Note 162 — Chapter VI · Six of the Lesser Great Cathedrals: Bourges, Beauvais, Troyes, Tours, Lyons, Le Mans (continued 2)
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About thirty miles to the north of Lyons lies Bourg-en-Bresse, in whose suburbs is the church of Brou. The eighteen windows of the school of Lyons were installed when the church was finished in 1536. Marguerite of Austria built it in fulfillment of a vow of her mother-in-law, a Bourbon princess, Marguerite herself being daughter of Mary of Burgundy, a line, like the Bourbous, that gloried in sumptuous mausoleums. She intrusted the work to the Lyons master, Jean Perréal, who called on his aged friend, Michel Colombe, for the imagery of the tombs. Colombe designed Duke Philibert’s gisant and the six winged genii, executed later, with liberties, by Conrad Meyt, and his brother (artists trained at Lyons), and some Italians. Disagreements rose, and Perréal was superseded by Loys van Boghem, who erected a bastard Gothic church of the same heavy Flemish type popular then at Toledo and Burgos. The three rich overcharged tombs are in the choir. Marguerite almost became the wife of Charles VIII, late-Gothic builder, and for a short time was married to the only son of Isabelle and Ferdinand, whose tomb is a boast of Avila. When the early death of the Duke of Savoy left her a widow she governed the Netherlands for her nephew, the Emperor Charles V. Her father’s tomb at Innsbruck is one of the noted ones of the world, and the heraldic tombs of her mother and her grandfather (Charles le Téméraire of Burgundy) are in Bruges.
If the traveler hopes to find flat, suburban Brou as described by Matthew Arnold, “mid the Savoy mountain valleys, far from town or haunt of man,” he will be disappointed. Moreover, no reflections fall from ancient glass, owing to the patina or coating added by time to its exterior surface. Poetic license is allowed, and “The Church of Brou” adds to this heavy votive monument the charm it needs:
“... So sleep, forever sleep, O marble Pair! Or, if ye wake, let it be then, when fair On the carved western front a flood of light Streams from the setting sun, and colors bright, Prophets, transfigured saints, and martyrs brave, In the vast western windows of the nave; And on the pavement round the Tomb there glints A checkerwork of glowing sapphire tints, And amethyst, and ruby—then unclose Your eyelids on the stone where ye repose, ... And looking down on the warm rosy tints Which checker, at your feet, the illumined flints, Say: ‘What is this? We are in bliss—forgiven. Behold the pavement of the courts of Heaven.’”
V. Nodet, L’église de Brou (Collection, Petites Monographics), (Paris, H. Laurens); C.J. Dufay, L’église de Brou et ses tombeaux (Lyon, 1879); Paul Vitry, Michel Colombe et la sculpteur française de son temps (Paris, 1901), p. 365; Dupasquier et Didron, Monographie de Notre Dame de Brou (Paris, 1842), in 4º et atlas in fol.