Category: Le Mans

I still have a blog posting backlog, but that’s nothing new. This painting is effectively a seventeenth-century supermarket, although one with rather more livestock wandering around and considerably less concern about refrigeration. Un marché by the Flemish painter Matheus van Helmont shows a market taking place in an imaginary square, complete with a fountain, Italian-looking buildings and enough food to make it clear that subtlety was not really the objective.

As an aside, it’s not unusual not to know the precise birth date of an artist from this period, but there’s even uncertainty over when Van Helmont died. He was born in Antwerp in 1623, but sources variously give his death as around 1679 or simply sometime after 1679. I’m used to a little uncertainty in seventeenth-century biography, but that’s still impressively vague.

Anyway, the produce is everywhere and these were the bad old times before Tesco Express came about. Anyone wanting a chicken apparently had to negotiate with another human being and then take responsibility for carrying it home themselves, which all feels rather sub-optimal. There are baskets of fruit and vegetables, game, poultry and various other things being bought, sold, carried and inspected. There are no aisles, no price labels and no loyalty card scheme, but the basic principle is recognisable enough, namely turn up, find what you want, haggle over it and try not to trip over a dog.

The abundance is also slightly deceptive. Among all the food and activity, there are poorer figures in the foreground, including a beggar. That stops the scene being simply a cheerful celebration of plenty. Van Helmont is showing a busy commercial world, but not everybody within it is benefiting from that prosperity in the same way. The square itself is imaginary, with its fountain and Italian-influenced architecture, but the people, produce and differences in social status are drawn from the world Van Helmont knew. It is essentially a fictional branch of a seventeenth-century supermarket chain stocked with very real social inequality.

I like paintings such as this because there’s no obvious point at which you’ve finished looking at them. Every little group seems to contain another argument, transaction, animal or basket of food that I hadn’t noticed before. I’m not sure I learned much about efficient seventeenth-century retail management, but I did establish that Tesco Express has significantly reduced the number of chickens wandering around near the checkout. I sometimes think I think too much about these paintings.

Just a quick post about the north door at Le Mans Cathedral. It’s hard not to be quite impressed about the architecture and perspective here. I’m not a student of medieval architecture, but those are clean lines with no unnecessary faffing about being added to the whole arrangement. There’s some evidence of former wall paintings still visible which would have made it look a little more artistic, but bearing in mind that this is one of the more minor entrances to the cathedral, it was worth pausing to look at. And, also, it gave me a chance to cool down as it was too hot.

Although on the subject of perspective, the whole cathedral is beautiful and seems perfectly proportioned.

The Ascension Window in Le Mans Cathedral is rather lovely, but the guidebook told me that it was not simply another attractive piece of medieval stained glass. Dating from the beginning of the twelfth century, it is regarded as one of the oldest stained-glass windows still occupying its original place within a religious building, making it one of the most important surviving examples of early stained glass in France and indeed Europe. Only the two central sections of the original composition survive, showing the Virgin Mary and the Apostles watching Christ ascend into Heaven, although the figure of Christ itself has been lost. The window has therefore survived for roughly nine centuries while retaining enough of its original imagery to remain intelligible, which given the number of wars, arguments, drunken residents and the like is all really quite impressive.

Later abstract panels were added by Max Ingrand in 1956, allowing the medieval fragments to remain displayed as part of a complete window. The window is therefore not entirely medieval, but it is very much a survivor, preserving enough of its original imagery, colour and setting to give an impression of what the medieval worshippers would have seen. Given that I thought it was quite impressive, and I’ve visited Greggs so I know decadence, it must have been seen as really quite the thing at the time.

Standing quietly beside Le Mans Cathedral is a monument that makes even the oldest parts of the church seem like relatively recent additions. The Pierre Saint-Julien is a prehistoric standing stone, or menhir, erected during the Neolithic period around five thousand years ago. It originally stood elsewhere in Le Mans before being moved to its present position in 1778 after its original site was destroyed.

In the photo, it’s that lump of rock in the bottom left and I didn’t take a better photo at the time as I thought that it was a weathered statue of limited interest. Some impressive archaeological skills on display there…. Over the centuries the stone has acquired a variety of names and legends, including the Pierre au Lait, the Stone of Blood and Gargantua’s Stone, reflecting the layers of folklore that have accumulated around it.

I think it’s rather lovely that at some stage, someone thought they needed to put this historic stone somewhere, so they popped it in the corner of one of France’s great cathedrals.

The beautifully named Cathedral of Saint-Julien is like me, very delicate and subtle. This building very much towers above the medieval streets and is part of the Cité Plantagenêt. It’s one of the finest cathedrals in France and it is dedicated to Saint Julian of Le Mans, traditionally regarded as the city’s first bishop during the third or fourth century. When building the cathedral in the early thirteenth century, the church got the permission of the King to move the city walls to ensure that their new structure surprised and delighted with its size. There are also strong links with the Plantagenets, as Geoffrey and Matilda were married here in 1128 and the baptism of Henry II (the English King between 1154 and 1189) took place in 1133.

I spent quite some time meandering around the cathedral, partly because there is a great deal to see and partly because it offered some welcome respite from the rather enthusiastic French summer temperatures outside. There will therefore follow, much to the delight of my two loyal blog readers, rather more posts about the cathedral than anyone strictly requested. Fortunately, it turns out that when a building has been evolving for the best part of a millennium, it generally manages to provide enough material to justify that level of enthusiasm. And, I might not have mentioned the heat, but it was so hot that I spent at least fifteen minutes fanning myself with the cathedral’s guidebook.

I rather like medieval religious art and I accept that I should probably get out more. There is often such an intensity of devotion behind these works that even a relatively small panel can carry considerable weight. This painting of Saint Agatha, attributed to the Sienese master Pietro Lorenzetti and dated to around 1315, is considered a work of national importance and has even acquired its own Wikipedia page, which is perhaps the modern equivalent of canonisation. Lorenzetti was one of the great painters of medieval Italy, although the history of this particular panel becomes uncertain after it left Siena. It eventually entered the collection of the Musée de Tessé in 1863, having travelled rather further than most fourteenth-century wooden panels could reasonably have expected.

Saint Agatha was one of the most widely venerated saints of the Middle Ages. According to tradition, she was martyred in Sicily during the third century after rejecting the advances of a Roman official and refusing to abandon her Christian faith. Here she holds the palm of martyrdom, while her composed expression contrasts with the deeply unpleasant fate described in her legend. Medieval artists often preferred to emphasise a saint’s spiritual victory rather than dwell on the physical details of their suffering, although it is fair to say that restraint was not always a universal feature of medieval religious imagery. Some artists were perfectly willing to ensure that nobody left the church uncertain about what martyrdom involved and there are some rather, er, bloody versions of the beheading of John the Baptist.

Anyway, I’m not sure if it has been restored, but it’s in decent condition and I thought it rather glistened in the heat of Le Mans.

Although this Portrait de famille, painted around 1805, is attributed to an artist from the circle of Jacques-Louis David rather than to David himself, it reflects the influence of a painter whose political journey was almost as remarkable as his artistic career. A committed revolutionary who was excited and delighted by the French Revolution, he voted for the execution of Louis XVI, became closely associated with Robespierre and produced some of the Revolution’s most iconic images. Following the fall of Robespierre, David himself was imprisoned, yet somehow managed to reinvent his career once again after his release. He’s like Robert Jenrick, but with artistic talent.

His greatest political transformation (I mean David and not Jenrick) came under Napoleon Bonaparte. Rather than painting revolutionary martyrs, David became the official artist of the new Emperor, producing vast works celebrating Napoleon’s rule, including the famous Coronation of Napoleon. This portrait belongs to that period, when David’s influence dominated French painting. Although depicting an apparently ordinary family, its restrained composition, clarity and quiet dignity reflect the ideals that David had done so much to establish. A country that had gone through turmoil needed some form of normality I suppose.

David’s political fortunes changed once more after Napoleon’s defeat in 1815. Regarded as too closely associated with both the Revolution and the Empire, he chose exile in Brussels rather than remain in restored Bourbon France, where he spent the rest of his life. The painting itself is rather lovely as well, it’s a warm and convincing family scene produced in the artistic orbit of a man who had painted revolutionaries, emperors and nearly every political settlement in between.