The Slow Breath of Stone: A Romanesque Love Story. Pamela Petro
two-storey houses one block from the church overlook its nave). Hannah Green, in her memoir Little Saint, likened the roofs to dragonfly wings. The standard comparison is fish scales. The traditional Rouergat lauzes, thin, round roof-tiles, here cut from silvery schist and overlapped very much like gills – reminded me of braided leather, arresting my eye again and again with intricate fugues of texture.
I thought of Lucy and Kingsley in Vézelay in 1919, the summer before they had visited Conques. They had fallen in love with the village that clustered around the great Burgundian abbey just as I was becoming smitten with Conques. Lucy had written in her journal that their travelling companion, Bernard Berenson, had fallen asleep in the car on the way back to Paris, and she and Kingsley had been free to fantasize. They’d decided that if their taxes kept going up at home they would return to Vézelay to live in one of the little houses that framed the abbey, and have a garden in front and a view at the back.
I smiled at the familiar daydream, and began to commence on one of my own. But there was the setter to untangle, and a photo to be taken of three Brazilians from Belo Horizonte. After that, my moment in Conques merged with Lucy’s, and I forgot everything but the great, scarcely weathered tympanum before me, to which traces of coloured paint still cling. A Conquois friend of Hannah Green’s called the tympanum ‘one of the four wonders of the world’ (she neglected to name the other three). Just a glance reveals its importance. The early twelfth-century abbey is predominantly built of buttery yellow limestone (salted butter, to be exact; the interior is the paler shade of whipped sweet butter), with rosy mortar and mottled grey schist in-fill. The tympanum, however, and the pierres de tailles – the fitted stones – of the surrounding portal are pure, creamy, ochre-coloured sandstone. The very best stuff the quarry had to offer.
The eye notes this and marks it; only when you move in closer do you realize that the golden stones were set there as a lure, to lead you to one of the most magnificent spectacles of Romanesque art. And it is a spectacle, like a parade or a circus, with a multitude of incidents, intimate and grand, frightening and beatific, some grimly funny, mushrooming throughout every inch of the sculpted half-moon. The theme is the Last Judgement. At the church of Perse in Espalion the great reckoning was compactly and clumsily depicted in shorthand – just a reference to ignite whatever associations already existed in the viewer’s mind. Here the theme has become art, supplying visual images of its own, supplanting others. Imagine that a director of greatness, of real vision and inspiration, working with a troupe of earnest amateurs, has set out to perform skits from the Second Coming of Christ – not to convey the idea of judgement, but to narrate it. The result is the tympanum of Conques.
Back at university my professor had thought that the little sculpted actors, the saints and the saved, the devils and damned, had a ‘folk-art quality’; my guidebook found them ‘endearingly anecdotal’. What I think they both meant is that the carvings are not types, representing ideas, but individuals acting out very particular rewards and punishments. This is an impolitic thing to say, but then travel books permit the occasional lapse into sentimentality: they are heart-achingly sweet. Even the devils look like nice guys in masks, trying to be mean. An abbot takes the hand of Charlemagne, depicted as an old, stooped, shuffling king, and kindly leads him into heaven. And it was a compassionate heart that imagined the justice of the damned – nowhere else but the tympanum of Conques would a rabbit be given the opportunity to roast the man who had hunted him, on a spit, eternally, in Hell.
Ste Foy, to whom Conques Abbey is dedicated, kneels under a miniature eave on the left-hand side of the composition, blessed quite literally by the hand of God. Foy, the ‘little saint’ of Hannah Green’s book, was beaten, broiled, and decapitated at the age of twelve, in the year 303, for refusing to pay lip service to the Roman pantheon. She was canonized a century later. Her remains lay at Agen, near Toulouse, for over four hundred years, until she was either stolen, lent, or borrowed (the facts are unclear) and brought to Conques, where a piece of her skull was set into a portable reliquary statue around the year 900. Foy had already been working miracles, but she seemed to like the reliquary, with its golden face – probably originally that of a Celtic god – and feverishly granted prayers as fast as they came in, rendering the abbey not only a stop on the Via Podiensis, but a pilgrimage destination in itself.
Of all the incidents on the busy tympanum, Lucy typically found and focused on the moment of greatest tension. It is a tension her black-and-white photograph enhances, making the weary graininess of the thousand-year-old carvings into a kind of elemental cognate to the fraught scene (more appropriate to its mood than the cosy sunlight that pampered the stone when I saw it). On the lowest tier of the tympanum, right in the centre, just beneath an angel and devil tensely weighing souls, is a divide; on one side angels lead little souls into what looks like a coat closet, but is actually the door of heaven. On the other, devils cast the damned into the mouth of hell – here depicted as a kind of toothy fish – which emerges from another, grimmer, door. The angel and devil closest to the centre glare at each other across the gulf that separates good and evil. The devil, with sumo-wrestler proportions, punk-spiked hair, and an enormous bludgeon, is the only character on the tympanum blatantly to overwhelm his allotted niche. The others, encased in their cartoon-strip boxes, tell their stories; this devil, however, poses an active threat, as if at any moment he may free himself from the stone and add your story to his.
The angel at whom he stares grabs a little soul by the hand and pulls him out of no-man’s-land – the grey area between good and evil, from which we only see him partially emerging – it’s that close a save – before the devil can get his claws on him. The angel’s eyes hold a dare: just try it, he says to the bludgeon-wielding devil. And yet he hurries the little soul onward toward heaven, just to be safe.
This is it, Romanesque art at its most anxiously appealing. This moment is acted on what Hannah Green calls ‘the rim of time’. The everlasting is about to begin; mortality is about to end. Yet it is a quintessentially human moment, full of fear of the awful arbitrariness of fate. Far from ceasing to be, time plays a role – the angel snatched that soul from the void just in the nick of it – and so does luck.
Most art makes a statement. Romanesque sculpture poses a question: will we be saved? The only answer it musters is a shrug. Maybe. Probably not. There is uncertainty and death, hard work and hunger in this life, and judgement in the next. No wonder its quiet, secular moments, the corbels of clasping couples, fiddlers, dancers, and domestic beasts, all found their places on religious buildings. Each is a touching bid to secure a chip of immortality – the cheap kind found in stone – for the otherwise brief pleasures of life. Despite its fixation with the everlasting, the Romanesque point of view ultimately hails from the conundrum of the human condition. This is one of the reasons I love it so much: it dares to reveal not the nobility, but the vulnerability of life in the face of death.
Lights came on without warning, like a shock of lightning. I had slipped into an over-fed daze sitting in the stony darkness of the nave. Before entering the abbey I’d found a very pink garret room in the Auberge St Jacques, just steps away, and had eaten dinner there too in the over-lit dining room. The young waiter had inquired if I wanted a salade aux gésiers. I’d asked what it was.
‘Une salade avec pommes et poulet, Madame,’ is what I heard.
A salad avec pommes de poulets is what came. Not a salad with apples and chicken at all, but a salad with apples of the chicken – fried gizzards, in other words. Ah, I’d thought, undone by a crafty French preposition. Not the first time, nor the last. What I’d actually ordered was a Salade Caussenarde, a speciality of the region, made up of mixed greens, local walnuts, and either crumbled feta or Roquefort cheese. Mine came with Roquefort – an appropriate choice, considering the caves where the cheese is aged used to belong to the monks of Conques. I willed myself to forget what I was eating. After the duck, crusty crème brulée, and half-bottle of Gaillac that followed, and then the soft abbey darkness, I had almost fallen asleep. But the abrupt lights in the upper gallery banished any easygoing rapprochement between wakefulness and sleep, night and day, light and dark. My grey-black heaven was gone, replaced by definitive black shadows cutting at odd angles across brilliantly revivified white stone: a sight unbeheld for more than nine hundred of Conques’ thousand years, until