The Slow Breath of Stone: A Romanesque Love Story
THE SLOW BREATH
OF STONE
A Romanesque Love Story
PAMELA PETRO
For Mary Diaz and Tom Ferguson
and for Richard Newman
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Map of Southwest France
Map of the Pilgrimage Road
1 Discovery
2 Preparations
3 Stones
4 Kingsley and Queensley
5 Maps and Quarries
6 Sculpture
7 The Causses
8 Pilgrimage
9 Racannières
Epilogue
Index
A Note on Sources
Acknowledgements
Also By Pamelo Petro
Copyright
About the Publisher
Map of Southwest France
Map of the Pilgrimage Road
1 DISCOVERY
Lend me the stones of the past, and I will lend you the wings of the future.
Robinson Jeffers
Lucy Porter awoke in a meadow outside the town of Espalion. She was unaccustomed to lying in meadows, but the summer of 1920 had been kind to the grass in southwest France, and it was as thick and inviting as any mattress. She propped herself up on an elbow. Perhaps Anfossi, her chauffeur, had jacked up the Fiat to check the patch on their latest puncture. But he was still asleep at a discreet distance in the next field. No matter, she was awake now. Lucy picked up her pen and rolled onto her side, pulling her journal closer. Its filled pages looked like an artist’s rendering of a hedgerow.
‘In the evening,’ she wrote of last night’s after-dinner stroll, ‘to walk by the River Lot. The willows grew in an exact Corot way – a boat with a touch of red in it, would have completed the Metropolitan Museum picture.’
The composition in which she lay was equally satisfying, perhaps more so thanks to the addition of her own small body, her pale dress like a white erasure against the green meadow. In front of her, its solitary bulk dwarfing the town and surrounding river valley, was a great cone of basalt, a volcanic orphan of the Mesozoic Era about eighty million years old, capped by the erratic profile of a ruined château. Behind Lucy lay a more recent, more imaginable past: a cemetery of granite crypts, many topped with vases holding fresh flowers, and, behind the graves, a worn, red church of the eleventh century.
Lucy sat up and looked back at the church of Perse, adjusting the bun at the nape of her neck. Her hair was dark but beginning to grey in weedy strands. She didn’t like it – grey hair reminded her that Kingsley was so much younger – but what did she expect? She was forty-four years old. The church was greying, too. White blotches – what the French called la maladie blanche, secretions of lime oozing from the red sandstone – had broken out over its façade, under the eaves, across the faces of sculpted apostles.
An image in Lucy’s mind, an image framed only a few hours earlier on the focusing plate of her view camera, superimposed itself across the bare western profile of the church. At the time the image had been upside down, but her mind’s eye righted it for her. She’d been dutifully recording the tympanum, the half-moon formed by the lintel of the church’s entrance and the rounded arch above, but then had become taken with one of the angels that framed it.
Her angel, Raphael, had more to do with architecture than art. It was his image that now lodged behind her eyes. He had been carved out of the wedge-shaped, fitted stones that formed an outer arch around the tympanum, cut in two at the waist, his upper body hewn from one stone, his legs and feet from another. More utilitarian than aloft, she’d thought – his wings were really little more than scratches – but she had made him fly. She had focused her camera on Raphael; the maladie blanche lightened him, and lifted him away from the stone. Then she had cropped the image severely, leaving only the angel and the curve of the arch to which he was bound, which suddenly, to her surprise, became transformed into a vertiginous arc of flight. Looking at him on the focusing plate, her head draped under the camera’s black cloth, she had thought he would propel himself right out of her frame. From the frozen gasp on his thin, wide-eyed face, he seemed to have thought so too.
The memory of Raphael’s flight was interrupted by a sound. At first it had been one note amidst the persistent birdsong, but now her ears sifted out the familiarity of her husband Kingsley’s whistle. Lucy smiled, turned around, and quickly grabbed her journal to record the moment.
‘In about two hours I heard his whistle and saw him coming in the softness of the August afternoon, the castle, the pastures and ripe blackberries setting off exactly his dear, sensible face. So tall and fair and mine!’
Later that day, before dinner, Lucy added a line. ‘Again, almost fearful because of our great happiness.’
Ste Foy, or St Hilarion, de Perse – it is known by both names – is not one of the great Romanesque churches of southern France. Its situation alone gives it a measure of rural dignity. It is possible to drive to the field-locked church, but not past it; only a footpath accomplishes this, passing beneath its northern profile and forcing walkers to crane their necks to take in the sizeable pile of red sandstone upon its hillock. A human body on its own tired feet ensures the church relative majesty by comparison. So does the fact that one’s feet are treading the Chemin de St Jacques, the famous medieval pilgrimage road to Santiago de Compostela, eight hundred miles away on the Spanish coast.
I first saw the church of Perse on a mild spring day in 2002. Its porous stones were the colour of a human tongue, some lighter, some darker, but all of the same hue. The interior was as cold as a cave deprived of geothermal heat. Awkward Gothic chapels meandered off the northern transept, and last year’s leaves collected beneath an ancient wooden door that once opened onto the grand south portal. It was locked now. Visitors used a smaller entrance fitted with an electronic buzzer.
The church was dank and forlorn inside – no nave was meant to be raked – so I went back out to see the temporal world meet its end on Perse’s façade. The earth was the same shade of tongue-red as the church; a breeze whipped up a pink whirlpool and I breathed the soot of France’s millennia into my lungs.
No one who has written about the tympanum of the church of Perse has avoided the word ‘rustic’. ‘Clumsy’, ‘anarchic’, and ‘inept’ are other adjectives that crop up. Most of these remarks pertain to the lower portion of the space, wherein we are to understand that Christ has come again, freeing humankind from the heartbreaking dictates of time. In the centre a corpse pokes his head out of a coffin, alert but addled with the sleep of centuries. For want of space, his head serves as the fulcrum for a set of scales, upon which angels and a cat-faced devil weigh souls. To the right, Jesus and the evangelists jumble crookedly into paradise; to the left, Satan and his devils feed the damned into a scaly, saw-toothed mouth of Hell, whose low-browed head erupts in a thatch of spikes.
Forme, a 42-year-old American woman drawn to France by my long-time love of Romanesque sculpture, this was a paradox as familiar as my own reflection: eternity in a state of decay. A thousand years of weather had made a crumbled mess of Satan’s face; Christ’s features were worn almost smooth. The everlasting angels were victims of the maladie blanche. The whole composition had lost the crisp admonition incised into it with a sharp chisel. Like a nursemaid, nature had said ‘There, there’ to our nightmare – for it was the rare man who was saved – and brought serenity to the Apocalypse. Ferreting in my bag I pulled out a small portfolio of fox-edged photographs and held up a dutiful shot of the tympanum, and then an inspired one of the angel Raphael, one of the figures that surrounds it. Most of the weathering had occurred before 1920, when the photographs had been made.
I moved into the surrounding cemetery and sat propped against one of the headstones, shivering like a reptile from its sudden warmth. Even though my side was in shadow the three-inch sandstone slab radiated heat. I calculated that the sun must have been shining on the facing side for at least three hours. Stone absorbs solar heat slowly, photon by photon, an inch an hour.
The photographs I held were from Volume IV of Kingsley Porter’s ten-volume masterpiece, Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads (one volume of text, nine of images). His wife Lucy – by far the better photographer – had shot the Espalion pictures and then taken a nap in the neighbouring field while he’d strode off to visit another church nearby.
There hadn’t been an ounce of sacrifice in Lucy’s nap. She’d loved the life that had led her to Espalion, in the old region of the Rouergue. She’d loved dashing through France, Italy, and Spain in the open Fiat; photographing Kingsley’s beloved Romanesque churches; enduring cold baths in provincial hotels, the two of them eating and sleeping like young soldiers. F. Scott Fitzgerald said that we all have a favourite, heroic period in our lives, and this had been theirs.
The field where she’d lain may have even seemed like a featherbed to Lucy after the conditions she had endured the previous spring. The war had just ended and Kingsley had been keen to visit and photograph Romanesque churches in the eastern environs of Paris. Lucy identified her journal from this time as, simply, ‘1919: Devastated Regions’.
The churches were often in ruins. ‘Climbed up fallen debris to height of capital to take photo,’ wrote Lucy without fanfare, or ‘Church had been blown up. Took heap of ruins, apse a circle against the sky.’ In another village she wrote, ‘Nothing standing and no people. Took a pile of stones to show what had been the church.’
Sometimes the churchyards had been shelled as well, so that the Porters were forced to navigate open graves and walkways strewn with body parts. ‘We had to pick our way carefully,’ recorded Lucy in April, ‘because of shells and hand grenades.’ Decaying horses littered the countryside. Lucy took in the horror and loss and legitimately feared for locals’ safety – ‘they mark [the buried shells] this year and not have them explode, but how about next year?’ – but she couldn’t keep her mind entirely off food (‘The Croix d’Or still sets a good table …’) nor her happiness discretely between the lines of her journal.
After our hot but poor coffee and tea we were off on the day’s work we both love so well.
… took interior, piers of nave distinctive. Despite the cold the birds, the flowering forsythia, and the ploughing oxen and horses announced spring. How happy I am!
Lucy may well have been content in her pasture, but I shifted restlessly against my tombstone. It was hard for me to sit still within eyeshot of the great pilgrimage way to Compostela. The road tugged at my peace, not so much that of my feet as of my mind. The Chemin de St Jacques implies a passage through time as well as countryside. In its promise of great distances lies the inescapable reckoning of passing seasons and years, and in my mind the Porters’ lives tumbled messily over the dam of 1920, down the decades of the twentieth century.
The thought nagged at me: why had Lucy been fearful of her and Kingsley’s great happiness? The phrase weighed down her journal like clumsy foreshadow. There amidst Perse’s dead I knew what she, in 1920, did not – that eventually Lucy had every reason to be fearful. That the Porters outlived the joy of that summer I knew from reading Lucy’s subsequent journals, discovered amongst her husband’s papers in a Harvard library. But that did not explain why a shadow had crossed her thoughts in Espalion. Was it a premonition? And did she recall that old, inexplicable dread a decade later when the high tide of her happiness had turned?
By then – the early 1930s – Kingsley and Lucy had forsaken the abundance of southwest France for the thin resources of the north of Ireland. On that warm, ripe afternoon, curled up against a rosy stone that smelled complete and holy, of everything that had ever lived and died, I couldn’t help thinking that in abandoning this place, this art, the Porters had left behind a source of salvation. These old French regions where my travels overlapped theirs – rural hinterlands once officially, but since the Revolution only affectionately, called Quercy and the Rouergue – are richly accommodating of body and soul. They burst at the seams with stone. Not the dense granite of Donegal, but fertile lime and sandstones central to the ecology, sculpture, and spirit of the great geological basin just south of the Massif Central.
In the Rouergue, which more or less corresponds to the modern département of the Aveyron, valleys of plum-coloured sandstone give root to the sloping vineyards of Marcillac. Quercy, a territorial ghost haunting today’s département of the Lot, is striated in bands of pale limestone plateaux called the causses – tablelands where the exposed bedrock is so plentiful you can smell it in the air. Its sheer abundance accounts for a culture of stony offspring varying greatly in age but retaining familial resemblance: dolmens and standing stones, erected thousands of years before Romanesque churches, and dry-stone walls, farmhouses, and conical shepherds’ huts – at once cheerful and ancient, like Stone-Age gazebos – erected centuries after. The bedrock from which they’ve all sprung, weathered into rich, calcareous soil, coaxes grapevines and walnut trees, melons and black winter truffles into abundance under the Quercynois sun.
This stone is both material and mortar. It not only builds art and shelter, it binds produce and architecture, sculpture and fungi, together as kin. The ‘black’ wine of Cahors is cousin to the angel Raphael, whom Lucy’s photograph freed from nine centuries’ bondage to the church of Perse.
To my mind Raphael and his Romanesque brethren are as generous to humankind, in their way, as the landscape. Their physical decline – Perse’s paradox of a sculpted vision of eternity fallen to ruin – is at heart a romantic paradox, begging us to imaginatively reanimate the life of an idea just as it asks our eyes to fill gaps in crumbled stone. These sculpted fragments and their pleas to be made whole again drew me, as nearly a century earlier they had drawn Lucy and Kingsley, generously and irresistibly into the sculpture. For the greatest romance of all is that of the self in love with the shadows it throws onto the external world. Romanesque art in its thousand-year-old decrepitude begs us to cast shadows. It insists we become part of what we view. And if we are unable to reinvent and reanimate? Then we are left with the dark pleasures of tragedy.
Lucy and Kingsley Porter were New Englanders, but they had meridional hearts: they loved Italy and found joy in what Lucy called ‘the choppy country’ of the Rouergue. And yet they exchanged the ready fecundity of southwest France for the dense granite and busy skies of County Donegal, in Ireland. Eventually I followed them there, too, to a saw-edged ridge of pink cliffs on Inishbofin, a tiny island barely clinging to the rim of Europe. Crouched there on the granite, I wondered if Lucy had remembered, as I was remembering, the tongue-red church of Perse, and that it was precisely the same colour as the headlands. The tumult of waves had worn them smooth just as rain and wind had erased the features of Christ’s face from the tympanum. Lucy must have wondered how she had come to travel so far from that sanctuary.
The autumn day I visited Inishbofin was unusually warm and I’d tarried on the little island, letting my imagination repopulate the past. I saw Lucy and Kingsley and their new young companion, Alan Campbell. Each in my mind’s eye poised in his or her turn on the cliff edge, a look of surprise not unlike that worn by Raphael on their faces. It was about Alan that I wondered the most. Alan, the inveterate dreamer, who would have been as likely as I – I’m easily his match in the sport of daydreaming, as was Kingsley – to fill the latent romance of the scene with characters and melodrama. By then, however, in midsummer 1933, he would have known that he’d wandered into a story beyond his own conjuring.
Alan was 21 years old at the time. I had been the same age when I discovered Romanesque art. Both of us were in dire need of a good hard slap from the backhand of maturity. And both of us got it, though I dare say mine stung a good deal less.
Shortly after I graduated from university, on the heels of my twenty-second birthday, I moved to Washington, DC to work at the Smithsonian Institution. Washington was then, and still is, overrun by ambitious young people who intern by day and party by night. My friends grazed on free appetizers put out as bait at slick bars and danced in clubs. Sometimes I did, too, but more often I stayed home drinking cheap wine and listening to the radio while I slowly, painstakingly filled a pencil drawing I’d made with tiny black dots of Indian ink.
My drawing was copied from a photograph of the tympanum of Ste Madeline of Vézelay, a twelfth-century Romanesque abbey in Burgundy. The picture tightly focused on a man and woman who held hands as he bowed to her. They were rapturously elegant, with rows of neatly braided hair and garments blown by unseen air currents into cascades of folds. Each partner bore the snout of a pig.
These were the ‘Pig-Snouted Ethiopians’, members of the heathen damned carved onto the great abbey of Vézelay at a time when tympana mapped a geography of Christianity’s fertile imagination. Night by night, my face inches from the paper and the desk lamp inches from my head – so close I could smell my scalp cooking – I lovingly translated their big hands and heads, their slim, pointy feet and voluminous drapery from photographed stone into ink. I was in love with Romanesque sculpture.
I’d discovered this strange art, the eccentric, embarrassing forebear of Gothic sophistication, just months earlier during my final semester at Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island. In my medieval art seminar I’d learned that the word ‘Romanesque’ had been coined in the nineteenth century with derogatory intent. It referred to the heavy, earnestly sturdy abbeys and basilicas that had begun to crop up in Europe around the turn of the first millennium, in the muddy, nameless years between the classicism of Rome and the spun stone of Gothic cathedrals.
These buildings of the eleventh and twelfth centuries had ‘Romanesque’ features – columns, capitals, arcades – but their decoration was radically unclassical. Hand in hand with the renaissance in architecture, the remembered skills of sculptors and masons had rushed back into currency as well. But instead of sculpting well-proportioned narratives of gods, these artisans freely – sometimes giddily – cut, scored, drilled, and chiselled the façades and column capitals of Europe’s Romanesque stonescape with stories from the Bible and detritus from their nightmares.
Out of the willing stone emerged hares in Hell, roasting poachers on a spit; rams playing harps and devils eating men’s brains; a female centaur pulling a mermaid’s hair; women suckling snakes at their breasts; tiny Peeping Toms. There were acrobats displaying their private parts; a man yanking out his own tooth; two warriors sharing a single penis; and in the Pyrenees, a marble dog stretching out his tongue, eternally unable to touch his water dish carved just out of reach.
Relatively little Western art before or after, excepting that of Hieronymus Bosch and the Surrealists, has been so feverishly inventive. From the beginning it was this very strangeness that was wondrous to me, this stony certitude that there was more to the world than sunlight illuminated for our eyes. Don’t misunderstand: I wasn’t looking for fairies and angels, rather confirmation that at one point in time, at least, images of the mind’s eye bore equal value to those fixed on the retina. Romanesque art stirred in me a deep, visceral joy, an inchoate thrill of imaginative validation, all the more extraordinary for spanning so many centuries.
Perhaps its appeal also betrayed the innate curiosity of a born traveller who had not yet travelled. In one of his brilliant essays on the Romanesque, Meyer Schapiro cited St Bernard’s furious twelfth-century letter condemning the then-new decoration of Clunaic abbeys. ‘What profit is there’, thundered the saint, ‘in those ridiculous monsters, in that marvellous and deformed beauty, in that beautiful deformity?’ Schapiro pointed out that Bernard sensed in those monsters an attitude that would eventually compete with Christian doctrine – ‘an attitude of spontaneous enjoyment and curiosity about the world’. A traveller’s attitude.
At the time I didn’t question too vigorously what fuelled my schoolgirl crush on the Romanesque. I just admired its easygoing, latent democracy. It was the first art of the Western tradition to place scenes of daily life – a peasant drying his socks by the fire – side by side with those of didactic importance, such as Abraham sacrificing Isaac. I felt an instinctive sympathy for its carved figures with oversized heads and eyes. Their bodies performed stunts possible only in a world unacquainted with linear perspective. Boats sailed on top of the sea, and Jesus and the Apostles evidently consumed the Last Supper in a room without gravity, where the tabletop floated before them and nothing fell off. Shoulders faced forward and knees turned to the side. After the Renaissance elevated the human eye and the illusions that please it above the soul and the cautionary tales that might save it, Romanesque art looked ridiculous. It became vulnerable; how could its ideas be taken seriously if it looked so naive?
It should come as no surprise that I did not choose the Romanesque as my field of study. I didn’t want my personal attachments supplanted by extraneous knowledge. So I left it at that, and did something else for twenty years. Then I attended the end of the world.
‘Before and After the End of Time: Architecture and the Year 1000’, read my friend Marguerite from the arts page of the newspaper, repeating the name of an exhibition so I could make a note of it. She thought it was something I might enjoy.
The show had been mounted in the second half of 2000 at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard to commemorate the more-or-less millennial birthday of Romanesque architecture. While a copy of the Pig-Snouted Ethiopians drawing hangs in my stairwell – regrettably, I sold the original for pub money when I was a poor postgraduate at the University of Wales – I have tended not to think much about things Romanesque over the years, but I made a point of seeing the exhibition. ‘The idea of the millennium enables us to contrast what might have happened in the year 1000 – the descent of the Heavenly Jerusalem – with what did happen, the Romanesque revival of architecture,’ wrote Christine Smith, an art history professor at Harvard who curated the show. ‘We juxtapose the City of God with the City of Man, the eternal with the temporal, and the divine with the human architect.’