Note 208 — Chapter VIII · Gothic in the Midi

The Chaise Dieu monastery, founded by St. Robert in 1043, was later affiliated with Cluny. The present church was begun in 1344 by Clement VI, who built the choir and four bays of the nave. The abbatial was completed, after 1370, by his nephew, Gregory XI. Clement had Avignon artists prepare his funeral monument, which originally possessed over forty statuettes representing his relatives, for he came of the great lines of Beaufort and Turenne. The Casa Dei abbatial, though possessed of grandeur, is dull and heavy. The aisles are as high as the principal span. The octagonal piers with uncut capitals lack elegance and lightness, the windows are the narrowest lancets, and there are no flying buttresses. Molds die away in the piers above the capitals—an early appearance of Flamboyant Gothic. The cloister (1378-1417) is frankly late-Gothic. The denuded church once was filled with the tombs of local magnates, among them those of the Lafayette family, precious pages of French history obliterated in 1562 and 1793. As if to shut out the funereal, humid aisles, the choir has been lined with tapestries (begun in 1492) unsurpassed in France. They reproduce the Mirror of Perfection and the Bible of the Poor, two books popular in the XIII and XIV centuries. Each episode of the Saviour’s life is accompanied by scenes of the Old Testament, prefiguring it. On the outer wall of the choir screen is a sketch, a Dance of Death, with the grim skeleton stalking in and out, touching with his chill finger pope, baron, burgher, page, field laborer, and little child. No XIII-century church had allowed so gruesome a theme on its walls. This lugubrious allegory came into vogue after the Black Death of 1348, when a third of Europe’s population perished. Congrès Archéologique, 1904, pp. 54, 402; E. Durand, La Chaise Dieu (1903); Maurice Fançon, L’église abbatiale de la Chaise Dieu en Auvergne; Émile Mâle, L’art religieux de la fin du moyen âge (Paris, Colin, 1910).