How France Built Her Cathedrals Part 26

CHAPTER VIII

Gothic in the Midi

The giant struggle we have witnessed is but the beginning of a long and complicated historical crisis in which men will have to make their choice between the unlimited augmentation of power (by force, riches, and success) and a forward-moving moral progress (by justice, charity, and loyalty). If we live always in exterior things, if we are always in movement, we become, little by little, incapable of recollection and fecund meditation.

--GUGLIELMO FERRERO, 1917.

It has been said that the Midi adhered long, if not always, to Romanesque architecture, even when employing the Gothic vault. Gothic art was not an indigenous development in the south, but was brought in the wake of political events, when central France and Languedoc became one with the royal domain. It proceeded, in part, from the architecture of southwest France, and in part from the cla.s.sic Ile-de-France Picard region.

The realization of the local type of Midi Gothic was Albi's fortress cathedral, which comprises a wide unaisled hall covered by twelve bays of diagonal vaults whose span is sixty feet--the width of Amiens' nave being merely forty-five feet. The b.u.t.tress are disguised as walls between the side chapels, the windows are long, narrow lancets, there is no triforium, and the roof is flat. Ogival art such as this has retained all the grand simplicity of Romanesque.

The chief care of the Midi architect was to avoid the flying b.u.t.tress; he had inherited Rome's admiration for wide, uninc.u.mbered interiors, and its aversion to showing the structural skeleton. His warm sun precluded the use of wall inclosures that were composed entirely of stained gla.s.s, which fragile screens would have necessitated wide-spreading b.u.t.tresses. He seemed to disdain sculpture. And yet, during the pre-Gothic day, Languedoc had excelled in that important branch of the builder's art, as Moissac's wealth of imagery and Elne's lovely cloister show.

Various causes led to the nudity of sculpture in the later churches of the south. The Gothic cathedrals of the Midi were erected after two generations of the Albigensian strife had impoverished the race. The new mendicant Orders of Francis and Dominic advocated austerity; the best Gothic of Provence is the Dominican church of St. Maximin. The building material available in some of the central and southern provinces did not lend itself to ornamentation; the lava of Auvergne, the granite of Limousin, and the brick of the Toulouse region are unyielding to sculpture.

The chief Gothic churches of the Midi were built in the second half of the XIII and the first part of the XIV centuries. First there rose in central France the sister cathedrals of Clermont and Limoges--northern Gothic infused with the regional spirit. Directly derived from them are the cathedrals of Toulouse and Narbonne. Albi Cathedral was not begun till 1282. The choir of Bordeaux, built by the first of the Avignon popes, is a cla.s.sic of Rayonnant Gothic, and so is that jewel of Carca.s.sonne Cite, the whilom cathedral of St. Nazaire. St. Sauveur, at Aix-en-Provence, the cathedral of Rodez, and Beziers' fortified church were the work of the successors of the apogee period of Gothic. At Montpellier, Mende, La Chaise Dieu, and Avignon, the XIV-century popes, all of whom were meridionals, built Gothic halls and chapels.

Memorable and interesting as are the Gothic monuments of the Midi, the traveler carries away the impression that the inmost soul of these central and southern provinces lingers most happily in the venerated shrines of Our Lady and St. Michael at Le Puy, in such churches as Notre Dame-du-Port, St. Sernin, St. Trophime, in the sculptured portal of St.

Gilles, and in Maguelonne's isolated cathedral of St. Peter.

CLERMONT-FERRAND[206]

Si c'est un aveuglement surnaturel de vivre sans chercher ce qu'on est, c'en est un terrible de vivre mal en croyant Dieu.... La conduite de Dieu, qui dispose toute choses avec douceur, est de mettre la religion dans l'esprit par les raisons, et dans le coeur par la grace.--PASCAL (1623-62; born in Clermont).

In mediaeval reckoning that mountainous, central province of France which was called Auvergne was counted in Languedoc. Therefore, to place the cathedral of Clermont in this general group of Midi Gothic is permissible. It is a daughter of Amiens, of the northern French type, and yet it belongs in a marked degree to its own volcanic region of mountains and storms. In it is the endurance and st.u.r.dy individuality of Auvergne, the inmost heart of France, where the Romanesque work may be said to be indigenous, so directly does it derive from the local traditions of Rome grafted on those of Gaul, and scarcely touched by those of Byzantium.

The chief Gothic church of Clermont has in it much of Romanesque austerity. The black lava of which it is built sets it apart among French cathedrals. "A pious fear of G.o.d makes itself felt in this spot,"

wrote a son of Clermont, Gregory of Tours, of the cathedral governed by Bishop Sidonius Apollinaris, Gallo-Roman and "last zealot for Latin letters." And though not a stone of the present edifice is of historian Gregory's day, one often murmurs in its precincts, "_Terribilis est locus iste_," and one often experiences in this abode of Jehovah the Lord, _un frisson d'ame a la Pascal_. In Clermont, where even the serene Gothic art could not free itself of the fire-torn mountains around, the somber soul of Pascal first experienced religion. That he should overstress the fall of man and original sin, what wonder? But Jansenist in temperament though he was--overwhelmed by man's nothingness and G.o.d's grandeur--the mystic Pascal was no rigid pessimist. Cathedral and man of genius both preach the resurrection after the fall, both have the upward surge of hope, even as the fearful summit of the Puy-de-Dome, standing over Clermont, outsoars the storm clouds hiding its base, to rear its head in sunlight.

For all its soberness, the cathedral of Clermont has the true Gothic sweep of the spirit _au-dela_. Happy the traveler who first approaches it at sunset, coming slowly across the mountain-walled plain, out of the Forez hills of rus.h.i.+ng torrents where is set the Chaise Dieu. The cathedral crowns the foothill around which has settled the city, and as it stands silhouetted against a bluish haze of mountain--the extinct crater, the Puy-de-Dome--it fulfills the ideal of a church crowning a city.[207] Seen from the town, the ma.s.sed volcanic hills are sufficiently near for their woods and villages to add picturesque details to the ever-changing views, yet not so close that they hang oppressively over the city. Other views of the cathedral can be gained from the foothills around Royat, whose small, st.u.r.dy church was fortified to bar the valley into the huge mountain behind it.

Lava stone is dusty black, therefore on closer inspection Clermont Cathedral has somewhat the aspect of the smoke-stained churches in manufacturing centers. The gray-black Volvic stone is of better effect within the church, though at first that interior may strike a chill.

Lava does not lend itself to sculptural decoration. However, the essential lines of Clermont are of such masterly proportions, of so grand a simplicity, that deeper and deeper grows the influence of this church on those who frequent it. The diagonals etched black against the white vault panels fall with peculiar ease and vigor on the tall dark piers. The slenderness of those cl.u.s.tered columns is not foolhardy, since lava has much resistant force. The single aisles of the choir and the double aisles of the nave rise to half the height of the church, and we have seen at Bourges and Le Mans that when pier arches are above the average height there is given to an edifice a note of exotic beauty.

Like Amiens, the height of this church is three times greater than its width. Its vista is closed imposingly; the imaged windows of its high apsidal chapels appear symmetrically behind the arches that surround the sanctuary.

The story of the chief church of Auvergne interests the archaeologist.

The crypt belonged to the previous Carolingian church, and so did the two western towers until the XIX century. M. Viollet-le-Duc removed the ancient belfries, extended the nave by two bays, and built the present towers, whose sky-pointing spires are superb in the general view of Clermont, but whose details can be criticized, as, for instance, the blocking of corner niches by pinnacles when the purpose of a niche is to hold a statue. Modern Gothic is too often a cold, hard imitation. The stair approaches here lack the old-time amplitude of the triple portals.

The XIII-century cathedral of Clermont was practically the first Gothic monument raised in Auvergne, which province adhered stubbornly to its own exceptional Romanesque architecture. The first stone was laid in 1248, in the same year that Cologne Cathedral was begun. The founder, Bishop Hugues de la Tour, had attended the dedication of the Sainte-Chapelle at Paris, and then had returned to Clermont to begin his own cathedral. That same year he started out as a crusader, in the train of Louis IX, but as he died in Egypt the work on the church was not continued seriously till 1253, when St. Louis helped to raise to the see of Clermont his friend Guy de la Tour, nephew of Hugues. Belonging to a feudal family of great possessions, the new bishop, too, was able to be munificent toward his cathedral.

In 1254, when St. Louis was returning from his unsuccessful crusade, he paused in Clermont, to replenish his depleted treasury. Ten years later he presented windows to the cathedral, on the occasion of his son Philippe's marriage there to the daughter of Jaime el Conquistador of Aragon. The lights in the Lady chapel show the fleur-de-lis and the donjons of Castile, and are apparently the work of Paris craftsmen, who controlled the vitrine art of the later XIII century. That unskilled local workers set them in place would seem to be indicated by the armature bars which do not follow the contour of the medallions, as was then the custom. In the choir's clearstory are the single figures and grisaille that were in vogue during the next century.

Jean Deschamps made the plan of Clermont Cathedral. He may have studied in the north, since certain traits of Picardy appear here, but the spirit of the work is regional. His windows do not fill the entire upper s.p.a.ce between the active members. Under Bishop Guy de la Tour he directed the building of the cathedral for almost forty years, till 1287. Perhaps he designed the cathedral of Limoges, in west-central France, since its plan and details closely resemble those of Clermont.

Bishop Aymar de Cros, who carried on the works in Auvergne's capital, was another of the schoolmen who were builders of churches; such was his intellect that St. Thomas Aquinas willed to him his ma.n.u.scripts in the hope that his _Summa_ might be completed.

Under Bishop Aubert Aycelin de Montaigu a new master-of-works took charge--Pierre Deschamps (1287-1325), the son probably of Jean who had made the plans. He erected the four westernmost bays of the choir, the transept, and the easternmost bay of the nave in its lower parts. From 1340 to 1359 the master-of-works was Pierre de Cabazat, who added three more bays to the nave, and was employed in those same years in making, with Hugues Morel, the abbey church of La Chaise Dieu in the Forez mountains across the plain from Clermont.[208] An Avignon pope, Clement VI, was the patron who undertook that gaunt granite structure, as full of sorrow as the times that produced it. Clement had been abbot at La Chaise Dieu, so naturally he contributed toward the erection of the cathedral of Auvergne as did his successor at Avignon, Innocent VI (d.

1362), a former bishop of Clermont.

The city was fortunate to have one of the notable D'Amboise family for its prelate in the late-Gothic day, Jacques d'Amboise (1505-16), who as abbot of Cluny had built at Paris the stately residence called the Hotel Cluny. Close to his Auvergne cathedral he set up the Fontaine d'Amboise, now on the Cours Sablon. The eloquent Ma.s.sillon was a later bishop of Clermont (1717-42); he founded its town library and bequeathed his fortune to the sick poor of the Hotel Dieu. Before the French Revolution had turned to violence and destruction, in Clermont Cathedral gathered the people, with hearts beating high with generous desire for reform, for the blessing of their National Guard banner, embroidered by a community of nuns. With all too tragic swiftness came the day when in the same church were lighted bonfires for the destruction of vestments and missals. Among the precious things then wrecked was a portrait statue of Louis IX, made while his friend Guy de la Tour was bishop.

Only by chance did the cathedral itself, riddled with bullets, escape annihilation.

The see of Clermont has gone by various designations; so ancient is this city that it has been called successively by five different names. Here where is more Celtic blood than in any other region in France, save Brittany, the Celtic hero, Vercingetorex, inflicted on Caesar his sole defeat. When Gaul became Christian, Clermont continued to be important.

Her first bishop, St. Austremonius, was one of the seven whom Gregory of Tours says were sent into Gaul in 250 by Pope Fabian, with St. Denis of Paris, St. Martial of Limoges, St. Saturninus of Toulouse, St. Just of Narbonne, St. Trophimus of Arles, and St. Gatien of Tours. At the close of the V century Clermont's bishop, the celebrated Caius Apollinaris Sidonius, poet and scholar, son-in-law of an emperor, made his stand for Latin culture against Teutonic submersion. Dearly he loved his own enlightened Lyons, but of Clermont he said, "Such an horizon would make a stranger forget his native land." A generation later another outstanding Gallo-Roman bishop of Clermont was St. Gall, uncle of Gregory of Tours, who was so just to all that even Jews marched with lighted tapers at his funeral. Some twenty-six of Clermont's bishops have been canonized.

The third cathedral of the city, and that which immediately preceded the present one, was consecrated in 946 by Bishop etienne II. Clermont had suffered grievously by Saracen invasion, followed by the Northmen inroads. After the second Norman sacking the ruined houses smoldered for a month, and in the streets corpses lay unburied, for the population in terror had fled to the countryside. The bishop called back his flock to remake their homes. In his new church was a precocious use of ambulatory and radiating chapels, a disposition which was to lead to the chief beauty in the Gothic cathedrals of the land, but which made its appearance in the Ile-de-France only in the XII century. Bishop etienne's Carolingian cathedral became the prototype for the Auvergnat-Romanesque school.

In the good etienne's church prayed the first crusaders when by papal bidding there gathered at Clermont a mighty council at whose tenth and last session was preached the First Crusade. Nature herself seemed to have prepared the people's minds for some vast enterprise, for all the chroniclers of western Christendom describe the sublime shower of astral stars, thick as snowflakes, which whirled in the sky. So in this same primeval Auvergne, some six centuries earlier, at the break-up of Rome's empire before the invading Barbarians, there had for three years been earthquakes and fiery volcanic eruptions.

Tradition says that the momentous gathering of 1095 took place in what is now the Place Delille and the adjacent Cours Sablon. Many of our building friends were present--Bishop Odo from Bayeux, Bishop Ives from Chartres, Bishop Hoel from Le Mans, the abbots Geoffrey of Vendome, Jarenton of St. Benigne, and St. Hugues of Cluny, and from Spain came the great Bernardo who ruled the see of Toledo. For the people of Clermont to-day, November 28, 1095, is as vivid a reality as any of the revolutions of yesterday. A statue of Urban II stands outside the cathedral. Even so he stood, said a witness, as one having authority, high above the vast throng, on one side of him the stunted Peter the Hermit of Picardy, and on the other the Norman-Italian Bohemund of Taranto, a veritable Greek G.o.d in build and feature. From end to end of France Urban journeyed to arouse the people. Now he used persuasion, now invective; sometimes he appealed to idealistic motives or propounded colonial policies very like modern ideas. Europe had good cause to be apprehensive. The Almoravids had advanced into Spain. The Seljukian Turks were a menace more serious than the Saracens. Urban understood the peril and raised his voice in warning. "Cease to be a terror to peaceful citizens," he exhorted the gathered barons. "Turn your arms to the defense of the soil trod by the King of Kings, of the tomb over which rose the sun of the Resurrection.... The great cities of Asia Minor have fallen a prey to the Mussulman, who has planted the crescent by the h.e.l.lespont, whence he menaces Europe.... Nation of the Franks, set beyond the mountains, nation cherished and chosen of G.o.d, as clearly your high deeds prove, nation distinct from others by your situation, by your faith, by your respect for Mother Church, to you I address my plea.... Who should right these wrongs but you who have received from on high agility of body, the training of arms and grandeur of soul?...

Cease these mutual wars!... Jesus Christ died for you. You should be willing to die for him." And a great answering cry rose from the hundred thousand gathered there, "G.o.d wills it," to be the rallying call of the crusades.

Thus in the heart of France a French pope initiated the cosmic ventures which were to change European ways of life, ventures in which Frenchmen played a leading part so that to this day a European is called a Frank by a Mohammedan. One can easily see in the crusades only their failures and their crimes, one can sneer at them with Voltaire--who sneered at Jeanne d'Arc. Europe's aggression was needed then to save Christianity from Asiatic immobility. The benefits of the crusades outweigh their delinquencies.

_Gesta Dei per Francos_ a monk called his chronicle of the First Crusade. And while those feats by G.o.d through the men of France in the East went on, other feats for G.o.d were ventured in France, the raising of Gothic cathedrals, sister movements that gave wings to the soul, purifying and molding the faith and the genius of those virile and faulty generations. Already the movement was stirring. On his way to Clermont, Urban II had seen Verona Cathedral building and S. Ambrogio's at Milan. He had blessed S. Abondio at Como. In France he blessed the new choir of St. Sernin at Toulouse and the material gathered for the cathedral at Carca.s.sonne. Cluny's new choir he dedicated, and various other Romanesque churches. Before the Second Crusade set out Suger had built St. Denis.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Notre Dame du Port at Clermont-Ferrand. Typical XII-century Church of Auvergne's Romanesque School_]

In Clermont, though the cathedral of 1095 has been superseded by the present Gothic structure, there is intact a venerated sanctuary where Urban had a votive Ma.s.s chanted on the eve of the historic council.

Every morning one can see the men and women of the city gather in the crypt of Notre Dame-du-Port to beg a blessing on their working day. They may not be able to put into words what it is each feels in that subterranean chamber impregnated by the pet.i.tions of those of their race who have gone before them, but each knows that here his prayer has plenitude and patriotic aspiration. A _custodia matutina_ in Notre Dame-du-Port, _usque ad noctem_ in the cathedral. One fears G.o.d in the cathedral, one loves G.o.d in Notre Dame.

Notre Dame-du-Port is a masterpiece of the Romanesque school of Auvergne.[209] When it was built lava stone was not in use for construction, but solely for decorative purposes. So curiously alike are all the pre-Gothic churches in this province that one architect might have planned them. The venerable crypt of Notre Dame-du-Port was built in the XI century. The Romanesque church above it was constructed during the XII century and has all the Auvergnese traits: a central tower in two stories set on a barlong which forms a kind of upper transept, a compact apse with snug absidioles whose exterior walls are decorated by colored volcanic stones in marquetry designs, a western narthex, and a princ.i.p.al span covered by a half-barrel vault undivided by transverse arches and b.u.t.tressed by side aisles surmounted by tribunes, which meant that light entered the middle vessel indirectly. Auvergne, like Burgundy, attempted to light her upper church by a clearstory, but found the experiment hazardous and gave it up. Her churches have stood intact through centuries of harsh winters. The very mortar lines were made means of decoration; wide bands of red mortar were found to be effective with blocks of black lava.[210] In the volcanic soil of Auvergne were elements that rendered mortar as resistant as stone. The local Gallo-Romans had used the polychrome lava as decoration.

The interior apse of Notre Dame-du-Port is a gem of masoncraft. Around the tiny processional path stand engaged pillars that are decoration and b.u.t.tresses, too. The regional skill in sculpture appears in the capitals of the main piers, where the story is related with animation, even if the figures are too squat and the heads too large. The armor indicates that the work was done early in the XII century. The doorjamb images at the southern entrance of the transept were sculptured in the years when St. Thomas Becket came to Clermont wearing the white robe of the Cistercians who had given him hospitality in France. Crowds gathered every day to receive his blessing, for all Christendom held him to be a saint defending right and liberty. A cast of Clermont's archaic portal, whose charm is exceptional, with its seraphim of the mystic triple wings, has been placed in the Trocadero Museum at Paris. When this side entrance was completed, Richard Coeur-de-Lion was making over his claims in Auvergne to his lifetime rival, Philippe-Auguste, which cession was to lead, in time, to the erection of the Ile-de-France Picardy cathedral of Clermont.

Some of the most admirably sculptured capitals in Auvergne are at Mozac, a suburb of Riom.[211] The nave of Mozac's abbey church was built from 1131 to 1147 by a brother of Peter the Venerable, who made Cluny's nave, and of the doughty abbot, Pons de Montboissier, who erected Vezelay's portico of paradise, all three of them belonging to a feudal family of Auvergne. The small abbatial holds a priceless treasure, the reliquary of St. Calmin, which an abbot presented in 1168. Its fourteen panels of Limoges enamel are ornamented in gold. A bold attempt was made to rob the church of this national heritage, so it is now protected by electric bells and every kind of burglar alarm.

"_Clermont le riche, Riom le beau_," so ran the old saying. Riom, the small but proud rival of the capital of Auvergne, was a town of magistrates who built themselves Gothic Renaissance houses as individual as the pre-Gothic work of the province. The church of St. Amable has a Romanesque nave and an early-Gothic choir. Jean, Duke of Berry, had Guy and Andre de Dammartin design the XIV-century Sainte-Chapelle for his palace at Riom. Its brilliantly cold stained gla.s.s was commanded for the wedding, in 1389, of sixty-year-old Duke John and the thirteen-year-old heiress, Jeanne de Boulogne. Froissart has described the curious union.

Each window panel has a single statue under a canopy; the prophets and apostles carry appropriately inscribed scrolls. A XV-century window, representing the Bourbon dukes, Jean II and Pierre II, patrons of Moulins, contains a St. Marguerite so similar to one in the "Book of Hours" which Jehan Fouquet painted for etienne Chevalier that the window is thought to be designed by the great _primitif_ of Tours.

It may be to artists of Jean de Berry's entourage that we owe the most entrancing Madonna of Flamboyant art, the _vierge a l'oiseau_, an image in the regional stone which stands at the trumeau of the XV-century church of Notre Dame-du Mathuret. One student after another has discussed the date of this exquisite figure, so purely French in essence, whose simplicity is as ample and unaffected as the best XIII-century art. Work as exceptional as this is of no date or school, but is due to some unrecorded individual genius. In that same late-Gothic day the spirit of St. Louis and Joinville lived again in _The Very Joyous, Pleasing and Diverting History of the Gentle Lord of Bayard, written by the Loyal Servitor_.

The serrated foliage of the Madonna's crown proves the sculpture to be late-Gothic. M. Gonse places it midway in the XIV century, M. Vitry early in the XVI, and M. Enlart thinks that it could not have been produced before the XV century. MM. Male, Pal.u.s.tre, Merimee, and others have discussed it. In the ideal innocence and dignity of the Virgin is Michel Colombe's charm. The legend was that in Egypt the infant Jesus modeled images of birds, then breathed on them, imparting life. This is the mystic moment which the unknown master of Riom chose to render; there is a brooding reverence in the young mother's face as she gazes at her Son, who ponders in a divine wonderment at a bird about to fly from his hand.

THE ROMANESQUE CATHEDRAL OF LE PUY[212]

Into whatever country you carry war, remember that children, women and churchmen and the poor are not your enemies.--(Dying words of BERTRAND DUGUESCLIN, killed near Le Puy, 1380).

Le Puy is h.o.a.ry with history. Perched high on basaltic rocks near the source of the Loire, picturesque beyond description, it stood on the great pilgrimage route from Italy to Compostela, the _Via Francigena_ by which French art and poetry pa.s.sed into Spain and penetrated to Italy, along whose pilgrim roads are found portal images of the Round Table heroes and the sculptured tympanums of France.[213] The cathedral is built near the top of the town's hill, and above it on the hillcrest has been set a mammoth statue of Our Lady cast from cannon taken at Sebastopol. In the immediate suburbs rises another ma.s.s of volcanic rock, a needle some two hundred and fifty feet in height. The oldest part of the chapel crowning that extraordinary little basalt mountain dates before the year 1000. The sanctuary is trefoil, like the early-Christian churches at Rome, and like St. Laurent at Gren.o.ble.[214]

At the end of the XI century St. Michel d'Aiguille was enlarged irregularly. From time immemorial a shrine dedicated to the Archangel has crowned the pinnacle: "In the presence of angels I shall sing my psalms."

The approach to the cathedral of Le Puy, while less difficult than the precipitous needle of St. Michel, is equally romantic and solemn. You mount the hill by the Street of Tables, so called from the days of pilgrimages, when the merchants' booths lined it. As you climb, the way changes to a broad flight of steps, more than a hundred, and up and up you mount, with the polychromatic facade of the cathedral rising before you on high. Then suddenly, almost before you are aware of what has happened, you pa.s.s right under that western front of the church, ascending always, climbing under the cathedral's western bays. Formerly you could have mounted right into the very sanctuary itself, coming to it through the pavement. To-day the stairway branches, and you enter the church at the side. Never was there such an approach to the House of Prayer as this, never a more sublime and grandiose conception than the shadowed stair over which hangs the facade. Halfway up, where stand red porphyry columns and doors of chiseled bronze, is carved, "If you do not fear crime, fear to cross this threshold, for the Queen of Heaven wishes a devotion without stain."

M. Thiollier has shown that the Romanesque school of the Velay region was an intermediary between Burgundy, Auvergne, and the Midi, with the meridional influences the strongest. Le Puy's choir, transept, and two bays of the nave were erected in the XI century, and of that date is the cloister walk that touches the church. The transept has a tribune at each end. Beyond the chevet stood a tower of which the actual one is a replica. As all the level s.p.a.ce available was covered by these structures, it became necessary, when they wished to lengthen the nave in the XII century, to build out from the hill a vast masonry foundation as a platform. It is under those westernmost bays that mounts the stairway of Wonderland. Each bay of the nave is covered by an oblong cupola set on an octagonal base, of a type found again only at Poitiers, in the church of St. Hilaire. At Le Puy the side aisles b.u.t.tress the cupolas.

No one should miss seeing a XV-century fresco discovered under whitewash, in 1860, in the library off the cloister. The Liberal Arts are symbolized by women of the type of Anne of Brittany with bombous foreheads, and at the feet of each sits a disciple. Thus Aristotle, with the sensitive face of a scholar, is seated at the feet of Logic, and Cicero learns of Rhetoric.