Not all three portals are conceived with such breadth. The western main façade, begun around 1200, treats each of its three portals differently. The left portal (which I discussed recently) depicts the deaths of the two Saint John; the central portal shows the Tree of Jesse, tracing the genealogy of the cathedral’s patron, the Virgin Mary; and the right portal depicts another martyrdom, that of Saint Stephen. Across the façade, statues of prophets, apostles, and saints unify the three portals.
Construction of the cathedral was largely completed by the 1250s. At that time, successive archbishops began refining the building’s details, the transepts, side chapels, the canons’ wing, and the cloister. At the end of the 1200s, the southern and northern transept portals were completed. The southern portal integrates Old and New Testament narratives into a single coherent story, centered on Christ’s redemptive work and glory. It spans humanity’s key historical cycles across thousands of years and dozens of images. This is an ample conception, the most important historical cycle of mankind, which embraces several thousand years in dozens of images. Yet the northern transept portal surpasses even this, offering a perspective that stretches from the Creation to the end of the world.
This monumental vision had political motives. In 1204, King Philip II of France conquered Normandy, which was previously largely independent – or, after the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, was under the Norman-English crown – and brought it under French rule. Within France, the Rouen archbishopric was overshadowed by Paris’s Notre-Dame. The archbishops sought to compensate through political representation, including architectural statements. To compete with Paris’s Sainte-Chapelle, they built the Chapel of the Virgin as an archiepiscopal burial site, and they modeled the new transept portals, instead of the outdated main façade of the cathedral, on the grand façades of Notre-Dame’s transepts.
The Portail des Libraires itself was begun around 1280 by Guillaume de Flavacourt, Archbishop of Rouen between 1278 and 1305, together with master builder Jean Davy. Construction required clearing the area between the cathedral and the Rue Saint Romain, the row of canon houses, for which the archbishop had other plans. Around 1300, he added wings on either side of the portal, connecting the cathedral to the street. The left wing became the archbishop’s palace, with the Chapel of the Virgin, and the right wing housed the library. The portal – and the courtyard formed between the wings – takes its name from the library as well as from the booksellers who offered their goods in the courtyard to the canons coming to the library. The canons could also quickly return to their notes after communal prayers recited every three hours via the grand stairway inside the portal.
By the first half of the 13th century, Gothic church façades had developed a characteristic, unified structure. At the center of each portal, the tympanum depicts the main theme of the façade: here, the Last Judgment, arranged in three tiers. The lowest one shows the dead rising from their graves, the middle one shows them lined up before their Judge, while the uppermost – which should depict Christ as Judge – is missing. Some scholars suggest it was destroyed, though most likely it was never completed.
Surrounding the tympanum on the archivolts are twenty-four figures – apocalyptic elders, prophets and apostles, as well as anels – providing a celestial framework for the scene. Above, in front of the rose window, Archangel Michael casts Lucifer from heaven. Though this apocryphal event occurred at the beginning of the world, Michael also functions as protector of the dead, as well as a soul weigher at the Last Judgment, keeping the devils at bay, which links him to the central theme.
Beneath the tympanum, on the trumeau, stands a statue of Saint Romain, the city’s 7th-century bishop and patron saint, with the chained Gargouille monster at his feet. Trumeau statues in Gothic portals usually relate to the tympanum’s theme, making Saint Romain an anomaly here. However, knowing that this statue was carved only during the 19th-century restoration and placed on the façade facing Rue Saint Romain clarifies the choice. 13th-century sources refer to this portal as the “New Gate of the Virgin Mary”, suggesting that a Madonna with child originally stood here as a heavenly intercessor on Judgment Day.
But perhaps the most remarkable feature of the portal is its base: an accordion-like sequence of half-pillars flanking the doorway, each with narrown niches for statues, from the top of which the curves of the tympanum’s archivolts spring. The façades of these half-pillars are decorated with five rows of quadrilobe panels each, covering the surface in a grid pattern, as if embroidered tapestries had been laid across the portal’s base.
The top row of panels depicts the scenes of the Creation: to the right of the portal, from “Let there be light” to the Tree of Knowledge; to the left, from the Expulsion to Cain’s murder.
During the seven days of Creation, the Creator wears Christ’s cruciform halo. As God created by His word alone, and Christ is the Word according to John, it was fitting that He executes the steps of Creation. These steps are unusually presented in circular diagrams. Only at the creation of man do we see three male heads, symbolizing the Trinity, as the Bible switches here to plural: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” (Gen 1:26)
Beneath each scene of the Creation and the episodes of first men’s story, are four quadrilobe panels with four grotesque creatures, on each of the twice ten pillars:
It is understandable that the origins of the world and of human history appear on the base of a Last Judgment portal: the beginnings of the world is a prerequisite for its end, and humanity’s fall a prerequisite for Judgment. But why these monstrous beings?
Scholrs d not entirely agree, but, setting aside more speculative interpretations, most consider them a form of bestiary.
Medieval bestiaries – collections illustrating the traits of animals – served two main purposes. They displayed the richness of Creation, and they conveyed moral lessons through the characteristics of each creature. Both roles are appropriate here, beneath the Creation and the Last Judgment which holds people accountable for their moral decisions.
Furthermore, the formation of this “basal carpet” is closely tied to bestiary traditions. Its precedents are relief sequences on the two sides of earlier Gothic cathedral portals that were independent sets, not linked to the topic of the tympanum: depictions of months, the struggle of the seven virtues with the seven deadly sins, the liberal arts, or animals. These are quickly organized into square-framed panels inherited from Romanesque art, and first descend here in Rouen to the base of the portals, forming a series of biblical narratives on the southern portal, and a bestiary encyclopedia on the northern one.
But why an encyclopedia of fantastic creatures only?
First, in this period there was heightened interest in exotic beings from distant lands, satisfied by Indica travelogues, Livres des Merveilles, John Mandeville, Alexander romances and other manuscripts. The beings described in them were all considered real and included in bestiaries. Vézelay’s Magdalene church tympanum (1140-50) offers a good example, depicting monstrous creatures among the nations Christ commands his apostles to teach (Mt 28:19).
Second, manuscript illuminators – whose motives were often copied in decorative sculpture as well – passionately filled their margins with grotesque and hybrid creatures, as they also occupy the margins of the portal here.
Third, the top narrative row at the base depicts not only Creation but also the Fall, humanity’s moral darkening, and their descent into murder, for which these hybrid, distorted, half-animal figures serve as fitting illustrations.
Finally, the innumerable multitude of creatures emphasize above all the inexhaustible richness of Creation and the Creator. As God commands, “Let the waters teem with living creatures” (Gen 1:20), so the portal base teems with every conceivable and inconceivable being – not only the eighty in the square panels, but also others in the triangular spaces between the quadrilobe forms and their square frames: dragons, hybrids, lambs, a man hunting a fox, birds, fish and more, totaling 280.
And these small corner-dwelling creatures are no less important than the large ones. As Salome’s tance on the cathedral’s main façade inspired Flaubert, so these inspired Ruskin visiting Rouen Cathedral, and later Proust interpreting Ruskin, continuing the chain of Creation into the twentieth century and beyond.
“I say nothing of their general design, or of the lines of the wings and scales, which are perhaps, unless in those of the central dragon, not much above the usual commonplaces of good ornamental work; but there is an evidence in the features of thoughtfulness and fancy which is not common, at least now-a-days. The upper creature on the left is biting something, the form of which is hardly traceable in the defaced stone but biting he is; and the reader cannot but recognise in the peculiarly reverted eye the expression which is never seen, as I think, but in the eye of a dog gnawing something in jest, and preparing to start away with it: the meaning of the glance, so far as it can be marked by the mere incision of the chisel, will be felt by comparing it with the eye of the couchant figure on the right, in its gloomy and angry brooding. The plan of this head, and the nod of the cap over its brow, are fine ; but there is a little touch above the hand especially well meant : the fellow is vexed and puzzled in his malice; and his hand is pressed hard on his cheek bone, and the flesh of the cheek is wrinkled under the eye by the pressure. The whole, indeed, looks wretchedly coarse, when it is seen on a scale in which it is naturally compared with delicate figure etchings; but considering it as a mere filling of an interstice on the outside of a cathedral gate, and as one of more than three hundred (for in my estimate I did not include the outer pedestals), it proves very noble vitality in the art of the time.”
John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, 1849
“Finally, Ruskin's medieval studies confirmed, with his belief in the goodness of faith, his belief in the necessity of free, joyful, and personal work without the intervention of mechanization. In order that you might realize this better, it would be best to transcribe here a very characteristic page of Ruskin. He is speaking of a figurine a few centimeters in size, lost in the midst of hundreds of such tiny figurines, of the porch of the Booksellers of the Rouen cathedral:
«The fellow is vexed and puzzled in his malice; and his hand is pressed hard on his cheek bone, and the flesh of the cheek is wrinkled under the eye by the pressure. The whole, indeed, looks wretchedly coarse, when it is seen on a scale in which it is naturally compared with delicate figure etchings; but considering it as a mere filling of an interstice on the outside of the cathedral gate, and as one of the more than three hundred, it proves very noble vitality in the art of the time.»
«We have certain work to do for our bread, and that is to be done strenuously; other work to do is for our delight, and that is to be done heartily: neither is to be done by halves and shifts, but with a will; and what is not worth this effort is not to be done at all. Perhaps all that we have to do is meant for nothing more than an exercise of the heart and of the will, and is useless in itself; but, at all events, the little use it has may well be spared if it is not worth putting our hands and our strength to. It does not become our immortality to take an ease inconsistent with its authority, nor to suffer any instruments with which it can dispense, to come between it and the thing it rules. There is dreaming enough, and earthiness enough, and sensuality enough in human existence without our turning the fe w glowing moments of it into mechanism, and since our life must at best be but a vapour that appears for a little time and then vanishes away, let it at least appear as a cloud in the height of Heaven, not as the thick darkness that broods over the blast of the Furnace, and rolling of the Wheel.»
I confess that when I reread this page at the time of Ruskin's death, I was seized with the desire to see the little man he speaks of. And I went to Rouen, as if obeying a dying wish, and as if Ruskin, upon dying, had in some way entrusted to his readers the poor creature to which he had given life again by speaking of it, and which, unknowingly, had just lost forever the person who had done for it as much as its first sculptor. But when I arrived near the huge cathedral in front of the portal where the saints were warming themselves in the sun, saw higher up the galleries where the kings radiated up to those supreme heights of stone I believed uninhabited, and where here a sculptured hermit lived in isolation, letting the birds rest on his forehead, while there a gathering of apostles listened to the message of an angel poised near them, folding his wings, under a flight of pigeons spreading theirs, and not far from a personage who, receiving a child on his back, turned his head in a sudden and secular motion; when I saw, lined up before its porches or leaning over the balconies of its towers, all the stone hosts of the mystic city breathing the sun or the morning shadow, I understood it would be impossible to find a figurine of but a few centimeters in the midst of this superhuman multitude.
I nevertheless went to the porch of the Bookseller's. But how to recognize the figurine among hundreds of others? All of a sudden, a talented and promising young sculptress, Mrs. L. Yeatman, said to me, «Here is one that looks like it.» We looked farther down, and there it was. It scarcely measures ten centimeters. It is crumbling, and yet the look is the same, the stone still has the hole that raises the eyeball and gives it that expression which made me recognize it. The artist, who died centuries ago, left there, among thousands of others, this little person who dies a little more each day, and has been dead for a really long time, forever lost in the midst of the crowd. But he had put it there.
One day, a man for whom there is no death, for whom there is no material infinity, no oblivion, a man who, casting away from him that nothingness which oppresses us to follow purposes which dominate his life, purposes so numerous that he will not be able to attain them all, while we seemed to have none, this man came, and, among those waves of stone where each lacelike effervescence seemed to resemble the others, seeing there all the laws of life, all the thoughts of the soul, naming them by their names, he said, "See, it is this, it is that." As on the Day of Judgment, which is represented near by, his words resound like the archangel's trumpet, and he says:
«Those who have lived will live, matter is nothing.»
And, in fact, like the dead whom, not far away, the tympanum represents awakening at the sound of the archangel's trumpet, arising, having recovered their forms, recognizable, alive, the figurine is now alive again and has recovered its look, and the Judge has said, "You have survived; you will live." As for him, he is not an immortal judge, his body will die; but what does it matter! as if he were not destined to die he performs his immortal task, unconcerned at the size of the thing that occupies his time, and, having but one human life to live, he spends several days in front of one of ten thousand figures of a church. He made a drawing of it. It corresponded for him to those ideas that exercised his mind, indifferent to approaching old age. He made a drawing of it; he spoke of it. And the harmless and monstrous little figurine will have come back to life, against all hope, from that death which seems more total than the others, which is the disappearance into the midst of infinite numbers and the leveling down of similarities, but from which genius quickly rescues us. Finding the figurine there again, one cannot help but be touched. It seems to live and to gaze, or rather to have been caught by death at the very moment of its gaze, like the Pompeians whose movements remain suspended. It is a single thought of the sculptor, in fact, that has been arrested here in its movement by the immobility of the stone. I was touched on finding the figurine there again; nothing therefore dies that has survived, no more the sculptor's thought than Ruskin's thought.
Marcel Proust, „Jean Ruskin”, La Chronique des arts et de la curiosité, January 1, 1900
(English translation from Marcel Proust: On Reading Ruskin, 1987)
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