Romanesque France: Cluny and the Churches of the Pilgrim Roads

Cluny and its houses, and the carved and painted Romanesque churches of Burgundy, Auvergne and the roads to Compostela.

Francia Sacra · 6 min read

What Romanesque means

Romanesque is the name given to the churches built in Western Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, before Gothic. The word is modern. Charles de Gerville used the French word romane in a letter of 1818 to Auguste Le Prévost, borrowing it from the Romance languages, and his friend Arcisse de Caumont applied it in print to the architecture of the eleventh and twelfth centuries in 1824. The churches use round arches, thick walls and stone vaults.

The great age of building began soon after the year 1000. The monk Raoul Glaber, writing about those years in his Histories, described the world as clothing itself everywhere in a white mantle of churches. Monks built or rebuilt many of them, and many served pilgrims who came to pray at the relics of the saints.

Cluny and its network

The leading monastery of the age was Cluny, in southern Burgundy. Duke William I of Aquitaine founded it in 909 or 910; the sources differ on the year, and the charter is dated at Bourges on September 11. He placed the abbey under the protection of Saints Peter and Paul and made it subject to no authority but the pope. Its early abbots Berno, Odo, Aymard, Majolus and Odilo are venerated as saints, as is Hugh of Semur, abbot from 1049 to 1109. Houses following Cluny’s customs spread across Europe. The New Catholic Encyclopedia counts 1,184 of them at the peak, early in the twelfth century, while other counts are lower.

Hugh began the third abbey church, known as Cluny III, in 1088. Pope Urban II consecrated its high altar in 1095, and Pope Innocent II dedicated the church in 1130. It was 614 feet long and remained the largest church in Europe until the sixteenth century. The abbey was suppressed in 1790, sold in 1798 and quarried for stone until 1823. Under a tenth of Cluny III survives, chiefly the south arm of the great transept with the octagonal Clocher de l’Eau-Bénite. The thirteenth-century granary, the Farinier, holds eight capitals from the choir, among them small figures in almond-shaped frames that stand for the tones of Gregorian chant.

Two other churches on Via Romanica show Cluny’s reach. The basilica of Paray-le-Monial is a scaled-down model of the great abbey church. At Souvigny, one of Cluny’s oldest daughter houses, Saints Majolus and Odilo died and were buried; the church there was rebuilt on the model of Cluny III, and their tombs were rediscovered in the early twenty-first century.

Tympana and capitals

Romanesque sculpture is concentrated in two places: the tympanum, the half-moon panel over the main door, and the capitals at the top of the columns. At Autun the cathedral of Saint-Lazare was founded about 1120 as a pilgrimage church and completed in 1147. It holds relics of Lazarus that Bishop Gérard brought from the abbey of Saint-Victor in Marseille in the tenth century. The sculptor Gislebertus, who worked there from about 1125 to 1135, carved his name on the tympanum of the Last Judgment and made or directed many of the capitals; his Eve, from a portal lintel, is now in the Musée Rolin. The church faces south, and pilgrims left beneath the Judgment.

At Vézelay the tympanum shows the Mission of the Apostles: Christ in glory blesses the apostles and sends them to convert the nations. The capitals mix biblical and hagiographic scenes with allegories. Saint Bernard preached the Second Crusade at Vézelay in 1146, and Richard the Lionheart and Philip Augustus met there in 1190 before the Third. Viollet-le-Duc began restoring the church in 1840 and saved it from collapse. The Franciscans served it until 1993, and the Monastic Fraternities of Jerusalem keep it today.

The abbey of Moissac adopted the Cluniac reform in 1047, under Abbot Odilo of Cluny. Its cloister, consecrated in 1100 according to an inscription on one of its piers, has 76 capitals, 45 of them carved with scenes from the Old Testament, the life of Christ, the Apocalypse and the lives of the saints. The tympanum of the south portal shows the vision of the Apocalypse, with Christ enthroned among the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders.

At Conques the relics of Saint Faith arrived from Agen in 866, taken by a monk of Conques in what the Middle Ages called a holy theft. Her reliquary statue, a wooden core covered in gold and built on a Roman head of the fifth century, was made in the later ninth century. The tympanum of the Last Judgment places the saved at Christ’s right and the damned at his left, and traces of its paint survive. The 104 windows are by Pierre Soulages, and Premonstratensian canons have kept the abbey since 1873.

The churches of the Auvergne

Five major churches of the twelfth century stand within about 19 miles of Clermont-Ferrand: Notre-Dame-du-Port, Orcival, Saint-Nectaire, Saint-Austremoine at Issoire and Saint-Saturnin. They share a choir with an ambulatory and radiating chapels, an east end that rises in stages, an octagonal bell tower and decoration in stones of different colors.

Notre-Dame-du-Port in Clermont-Ferrand, listed by UNESCO with the routes to Compostela, keeps a Black Virgin in its crypt; her first recorded procession was in 1614, and pilgrims still come in May. At Orcival the Virgin and Child is carved in walnut and covered with silver and silver-gilt. Chains on the south wall recall prisoners freed through her intercession, which gave her the name Notre-Dame-des-Fers, and on Ascension Day barefoot men carry her in procession. Saint-Nectaire, from the mid-twelfth century, has one of the richest series of capitals in Auvergne, with scenes from the life of Christ and the legend of Saint Nectaire.

Painted walls

Two buildings keep large cycles of Romanesque painting. The Chapelle des Moines at Berzé-la-Ville belonged to a priory where Saint Hugh of Cluny came to rest away from the abbey. Its paintings of the early twelfth century, with Christ in Majesty in the apse, are the only surviving monumental paintings from Cluny at its height.

The abbey church of Saint-Savin-sur-Gartempe, near Poitiers, inscribed by UNESCO in 1983, is often called the Romanesque Sistine Chapel. Its paintings, dated about 1095 to 1115, cover nearly the whole church: Genesis and Exodus on the nave vault, the Apocalypse in the porch, the Passion in the gallery, and the lives of Saints Savin and Cyprian in the crypt. Strong outlines and broad areas of color make them legible from the floor.

The roads to Compostela

Many of these churches stood on the roads to the tomb of Saint James at Compostela. The Pilgrim’s Guide, the fifth book of the Codex Calixtinus, compiled in the 1130s, describes four roads across France: from Saint-Gilles and Arles through Toulouse; from Le Puy through Conques and Moissac; from Vézelay through Saint-Léonard and Périgueux; and from Tours, called the Paris road, through Poitiers, Saintes and Bordeaux. It names the saints to visit on the way, among them Saint Trophimus at Arles, Saint Saturninus at Toulouse, Saint Faith at Conques, Mary Magdalene at Vézelay and Saint Martin at Tours.

In December 1998 UNESCO inscribed the Routes of Santiago de Compostela in France: 71 buildings and seven stretches of path, among them Conques, Moissac, Vézelay, the cathedral of Le Puy, Saint-Sernin in Toulouse and Notre-Dame-du-Port. Via Conchae follows the Le Puy route through Aubrac, Conques, Figeac and Cahors to Moissac.

What to look for

Look at the tympanum before you go in and find the central figure. In a Last Judgment the saved stand at Christ’s right hand, which is the viewer’s left. Inside, find the altar, usually at the east end, though Autun faces south, and then look up at the capitals, where scenes are carved at the top of the columns. Many of these churches have a crypt beneath the choir, as at Notre-Dame-du-Port.

Binoculars help with capitals and vaults. Cluny, Berzé-la-Ville and Saint-Savin are visited as monuments with their own opening hours, so check their websites before you go.

Our ways that go there

Holy places: Cluny, Berzé-la-Ville, Paray-le-Monial, Souvigny, Autun, Vézelay, Moissac, Conques, Orcival, Saint-Nectaire, Clermont-Ferrand. Saints: Saints Mayeul and Odilo, Saint Faith, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux.