Biblical heroes, kings and queens – church sculpture in France

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Early Gothic Column-Figure Sculpture in France

By Janet E. Snyder

Column figures were a regular feature of portal sculpture on French (mainly) church facades from about 1130 to 1170. They are limestone figures of men and women, a little larger than life-size, carved on the door jambs. Their prominent position and imposing size ensure that they are the first large-scale sculptures one sees on entering a cathedral. Art historians have long subjected these jamb figures to stylistic analysis and comparison, searching for meaning and investigating their development, change or influence. Here the author presents a slightly different and more directed pursuit by ignoring stylistic analysis altogether. Instead she explores who or what the sculptures represent, for whom they were made, why the form emerged in the 12th century and what the figures and their clothing tell us about the society that produced them.

What Snyder calls ‘the design formula’ for façade programmes became standard in the 12th century. Artist-masons ( ‘ymagiers’) worked in various styles of carving, travelling from site to site to complete the fully developed form of column-figures we see on cathedral portals today. The meaning of these sculptures has been written about since the 18th century, when the crowned figures at Chartres were drawn and identified, by Montfaucon, as mediaeval rulers and queens.  Writers have since referred to them as ‘ancestors of Christ’ or, more vaguely, ‘biblical heroes, patriarchs, kings, queens and high priests’ without sufficient serious consideration or certainty.

Snyder draws on archival texts and vernacular literature as well as accounts elucidating  12th-century social, political and commercial history.  Finally, she addresses the clothing and textiles, depicted with such astonishing precision and delicacy in the limestone that they aid the figures’ identification.

The author bases her excursion into 12th-century political and social history on the most important church of the time, Saint-Denis. She uses its portal sculpture and the writings of its creator, Abbot Suger, to demonstrate the connections between the column figures depicted in contemporary dress and legendary (Christian ) ‘ancestors’. The French monarch Louis VI (1081–1137), had been called ‘the most Christian king’. His success at the First Crusade unified France, projecting an ‘idea of the…unification of all people in a Christian world’. The sculptures were never intended to be portraits in the modern sense, but when seeing the crowned figures in courtly dress a contemporary viewer might have recalled Old Testament kings and considered ‘the rightness of peace and order pursued through temporal political culture’.

There is a very detailed examination of the garments of men and women depicted on the column figures.  The carving is so exact that shapes and creases and folds of drapery can be seen, making it possible to speculate about the textiles used to make the actual clothing.  One scholar characterized the vertical folds on column-figures at Chartres as a ‘vigorous, vertical discipline’ but Snyder is much more thorough in her approach and  deals with such topics as changes in fashion, veils, ladies’ hairstyles and belt fastenings.  Some of her detailed discussion is fascinating, such as her review of the figures’ hair and braids.  Column-figures have extraordinarily long plaits often reaching to the knees, and Snyder explains that recent archaeological finds (in London) of tresses of silk, flax and wool prove that other things were used to lengthen and add to human hair.

Snyder also considers the characteristics of certain textiles, their origins and use in clothing, and investigates the fine materials, silks, luxurious textiles and ‘other fine stuffs’ for courtly clothing. These kinds of fabric were brought back by pilgrims and crusaders from the Middle East. She reminds us that ‘clothing reflects contemporary values and … convey[s] the status or power of the wearer’ and the ‘high status and authority of Christ and the Church’.

The author develops a ‘language of dress’: a special vocabulary used not only for items of clothing but also for the ranks of the people who wore them.  She shows that clothing defined the social status of the wearers and suggests meanings that would have been apparent to contemporary viewers of the jamb figures. But she stops just short of proposing definite meanings for the column-figures, other than suggesting that fine fabrics signalled ‘a kind of optimism on the part of pilgrims and crusaders returning from the Middle East’. 

On one hand it is refreshing to see a vigorous approach to understanding the still obscure aspects of mediaeval sculpture, and the presentation of the book is very clear with fine illustrations (many of the best taken by the author) usually on the same page as the relevant text.  Nonetheless, the writing still betrays its origin as a dissertation and contains repetitions and occasional passages and the usual entanglements of academic pretension that are irritating to the general reader. The subject is a dense and detailed one, requiring simplification and overall consideration for the reader.  But there is much of compelling interest here, and it is always worthwhile to demonstrate the skills of the greatest mediaeval sculptors.

The book is based on a PhD dissertation submitted to Columbia University. The bibliography, always the best indication of an author’s depth of commitment and consideration for earlier scholarship, is many pages long, and it also includes a number of topics that have been largely overlooked by scholars and are still available for fresh consideration.

Early Gothic Column-Figure Sculpture in France by Janet E. Snyder is published by Ashgate Publishing, 2011.  266 pp., fully illustrated in mono and colour. ISBN  978 1 4094 0065 3