Ste-Foy (Conques)
The Romanesque monastery church Sainte-Foy is in Conques (municipality of Conques-en-Rouergue ) in the Aveyron department in France . The church and its small museum are among the highlights of the cultural history of southern France. Nevertheless, the place is rarely visited due to its remote location. Conques and its monastery church are located on a mountain slope, and it is precisely this location that threatened to become doomed for the church.
Since 1998 the church has been listed as part of the UNESCO World Heritage “ Camino de Santiago in France”.
history
The church takes its name from Saint Fides , in French Sainte-Foy . Fides was the name of a girl who had become a martyr. She was the daughter of a respected citizen of Agen and was martyred and beheaded on a red-hot grate on October 6, 303, at the age of 12. This was done at the direction of Dacius, the proconsul of the province of Aquitania, after she refused to worship the pagan gods. She was one of the first of the comparatively few martyrs in Roman Gaul. The religious imagination and the emotional excitement experienced a significant increase through the fact of their youthful age and their associated virginity. Her bones were solemnly brought to Conques on January 14, 866 after a robbery and have been venerated here ever since.
The monastery church, which replaced an older Carolingian building, was started shortly after 1041 and largely completed at the beginning of the 12th century and is thus in the early and high Romanesque phase. In the Middle Ages it belonged to a Benedictine abbey. After Saint-Philibert in Tournus in Burgundy, it may have the oldest large barrel vault, which was built around 1060. However, this date is not entirely certain. There is some evidence that the upper parts of the nave in Conques were built after the great Saint-Sernin church in Toulouse.
The monastery church has the typical shape of a medieval pilgrim church: a spacious interior and numerous side chapels. It has a five-fold relay choir, more precisely a combination of a relay choir and a chapel wreath, one of the pre-forms of the later chapel wreath.
At the time of the pilgrimages to Santiago de Compostela , Sainte-Foy became one of the most important stops on the Via Podiensis , the oldest section of the Camino de Santiago in France.
After the great days of pilgrimages, Conques and his church fell into disuse and a slow decline began. In 1537 the monastery was secularized and the Benedictine monks were replaced by a chapter of twenty canons. The basilica burned down in part in an attack by Protestant troops in 1568 and only rudiments of it could be used for worship. Its location on the mountainside made it particularly vulnerable to the destructive power of rainwater and the risk of pillar displacement.
After the revolution of 1789 and the final dissolution of the monastery, it was neglected for 50 years. Copper engravings from 1840 show the church with a partially collapsed roof and an apse that was buried outside to the lower edge of the window. In 1839 the municipality of Conques commissioned an architect from Rodez to demolish the church, which supposedly threatened to collapse. The adjacent monastery was also at risk. But only the monastery was actually demolished, a small part of the cloister is still standing today.
Prosper Mérimée deserves the credit of having saved this Romanesque wonder, as the city of Conques calls it today. Prosper Mérimée (1803–1870) was actually a writer, but in 1831 he became inspector of the historical monuments of France. French art history owes it and Viollet-le-Duc the preservation of a number of its most important buildings. During an inspection trip to review historical monuments in June 1837, he resolutely opposed the destruction of this church and achieved that it was placed under monument protection. The restoration work began immediately, but was not completed until 1950 when the windows were installed.
In 1875, the monastery treasure that had been buried was rediscovered under the floor slabs of the choir aisle.
Tympanum
The main attraction of the monastery church of Conques is the large tympanum of the entrance portal from the time before 1130. It belongs on the same level as the tympanums of Chartres , Autun and Vézelay . We have before us a kind of compendium of medieval storytelling, which is not limited to biblical scenes.
The general theme of the tympanum is the Last Judgment . This time, 117 characters populate the scene. Originally it was not on the outside of the church, but - as in Vézelay - inside an antechamber and is therefore so well preserved. The material is reddish and yellow sandstone.
In the middle of the multi-layered story, Christ is enthroned in the mandorla , an elliptical halo . Some paint remains can still be seen here, but it is not known for sure whether they are the medieval original colors; What is certain is that these figures were painted. According to Matthew's vision of the Last Judgment, according to which Christ gathers the sheep on his right hand and the goats on his left (Matthew XXV, 33), with his outstretched arms he divides the world of the hereafter into paradise on his raised right hand and hell his downward facing left. This division of the world into good and bad, which dominated the entire Christian art of the Middle Ages, is still effective in the present day.
In the mandorla, Christ sits as the highest judge, wearing a pallium . On the cross in the halo behind his head is the inscription: "Judex" (judge). With his right hand he shows heaven to the elect: “Come, you blessed ones of my Father,” reads the inscription on the side; with his left hand he shows the damned hell: "Move away from me, cursed", it says on the other side.
Four angels can be seen to his left, i.e. from the front to the right of him. Of the two angels facing Christ, one holds the book of life, the other an incense burner. The two angels facing the damned hold a lance, shield and pennant. They keep the damned away, as the sign says: "The angels will separate the wicked from the righteous". In hell everyone is punished for their sins. The torments inflicted here on the damned relate to deadly sins. The characters in these horrific scenes were not made up, but contemporaries.
As with many medieval depictions of the Crucifixion or the Last Judgment, the personifications of the sun ( sol ) and moon ( luna ) are to the left and right of the cross . The cross is seen as the center of creation, the center of the world and history. On the crossbar is the inscription: “This sign of the cross will appear in heaven when the Lord comes to judge” (Matthew XXIV, 30). On each side of the cross - not shown here - an angel blows the horn to call humanity to the youngest meeting.
To the right of Christ is the morally “good” side, the side of the virtues and the redeemed - but that also means: the side with the more boring subjects. First of all - above the figures - you can see banners, which are held by four angels and on which the cardinal virtues are recorded: Faith - Hope - Love - Humility.
Below is a crowd of saints and figures who approach Christ with full confidence: on the far right, first the Virgin Mary, then St. Peter with the key and a staff in his hands, then the hermit Dadon, the founder of the Conques monastery, followed by Abbot Odolric, the builder of the basilica and first abbot of the monastery - under the Caritas banner. He leads Charlemagne by the hand, whose generosity had enabled the building or completion of an earlier church in the same place. The emperor wears a crown and holds a small figure in his hand, presumably it is supposed to represent holy Fides. At that time, Germany and France still belonged together in cultural and historical terms.
Members of his family are gathered around the emperor. It follows to the left - one step higher - the three figures who were martyred with her at the time of St. Fides. The last in the row on the far left in the corner is Arosnidus, the famous monk who committed the “pious theft” that helped Conques to obtain the relics of Fides, which were stolen in Agen and then - as it is said - “various adventures” on this place were spent. So here a theft is presented in retrospect as a pleasing work for one's own fame and excused.
Below the previous scene, three small arcades in a narrow crotch zone represent the Church of Conques. Three arcades are always a sign of holiness and usually stand for the Heavenly Jerusalem, with which the Cathedral of Conques is symbolically equated here. Under these arcades hang the iron fetters of the captured Christians who were freed from the hands of the Moors by holy Fides . To the right of this is Sainte-Foy, Saint Fides, the patron saint of the basilica, kneeling in prayer in front of the hand of God, which is blessing her out of the clouds.
Below you can see the heavenly Jerusalem as the main scene of this part . In the center, Abraham , who receives the elect, is enthroned , symbolized in two smaller figures with halos. To his left are the righteous of the Old Testament ; to his right are the martyrs , the holy men and women of the New Testament.
Here in this place there is eternal peace. This becomes clear in the emphatically calm language of expression of the entire body of the figures.
At the bottom in the middle is the entrance to paradise. In front of the door with ornamented fittings, an angel receives the chosen ones, who hold hands and crowd at the entrance - as if dismayed by the demon and the terrible sight opposite. With these scenes, which seem amusing today, you have to keep in mind that they were created at a time when the fear of hellish damnation was real and very intense.
The whole scenery of the tympanum is divided in the middle between the world of good on the left and the world of evil on the right. The biblical monster, the Leviathan , with its jaws open, devours the damned, who are pushed in by a devil with a heavy club, turning his head to see the elect who escape him. The scenes in the narrow strip above are the resurrection (left: angels pick up the tombstones and help the dead out of the graves) and the weighing of souls (right: on one side the Archangel Michael , on the other a demon with a mischievous face, the one with the Finger presses on one of the bowls so that it tilts in his favor. Only the two bowls remain of the scale.)
To the far right of this, in this upper strip, the remorse is shown in a pictorial allegory , in a very literal version. The damned are bitten in the skull by smaller demons.
In another scene in the lower part, the demon of darkness rules in all its ruthlessness. Satan is enthroned in the midst of busy devils and receives the damned. In the right part of the tympanum, which shows the world of evil, the seven deadly sins are emphatically punished: gluttony , lust , avarice , lushness (excess), anger , envy and laziness . Under the feet of Satan, in the flames for all eternity, lies the idler with a toad, the symbol of laziness, on the tip of his toes. To the left of it, a man and a woman, bound and handcuffed, await the punishment for lust.
Even further to the left, directly at the entrance to Hell, is arrogance, represented by a knight who has been thrown from his saddle and who in real life was an ambitious neighbor of the abbey and who sought after their goods. He is pulled from his horse by a devil and impaled from above by another. During his lifetime he was excommunicated by the monks of the monastery . Here local aspects from the history of the monastery are included in the presentation of the Last Judgment.
To the right of Satan the consequences of avarice are shown on a hanged man. You can recognize him by his bag of money around his neck. The scene to the right is harder to understand. The statement is this: In Hell there is no more gossip, no slander, no more lies, so the wicked tongues are torn out. And on the far right you can see the rage, increased to the highest degree: a small bath in a boiling kettle is prescribed to calm down.
Here, too, there are a few special stories in a narrow upper strip that could hardly be deciphered without explanation. First the subject of envy in the middle left: The envious "still die of envy" is what the inscription says. The devil shows a player a pan flute , the instrument of his dreams, but another devil prevents him from grasping it and thus creates real tantalum torments. And in the center right appears the lot of the poachers who hunted in the abbey's forests: They are roasted like a hare on a spit, and the hare helps. Poaching is not one of the seven deadly sins, but one of the local themes in the history of the monastery.
In the upper right part of the tympanum further human weaknesses are shown: the arrogance which is also chastised. One bows, but the devil, as a kneeling courtier, tears the crown from the prince with his teeth.
In the scene three clergymen are caught in a net , they are dragged away with difficulty by a fat-bellied devil: one of them is holding a crosier. It is Etienne, Bishop of Clermont and administrator of Conques Abbey in the 10th century, who plundered the church treasure. Before that, bent and humiliated, Begon II, he too was abbot of the monastery. He owed his appointment as abbot to fraudulent machinations and had also squandered the abbey's goods. So here, too, clear local issues are addressed again, including against former monastery boards.
To the right of this are the heretics , recognizable by the parchment and the book of heresies - here as a scroll that they are holding in their hand. One of them is lying on the floor, the devil's mouth is closed with his foot. The statement is clear: No more heresy! And the forger is depicted even further to the right on the extreme edge - in front of him his instruments, which remind him of the reason for his damnation.
The inscription on the continuous beam should strengthen the believers in the faith before entering the church and encourage those who doubt to repent. Accordingly, it reads: “The community of saints stands joyfully before Christ the judge. Thus, the elect, united to receive the joys of heaven, are given glory, peace, rest and eternal light. - The chaste, peaceful, benevolent and pious are filled with joy and confidence and fear nothing. The wicked are thus delivered to hell. The wicked are tormented by punishments, consumed by flames, they tremble and moan forever in the midst of devils. The thieves, liars, deceivers, avaricious, kidnappers, they are all condemned with the evildoers. You sinners know that you will suffer a terrible judgment if you do not change your way of life. "
Below is the scene of fornication: what these two have done, a devil shows visibly on a parchment, to the greatest shame of both of them in public. The woman's long hair suggests rampant sensuality. And on the far right the gluttony: the gourmets have to "give back" their gourmet food, if necessary with effective means, here: by hanging the sinner by the feet.
inner space
The interior of the church is unusually steep and high, which of course added to the structural difficulties already mentioned. The central nave has a height of 22 meters and a length of 56 meters. When it was built around 1060, it was possibly not only the oldest large-scale vault after Tournus , but also the highest at that time. Cluny III was then built a little higher from 1088. Speyer II , the other major building at that time, was started shortly before in 1082 and reached a height of 33 meters. Conques is in line with the most ambitious architectural ventures of the time.
Conques is a gallery basilica . The galleries open to the central nave, each with a double opening. The gallery served to support the central nave vault - just like in the first Gothic cathedrals in Sens , Noyon and Laon before the invention of the buttress . In pilgrimage churches like this one, a gallery also served as a bedroom for pilgrims. But in Conques the access to the galleries is so impractical that it was obviously only used to stabilize the vault.
In addition to the dimensions of the interior, the figural stone carvings preserved on many of the capitals are worth mentioning.
window
The brightly colored windows used at the beginning of the 1950s did not meet the strict rules of the Benedictines, so that in the late 1980s Pierre Soulages was commissioned to design new church windows. Soulages, who was born in Rodez about 40 km away , developed windows based on studies that underline the strict character of Romanesque architecture with their very reduced pattern, straight and curved horizontal and diagonal lines. The glass for the windows was developed together with French manufacturers and the German company "Glaskunst-Klinge" in Rheine . Depending on the time of day, this glass changes the color of the light inside the church between white and subdued orange. All 104 wall openings, 95 of which are windows, as well as a further nine slit-like light inlets are now glazed.
The German cultural journalist Peter Iden writes about these windows:
"Soulages has succeeded in doing something that has never before been seen in such a compelling, convincing, moving way on a cathedral."
Fides reliquary
The small museum of the village houses the largest preserved church treasure of the French Middle Ages. The main attraction is the statue of Sainte-Foy, richly decorated with gold fittings and precious stones, which mainly dates from 984. It is exhibited under bulletproof glass in the center of the darkened main room of the museum.
The wooden core of the statue is completely covered with gold sheet and adorned with precious stones and pearls. The sculpture is composed of different parts that were made at different times.
1954–1955 an investigation of the entire church treasure of Conques and in particular the reliquary of St. Fides was carried out. It turned out that the head of the figure may come from late antiquity in the early 4th century and was possibly originally intended to represent a Roman emperor. It was also concluded that the first version of the statue was made in the last quarter of the 9th century. There were further changes in the late 10th century and later additions in the 14th, 16th and 17th centuries. In particular, the arms, which were quite unmotivated and stuck out of the block, were not cast until the 16th century.
The sculpture is a so-called seat reliquary, in which, according to tradition, the bones of Fides were kept. It originally stood within the church's latticed choir and was the central place of worship for the saints.
As early as the 10th century, some church leaders viewed the cult that had developed around this statue with skepticism. They feared the danger of idolatry , that is, idol worship. Bernhard von Angers said in the year 1013: “Looking at her for the first time, all in gold, sparkling with precious stones and resembling a human figure, she appeared to most ordinary people as if she [the saint] were looking at them alive and with them answered her prayers in her eyes. "
Such sculptural statues were frowned upon by the official church in the churches of the early High Middle Ages. In addition to a ban on images derived from Judaism , which sparked the image controversy of the 9th century, another cause of the banishment of sculptural figures from the church was the cult of gods in the Roman Empire . Christianity wanted to distance itself clearly from this, especially since the church still feared the power of the old gods among the people. But here in the Massif Central, the people wouldn't let their figures be stolen. Theologically the church now helped itself with a trick by always hiding relics in these figures. These could be venerated. The cult of relics is considered to be the main reason why fully plastic figures that were not integrated into the architecture were included in the Christian cult area.
The relics had to be kept in a worthy place, which was done in a plastic representation of Christ, Mary or a saint. Russian Orthodox art, on the other hand, stuck to its hostility to images. Only by lucky coincidence could this unique sculpture escape the usual fate of looting and melting down during the wars of religion in the 16th century.
See also
Movie
- The Sainte Foy abbey church in Conques. Documentation, France, 2004, 26 min., Director: Stan Neumann, production: Arte France, series: Baukunst, summary by arte
literature
- Marcel Durliat : Romanische Kunst , Freiburg-Basel-Wien 1983, p. 481, color plate 2, 22, 47, fig. 241;
- Hermann Fillitz : The Middle Ages I , (= Propylaen Art History Vol. 5. Frankfurt am Main - Berlin [1969] 1990), Fig. 102
- Beate Fricke : Ecce Fides: The statue of Conques, idolatry and image culture in the west , Wilhelm Fink Verlag, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-7705-4438-7
- Thomas Göbel: The sources of art , Dornach / Switzerland 1982, Verlag am Goetheanum ( ISBN 3-7235-0319-5 ), chapter: The church buildings of the Romanesque, pp. 268-278
- Rolf Legler: Südwestfrankreich , Cologne 1978, 5th edition 1983. (DuMont Art Travel Guide), p. 119, fig. 16–23, color plate 1,2;
- Viviane Minne-Sève: Romanesque cathedrals and art treasures in France , Eltville 1991, pp. 100, 102, 114–116,
- Ulrich Rosenbaum: Auvergne and Central Massif , Cologne 1981, 7th edition 1989. (DuMont Art Travel Guide), p. 140, fig. 65–67, color plate 22.25;
- Reinhart route: Romanesque art and epic way of life. The Last Judgment of Sainte-Foy in Conques-en-Rouergue, Berlin 2002; ISBN 978-3-931836-84-9
- Ingeborg Tetzlaff: Romanesque portals in France , Cologne 1977, figs. 12–14;
- Rolf Toman (ed.): The art of the Romanesque. Architecture - Sculpture - Painting , Cologne 1996, p. 147
Web links
- WHC Nomination Documentation (PDF, 88.9 MB!), Application documents for the nomination as World Heritage, here: Section "Conques, Abbatiale Sainte-Foy"
- ARTE dossier on Sainte-Foy (2007) ( Memento from June 18, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
Notre-Dame du Puy cathedral and Hôtel-Dieu Saint-Jacques in Le Puy-en-Velay | Pilgrim bridge over the Boralde | Old bridge in Espalion | Bridge over the Lot in Estaing | Bridge over the Dourdou and Sainte-Foy monastery church in Conques | Hôpital Saint-Jacques in Figeac | Dolmen of Pech-Laglaire | Saint-Étienne cathedral and Pont Valentré in Cahors | Saint-Pierre Abbey in Moissac | Collegiate Church of Saint-Pierre in La Romieu | Artigue Bridge | Sainte-Quitterie church in Aire-sur-l'Adour | James Gate from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port
Near the path: Saint-Sauveur Basilica and Saint-Amadour Crypt in Rocamadour | Saint-Caprais Cathedral of Agen | Church of L'Hôpital-Saint-Blaise
Via Turonensis · Via Lemovicensis · Via Podiensis · Via Tolosana
Other buildings: Notre-Dame du Port basilica · Mont Saint-Michel
Coordinates: 44 ° 36 ′ 1 ″ N , 2 ° 23 ′ 50 ″ E