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Construction
Construction of Bordeaux Cathedral
cathedral located in Bordeaux
- 11th century – 11th century
- Europe
Construction
cathedral located in Bordeaux
Fetching the article from Wikipedia…
Bordeaux Cathedral, officially known as the Primatial Cathedral of St Andrew of Bordeaux (French: Cathédrale-Primatiale Saint-André de Bordeaux), is a Catholic church dedicated to Saint Andrew and located in Bordeaux, France. It is the seat of the Archbishop of Bordeaux.
In 1998, UNESCO designated the Routes of Santiago de Compostela in France as a World Heritage Site, including the three main churches of Bordeaux: the basilica of St Severinus, the basilica of St Michael and the cathedral of St Andrew.
A church of Saint-André was first mentioned in Bordeaux in documents dating from 814, in the Carolingian period. This church was probably part of group of churches, including the Basilica of Saint Severinus of Bordeaux and Notre-Dame-de-la-Place, located in the old castrum or Roman fortified town. It appears more officially in 1096 in a document from the chancellery of Duke William IX of Aquitaine. In that year it was formally consecrated by Pope Urban II.
In the 11th and 12th centuries, the Romanesque church was engaged in long competition with its neighbouring church, Saint Sevrinus of Bordeaux, to attract pilgrims taking part in the Pilgrimage to Saint-Jacques de Compostelle. Saint Severinus had what Bordeaux Cathedral did not, the remains of the companions of Saint Jacques, as well as the oliphant or hunting horn of Roland, a relic placed there by Charlemagne. However, Saint André gradually gained influence and became the leading church of Aquitaine. Until this time it was under the jurisdiction of the Archbishop of Bourges Cathedral, but under Pope Clement IV Saint-André began reporting directly to Rome. It also took jurisdiction over churches in Agen, Périgueux, Angoulême and Saintes.
On the 25 of July, 1137, the 13-year-old Eleanor of Aquitaine married the future Louis VII of France, in the cathedral. A week later the King's father died, and Eleanor became the Queen of France. This marriage was cancelled in 1152. That same year she married the future Henry II, and became Queen of England in 1154. She is the mother of King Richard the Lionheart and King John of England.
The Romanesque church had been begun sometime before 1170, atop masonry from the earlier Carolingian church. It nave seems to have had three rectangular traverses, and an asymmetric transept, with a plan of adding several cupolas, similar to the church of St. Maurice in Angers. However, at the beginning of the 13th century it was decided to continue building the cathedral following the new Gothic style that had appeared at the end of the 12th century in the Ile-de-France. The old sanctuary was gradually demolished. Of the Romanesque church, only a wall in the nave remains.
The transformation from Romanesque to the French Gothic architecture took place during a long period when Aquitaine and Bordeaux were under the control of the English. It was assisted by the support of the archbishop of Bordeaux, Bertrand de Goth, who from 1305 until 1314 reigned over the Catholic church as Pope Clement V, and directed numerous donations and concessions to the new cathedral.
The choir of the new cathedral was still under construction in 1320, when Bertrand Deschamps became the master builder. Construction of the nave was greatly delayed by the outbreak of the Hundred Years' War in 1337 between England and the Valois kings of the Kingdom of France. The plan of the nave was reduced in scale from three aisles to a single aisle. Work continued principally on the decor. The construction of the bell tower, separate from the main building, began in 1440, but was not finished until 1500. Following an earthquake in 1427 that caused the collapse of parts of the city ramparts, flying buttresses were added to the outside of the nave under master builder Imbert Boachon.
In the 16th century, Renaissance decorative elements were added to the Gothic structure, including an ornamental jubé or rood screen between the choir and the nave. It was taken down in 1806, but elements of it can now be seen on the tribune of the organ. The seventeenth century saw the reconstruction of the spires, but few changes in the interior. Between 1772 and 1784, under Cardinal de Rohan, the archbishop proposed giving the archbishop's palace classical facade. A fire in 1787 caused serious damage to the roof of the choir and transept.
The royal wedding of Louis XIII and Anne of Austria, the daughter of King Philip III of Spain and Archduchess of Austria, took place in the cathedral in 1615, cementing alliance between Spain, Austria and France. It led in 1638 to the birth of Louis XIV.
During the French Revolution, the furniture and much of the decoration of the cathedral was removed or vandalised. A portion of the exterior sculpture, on the north side, was hidden by the neighbouring buildings, and was spared. In March 1793 the building was officially nationalised, and transformed into a storage barn for the feed of military horses. The nave was used in 1797 for political meetings and patriotic assemblies. The tower was threatened with destruction, and most of the furniture was gone when the building was finally returned to the church in 1798.
A long series of renovations and reconstructions began in 1803 and continued throughout the century. The most ambitious reconstructions were carried out by Paul Abadie, best known as the architect of the Basilica of Sacré-Cœur in Paris, and a student of Eugène Viollet-le-Duc. The later constructions in front of the north side of the nave in Bordeaux were removed in 1866, making that part of the cathedral more visible. In 1862 Abadie proposed to build new sacristies to replace the old cloister, much larger than the original sacristies. Abadie's plan was opposed by the Bordeaux archeologist Leo Drouyn, who felt that Abadie's changes were based more on Abadie's imagination of the Gothic style than the historic reality of the original building. Drouyn insisted on a more strict recreation of the medieval Bordeaux style. In the end, however, the version of Abadie prevailed.
Restoration and reconstruction continued throughout the 20th century. The west vaults of the nave were strengthened between 1907 and 1909; the west spire of the north transept in 1943, and the east tower in 1958. The roofs of the ambulatory and chapels were finished in 1990, followed by work on the northwest chapel, the sacristy, and axis chapel, and the facades of the transept. In 1997–98, the north portal walls were cleaned of centuries of grime and soot with lasers.
The north portal of the cathedral, which enters the north transept, is known as the portal of spires and was considered the most prestigious entrance. It dates to about 1325–1350. The two spires on the towers were reconstructed several times; 1665 and 1952 for the west spire, and 1958 for the east spire.
To the west of the north portal, the bays date to around 1210; to the east, in the second half of the 13th century. The north side of the cathedral nave has foundations twelve meters wide and reaching six meters underground to the bedrock beneath. Despite this, the north walls of this part of the cathedral have had a history of stability problems, and have required the construction of additional flying buttresses over the years. The largest of these, called the Gramont buttress after archbishop Gabriel Gramont and his successor Charles Gramont, was begun in 1531 and is a monument in itself. It has the flying arches of a Gothic buttress, but is covered with has lavish Renaissance decoration, including a host of small putti, or angels, and carved inscriptions describing the Biblical Day of Judgement.
Another feature of the north front is the royal portal, which is located between the Gramont buttress and the sacristy. This doorway opened into the transept and choir and served as the main entrance to the cathedral until the 1320s when the north portal was opened.
The sculpture of the tympanum of the royal portal was made in between 1200 and 1250 and is considered some of the oldest and best of the cathedral. It was spared destruction because the portal at the time of the Revolution was hidden by other structures. The sculpture of this tympanum was used as a model for the recreation of the tympanum of the central portal of Notre Dame de Paris in the 19th century, which had been destroyed during the Revolution, and which dated from the same period.
The south front of the transept is flanked by two towers which were built to contain the Cathedrals' bells. They were originally intended to have spires, which were never built.
The lower portions below the rose window date to the early 14th century, and are older than the north transept. However, most all of the original sculptural decoration was destroyed during the Revolution. Portions of The tympanum and the trumeau of the south portal were destroyed in 1794 to allow wagons carrying supplies to pass through the portal. Some sculptures in the voussoirs did survive; it is now attributed to a Toulouse sculptor of the 14th century, Petrus de Sancto Milio, the leader of the prominent school of sculpture of southern France and northern Spain.
The west front of Bordeaux Cathedral, unlike the west fronts of most other Gothic cathedrals, is entirely without decoration. It was concealed by other buildings until 1772 when the other structures were demolished. The doorway is also a late addition, made in 1805. Excavations in 1954 showed that the bare wall was part of the original Romanesque nave built in the 11th century, which was raised in height and widened in the 12th and 13th centuries. The early buttresses are still in place.
A prominent feature of the south side is the row of buildings with neo-Gothic facades called the New Sacristies, which are placed against the south wall between the buttresses. They contain the baptismal chapel, the sacristies, a chapel for catechisms, a chapter house, a bedroom for the bishop, and other functional spaces. These were constructed in 1869 and 1879 by the 19th-century architect Paul Abadie in the place of the medieval cloister.
The choir and chevet are traditionally at the east of the cathedral, facing the sunrise. At Bordeaux, as in other cathedrals of the period, the chevet is surrounded by radiating chapels. The flying buttresses, between the chapels, reach up to support the upper walls of the choir.
The Pey-Berland tower, in the flamboyant Gothic style, was added to the cathedral by Archbishop Pey Berland, who laid the first stone on October 13, 1440. It is located about twenty meters from the chevet of the cathedral. It is slightly over sixty meters high, on a base eight meters on each side. It was intended to have a much higher steeple, but the original stone steeple, 12.5 meters high, was blown down in a hurricane in 1667. The remains of the steeple were taken down during the Revolution, then reconstructed in 1851. The statue of Our Lady of Aquitaine, made of gilded metal by the sculptor Alexandre Chertier, was added in 1863.
The nave is the portion of the cathedral where the ordinary churchgoers are seated, between the west front and transept. It is considerably narrower than the choir. It was first covered with four-part rib vaults in the first half of the 13th century. In the 16th century, some of the nave traverses were reconstructed with the more ornate lierne vault, which have purely decorative additional ribs. The vaults are further decorated with keystones bearing the arms of the Archbishop Jean de Foix, and carved figures of the patron saint of the cathedral, Saint Andrew.
Text from the Wikipedia article “Bordeaux Cathedral”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.