The Slow Breath of Stone: A Romanesque Love Story

Based on sheer numbers, the museum shines in its assortment of ceramic holy-water vessels, but its chief prize is singular: an anthropomorphic menhir about waist-high, found locally and erected sometime between 3500–2200 BC. Statue-menhirs, which are essentially standing stones carved with human attributes, are rare, though the greatest concentration in Europe is in the Rouergue. Some sport schematic arms and legs, beards and breasts, even tattoos incised onto large, tooth-shaped stones; this one, however, was more enigmatic. Two deep eyeholes and a long, half-open mouth seemed to fix the viewer from a place far older than the Bronze Age. I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was an ancestral totem, a sire of all creatures with eyes and mouths before we differentiated into separate species. It was an eerie sight, like looking deeply into everything and nothing in particular at once.

When I visited the Musée Joseph Vaylet I had the place entirely to myself; the handful of other museum-goers in Espalion were all next door at the Musée du Scaphandre – the Diving Suit Museum. The unusual fact that a land-locked town like Espalion has a museum of the diving suit, advertised by a statue of a bronze diver in antediluvian gear standing in the middle of the River Lot and an orange diving bell on the pavement, is imperfectly explained by the fact that two local men were diving pioneers in the mid nineteenth century. I never made it there; I was too busy pondering M. Vaylet’s exhibits, the only common attribute of which seems to be their irrelevance to the present day.

The sixteenth-century building that holds his collection, the former church of St Jean, is irrelevant itself, having been made redundant in the late nineteenth century by the construction of a new parish church across the street. The older structure is an urbane building, compact and narrow but lofty – the in-town edifice of a rising middle class grown wealthy on the tanning trade. The only thing it shares with its predecessor, the field-locked church of Perse, is building material of local red sandstone. There must have been a town meeting at which the masons, tailors, tanners, and stone-cutters of Espalion decided that an eleventh-century church in a meadow outside the town was no longer fitting to their stature, so they decided to commission a new one.

It was in this former church, now a repository of the extinct and obsolete, itself the very agent that had thrust irrelevance on the church of Perse five hundred years earlier, that I momentarily lost faith in my adventure. Here at the beginning of my journey was every reason to abandon it. If a nineteenth-century antelope-headed mallet was no longer useful to the residents of Espalion, how could eleventh-century Romanesque sculpture be relevant to me? It rendered an increasingly discredited theology of judgement and damnation in thoroughly discredited artistic shorthand: what could be more irrelevant than that? St Bernard’s question – ‘What profit is there in this art?’ – had got inside my head. What did I want of it, not to mention the Porters and Lucy’s photographs?

The facts I’d gathered about their lives were as so many exhibits in these cloudy glass cases. Lucy liked to garden; Kingsley was driven to distraction by the unruly clanging of church bells in French villages; they were both bothered by flying insects in the night. Knowing these things didn’t begin to answer why I was so drawn to them.

Instead they rendered the Porters in a kind of Romanesque perspective. Lucy and Kingsley moved about in my imagination, but they did so within the constricted, one-dimensional space of the past. They were like photographs shot by my mind’s eye – as yet a camera without a depth-perceiving lens, restricting its subjects to the surface plane. My mental images of them reminded me of the sculpted tympanum figures on the church of Perse. Although the Perse sculptures were shaped in the round, they had been conceived to inhabit a flat universe. Christ is depicted sitting, but because he sits in one dimension, his knees occupy the same plane as his torso. Writing about Romanesque sculpture, Meyer Schapiro tried to explain how three-dimensional carvings could be rendered in one dimension: ‘They are’, he wrote, ‘like shadows cast on a wall’ – the antithesis, in other words, of real photographs, which are themselves flat but depict depth.

At this point in my journey I felt like that eleventh-century sculptor who had shaped the awkward little figures at Perse. Perhaps, over time, Lucy’s photographs and their stony subjects, abetted by her journal and Kingsley’s letters, even the French countryside itself, might begin to lend the couple shading and spatial depth. Perhaps my own younger self would flesh up a bit, too, and speak to me of the real reasons she’d felt such an affinity for this strange art; at the moment she was little more than a shadow cast behind the present Pamela. It seemed odd to be looking for answers – for personalities, even – in stone. But then I thought of Lucy’s words about winter in Paris; how she’d seen frozen sprays of ice issuing from the mouths of gargoyles, and how they’d revealed the way the wind had been blowing on the first cold day.

I, too, wanted to know which way the wind had been blowing; I wanted to catch secrets on the breath of stone. Lucy had found traces of the wind’s restless passage in ice; perhaps I would be lucky enough to find answers – or at least clues – in sculpture.

I chatted again with the pea-shellers, who directed me to an excellent greengrocer. I was feeling better about things. For good or ill – for now, anyway – let the Porters be a pair of Romanesque photographs cast on the wall of my mind’s eye. About the old sculptures Schapiro had also written: ‘Although they represent incidents … drawn from a real world, it is another logic of space and movement that governs them.’ His words gave me a way to think about Lucy and Kingsley that honoured them for what they were at present: not a living, breathing couple who had stood outside the church of Perse eighty years earlier, perhaps chatting with Joseph Vaylet, their three-legged view cameras at the ready, but guides reshaped on the focusing-plate of my imagination by the logic of my journey. The questions that propelled my travels governed my acquaintance with them. I was not so much their biographer as their fellow traveller, in the same place but another time, and their own painstakingly constructed, black-and-white photographs would be my maps.

There are 1,527 photographs in Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads, and only three, to my count, have people in them. In one, a priest poses in front of St Michel de Cuxa near the Spanish border; in another, three children line up before the entrance to a church in Western France; the third, labelled ‘Baptism of Christ; Shepherds; Magi’, is the most curious. Lucy shot the other figures, but Kingsley took this picture, and as a documentary photograph of column capitals it is an abject failure. The capitals are barely legible – the carvings look like webs secreted by a clumsy, stone-spinning spider – but below them, in sharper focus, stand two young peasant children, a boy with a hat pulled low over his eyes and a girl whom Kingsley half-cropped out of the picture.

It wasn’t unusual for the Porters to take pictures of the children who gathered to watch them work, but it was a rare portrait that Kingsley allowed into print. Lucy noted in her ‘Devastated Regions’ journal that, ‘I let the Le Duc brothers – aged 11, 9, and 5 – stand in my picture. They were clad in cast-off soldiers uniforms.’ That photograph was not included in Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads.

Everything about Kingsley’s picture is curious. The capitals and the children are pushed to the extreme left side of the image; the right simply shows a blank, masonry wall. Had he been fully concentrating on the sculpture he could have got much closer to it, as he did with a different set of capitals in the next photograph. That he didn’t suggests he was taking a portrait of the children, and yet the little girl is half missing. It is either a rare display of sentiment, if not quite sentimentality – both children look solemnly obstinate – or a display of wry humour. From their dress and the rural setting of the church, it’s a good bet the children are shepherds. The fact that they stand directly beneath their carved, biblical colleagues suggests that Kingsley was making a visual pun and a subtle reference to the rural pastureland in which he and Lucy, the church, and the children found themselves.

This photograph is from Volume IV, somewhat misleadingly called ‘The Aquitaine’, of his multi-volume work. In Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads Kingsley set himself an exhausting mission: to examine the sculpture of Romanesque churches along the great medieval pilgrimage ways that led to Santiago de Compostela, in Spain (the route flows like a straight river across northern Iberia, fed by tributaries that branch out into France, Italy, and northern Europe). He and Lucy took photographs in northern Italy and Spain and throughout France; then, using comparative analysis, he determined his thesis. Kingsley rejected the idea of national schools of medieval art, suggesting instead that Romanesque forms and iconographies, like the chansons de gestes, had grown up along the roads, flowing freely across linguistic and political boundaries. The French art historian Émile Mâle also postulated that there was an ‘Art of the Road’. Mâle, however, believed that the Romanesque flowered first in Toulouse and spread from there to Spain. Kingsley countered with the notion that pilgrims and masons carried the new art in both directions, though he thought it might have originated on the Iberian Peninsula. His nine volumes of photographs – totalling 21 pounds on their own, 23 with the volume of text – were the ammunition in his battle (most art historians today have left the battlefield, preferring instead to study Romanesque form rather than date it).

Kingsley amassed six volumes of principally French photographs; one of Italian; and two of Spanish. I chose to concentrate on ‘The Aquitaine’, which includes not only the area around Bordeaux, but almost all of southwest France from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, stretching as far north as the lower Limousin. I picked this volume for two practical reasons. One, I can get by in French, but speak not a word of Spanish or Italian; and two, as opposed to other volumes, which are liberally sprinkled with photographs taken by the Porters’ assistants or purchased from photographic services, almost all of the plates in ‘The Aquitaine’ were shot by either Lucy or Kingsley. Pride betrays this last fact, as each of the 1,527 plates in all nine volumes is attributed to the photographer who made it. The image of the shepherd children is labelled ‘A.K.P. phot.’, and the Espalion pictures ‘L.W.P. phot.’ – a rare practice in a scholarly text, but a fair clue as to how much both Porters valued their work.

There was a third, personal, reason I chose Volume IV as my map to Romanesque France. Nestling within the central portion of its geography, in the corrugated landscape of Quercy and the Rouergue, lie three of the churches I have wanted to see since I was an undergraduate: the great abbeys of St Pierre in Moissac, Ste Foy in Conques, and Ste Marie in Souillac. This litany of names, for me, summoned up the accessible majesty of Romanesque sculpture that, for some intuitive reason, had offered a steady source of serene contentment ever since I’d first heard of them twenty years earlier.

Before I could march off to France, however, I needed a copy of the book. A little hunting turned up three editions: the original of 1923, in 10 volumes and limited to 500 copies, and two later editions of 1966 and 1985, both compressed into three volumes. I descended into the art storage lair of Smith College and looked at all three. The plates in the 1923 books – many of which were missing, having been removed by Smith undergraduates over the years – were bathed in tones of grey, both luminous and grainy, like the pocked surface of a full moon. When the librarian brought out the newer editions I literally rubbed my eyes, thinking my contacts had clouded over. The beautiful plates were blurred and hazy, as if they’d been wound in plastic wrap. I later discovered that the reproductions had not only been taken from prints, rather than the original negatives, they had also been shot through slips of tissue paper that protected the plates.

I bought an original Volume IV and a plane ticket to France, and made up in metaphor what I lost in convenience. So much for obscuring the past.

3 STONES

Go inside a stone

That would be my way …

I have seen sparks fly out

When two stones are rubbed,

So perhaps it is not dark inside after all;

Perhaps there is a moon shining

From somewhere, as though behind a hill –

Just enough light to make out

The strange writings, the star-charts

On the inner walls.

‘Stone’, Charles Simic

I was lost and trapped behind a truck. Not just any truck, an Auto École truck – a big, lumbering learner’s vehicle that inched along and came to a painstakingly diligent stop at each intersection. Instead of overtaking it and risking a fiery death, I decided to hang back and try to get a bearing on where I might be.

It was late afternoon and the sun flared in my windscreen. This seemed impossible: according to my map I’d been heading east. But prolonged squinting proved I was driving west, and the map was old. So I pulled over, irked at lost time but thankful to be rid of the truck, swung the car around, and headed the other way, in the direction of the Rouergue – one of the few places in France, wrote Fernand Braudel, not yet entirely transformed by the modern world.

Quickly the ravishing but mild, carefully tended farmland of northeast Quercy, where the region meets the Dordogne, became a pleasant memory. As I drove east the vegetable colours faded and the soil grew pinker. Towns and farms became scarce and the wavy earth fell almost flat, like a sea with long, rolling swells from a distant storm. Only here the swells were covered in pale moors or forests of stumpy scrub-oak: low trees with thick, gnarly branches whiskered in lichen that made them an alternately venerable or menacing presence, depending on whether they were in sun or shadow.

I did not know it at the time, but later discovered that I was crossing the Causse de Gramat, one of Quercy’s ‘Petits Causses’, so named to differentiate them from the Grands Causses farther to the east. Despite the aged look of the trees they gradually came to seem newborn, a kind of piny stubble, once it became clear that the land was assaulting me with a dose of deep, geological time. Exposed bedrock was everywhere; the causse crawled with it, and the roadside shoulders were bleached white with its dust. Outcrops shared the moors with occasional sheep and goats. Dry-stone walls, thickly overgrown with moss and lichen, wine-tipped with tiny flowers, textured either side of the smooth macadam like mountains on a topographical map. The road itself was relatively new and its construction had left gashes in the earth that hadn’t yet scarred over in the weathered grey of the walls.

Out of these roadcuts tumbled the colours of crustacea, coral, and seashells: white and light grey, cream, tan, pink, and peach. The whitish stone had been tinted by iron oxide, but the marine allusion was on the mark. These were the same colours I would find in the cool interiors of Romanesque churches. This was the same smell I would smell there: a salt-and-chalk scent I remembered from childhood, from holding conch shells to my nose and taking a great sniff. It was the smell, I’d learn, of Conques Abbey. In that sanctuary and others I’d remember the Causse de Gramat and feel the tug of an ancestral memory-tide ebbing back to ancient seas. For that rock and this – everything within eyeshot, all of the stone tumbling from the roadcuts – was limestone.

Limestone is essentially calcium carbonate – it’s called calcaire in French – brought into being by the joint agencies of weight, time, and the sea. As sedimentary rock, limestone is made up from layer upon layer of compressed sea-bottom graveyards, rich with lime secreted from the dead things that collect there: algae, coral, the shells of marine invertebrates, the drowned. As building stone it’s wonderfully abundant, and for humid regions like Europe there has never been a material more receptive to man’s need for shelter, or his drive to express his imagination. The earth gives it up with relative ease and, unlike marble, limestone blocks hold firm against one another – marble skids – which is why Romanesque arches and Gothic vaults literally got off the ground. Most limestone is also mercifully soft and easy to carve (only soapstone and alabaster are easier, but they’re too delicate to be practical building materials). Although its rogue fossils occasionally deflect a chisel, it takes and keeps any detail a stonecarver’s imagination wishes upon it.

Like all sedimentary rock, limestone is a process as much as a substance. At the earliest stage it’s just latent ooze, still in the midst of precipitating out of seawater and collecting in beds on the ocean floor. There is limestone-to-be forming right this minute. The hard, chalky rock of the Causse de Gramat was at this stage during the Jurassic Period, the middle phase of the Mesozoic Era, which lasted from between 208 to 145 million years ago. At that time the causses formed the seabeds of shallow, prehistoric oceans: it was here that M. Vaylet’s plesiosaurus would have swum.

The Mesozoic was a 185-million-year bull market for the species then occupying the globe, especially the reptiles, whose evolutionary stock proliferated as their bodies swelled to stupendous size. The dinosaurs developed during the Jurassic, which was named for tremendous outcrops of limestone in the Jura Mountains, in Switzerland. The Jurassic has been called ‘the noblest of geological time’. Life was good then. The dinosaurs enjoyed the kind of environment we see today only on expensive vacations. Large, warm seas were hiked into shallows by chains of coral reefs. There were underwater gardens of sea lilies and acres of oyster beds. Dunes and shell banks piled the shores. The dinosaurs came of age in this period and then had their time in the sun all throughout the Cretaceous, as geologists call the following 80 million years. It was during this last period that a massive volcano erupted in what is known now as Espalion, about thirty miles to the east, covering its flanks in lava that, as it cooled and hardened, became the basalt mound Lucy Porter noted in her journal.

About 65 million years ago the dinosaurs vanished abruptly and the Mesozoic seas began to dry up, bringing the era to a close. As they evaporated they left behind limestone outcrops, where masons quarried only a thousand years ago for stone with which to build and sculpt Romanesque churches. Not quite a hundred years ago the Porters drove across these limestone plateaux in their 1920 Fiat, in search of the masons’ handiwork; today I was doing the same in my rented Renault. Had any of us been a few million years earlier, we would have needed a boat.

As I approached the crossroads village of Livernon – that is all it was, literally, a crossroads – I came upon a pile of bones left over from this fathomless, geological past: an acre, maybe, of loose, palm-sized rocks, pure white, for all the world like an archetypal joke, a caveman’s trash heap in a cartoon. I slammed on the brakes and got out and took one as a souvenir. It smelled of both seashells and sanctity; it smelled of church. There was latent sculpture underfoot, sanctuaries, farmhouses, walls, and villas. This was where Romanesque sculpture had come from and what had made it possible in the first place – this landscape, this stone, this history that so dwarfed my imagination. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, climbing a mountain in Germany, once defined the sublime by saying that it resided in a suspension of the powers of comparison. On that afternoon the causse achieved sublimity, as geological time struck my associative memory stone cold mute.

So I retracted back into the sphere of my kind, projecting human aspirations on the obliging rock. So much potential all around, and what did I find but the simplest, perhaps the first, stone structure of all: a dolmen, the evolutionary ancestor of all European building.

Just outside Livernon I saw a sign for the Dolmen de la Pierre-Martine. For the same reason that Quercy and the Rouergue boast an abundance of old churches they also, not surprisingly, have the market cornered on Stone-Age structures. There is a greater concentration of dolmens, or cromlechs as they’re also known, in this part of southern France than anywhere else in Europe. Quercy has eight hundred dolmens on record; the Rouergue has a thousand, most of them about 4,500 to 3,500 years old. The pursuit of this particular one led me down a farm track of such beauty that my throat ached. The grey, dry-stone walls had fallen into lavender shadow, behind which branches of scrub oak, roughly interlaced, made shard-patterns of the sky. Bells sounded as ponies bent down to graze.

The dolmen wasn’t much to look at; two of its supporting slabs had been reinforced with concrete to render its massive capstone perfectly flat. A dog’s leash lay on top, domesticating the tomb by association. It looked more like a picnic table than the skeleton of a prehistoric gravesite once filled with human bones (the horizontal and vertical megaliths originally would have been covered with earth, forming a tumulus). I taped my bit of limestone on it and tried to recall when I’d first begun to think about stone. My name, Petro, means ‘stone’ in Greek, and my father has collected gems and minerals since I was a child. But it was only when I was about forty that I began to suspect that my lithic adventures in life – dolmen hunting in a beat-up Renault in Portugal, toting dinosaur footprints to school as a child, a yen to build dry-stone walls – might add up to more than casual appreciation.

Shortly after my fortieth birthday I’d found myself crouching in a cave in Tuscany, inspecting an Etruscan relief carving of a faceless woman, her legs impossibly splayed outward like wings. A leaflet told me that she was a ‘mermaid with two tails’. I recognized her as a fertility goddess. I touched her shin, entranced. The other visitors wandered off, but an elderly Italian guide lingered behind. ‘You love this,’ he said in halting English, taking my hand and pressing it against the stone.

Over the next months it occurred to me that he was right. I didn’t just love Romanesque sculpture, I loved stone itself. Dogs may be our best friends, but stone is our most steadfast companion. It accepts whatever we find significant – our scratchings and carvings, our borings and borrowings – and remembers them far longer than we do until, like this dolmen, they become secrets. I trusted the mute companionship of stones, their testament to ancient lives and even older weather, and, especially, their humbling perspective. Compared to us, stones are immortal.

The only hotel in Livernon, a shifty-looking place, was closed, so I drove on to the much larger town of Figeac, not far from the Rouergue border. Venerable, mottled sycamore trees and neon advertisements lined streets crammed with rush-hour traffic. I could see a string of old hotels with lovely terraces on the far embankment overlooking the River Lot. In the forty-five minutes it took to travel three blocks to a bridge and cross the river, not a single parking space was left to be had. I bolted out of town in desperation, as fast as the Friday evening crush would permit, and fled south.

The ample croplands of the Lot Valley didn’t last long. Soon I was climbing, switch-backing up atop a high ridge, which gave onto the open, scrubby moors of the Causse de Limogne, another limestone plateau just south of that of Gramat. I bellowed out of the car window into the greying emptiness, noisy with relief. It was refreshing to find feral lands in France, where the trees aren’t pruned or planted in neat rows – an antidote to Gallic cultivation, in every sense of the word.