CESARIS, JOHANNES
(fl. early 15th c.). Composer documented at the Sainte-Chapelle, Bourges (1407–08), and
perhaps at Angers cathedral (1417). In his Champion des dames (ca. 1442), Martin Le
Franc described Cesaris as one of the composers who “astonished Paris” in the years ca.
- Seven French songs and one Latin motet survive, showing a remarkable
resourcefulness and variety of style.
David Fallows
Reaney, Gilbert, ed. Early Fifteenth-Century Music. Vol. 1. N.p.: American Institute of
Musicology, 1955.
Besseler, Heinrich. “Cesaris.” In Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart. 17 vols. Kassel:
Bärenreiter, 1949–86, Vol. 2 (1952), cols. 983–89.
CHAALIS
. Notre-Dame-de-Chaalis (Oise), a Cistercian abbey in the Gothic style near Senlis, was
founded on January 9, 1137, by Louis VI in memory of Charles the Good of Flanders,
who had been killed in 1127. The site had previously been occupied by a Benedictine
priory founded by Renaud de Mello on his return from the First Crusade and was
dependent upon Vézelay. The Cistercian refoundation was a dependency of Pontigny
(Yonne). The first abbot, André de Baudemont, had been seneschal for Thibaut IV, count
of Blois.
The abbey, suppressed in 1791, is now in ruins. Of the first church erected in the 12th
century, there are no remains. The second church, begun by Abbot Adam ca. 1202,
survives in fragmentary form: the apse and south transept have been destroyed down to
their foundations, but parts of the north transept and fragments of the claustral buildings
adjacent to it survive. The church was consecrated on October 20, 1219. Abbot Adam
was buried in front of the main altar, and numerous tombs of other abbots, as well as
those of thirteen bishops of Senlis and aristocratic patrons, once filled the church. An
abbot’s chapel located to the east of the church and built ca. 1245–50 is intact, though it
was heavily restored in the 19th century. The conventual buildings erected beginning in
1736 now house collections belonging to the Jacquemart-André Museum, and the abbey
as a whole is the property of the Institut de France.
The abbey church is notable for its size (almost 270 feet long, with a nave 46 feet
wide) and the unusual character of the transept, which had polygonal terminations with
seven chapels in each arm. Although often associated with the rounded transepts of
Valenciennes, Tournai, Cambrai, and Saint-Lucien at Beauvais, there are important
differences between the design of the monastery church and these other monuments in
northern France; the transept design seems to have been inspired instead by the chevet of
its mother house, Pontigny, begun ca. 1186–1210. Prior to the Revolution, a similar
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