Visiting Autun Cathedral in Burgundy, France with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget
One year my husband Laurent and I arrived in the Burgundian town of Autun during the church feast of Pentecost. A concert was taking place in the Saint-Lazare Cathedral. (Cathedral of Saint Lazarus). The feast of Pentecost celebrates the ability of Christ to give the gift of tongues to his disciples. The gift of tongues allows one to speak foreign languages to spread Christ's gospel far and wide.
During the concert’s final Alleluia chorus, tourists were allowed into the cathedral to admire the singing and the perfect acoustics in the high-ceilinged cathedral. The masons who built Saint-Lazare knew more than just engineering it would appear.
The Saint-Lazare Cathedral at Autun was built between 1120 and 1146. It is considered a Romanesque church and not a Gothic one for more than the dates of its construction. The cathedral’s ceiling is considered Romanesque for its single rib, barrel vaults that run the length of the nave or main aisle of the cathedral.
Guidebooks often describe Gothic churches as having arches, which Saint-Lazare Cathedral does not have.
Other Romanesque features in Saint-Lazare Cathedral in Autun include the clerestory windows, which extend down from the ceiling to a blind triforium. The triforium looks like a corridor than runs around the cathedral nave, yet is solid stone.
The triforium rests upon columns with sculpted tops that run along the nave. The clerestory windows provide light, but it was not until the Gothic era that flying buttresses on the outside of a church allowed walls to be opened up for stained glass windows as at the Sainte Chapelle in Paris.
The high nave or main aisle makes it difficult to see the tops of the columns that are sculpted, but, in general, Romanesque churches are decorated with imaginary beasts on tops of columns. Perhaps beasts like these Romanesque ones and Gothic gargoyles share the same function of scaring away evil doers.
Outside the cathedral on the west portico (covered porch), there is the famous Last Judgment scene art history students study in their introductory classes. The tympanum, or semi-circle, above the doors features Christ as judge, sending the good to heaven and the evil to hell. One sinner is forever doomed to having hands clasped around his head in hell.
Last judgment scenes figure on many Romanesque churches and probably served to remind parishioners that life is precious, especially when it is tied to the land. Bad harvests are just as life threatening as the plague and war.
The French historian Emmanual Le Roy Ladurie wrote in several of his books that the difference between aristocrats and peasants in the Middle Ages was that the aristocrats had stores of food that could tide them over bad harvests, war, and lawsuits whereas peasants were kept weak on gruel or died.
You had to be ready to have your soul weighed at any moment as the Last Judgment during the Romanesque Period when harvests were precarious.
By Ruth Paget, Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
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| Laurent Paget Photography |
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