a horizontally stretched sheet of fabric. The same scene appears on a capital in the cloister of Saint-Genis-des-Fontaines. Both times coats of arms are depicted on the panel. The heraldic motifs seen in Saint-Martin du Canigou are repeated several times on the capitals of the younger group. They are composed of a dove with a branch in its beak and a chess tower . In all likelihood, it is the abbot's coat of arms, under which the upper floor of the cloister was completed. However, this assignment is not yet absolutely certain. Thus, stylized criteria have to be used in order to chronologically classify the capitals, which belong to the last testimonies of Romanesque creativity in Saint-Martin du Canigou. This leads into the 13th century, a time when both human figures and animals began to take on individual traits. One will even more precisely assume the second half of the century as the time of origin, due to a three-pass arch over the dancer typical of that time.
Capital south gallery, crouching animals with a common head
Capital south gallery, monks
Capital south gallery, base with animals
Capital south gallery, base with four-legged friends
Capital south gallery, base with heads
A closer examination of the column bases confirms this dating. Some belong to the type common in the 12th century and consist of a groove between two bulges. On other higher bases, the corner spurs have been replaced by animal motifs or large human heads. Two chess towers and a bird that this time has nothing in its beak appear on a large chapter; which carries the altar plate of the upper church. Monseigneur de Carsalade found it between the courtyard and the gorge, that is, under the former southern cloister wing. The capital consists of three picture surfaces: the heraldic motifs in the middle are flanked by two scenes from the life of St. Martin. On the right, Martin, sitting on horseback, hands half of his coat to one of the arms. The miracle of the sacred pine is remembered on the left. The legend tells that the saint wanted to cut down this tree, which was sacred to the pagan farmers. They agreed on the condition that he sit under it. The moment when the tree tips is recorded on the capital: not on Martin, but on the heathen who fell the tree.
On the upper floor of the cloister, on the south wall of the church, there is the roofing of the staircase, whose wooden monopitch roof rests on some capitals. One of them shows the representation of sirens with hunched bodies and another with eagles standing upright with spread wings.
Cloister, capital on the staircase roof, sirens
Cloister, capital on the staircase roof, eagle
Cloister, capital on the staircase roof
literature
- Marcel Durliat : Romanesque Roussillon . Echter Verlag, Würzburg 1988, ISBN 3-429-01163-9 , pp. 61-89 .
- Rolf Legler: Languedoc, Roussillon . DuMont Buchverlag, Cologne 1981, ISBN 3-7701-1151-6 , p. 191-192 .
Web links
- Official homepage of the abbey
- French site with many pictures
- Abbaye de Saint-Martin du Canigou (ancienne) Description as Monument historique at the French Ministry of Culture (French text)
Individual evidence
- ↑ stmartinducanigou.org
- ↑ Unless otherwise stated, this chapter is based on: Marcel Durliat: Romanisches Roussillon. Echter Verlag, pp. 61-83.
- ↑ This presentation follows: Rolf Legler: Languedoc Roussillon. DuMont Buchverlag Cologne; Pp. 191-192.
- ↑ a b c This chapter follows: Marcel Durliat: Romanisches Roussillon. Echter Verlag, p. 83.
- ↑ Unless otherwise stated, this chapter follows: Marcel Durliat: Romanisches Roussillon. Echter Verlag, pp. 83-85.
- ^ Marcel Durliat: Romanesque Roussillon. Echter Verlag, p. 85.
- ^ Marcel Durliat: Romanesque Roussillon. Echter Verlag, pp. 85-86.
- ^ Marcel Durliat: Romanesque Roussillon. Echter Verlag, p. 86.
- ^ Marcel Durliat: Romanesque Roussillon. Echter Verlag, pp. 87-89.
- ^ Marcel Durliat: Romanesque Roussillon. Echter Verlag, pp. 87-88.
- ^ Marcel Durliat: Romanesque Roussillon. Echter Verlag, pp. 88-89.
Coordinates: 42 ° 31 '41.3 " N , 2 ° 24' 2.9" E