Monet, Rouen, and Bergson: the Eternal Cathedral (Part 2)

 Now, we come to the cathedral itself. This choice in subject is what truly separates the Cathedral series from a series like the Haystacks. Again, why does Monet choose to paint a cathedral? It might just be because a cathedral’s architecture is also about the persistence of memory. This, after all, was the very reason that the Gothic was so desired during Monet’s time. After regarding Gothic architecture as the embodiment of all things ugly and deformed, nineteenth-century Europe came to re-evaluate the Middle Ages (Glaser, 1). The French discourse on the Gothic style, according to Stephanie Glaser, “focused on establishing continuity between past and present, a result of the great rupture caused and willed by the French Revolution” (15). Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thinkers saw in the Gothic cathedral a powerful bridge to overcome the chasm of time; in other words, at a period of great change and vanishing beliefs, this phenomenon of Gothic appreciation came from a deep-seated desire to reconnect with the much-less fragmented past through a 600 year-old vessel (Glaser, 339). The massive cultural presence the Gothic cathedral took on helped this newfound Gothic appreciation along, with Victor Hugo’s 1831 novel, Notre Dame de Paris, inspiring a widespread interest in the Gothic in France (Emery, 11). By the end of the century, the cathedral had come to represent a space for collective memory, a unifying concept that “became a talisman to be appropriated as a deeply felt connection with the past” (Bernier, 63). If nothing else, we might assume that Monet chose the Gothic cathedral as a subject because it was, at that time, considered the pinnacle of French culture. It was considered the pinnacle of French culture because of its function as a holding of memories. And while we cannot say for sure that Monet was aware of any of this reasoning, it nevertheless makes the Gothic incredibly significant in his building of a time continuum, as it is a time continuum in and of itself. It is the memory-laden cathedral itself that resonates with, reverberates, and gives voice to the creation of timeless paintings.  

The idea of the Gothic as deeply important to the past, the present, and the connection between the two, is expressed perfectly in Victor Hugo’s description of the Gothic cathedral as a “stone book.” “Each face, each stone of the venerable monument is a page not only of the history of France, but also of the history of science and art,” he writes in Notre Dame de Paris (Hugo, 124). The renewed interest in the Gothic was largely spurred by his idea of the cathedral as the chronicle that wrote down and preserved an accumulation of centuries, thus integral to maintaining a sense of national identity (Emery, 19). As famed French sculptor Auguste Rodin put it, it is the “tree of all our genealogies” (Rodin, 100). While we tend to think of architecture as a nonrepresentational art, Hugo made it clear that memories were fused into each building block of the Gothic building—it envelops a persistence of historical memory, a concretization of time. We are reminded greatly of Bergsonian duration. The past is recorded as the cathedral’s walls are slowly built up, and thus the past is fully responsible for creating our experience of the present monument. It is a building made of remembrance. 

We can get even more precise with how exactly the past builds into the present within the Gothic building. For Hugo, what made Gothic, Gothic, was its ability to adapt and accumulate. “It is a transitional building,” he states (Hugo, 124). Everything from the Romanesque abbey to Saxon art was merged and amalgamated in a building like the Notre Dame. New York’s Institute of Fine Arts professor Marvin Trachtenberg encourages us not to isolate and label the different styles that might make up one building, but to recognize importance in the miraculous continuity that is able to develop. A Gothic building is a structure that physically melds together these different marks of time into a continuum, “a continuum of cultural production organized around dominant twin strands of historicist and modernist discourse, distinct yet often entangled in ever-varying relationships” (Trachtenberg, 193). It is an edifice built out of stones of the past, which bind together with stones of the present, producing a “transparency and compatibility” between various time periods, modes of history, and style-based “incompatibilities” (Trachtenberg, 193). The way people change over time, the way the world has changed over time, has materially manifested itself into each stone block. They build on top of each other, engage with one another, and integrate within the cathedral walls, forming one great stone book. 

This idea is embodied in the Rouen cathedral. When one first looks at a frontal image of the cathedral, they are struck by the way it mismatches and matches with itself. We are introduced to the idea of time immediately, as the west facade looks, almost crudely, like one newer building sandwiched beside an older tower and a newer tower, a lace-like layer of stone encrusting the surface (Figure 9). One can actually point out the yellowing of older stones and the white of the new. This mix of different layers can be explained by its complex history. Throughout its lifetime, the Cathedral has been rebuilt a total of five times: just as Monet “rebuilt” and reworked his canvases, architects find themselves revisiting previous states over and over again to build the new, layering stone on top of stone like paint. First established in the seventh century as a very small church, the church was demolished and then rebuilt, and then rebuilt again, getting larger each time. In the year 1020, the building was replaced by a Romanesque-style one, before the project for a new cathedral in the Gothic style was finally launched by the Archbishop of Rouen (Cleveland, 5). The cathedral and its monumental western facade have gone through a series of continual transformations and restorations in the centuries since, all recorded in its very stones. 

Figure 9. A view of Rouen Cathedral's west facade

By featuring the west facade in his series, Monet inevitably features its accumulations and transformations. To identify what Monet would have seen, we might compare his paintings to an image of the actual west facade from the same perspective (Figure 10), angled slightly so that the right side of the facade is closer to us. The western front is made of three portals that act as entrances into the Cathedral, with the central portal crowned by a great triangular gable—-in Monet’s paintings, all three portals are visible, illuminated by warm orange and cool blue. The facade was redone entirely three separate times, each time becoming more lavishly decorated, as marks of the Renaissance and rows of sculptures were added to the portals and niches above (Figure 11) (Lescroart, 30). The upper part of the western front is made up of Flamboyant Gothic features, with pyramid-shaped pinnacles topping the image (Figure 12) (Pierre). The rose window, created in the fourteenth century, is seen in Monet’s paintings as a sort of hollow behind the tall gable and above the central portal. The two towers on either side of the facade are the Tour Saint Romain, the northern tower built in the twelfth century, and the Tour de Beurre, the southern tower built at the end of the fifteenth century (Figure 13 and 14 respectively) (Pierre). Today, the Tour de Beurre looks so much older than its counterpart due to the fact that the Tour Saint Romain was burned down in June 1944 after bombings in WWII, and then rebuilt (Lescroart, 17). Every part of the building has at times sustained damage from fire, lightning, crusade wars, world wars, or age. One can still see statues that have been decapitated within the central portal’s tympanum, which depicts a ‘Tree of Jesse’ scene (Figure 15). The original Gothic spire was destroyed by a fire in 1514, rebuilt in the Renaissance style, then replaced with a cast iron spire after being struck by lightning (Lescroart, 94).

Figure 10. Diagram of Rouen's western front, side-by-side with Rouen Cathedral, Facade 1894

Figure 11. Sculptural figures on the west facade

Figure 12. Upper part of Rouen's facade

Figure 13. Tour de Saint-Romain, featured in many of Monet's depictions of the west facade

Figure 14. A view of the Tour de Beurre

Figure 15. Central portal's tympanum, depicting the 'Tree of Jesse'

We have gone through Rouen’s history, not because Monet would have known any of it, but to show the way the present is repeatedly made out of the past, the way the movement of history and time has recorded itself in the creation of the cathedral, and then agglomerated into one being. The blurring of the cathedral’s features in Monet’s sculpture-like renderings gives one dominant effect: containing all sorts of different periods, styles, and movements, the Rouen cathedral is shown to be one great beautiful creature, always in motion. The decadence left by changing architectural attitudes gives the effect of dripping stone, shown in the frosting-like impasto in Monet’s representations, somehow working to elevate and enhance its Gothic features. It is all an extension of the past moment. Rouen cathedral stands as the result of an accumulation of fires and wars, of popes and churchgoers, of layers and layers of building and rebuilding, of people’s changing beliefs, transforming visions, and worlds evolving, from the eleventh century to today, and tomorrow. “Each wave of time lays its alluvium on top,” Victor Hugo writes. “Each race lays down its stratum, each individual brings his stone” (Hugo, 125). This is what the cathedral is made of. It is the pinnacle of a continuous becoming. 

And so we have created a picture where Gothic architecture itself hinges on an essential relationship with time and memory; and thus, the relationship developed between Rouen cathedral and Monet’s depiction goes much deeper than we could have ever imagined. Critics of the time spoke frequently about the “mismatched” architecture of Rouen cathedral, with critic M. Deville commenting: “one feels that its architect, living at a time of transition, hesitates between a Past which he knows no longer, and a Future which as yet he does not understand” (Cleveland, 23). This is the very essence of Bergsonian duration, of a cathedral continuously made of and caught between different temporal dimensions, until it transcends, so full of time that it becomes, in a sense, timeless, enduring, eternal. In the cathedral and in the series of thirty-one canvases, it all culminates in an inheritance of the past in the experience of the present. It means we can stop tracking the tedious periodic labels we have placed onto each part of the monument, and realize what it means that they have all been recorded and melded together. We must think of time, not as instances, but as something long-lasting and flowing and real; we must think of the cathedral, not as an immobile being, but as a physical manifestation of this flow, this duration. Just like we would have viewed Monet’s series, when we imagine viewing the Rouen cathedral, we feel states of pasts and presents penetrating one another within the walls—we remember and remember and remember, swelling with the duration the cathedral has amassed, until a continuum of historic and present memory is formed, and we can’t tell through the beauty and euphoria of it all where one ends and the other begins. Funnily enough, just as Monet erased the clock in his paintings until we could no longer tell the time, the clock on the actual Rouen cathedral eventually fell off the facade and was never replaced (Figure 16) (Pissarro, 23). The distinction made from minute to minute has been quite literally eradicated, and the experience of being becomes timeless. One imagines that if they were to stand in the middle of Rouen cathedral, they would simply tilt their head back and exist, not entirely in the past or in the present, but in between and in both, in memory. “There is an accumulation of thoughts over this facade,” Rodin writes in Les Cathédrales de France. “This is a visage of human infinity” (Rodin, 187).

Figure 16. Rose Window and main gable of Rouen Cathedral, sans clock

Monet chose the eternal cathedral as his subject. But what makes it eternal is not the sense that it is immovable and old and all the things that make it contradictory to Monet’s Impressionistic style. What makes it eternal is the promise of change and ceaseless resolvability within our perceptual experience (Bernier, 61). Authors Marcel Proust and John Ruskin put it best in their famous work, La Bible d’Amiens:

“Blue in the mist, dazzling in the morning, sun-drenched and liberally gilded in the afternoon, pink and already coolly nocturnal at sunset, no matter at what hour its bells ring in the sky, as Claude Monet captured it in his sublime canvases in which the life of this thing reveals itself…a cathedral, whose life, like that of the earth in its double revolution, unwinds through the centuries while renewing itself and completing itself daily" (Ruskin & Proust, 67).

The persistence of memory in Gothic architecture was what drew France to the cathedral, and so is what perhaps drew Monet to it. Maybe this is what caused Monet to seek a persistence of memory in his own creation. Or maybe it was simply about the enveloppe all along. No matter—what has come out of all this is not the precise answer to our very first question, but the realization that the Rouen cathedral turned out to be the ideal subject, whether Monet knew it or not. It is not a series about haystacks and the instantaneous, in which the cathedral would be a juxtaposition. Rather, it is a series about the cathedral, about duration. What the cathedral does in its existence is perfectly reflected in what Monet accomplishes in his work—the magic of the series could not have existed without everything Rouen cathedral does for us. It is the perfect subject: they do the very same thing; they move together through time. They take us through time.

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