Cluny and the Facade of La Charité

The centuries from the tenth to the twelfth were the great age of the monastery. These institutions had been revived and fostered during the Carolingian period but there had always been a tendency for some to lapse into laxity in their practice of the Benedictine monastic rule.

The abbey of Saint Pierre et Saint Paul at Cluny in Burgundy led the way in developing an unmatched rigour in the performance of chanted prayer for the purpose of intercession.

The abbots of Cluny had progressively transformed the original Rule of Saint Benedict by increasing the time spent in prayer to the point where it ran almost continuously, imposing an unremitting burden on its monks.

These ritual acts were now performed in an atmosphere of extremely elaborate lavish ceremonial which was conducted in vast, imposing and richly decorated churches. To contemporaries the effect must have been dazzling and awe-inspiring.

A reputation for efficacious prayer for the deceased led to the abbey accruing enormous wealth. This was not merely financial but came also in the form of donations of land and property. Failing religious establishments under secular rule were also donated. These gifts were intended to benefit their donors in the afterlife.

In this way Cluny acquired a large and important network of dependent monasteries which followed to a greater or lesser degree its liturgical prescriptions. As a religious force in the eleventh century it was unmatched in western Christendom and was the Papacy’s most powerful ally.

On the tympanum, beneath this celestial scene is a terrestrial one. The lintel is devoted to a Nativity cycle, an expression of the historical fact of Mary as the Mother of God.

Because of her divine maternity, the Virgin was deemed to have the preeminent role in the history of human salvation.

The lintel depicts the scenes of the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Nativity and the Annunciation to the Shepherds. Scenes of the Nativity are presented to confirm the main theme above, that of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary into the presence of Christ upon which her role as intercessor on behalf of humanity rested.

The Visitation was considered as Mary’s first act of intercession, prefiguring her role in the scene above.

According to Luke’s Gospel, Mary pregnant with Jesus, visits her cousin Elisabeth herself pregnant with the future John the Baptist. By coming into contact with the unborn Jesus the unborn John is himself absolved of Sin.

 

The role of Mary was paralleled by another feminine figure, Ecclesia, the Church on Earth. In the context of the sculpture at La Charité this would represent the church of the Cluniac order, the most perfect realisation of Ecclesia. The “Tympanum of the Virgin” presents the closest visual representation of the Cluniac monastic ideal which has come down to us.

Today the church of La Charité retains two out of an initial five monumental portal relief sculptures. The other remaining portal is the Tympanum of the Transfiguration whose lintel also extols the role of the Virgin in its lintel depicting the Adoration of the Magi and the Presentation in the Temple.

This would suggest that the same theme continued across the whole of the five portals of the façade of the priory church dedicated to the Virgin. The building was modelled after the great church at Cluny, then the largest in Christendom. The western facade of La Charité was perhaps the most ambitious sculptural programme of its day and would have culminated in a central portal relief depicting the Second Coming.