The Sculptor of Autun

IN AN AGE WHEN cathedral builders and sculptors were all but anonymous, one artist, more audacious than the others, placed his signature, “I, Gislebertus, created this,” immediately beneath the feet of his Christ in Majesty. He thus left the clue from which three 20th-century scholars, Abbe Grivot, Arnold Fawcus and George Zarnecki, launched an arduous and exciting adventure into art history: rediscovering and reassembling the phenomenal wealth of 12th-century sculptures which originally decorated the famous Romanesque cathedral of St. Lazare in Autun, France, and re-establishing the sculptor in the process.

Life-size photographs, ranging in size from four by six inches to eight by nine feet, presenting the arguments and evidence collected by the discoverers, comprise an exhibition which, after circulating throughout Europe this past year, made its American debut at the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum December 12th. A limited number of original sculptures by Gislebertus, mostly heads, were included for the de Young showing only, and will be returned to France while the photo-panels continue to tour key cities of the United States under the auspices of the American Federation of Arts.

One’s first thought when informed of a show of this sort is the oft-sounded warning against today’s heresy of looking at photographs instead of at original works of art. And it is true enough that no reproduction, however good, can take the place of a Rembrandt or a Rouault or a Rothko; it can only remind one of remembered subtleties. The same applies to sculpture—to appreciate it fully one must see it in the round and in the position for which it was made. Few of us, however, can just pop over to Autun on a week-end. Even if we could, those who have endured hours of neck-breaking strain studying church art know that a good photographer is the viewer’s best friend. Franceschi took most of the photographs in this exhibition. His magnificent camera technique reveals ten times the detail even the best trained eye could see under ordinary viewing conditions, and puts us into the story as well as the evaluation of the carvings.

We are familiar enough with iconoclasm in European church-art history—heads of saints, statues of the Virgin, the whole Bible story as portrayed in stone destroyed for the glory of God, to confound Popery, or, as in the case of French churches during and after the Revolution, to supplant Superstition so that we should all live happily ever afterwards. What revolutionary idealists failed to accomplish had sometimes been started with the best of intentions by pious ecclesiastics merely keeping up with the times as in the case of the Cathedral of St. Lazare, located some 150 miles southwest of Paris and long noted for the immense tympanum of its west portal depicting the Last Judgment signed prominently in bold letters with the inscription quoted above. The history of this cathedral and a carefully documented story of its carvings is related in a fascinating and scholarly book, by Denis Grivot and George Zarnecki, for which the exhibited photographs were originally taken.

Work on the church began about 1120 when Autun was a part of Burgundy. Originally intended for lepers, it was dedicated to saint Lazarus whose bones were supposedly buried there. Also, it was intended that the church at Autun should be an imitation of the one at Cluny, but the vault of the nave at Cluny Abbey collapsed after five years and the plans for Autun underwent some radical changes. Gislebertus then became the new sculptor with a contract that was to occupy him for at least the next ten years.

Nothing is known about Gislebertus as a person and questions nag any discussion of him. He lived in Burgundy, but it is not known if he was born there. He is believed to have worked at Autun from 1125 to 1135. Since there were no art or architectural schools at that time he may have received his early training as an apprentice in one of the rock quarries that were then the focal points of the building trade—starting on simple figures and low-relief foliage and progressing to deep carving. His apprenticeship over, he is believed to have worked on the decoration of the Benedictine abbey of Cluny and, later, the Church of La Madeleine at Vezelay.

Gislebertus was probably not a monk, but as a close associate of churchmen, he most likely had a fairly thorough education. It would be interesting to know if he belonged to the guild of Mortelliers et Tailleurs de Pierre, or whether he used the quaint title of Doctor Latomorum (doctor in stone carving). Dr. Zarnecki suggests that he may have been a member of the team that created Vezelay’s great tympanum (1120–1125). If so, then his supervisor was the unnamed “Master of the Tympanum,” regarded as Cluny’s most important sculptor and an important influence. On these assumptions one can build the premise that when the Duke of Burgundy and Bishop Etienne de Bage undertook the building of a new cathedral at Autun they already had great respect for Gislebertus and engaged him to provide ornaments for its outside portals and inside piers.

When Gislebertus arrived at Autun, stone carving was no longer done in the quarry. He probably had his own shed near the construction site, with a sand bed on which to assemble and skillfully fit together the 29 blocks of the tympanum, plus assistants to prepare the blocks and carve the simpler ornamental patterns for the highest pillars. Messrs. Zarnecki and Grivot believe, however, that Gislebertus did all the figure groups himself, with the exception of two scenes attributed to his pupils.

He must have worked ceaselessly to complete so great a project. Stone carving is and always has been a time consuming art and because of this churches of the Middle Ages were generally assigned to workshops of artists, mostly unidentified as individuals. Disturbed by the rankling question of one man’s ability to do this body of work in ten years, Dr. Zarnecki discussed the problem with many stone carvers. At the St. Isidorus cloister of Leon, Spain, he met a stone carver who, without formal training and with tools surely as crude as those used by Gislebertus, could turn out a high relief capital in a week. Hence Gislebertus could have done it. And it just could be that this unrelenting pace accounts for the expressive spontaneity that marks his work.

Gislebertus had completed his work by 1135. Where he went from Autun is not known. The cathedral itself was not finished until a decade later, when it was both praised and criticized. A veritable Bible of stone, it contained more than four hundred figures, eighty-six of them in the tympanum alone—a vast theological panorama of the Last Judgment depicting Christ as the central figure, with palms out and knees spread in a gesture of compassion and beneath whose feet Gislebertus inscribed his famous signature. In the total church carving, Jesus is portrayed sixteen times, Peter six times, Judas once (hanging by the neck), thirty angels are busy on a variety of missions and eighteen devils are likewise busy on countermissions. There are sixty leading characters of the Old and New Testaments and thirty lesser personages.

Add to these seventy animals both domestic and wild and twelve monsters serving Satan, and even seen through the eye of the camera this adds up to a massive amount of carving.

For Gislebertus to be given so much space for a self-glorifying signature in so prominent a place indicates that the clergy of Autun thought highly of him indeed. But not so one of their contemporaries, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who wrote in part (1125): “The Church inlays the stones of cathedrals with gold but leaves her sons naked. . . . Why, in an age when so many of our brothers can read, such ridiculous monsters, such abhorrent deformities? What are they doing here—these revolting apes, ferocious lions, centaurs, spotted tigers, and horn-blowing hunters . . . everywhere a variety of shapes so astonishing that the worshipper finds it more entertaining to read the stones than books. Great God! Even if no sense of shame surges at the sight of such futility, why not at least deplore the high cost of it all.”

In the late 18th century the canons of the cathedral seemed to agree with St. Bernard in all but the expense item. Well versed in the classics and seeking to improve the “barbarous” 12th-century carvings with which their splendid building had been decorated, they plastered over the tympanum of the Last Judgment, removed the head of Christ when it protruded too far, and at great expense covered the interior of the apse with a layer of marble, damaging some of the original capitals in the process. A mixed blessing here was the probable preservation of the art from attacks of anticlerical fanatics during the French Revolution when so much religious art was desecrated. The chipping away at the same time of the three archivolts above the tympanum, showing a procession of twenty-four Patriarchs and Prophets, was an irreparable loss.

Tastes changed again and in 1837 Abbe Devoucoux, after consulting a document of 1482 describing the church, probed the plaster on the tympanum “put there by architects of no taste in the last century” and rediscovered the generally well preserved carving. Then came restoration by Viollet-le-Duc, beginning in 1860. Viollet-le-Duc has been violently criticized at times for over-zealous restoration, for scraping clean and then refashioning. At Autun he seems to have replaced the mutilated central pillar beneath the lintel with a modern carving but otherwise to have done nothing very drastic. Happily, he made no attempt to restore the missing head of the Christ. As to the marble interior of the apse so piously added at the time the sculpture of the west door was decently hidden beneath the plaster, this expensive screen was not removed until 1939, to reveal the original 12th-century fluted pillars, the capitals of the upper series much damaged.

Autun has always been recognized as surprisingly uniform in its decoration—the Biblical themes exploited in all their richness with a freshness and a gaiety of conception infinitely moving. Several art historians prior to 1948 had suggested an existing similarity between the work on the tympanum and that of other areas of the church, two of them especially noting possible relationships between the headless body of Christ and an unidentified head in a nearby museum.

Abbe Grivot, choirmaster of St. Lazare and a student of Romanesque architecture, had also noted this relationship. One November afternoon in 1948 he borrowed the piece, climbed a shaky ladder to the top of the tympanum, lifted the 40-pound stone to the top of the headless figure and found that it fitted perfectly. It was indeed the missing head of Christ in Majesty. Thus began the investigation which, lasting eleven years, encompassed a study of the figures on piers, niches and tympanum, many of them beyond the line of everyday sight and some long since fragmented or dispersed.

Arnold Fawcus, founder of Trianon Press, a British publishing house with offices in Paris, visited Autun for the first time in 1949. With subsequent visits he, too, became convinced that Gislebertus and the sculptor of Autun were one and joined Abbe Grivot in the treasure hunt, enlisting at the same time the aid of Dr. Zarnecki, one of Europe’s foremost experts on church art. The three art sleuths then focused their attention on those hundreds of stone figures at St. Lazare, finally identifying Gislebertus as beyond a reasonable doubt the creator of virtually all of this work. When seen together and at close hand, it embodies a style so distinctive and concepts so powerful and original that Gislebertus has now been hailed in France as that country’s earliest major artist of name in terms of time and as the greatest single master to have worked in the entire Romanesque era.

Mr. Fawcus came to San Francisco in connection with the de Young Museum exhibit and was here during the installation, which was a very accomplished one. Comparing the photo detail was real luxury sleuthing. No searching through dusty rubble for missing heads and hand, no climbing of rickety ladders or being chased by an irate butcher whose basement building-blocks contained fragments of sculpture—as befell the good Dr. Zarnecki. For instance, a photo panel set at door-top height as in her original position showed the wonderfully nonchalant Eve from the lintel of the north doorway, whose gesture at the moment she picks the fatal apple has the absent-minded detachment of a James Thurber character. She lies on her side whispering through her hand to a now absent Adam, similarly reclining and long since lost. The two, no doubt, were an echo of some surviving classical model. The Eve had disappeared after having been carted down to the foot of the hill where the stone on which she is carved was used as building material for a house constructed in 1769. She was discovered when the building was torn down a century later and is now the prize exhibit of the Musée Rolin. The Adam she is tempting has never been found.

Of all the mysteries surrounding the sculptor and sculptures of St. Lazare, one of the greatest is: why, with so much evidence before them, succeeding generations of scholars, even after restorations were made, gave so little heed to the hypothesis that a single artist might have conceived almost all of the statuary, both inside and out.

Those carvings which have survived the multiple misfortune of the years, show unmistakable similarities. There is a striking elongation of the body and an extraordinary freedom of movement. Faces and gestures are wondrously expressive—Munch never created a better scream, or Goya a more blood-chilling monster. The drapery reveals rather than conceals the human form, as in most Romanesque art. A dramatic open handling of space greatly varies from the crowded clusters of shapes favored by the contemporary sculptors. Claw-chisel marks are often left to show instead of being carefully polished off.

Yet had these criteria been given cognizance, there might never have been a book about Gislebertus needing detailed photographs which wanted exhibiting, and San Franciscans would not have been privileged to see the sculptures of Autun’s great cathedral, even second hand.

—E.M. Polley