The Slow Breath of Stone: A Romanesque Love Story. Pamela Petro
City of Man, the eternal with the temporal, and the divine with the human architect.’
To give viewers something to look at as she pursued these heady divisions, Smith pulled a couple of nearly hundred-year-old black-and-white photographs from Harvard’s Fine Arts Archive. ‘Old pictures of older buildings, what could be duller?’ asked my friend Dick, who’d worked at Harvard at the time. I thought much could be duller. The black-and-white prints revealed a reverence for the tactile surface of stone. Every crack, every crumbling rough edge or rash of lichen was fixed with absolute clarity and modulation of light. These were not simple documentary photographs. They were scrupulously unsentimental, but they betrayed a sense of humour and a devotion to texture; a clear-eyed acknowledgement of great age; a sense of grace; susceptibility to valuing the overlooked. Whatever the source, there was passion in these pictures.
I checked a label for the photographer’s name: Arthur Kingsley Porter. Months passed before I discovered that his wife Lucy, or ‘Queensley’, as she was called, had actually taken most of the pictures in the show. By then I was planning my own tour around southwest France to see what she and Kingsley had seen almost a hundred years earlier, and to find out why her photographs quickened my heart. I had no idea then that their Romanesque love story would lead me to Ireland as well.
Twenty years ago, when I was at university, I pondered the body of Romanesque sculpture but not its soul – nor did I give much thought to my own, for that matter. For argument’s sake, let us say that if carved stone has a soul, perhaps it looks like a photograph. In the course of writing this book I came back time and again to a working proposition I’d first articulated to myself at the Harvard exhibition: that stone carving is to the body what photography is to the soul. One describes the solid, three-dimensional art of occupying space and being at rest; the other, a chimera of light and water, the art of being in motion, of being in two places at once – of travelling.
I needed both to learn about the paradox of the Romanesque and to understand the reasons why I loved it so much. I needed to look back to the beginning of the twentieth century in order to really see the sculpture of the eleventh and twelfth, as it crystallized on Lucy Porter’s focusing plate. As I travelled and read and learned over the course of three years her face began to appear there as well, a shadowy overlay that grew ever stronger. Often Kingsley’s reflection flickered next to hers, and together their images foxed the present with intimations of their beleaguered, but always graceful, love story. Finally, once or twice, I glimpsed my own image beside them.
The Yukaghir people of northeastern Siberia, seeing a camera for the first time, called it ‘the three-legged device that draws a man’s shadow to stone.’ The three legs were the tripod, and the shadow drawn to stone was the image inscribed onto the glass-plate negative.
Drawing Shadows to Stone, Laurel Kendall
Room Five in the two-star Hôtel Quercy struck the visual equivalent of perfect pitch. The walls were white; so were the gauze curtains and quilted cotton bedspread. A chestnut armoire, in which I knew I would find two square pillows cased in starched linen, sat on Empire legs in the corner, a full-length mirror dividing its two doors. Simple wooden tables flanked both sides of the bed, and a third, set with two chairs and a flowered cloth, was placed beneath the full-length, open window. The bathroom had all the appropriate fixtures including a white marble baptismal font of a sink, and a small wooden table for toiletries.
Two stars release hotel rooms from the need for incidentals, and that was fine: sensibility, simplicity, and forethought were on view without distraction. There was no telephone or television, nothing betrayed a date. It could have been any decade of the twentieth or twenty-first centuries, or even the nineteenth.
Several months earlier I had woken in a similar room after arriving in France and driving from the airport, and not known if I’d slept for an hour – if it was 8:20 p.m. – or if I’d slept off my jetlag for thirteen hours and it was 8:20 a.m. Thick yellow sunlight had slanted through the curtains: marginal sunlight, but I had no clue from which margin of the day, morning or evening, it shone. For two or three minutes I had been helpless, acutely baffled, until I’d turned on the television and found the evening news.
A time traveller might have the same problem in Room Five of the Hôtel Quercy. It was one of the best places in France, in addition to Romanesque churches, in which to conjure Lucy and Kingsley Porter.
Called at 8. We strolled about town, having leisurely put on pressed [and clean] clothes … Natalina makes this hurried travelling almost luxurious.
Without Lucy’s journal I probably would not have envisioned Natalina, her Italian maid, ironing their summer linens. Despite having to make do with provincial hotels (‘the hotels … are abominable’, wrote Kingsley to Bernard Berenson, ‘but the sculptures are worth putting up with anything’), the Porters travelled in style. Berenson’s biographer describes them in Paris at the end of the First World War: ‘a well-to-do, well-educated couple of no particular idiosyncrasies apart from their obsession for some curious sculpture.’ In appearance they were opposites. Kingsley had the tall, slim, slightly awkward frame of a runner who doesn’t run – he was in fact an intrepid walker and swimmer – matched by gentle, blond good looks. Lucy was short and a little stocky, her face broad and candid, with high cheekbones and a square jaw; her husband’s, by contrast, was long and thin, an oval of smooth, sloping angles. In photographs she looked directly into the camera. He tilted his head and sought the horizon, always slouching apologetically for his height.
Both were from wealthy families that split their time between Connecticut and New York City. As affluent young men do in Connecticut, Kingsley had gone to Yale University; as affluent young women do, Lucy had attended Miss Porter’s School for Girls. After graduation, Kingsley wasted no time in becoming an academic wunderkind, publishing his first book on medieval architecture in 1909, at the age of 25. It immediately seized his peers by both the imagination and intellect – a twin reaction he’d inspire for the rest of his life. Kingsley was an art historian who thought of himself as an archaeologist. When other scholars went to the library he went into the field, took comparative photographs, sought out primary documents, and drew his dates accordingly, rejecting prevailing notions about architectural development. His work was consequently perceived as both rigorous and romantic. First at Yale, where he was an assistant professor, then especially at Harvard, he was surrounded by admirers who considered him ‘a valued exotic’. As one former student wrote: ‘His scholarship offered a paradoxical blend of solidity with a penchant for living dangerously.’
How much Kingsley believed and perpetuated his own myth is uncertain; it’s doubtful he considered being chauffeured around the back roads of southwestern France with his wife and her maid a hazardous undertaking. Yet in some ways he did see his fieldwork as a scholarly extension of the big-game hunting he’d pursued in Newfoundland as a teenager. Early in 1920 he wrote to Berenson about his great project, photographing and comparing Romanesque sculpture on the pilgrimage roads of France and Spain, in hopes of discovering a relational lineage of development. ‘I am delighted with some of the things that have turned up from the Burgundian photographs we made last summer. There are so many things I want to find out about that the excitement of the chase perhaps lends an interest not purely aesthetic …’
Fuelled by adventure, romance, and a kind of moral pragmatism in equal parts – a scrupulous, verging on puritanical, need to set eyes on his subjects before he wrote about them – scholarship, for Kingsley, could never be a strictly indoor pursuit. After Yale and a two-year stint at the Columbia University School of Architecture in New York, he moved to Europe to study on his own. It wasn’t what was meant to have happened; his mother, one of the first students to study at Vassar, had intended him to join his brother Louis’ law firm. But in the summer of 1904 Kingsley visited Coutances, in Normandy, and beheld the cathedral that had recently captured the attention of Henry Adams, another gentleman-scholar from New England. Of the cathedral Adams had written in his book on Romanesque and Gothic architecture, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, which would be published the following