Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads Kingsley set himself an exhausting mission: to examine the sculpture of Romanesque churches along the great medieval pilgrimage ways that led to Santiago de Compostela, in Spain (the route flows like a straight river across northern Iberia, fed by tributaries that branch out into France, Italy, and northern Europe). He and Lucy took photographs in northern Italy and Spain and throughout France; then, using comparative analysis, he determined his thesis. Kingsley rejected the idea of national schools of medieval art, suggesting instead that Romanesque forms and iconographies, like the chansons de gestes, had grown up along the roads, flowing freely across linguistic and political boundaries. The French art historian Émile Mâle also postulated that there was an ‘Art of the Road’. Mâle, however, believed that the Romanesque flowered first in Toulouse and spread from there to Spain. Kingsley countered with the notion that pilgrims and masons carried the new art in both directions, though he thought it might have originated on the Iberian Peninsula. His nine volumes of photographs – totalling 21 pounds on their own, 23 with the volume of text – were the ammunition in his battle (most art historians today have left the battlefield, preferring instead to study Romanesque form rather than date it).
Kingsley amassed six volumes of principally French photographs; one of Italian; and two of Spanish. I chose to concentrate on ‘The Aquitaine’, which includes not only the area around Bordeaux, but almost all of southwest France from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, stretching as far north as the lower Limousin. I picked this volume for two practical reasons. One, I can get by in French, but speak not a word of Spanish or Italian; and two, as opposed to other volumes, which are liberally sprinkled with photographs taken by the Porters’ assistants or purchased from photographic services, almost all of the plates in ‘The Aquitaine’ were shot by either Lucy or Kingsley. Pride betrays this last fact, as each of the 1,527 plates in all nine volumes is attributed to the photographer who made it. The image of the shepherd children is labelled ‘A.K.P. phot.’, and the Espalion pictures ‘L.W.P. phot.’ – a rare practice in a scholarly text, but a fair clue as to how much both Porters valued their work.
There was a third, personal, reason I chose Volume IV as my map to Romanesque France. Nestling within the central portion of its geography, in the corrugated landscape of Quercy and the Rouergue, lie three of the churches I have wanted to see since I was an undergraduate: the great abbeys of St Pierre in Moissac, Ste Foy in Conques, and Ste Marie in Souillac. This litany of names, for me, summoned up the accessible majesty of Romanesque sculpture that, for some intuitive reason, had offered a steady source of serene contentment ever since I’d first heard of them twenty years earlier.
Before I could march off to France, however, I needed a copy of the book. A little hunting turned up three editions: the original of 1923, in 10 volumes and limited to 500 copies, and two later editions of 1966 and 1985, both compressed into three volumes. I descended into the art storage lair of Smith College and looked at all three. The plates in the 1923 books – many of which were missing, having been removed by Smith undergraduates over the years – were bathed in tones of grey, both luminous and grainy, like the pocked surface of a full moon. When the librarian brought out the newer editions I literally rubbed my eyes, thinking my contacts had clouded over. The beautiful plates were blurred and hazy, as if they’d been wound in plastic wrap. I later discovered that the reproductions had not only been taken from prints, rather than the original negatives, they had also been shot through slips of tissue paper that protected the plates.
I bought an original Volume IV and a plane ticket to France, and made up in metaphor what I lost in convenience. So much for obscuring the past.
Go inside a stone
That would be my way … I have seen sparks fly out When two stones are rubbed, So perhaps it is not dark inside after all; Perhaps there is a moon shining From somewhere, as though behind a hill – Just enough light to make out The strange writings, the star-charts On the inner walls.
‘Stone’, Charles Simic
I was lost and trapped behind a truck. Not just any truck, an Auto École truck – a big, lumbering learner’s vehicle that inched along and came to a painstakingly diligent stop at each intersection. Instead of overtaking it and risking a fiery death, I decided to hang back and try to get a bearing on where I might be.
It was late afternoon and the sun flared in my windscreen. This seemed impossible: according to my map I’d been heading east. But prolonged squinting proved I was driving west, and the map was old. So I pulled over, irked at lost time but thankful to be rid of the truck, swung the car around, and headed the other way, in the direction of the Rouergue – one of the few places in France, wrote Fernand Braudel, not yet entirely transformed by the modern world.
Quickly the ravishing but mild, carefully tended farmland of northeast Quercy, where the region meets the Dordogne, became a pleasant memory. As I drove east the vegetable colours faded and the soil grew pinker. Towns and farms became scarce and the wavy earth fell almost flat, like a sea with long, rolling swells from a distant storm. Only here the swells were covered in pale moors or forests of stumpy scrub-oak: low trees with thick, gnarly branches whiskered in lichen that made them an alternately venerable or menacing presence, depending on whether they were in sun or shadow.
I did not know it at the time, but later discovered that I was crossing the Causse de Gramat, one of Quercy’s ‘Petits Causses’, so named to differentiate them from the Grands Causses farther to the east. Despite the aged look of the trees they gradually came to seem newborn, a kind of piny stubble, once it became clear that the land was assaulting me with a dose of deep, geological time. Exposed bedrock was everywhere; the causse crawled with it, and the roadside shoulders were bleached white with its dust. Outcrops shared the moors with occasional sheep and goats. Dry-stone walls, thickly overgrown with moss and lichen, wine-tipped with tiny flowers, textured either side of the smooth macadam like mountains on a topographical map. The road itself was relatively new and its construction had left gashes in the earth that hadn’t yet scarred over in the weathered grey of the walls.
Out of these roadcuts tumbled the colours of crustacea, coral, and seashells: white and light grey, cream, tan, pink, and peach. The whitish stone had been tinted by iron oxide, but the marine allusion was on the mark. These were the same colours I would find in the cool interiors of Romanesque churches. This was the same smell I would smell there: a salt-and-chalk scent I remembered from childhood, from holding conch shells to my nose and taking a great sniff. It was the smell, I’d learn, of Conques Abbey. In that sanctuary and others I’d remember the Causse de Gramat and feel the tug of an ancestral memory-tide ebbing back to ancient seas. For that rock and this – everything within eyeshot, all of the stone tumbling from the roadcuts – was limestone.
Limestone is essentially calcium carbonate – it’s called calcaire in French – brought into being by the joint agencies of weight, time, and the sea. As sedimentary rock, limestone is made up from layer upon layer of compressed sea-bottom graveyards, rich with lime secreted from the dead things that collect there: algae, coral, the shells of marine invertebrates, the drowned. As building stone it’s wonderfully abundant, and for humid regions like Europe there has never been a material more receptive to man’s need for shelter, or his drive to express his imagination. The earth gives it up with relative ease and, unlike marble, limestone blocks hold firm against one another – marble skids – which is why Romanesque arches and Gothic vaults literally got off the ground. Most limestone is also mercifully soft and easy to carve (only soapstone and alabaster are easier, but they’re too delicate to be practical building materials). Although its rogue fossils occasionally deflect a chisel, it takes and keeps any detail a stonecarver’s imagination wishes upon it.
Like all sedimentary rock, limestone
