The Times - UK (2021-12-18)

18 saturday review Saturday December 18 2021 | the times

F

ive stars: Amiens, Bourges, Char-

tres, Wells, St Mark’s Venice,

Seville and Toledo. One star (you

managed to get into this book, so

you must be pretty good but

you’re not that good): Ulm, Vézelay, Sois-

sons, Kirkwall, Coimbra, Wrocław, Bolo-

gna and Torcello. Three stars each for

St Paul’s and Westminster Abbey. Thanks

a bunch!

Simon Jenkins can be as spiky as the

crockets on Milan’s “wedding-cake con-

fection”. It’s this that makes his feast of a

Europe’s 100

Best Cathedrals

by Simon Jenkins

Viking, 328pp; £30

books

St Paul’s Cathedral? I’ll

give it three out of five

Simon Jenkins is on spiky form in this opinionated ranking

of Europe’s finest cathedrals, says Ysenda Maxtone Graham

book about the great cathedrals of Europe

(following on from his 2016 book,

England’s Cathedrals) such excellent com-

pany. He provokes on every page. He finds

one of my favourites, Durham, “hard to

like” with its “inert” Romanesque archi-

tecture; “its purpose was to assert the pres-

ence and permanence of an alien power”

— the power of Norman bishops and

clergy, who “stamped their authority on

the country with an empire of stone”. Nor

does he approve of the “fussy battlements”

of its later west towers, or the too many

zigzags in the interior.

Of Norwich, he writes, “the West Front,

like so many in England, lacks panache”.

Ouch. He can’t bear the way we allow the

statues on our west fronts to erode into

unrecognisable stony stumps, while the

French restore and replace theirs. (I’d

rather have an original stony stump than a

newly made angel with too-pointy wings.)

He longs for us to have the guts to recol-

our our cathedrals as they were coloured

in the Middle Ages, and gives us a double-

page illustration of a laser-lit Amiens

portal, its display of statues turned blood

red, lemon yellow and chlorophyll green.

“We deceive ourselves,” he writes, “by de-

nying thisessential feature of their crea-

tors’ vision.”

Then he goes and absolutely

loves Milan’s west front,

which Ruskin wrote off

as “vile... every style in

the world, and every

one spoiled”. Jen-

kins says he

couldn’t take his

eyes off it. He

adores Gaudí’s

Sagrada Família

in Barcelona

(officially a ba-

silica), described

by Robert Hughes

as “melted candle-

wax and chicken

guts”, but Jenkins finds

the effect “sensational”.

He admits that, much as he

admires emotive Spanish gothic, in

Burgos “after hours of bloodshed, damna-

tion, crucifixion and torture, I retreated to

the Plaza Rey San Fernando for a stiff Prot-

estant drink”. Not that he is a Protestant.

He’s an atheist, and tells us so in the intro-

duction. He ranks the cathedrals purely in

terms of their aesthetic beauty, not in the

quality of their liturgical offerings, which

would surely put Westminster Abbey (per-

mitted to be included as it briefly had cath-

edral status in the 1540s and 1550s) and St

Paul’s and indeed all English cathedrals

into the five-star category.

Like a good schoolmaster, his tendency

to criticise means you take notice when he

lavishes praise. He loves Arles’s cloister: “I

spent longer here than in the nave of Char-

tres”. Le Mans has “one of the loveliest east

ends of France”. Orvieto is “as near a per-

fect work of art as any cathedral I’ve seen”.

“Of all German cathedrals, Naumberg is

the one I long to revisit.” (He’s a sucker for

Naumberg’s painted statue of stylish Uta,

wife of a local medieval ruler, who was the

inspiration for the evil queen in Disney’s

Snow White.)

It’s a feat to keep going for 100 cathe-

drals. There are only so many ways you

can describe the goody-goodies ascending

to Heaven and the damned going down to

Hell on a west-front portal, but

Jenkins never gets repeti-

tive. The book is in strict

alphabetical order of

country and then

cathedral, which

relieves him of

having to tell

a chronological

story; you just

pick up the

story in dribs

and drabs as

you go through.

And what a

story it is. “Europe’s

cathedrals are its

finest works of art,”

Jenkins writes in his very

first sentence (and you mut-

ter, “Discuss”). But he has a point.

What makes them so incomparably en-

riching is the mixture of the audacious

architectural conception of some vision-

ary medieval abbot or bishop with the

minuscule inspirations of individual

stonemasons, who created carvings like

the “man with the toothache” and the

“man removing a thorn from his foot” in

Wells — items that bring us slap-up

against the realities of daily life in the

Middle Ages.

Jenkins revels in both the overall visions

— soaring gothic columns “as if carrying a

line of energy from earth to the gates of

Heaven” — and tiny items of beauty, such

as the first-ever depiction of a medieval

golfer in the stained glass at Gloucester,

and the stained glass pretzels in the

“bakers’ windows” at Freiburg (a cathedral

with “the most beautiful spire on earth”).

His lively reactions make you long to

visit or revisit these places. His favourite

century is the one he calls “the Glorious

Twelfth”, when an extraordinary creative

and competitive spirit erupted across the

continent, towns vying with each other to

build the highest vault: Chartres 37m

(121ft), Amiens 42m, Beauvais 48m (but in

1284 the choir vault of Beauvais fell under

its own weight). Jenkins takes a particular

interest in buttresses, coming up with

the collective noun “a desperation of but-

tresses” to evoke Beauvais’s determination

to remain standing against all the odds.

Yes, disaster happens everywhere. Sen-

tences start with subordinate clauses such

as “After its destruction by fire in 1174”,

“The child of a fire in 1200” and, “Thanks

to the collapse of Ely’s tower in 1322”. You

shut your eyes and imagine people run-

ning screaming from the scene. Yet out of

those disasters, incredible replacement

beauty sprang, such as Ely’s stone octagon

and timber lantern, requiring 24 giant oak

trees to be transported from Bedfordshire.

I was vaguely hoping to escape politics,

evil and greed, but of course the story of

cathedrals is riddled with wars, looting and

outrageous avarice. Pisa was financed by

the winnings from the wars against the

Moors. The four bronze Hellenistic horses

on the west front of St Mark’s, Venice, were

arch critic Simon Jenkins ranks Chartres Cathedral among Europe’s best. Left: a

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