Why did Louis de Roncherolles commission a stained-glass window for Beauvais in 1522?(Abstract)(Bibliography)

Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeked into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, "and what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversations?"--Lewis Carroll, A1ice's Adventures in Wonderland, 1865

Why did the noble, wealthy, and powerful Louis de Roncherolles (Fig. 1, left) commission an impressive and expensive window (Fig. 2) for a transept chapel in the incomplete cathedral of Beauvais (Fig. 3) in 1522? Why did an art historian better known for the study of twelfth- and thirteenth-century stained glass choose to ask and answer such a question of a Renaissance window? This article explores answers to both of these questions--why the work of art and why this interpreter--by working to uncover meanings within a very complicated picture and by seeking to situate both author and reader within the process of its historical interpretation, and even before that of its choice as a subject worthy of critical interest. The discussion will be "sub-theoretically" based and "anti-theoretically" argued. (1) Ultimately, it is about making choices, about choosing among interpretetive assumptions, strategies, and conclusions in postmodern art history and--equally as important--choosing the works of art on which they will be used and from which they are drawn. I will also be telling stories. Although that is something that art historians have always done, recently we have learned to be more comfortable doing it. (2)

The Interpreter's Journey

My interest in the stained glass of the cathedral of St-Pierre in Beauvais is long-standing. The thirteenth- and fourteenth-century windows of the choir were assigned in 1975 as the subject of my dissertation; (3) involvement with the Renaissance glazing came later. In the early 1980s, while contemplating the notion of transforming dissertation into book, I developed a conviction that monographic studies of glazings should be comprehensive--specifically, that chronological inclusiveness would render the book I intended to write more meaningful. Most modern studies of stained-glass windows have a synchronic focus, addressing one discrete portion of a larger glazing and relating it to contemporary stained glass installed elsewhere and to contemporary pictorial art in other media. One moment in time, or a short interlude, is thereby isolated, extracted, and contextualized. Rarely since the nineteenth century has the scholarly approach been diachronic, tracing the history of the glazing of one particular monument as it evolved through time. I decided that this diachronic approach might turn out to be more authentic, more interesting, more revealing in terms of the relationship of this public art to its principal audience on site. The argument for it is obvious. Many of the large architectural projects begun in the thirteenth century were built over an extended period and encompassed the working and viewing of several successive generations. Although they belong to one place, they do not belong to one time.

Beauvais is a particularly good example. Construction began in 1225. After an interruption in the 1230s, the choir was not completed until the 1260s. Shortly thereafter, in 1284, the vaults collapsed and the choir was restored--in places largely reconstructed--between the 1290s and the 1340s. Transept arms were added to the rebuilt choir only during the first half of the sixteenth century, incorporating aisles that had been part of the earliest architectural campaigns. After the crossing tower (built in the 1560s) toppled in 1573, work on the cathedral stopped. (4) It remains incomplete. From the clerical perspective, the lavish liturgical choir never received the counterpoise of an extended processional approach. And the laity lacked an enclosed hall for witnessing the celebration of the liturgy on feast days. Given this episodic and truncated architectural history, it seemed logical to approach the glazing of Beauvais along its trajectory, to study the cathedral as an evolving, if never completed, ritual sp ace within the fabric of a local context, not as the syncretic product of an international art world, not as an art museum.

While I was in the midst of investigating the sixteenth-century glazing of the Beauvais transepts, a chance encounter provided a seductive detour from my interpretive agenda. During a visit to Beauvais on July 10, 1982, I discovered scaffolding erected directly in front of the Louis de Roncherolles window in the northwest transept chapel (Fig. 3: 8N, nXVI). Faced with what is usually a once-in-a-lifetime situation, without asking any questions I jumped the chapel barrier and scampered up the ladder. The impression this glass made on me from a close vantage point was overwhelming. The technical quality of the painting was astonishing. That Engrand Le Prince--the artist to whom this window is universally attributed--was a virtuoso in his craft is received wisdom in stained-glass circles, (5) but I had never been drawn close enough to his work to evaluate the reputation. As I climbed up into the world of the window, however, it was the figures of its fiction rather than the virtuosity of its execution that spoke to me most powerfully, that made the most lasting impression, that posed the most compelling questions.

I was initially captured by the pasty, detached face of the donor (Fig. 4), Louis de Roncherolles, looking stiff and uncomfortable, almost consumed by his heraldic outfit (Figs. 1, 5), only obliquely related to the book before him that was supposed to be directing his prayers. Saint Louis--his delicate, graceful, and expensively outfitted royal patron--seemed even more detached, almost bored. Louis's wife, Francoise d'Halluin (Fig. 6), however, appeared more composed, elegant, strong, even comfortable. She was more in control of her posture, her costume, even her prayer book.

Her heraldic device (Fig. 7) was distinguished from the many others sprinkled throughout the window by its larger scale and unusual format. Her patron, Saint Francis, was not a vacuous courtly mentor but a passionate holy man, adoring the winged Crucifix after his stigmatization, involved in the narrative of his own life rather than detached from it to become a part of hers.

My concentration on this side of the window was underlined by my fascination with the detailed representation of the cathedral of Beauvais in the background as well as with an enigmatic inscription spiraling through Francis's brilliantly silver-stained halo. But I encountered the most compelling surprise at the top of the window, where the artist had situated the cathedral a second time, tucked into the background, painted in delicate, delicious grisaille (Fig. 8). I quickly jumped to the dizzying conclusion that this picture of the earthly embodiment of the heavenly Jerusalem had been elevated here to represent the celestial city itself within a window that was a part of the very monument represented.

By the time I climbed down from the scaffold, the gulf of time that separated me from Louis and Francoise seemed as insignificant as that which could have distanced them from their medieval patrons in the artist's fiction. Paradoxically, however, I felt at the same time a real need to explain their story through a fuller understanding of its historical context--admittedly a synchronic, rather than a diachronic, concern.

My art historical training, therefore, led me away from the window, back to Paris, and into the library.

Once there, I made a curious discovery. Although pioneers in the study of sixteenth-century stained glass like Jean Lafond (6) and Francoise Perrot, (7) as well as local historians like Victor Leblond, (8) had documented, dated, attributed, charted, described, and catalogued Engrand Le Prince's windows-- including this one--in a series of focused investigations, both he and his work were practically invisible in the general art historical literature on French Renaissance painting. Indeed, surveys of sixteenth-century French art barely mentioned stained glass. When included, windows were treated as a minor art unworthy of major consideration, at times relegated to a separate section on "les arts appliques" (the applied arts). (9) Louis Dimier was most explicit: stained glass has no place in the history of sixteenth-century French painting. (10) As the scope of the studies broadened, stained glass became more marginal. Charles Guttler, though he discussed manuscript and panel painting extensively, and even ment ioned banners, coaches, and saddles as fields for painting, excluded stained glass from his broad survey of "northern painting." (11) So did James Snyder (12) and Anthony Blunt, (13) both of whom characterized the early part of the century--a period of efflorescence in the production of stained glass (14)--as "relatively undistinguished in the art history of France." (15)

Although it was an easy first conclusion to jump toward, it was perhaps intemperate of me to interpret the exclusion of stained glass from these general studies as uniformly the result of uncritical prejudice. Until recently it might have been excused as ignorance. Since 1978, however, five volumes have appeared in the French Corpus Vitrearum series Recensement des vitraux anciens de la France, documenting a wealth of surviving material. (16) Thousands of windows are now part of the public scholarly domain. Many of them are signed by artists whose careers can be traced from place to place, commission to commission. The stylistic variety--both regional and individual--is staggering. Both ecclesiastical and secular patronage are documented through portraiture and more emblematically through heraldry or inscription. Iconographic programs are varied and complex, drawn from a variety of sources--both pictorial and textual--eventually becoming compelling source material themselves. As exposed works of art, these wi ndows pose questions of design and production, patronage and propaganda, devotion and reception that are at the center of both old-fashioned and newfangled art history. Since most were embedded in public contexts, their study would embrace communities with concerns broader than those of the closed courtly circle, the artificially nuclear audience for most of what has traditionally been considered art by historians of this place and period.

More recently specialists in the study of sixteenth-century stained glass such as Michel Herold and Guy-Michel Leproux have advanced in Jean Lafond's footsteps, pushing their work beyond the confines of cataloguing and documentation to engage questions of production and artistic personality. (17) Even as distinguished a scholar of the French Renaissance as Henri Zerner has begun to address the central place of stained glass within French art of the sixteenth-century. (18) Within his work, however, Zerner has sought to justify and maintain the historiographic tradition by arguing that stained-glass windows should not be considered as or with painting (19) but should instead be defined by their firm integration into an architectural context, (20) where they possess a unique ability to transform interior spaces with atmospheric lighting. (21) For Zerner, this situation renders them so difficult to observe that they neither invite, nor can they sustain, the extended, contemplative viewing central to the Renaissan ce category of painting as pictorialized fiction:

We have to stress this one point, which is fundamental for understanding the role and originality of the stained-glass window. If painting became the quintessential form of art and remained so for several centuries following the Quattrocento, it is because it could establish a privileged connection with spectators; it focuses their attention, captivates them, engages them in contemplation. Since the Renaissance, painting has been a fiction. Once their gaze has been captured, spectators enter into the world of the picture, whose frame separates and protects it from the outside world. But it is not possible to look at stained-glass windows in the same way for the simple reason that we are dazzled by their light. Thus, pictorial representation in stained glass is much more fugitive; we must work hard to grasp it and focus on it. This fundamental difference in the very conditions of perception excludes stained-glass windows from the domain of painting, as it was established during the Renaissance in Italy, of cou rse, but also in the Netherlands and in Germany. Painting invents a world unto itself, a world where we are enticed and held; stained glass does not have this power, but it has another: it transforms

the real environment, it envelops us and inevitably affects us, without our even realizing it. (22)

My experience with the Louis de Roncherolles window calls Zerner's position into question. Although it capitalizes on salient, even significant, ahistorical qualities of stained glass as an architectural medium, his definition is unnecessarily limiting as a critical posture--what Michael Baxandall calls a "sub-theoretical" platform (23)--for the study of sixteenth-century French art in relation to its initial audience. On one level, Zerner is seeking simply to clarify a perceived semantic distinction. Through a process of exclusion he constructs the precise definition of a critically significant word-painting--by contrasting it with his characterization of a separate genre--stained glass. Historiographically, of course, painting is an unusually powerful word. Its use as a labeling category continues to circumscribe a privileged group of pictorial artifacts--a canon--which is destined to receive a premium of care and attention in the professional world of art reception, interpretation, and conservation. Propos ing a limiting, exclusionary definition of painting may have broad implications. (24)

We will probably never be certain whether all sixteenth-century producers and consumers referred to or conceived of stained-glass windows as paintings, or those who made them as painters. A growing literature on the production of stained glass during this period is revealing an absence of uniformity in the organization and distribution of the labor involved in the complex, collaborative task of creating a window. At times a small-scale drawing, commissioned from a designer, was subsequently consigned to an independent glazier for translation into stained glass; in other instances glass painters, such as Engrand Le Prince, seem to have designed and supervised the production of entire windows within a workshop setting. (25) But no matter how the Louis de Roncherolles window was actually made, I will argue in this case study that for a resident sixteenth-century public--which frequented, rather than infrequently visited, the exhibition space--installed stained glass windows such as this both invited and sustaine d the extended viewing that Zerner associates with paintings. That is, they involved spectators in precisely the sort of symbiotic fiction that he has suggested was reserved for easel painting, even if the medium through which the fiction was conveyed might also have been uniquely effective in transforming the luminosity of the "real" environment into a setting for its own fiction, transforming it into a world unto itself that is as alluring and possessive as the fictive narrative space within the windows.

Since this study is fundamentally about making critical choices, it has been, I believe, crucial at the outset to explain how I made mine. To summarize, my interpreting of the Louis de Roncherolles window grew out of, in chronological order, first, my interest in seeing the stained-glass windows of the cathedral of Beauvais embedded in the context of enduring local concerns rather than those of an episodic international art world, second, my largely visceral fascination with one work of art engendered by a fortuitous--even furtive--close personal encounter with it, and third, my frustration with what I perceive to be a distorting prejudice within the art historiographic tradition, a prejudice that still conspires to alienate important and interesting pictures from the canon because of the medium in which they took form. Therefore, in fashioning my interpretation of the window itself, I sought first, to explain its local meaning in the past, second, to elucidate my strong personal response in the present, and third, to prove that it, and tens of thousands of windows like it, are susceptible to art historical interpretation as vicarious pictorial fiction and--if integrated into the center of its study--could have an impact on our future understanding of the production and reception of art in sixteenth-century France.

The Window's Story

Why did the noble, wealthy, and powerful Louis de Roncherolles commission an impressive and expensive stained-glass window, painted by the celebrated virtuoso Engrand Le Prince, for a chapel in the incomplete cathedral of Beauvais in 1522? As the question itself indicates, the circumstances surrounding the creation of the window are well established. We know when, for what location, and for whom--or at least at whose behest--it was made. An entry in the Beauvais Cathedral Chapter records for June 13, 1522, (26) documents Louis de Roncherolles's assignment to the chapter of his seigneurial rights for lands at Auneuil left to the church as a bequest of Jean Belin. Louis forgoes the financial payment due him on condition that a window of the same value (100 livres tournois) be installed in the transept chapel of SteBarbe. (27) The window was to be based on drawings provided by Louis himself (28) and depict the patron and his wife, their heraldic devices, and their patron saints, flanking Christ.

This is precisely what appears in the lowest register of the window (Fig. 7). To the left, Louis II de Roncherolles, wearing a surcoat of arms, kneels directly above his heraldic shield. (29) There is no written text; his identity is totally pictorial, signified both by physiognomy and a family armorial bearing that, in the year in which this window was commissioned, belonged only to Louis. Above and behind him stands Saint Louis, (30) his patron, who is introducing his protege to the scene of the Pieta or Lamentation at the center of the window and encouraging the donor to follow his own example, and that of the Virgin, by contemplating the dead body of Christ. Louis's wife, Francoise d'Halluin, kneels to the right in a composition that mirrors the one containing her husband at the left. Francoise's heraldic device--not, strictly speaking, hers but actually the dimidiated arms of her father and her husband contained within a lozenge, as is frequently the case with women--is beneath her; (31) her patron saint, Francis, stands behind her. Rather than directing Francoise's attention to the cent ral tableau or contemplating it himself, however, Saint Francis is caught in ecstasy, adoring the crucified seraph.

This is not the only feature that distinguishes the scene in the right lancet from those occupying the other two leaves of the lower triptych. The setting here is not an extension of the imaginary city- or countryscape that unifies the other two compositions but the backyard of the cathedral of Beauvais, (32) recognizable above the head of Saint Francis (Fig. 9) through its distinctively double-tiered flying buttresses with gabled abutments (culees) surmounted by attenuated, crocketed pinnacles as well as through the appearance of the small tower at the western end of the choir roof, peeking in this foreshortened vantage point over the steep pitch of the hemicycle covering. (33) Francis and Francoise, therefore, seem to be situated within a real, local space rather than the generic, ideal world portrayed behind the scenes in the other two lancets. The prominent inscription on Saint Francis's golden halo (Fig. 10), LANMIL*VC*XXII*DVRANT*LA*FAMIN*CA* GRANT MORT*CESTE VERIERE, (34) reinforces this actual ized local reference by associating the window with a date (1522), a disaster (famine), and its outcome (death). Although the lack of a verb in this phrase leaves open the question of whether it documents execution as well as commission, it provides a first clue that the window may respond to hard times in Beauvais. (35)

Although not mentioned specifically in the chapter records--but potentially included in the drawing supplied by Louis--other subjects supplement this most proximate lowest register in the upper half of the window (Fig. 11). (36) At the left, above the two Louis, appears a conflation of two events from the life of Saint Hubert: his Saint-Francis-like adoration of a crucifix that appeared in the antlers of a deer he was hunting on Good Friday and the descent of an angel with a stole sent by the Virgin in an effort to overcome his reluctance to become a bishop. (37) At the center of the upper register, above the Pieta, is its narrative antecedent, the Crucifixion, and a monumental Saint Christopher stands to the right above Francoise and Francis. Additional heraldic shields float in the foregrounds below the flanking scenes, as well as in the lancet cusps and the adjacent tracery openings above them. (38) In the upper tracery lights (Fig. 12), the Virgin ascends, surrounded by the Three Persons of the Trinity an d surrounded by a welcoming party of two angels. As already mentioned, another depiction of the cathedral of Beauvais appears at the side of one of the angels (Fig. 8), presumably as an evocation of the heavenly Jerusalem, which is Mary's destination.

Neither signature nor written evidence identifies the artist who executed this commission, but the window's style and technique associate it unmistakably with Engrand Le Prince, (39) the most famous member of a powerful stained-glass dynasty in Beauvais. (40) His stylistic trademarks, (41) established from the study of a small group of signed works in three other churches, (42) permeate this window. In the words of Lucien Magne--whose 1888 study of Engrand's window at Montmorency was the first vivid characterization of this very distinctive artistic personality--the Louis de Roncherolles window, like Engrand's other work, is distinguished "by the freedom of execution and the broad conception of modeling, by the delicate application of silver stain which shines like gold in the reflected light of the white draperies, by the harmonious contrasts of the most vivid tonalities" and by …