around 1070 to honor the city’s first bishop, a martyr saint of the
middle of the third century. Toulouse was an important stop on the
pilgrimage road through southwestern France to Santiago de Com-
postela (MAP17-1). Large congregations were common at the shrines
along the great pilgrimage routes, and the unknown architect de-
signed Saint-Sernin to accommodate them. The grand scale of the
building is apparent in the aerial view (FIG. 17-4), which includes au-
tomobiles, trucks, and nearly invisible pedestrians. The church’s
12th-century exterior is still largely intact, although the two towers
of the western facade (at the left in FIG. 17-4) were never completed,
and the prominent crossing tower dates to the Gothic and later peri-
ods. Saint-Sernin’s plan (FIG. 17-5) closely resembles those of the
churches of Saint James at Santiago de Compostela and Saint Martin
at Tours, and exemplifies the building type that has come to be called
the “pilgrimage church.” At Toulouse, the designer increased the
length of the nave, doubled the side aisles, and added a transept, am-
bulatory, and radiating chapels to provide additional space for pil-
grims and the clergy. Radiating chapels opening onto an ambulatory
already were a feature of Vignory’s abbey church (FIG. 17-3), but at
Toulouse the chapels are greater in number and attached to the
transept as well as to the ambulatory.The Saint-Sernin plan is extremely regular and geometrically
precise. The crossing square, flanked by massive piers and marked off
by heavy arches, served as the module for the entire church. Each
nave bay, for example, measures exactly one-half of the crossing
square, and each aisle bay measures exactly one-quarter. The builders
employed similar simple ratios throughout the church. The first sug-
gestion of this kind of planning scheme in medieval Europe was the
Saint Gall monastery plan (FIG. 16-19), almost three centuries earlier.
The Toulouse solution was a crisply rational and highly refined real-
ization of an idea first seen in Carolingian architecture. This ap-
proach to design became increasingly common in the Romanesque
period.
Another telling feature of Saint-Sernin’s design is the insertion
of tribunes over the inner aisle and opening onto the nave (FIG. 17-6).
These galleries housed overflow crowds on special occasions and
played an important role in buttressing the continuous semicircular
cut-stone barrel vaultthat covers Saint-Sernin’s nave, in contrast to
the timber roof over the nave (FIG. 17-2) of the smaller abbey church
at Vignory (see “Timber Roofs and Stone Vaults,” above).Groin vaults
(indicated by Xs on the plan,FIG. 17-5) in the tribunes as well as in
the ground-floor aisles absorbed the pressure exerted by the barrelFrance and Northern Spain 435T
he perils of wooden construction were the subject of frequent
commentary among chroniclers of medieval ecclesiastical his-
tory. In some cases, churches burned repeatedly in the course of a
single century and often had to be extensively repaired or completely
rebuilt. In September 1174, for example, Canterbury Cathedral,
which had been dedicated only 44 years earlier, was accidentally set
ablaze and destroyed. Gervase of Canterbury (1141–1210), who en-
tered the monastery at Canterbury in 1163 and wrote a history of
the archbishopric from 1100 to 1199, provided a vivid eyewitness ac-
count of the disastrous fire in his Chronica:
[D]uring an extraordinarily violent south wind, a fire broke out be-
fore the gate of the church, and outside the walls of the monastery,
by which three cottages were half destroyed. From thence, while the
citizens were assembling and subduing the fire, cinders and sparks
carried aloft by the high wind, were deposited upon the church, and
being driven by the fury of the wind between the joints of the lead,
remained there amongst the half-rotten planks, and shortly glowing
with increased heat, set fire to the rotten rafters; from these the fire
was communicated to the larger beams and their braces, no one yet
perceiving or helping. For the well-painted ceiling below, and the
sheet-lead covering above, concealed between them the fire that had
arisen within....But beams and braces burning, the flames arose
to the slopes of the roof; and the sheets of lead yielded to the increas-
ing heat and began to melt. Thus the raging wind, finding a freer
entrance, increased the fury of the fire....And now that the fire had
loosened the beams from the pegs that bound them together, the
half-burnt timbers fell into the choir below upon the seats of the
monks; the seats, consisting of a great mass of woodwork, caught fire,
and thus the mischief grew worse and worse. And it was marvellous,
though sad, to behold how that glorious choir itself fed and assisted
the fire that was destroying it. For the flames multiplied by this massof timber, and extending upwards full fifteen cubits [about twenty-
five feet], scorched and burnt the walls, and more especially injured
the columns of the church....In this manner the house of God,
hitherto delightful as a paradise of pleasures, was now made a despi-
cable heap of ashes, reduced to a dreary wilderness.*
After the fire, the Canterbury monks summoned a master builder
from Sens, a French city 75 miles southeast of Paris, to supervise the
construction of their new church. Gervase reported that the first task
William of Sens tackled was “the procuring of stone from beyond
the sea.”
A quest for fireproof structures, however, seems not to have
been the primary rationale for stone vaulting. Although protection
from devastating conflagrations was no doubt one of the attractions
of building stone roofs in an age when candles provided interior illu-
mination, other factors probably played a greater role in the decision to
make the enormous investment that stone masonry required. The
rapid spread of stone vaulting throughout Romanesque Europe is most
likely the result of the clergy’s desire to provide a suitably majestic set-
ting for the display of relics as well as enhanced acoustics for the Chris-
tian liturgy and the music that accompanied it. Some contemporane-
ous texts, in fact, comment on the visual impact of costly stone vaults.
For example, in 1150 at Angers in northwestern France, a church
chronicler explained what the bishop sought to achieve by replacing
the timber roof of his cathedral with stone vaults: “[He] took down the
timber beams of the nave of the church, threatening to fall from sheer
old age, and began to build stone vaults of wondrous effect.”†❚WRITTEN SOURCES: Timber Roofs and Stone Vaults
WRITTEN SOURCES* Translated by Robert Willis. Quoted in Elizabeth Gilmore Holt,A Documentary
History of Art,2d ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981), 1:52–54.
†Translated by John Hooper Harvey,The Medieval Architect (London: Waylan,
1972), 39.17-6A
Saint James,
Santiago de
Compostela,
ca. 1075–1120.