Lepers and Kings | The Tympanum : Vision in Stone

The Lepers and the Kings The 12th Century French Abbey of St. Pierre, Moissac
Project Home The Abbey Project Description Essays Table of Contents Send comments	The Tympanum : Vision in Stone 1 2 3 The city of Moissac lies on an alluvial plain in the Bas-Quercy, where the river Tarn emerges from the Aveyron Gorges to join the Garonne on its way from Toulouse, in a region long known for its independent politics and theology. The character combines the wild geology of the causses to the north with the gentle and fertile southern plains. It carries within its somewhat decayed aspect both the Mediterranean air of Spain and the cultured, heretical individuality of Languedoc. It is an old town and, like an old and weathered vineyard, it is both gnarled and vibrant.
	The city surrounds its ancient abbey and expands toward the river to the south and east in haphazard suburban communities. The economy includes a few small industries but relies heavily upon the wealth of the surrounding fields. The abbey, with its portal and cloister, shares an equal place with the famous Chasselas dessert grape and the rivers as trademarks and attractions of the city. Postcards of vignettes of the town show the doorway and the cloister with bunches of grapes in the border. The smart new logo for the city combines references to the three – “La pierre, l'eau, les fruits.” What remains of the abbey complex, once so powerful as to be called “the abbey of a thousand monks,” occupies the northwest corner of the city.	Logo from the Moissac city site.
	Recent renovations have restored some sense of elegance to the buildings that remain of the medieval foundation. Excavations in front of the portal to save it from damp lowered the ground level by one meter and exposed the original stones, worn by the feet of pilgrims. The square in front of the portal, once crowded with cars, is now broad and quiet, paved with a graceful brick pattern. Cars from the town drive up the narrow rue de la République, across the southeast corner and off along the ancient rue Guilleran that runs along the south flank of the abbey. Shops along the street put out awnings, displays, and signs to attract visitors, obscuring the path and the view.
	From about one block away, at the corner of the rue Sainte Catherine and the rue République, the front of the massive block of the porch appears flat, the archivolts both inside and outside the porch appearing as successive concentric patterns on a closed surface. In fact, the archivolts mark the inner and outer boundaries of a deep porch with slightly splayed sides and a smooth barrel vault. Above the double doors, with a height roughly equal to them, rises one of the most famous tympana remaining from the Middle Ages.
	Within this tympanum sits a figure, bearded, crowned and cross-nimbed, upon a throne within a mandorla. On either side and below him are two beings with wings - angels, we might say. Surrounding-these are the four Beasts of the Apocalypse and ranked in rows that fill the curved space, four-and-twenty smaller crowned and enthroned figures, carrying chalices and viols - the four and twenty Elders. - Like other church portals of the medieval period, this one is richly sculpted on either side and the stories the sculptures tell are easy to identify, or so it seems from the texts. To most art historians, this monument has taken a somewhat uneasy place within a perhaps too familiar sequence of sculptured portals, the uneasiness deriving in part from the fact that the work inspired no school: it had no followers; it did not influence anything that art history identifies. This is strange, for in its day it was highly valued by its mother abbey at Cluny and was second only to Cluny in size. It housed a large library, and was the site of the production of many manuscripts. It had a network of dependencies in the region and stood on a road well traveled by pilgrims, merchants, and marauders of various descriptions. In other words, Moissac was in a position to influence as well as to receive influences. That it appears not to have done so is intriguing. Perhaps the evidence has disappeared, perhaps we have lost the ability to recognize evidence that remains, or perhaps something happened to disrupt an otherwise predictable historical course. The Tympanum : Vision in Stone 1 2 3