Betsy’s Post 06-16-2011
Phooey, the pictures are too dark. There are writhing sinners on the left, a skull under the bust on the right. The gold chalices in the original picture are wonderful.
We went to Albi this morning. The driveway here was to be paved and indeed they were working on it when we left. There is a beautiful truck that mixes aspalt and gravel on site, JP says. Very efficient. There was also to be a service in the church today. Perhaps a funeral? Christine says everyone around here is old; there is never a wedding or baptism. Anyway, we drove to Albi and after the requisite arguing back and forth, found a place to park, walked through the old streets, sensibly made into pedestrian use only, past upscale shops to the Plaza around the Cathedrale Ste-Cecile, patron saint of music, the very plaza I drove through in terror last week. The cathedral is the biggest brick cathedral in Europe. No, de monde! Enormous. Red. The guidebook says it was built (1282-1382) “..not just to impress but overawe the faithful.” One façade seems to be stone; I think it is the oldest part. The plaza was brick , the cathedral was brick. Beaucoup de Brick. We got maps at the tourisme office then walked up brick walkways to a view down on a very manicured garden, over a wall and out to the Tarn, green and sweetly flowing like all the French rivers that we’ve seen. The pictures never do justice. Then we came back and went into the cathedral. It is dark, immense and every inch is brick covered with a thin layer of plaster. And every inch. EVERY INCH! of that surface is painted. The ceiling, all those gothic curved pie shapes, way way up there, is a heavenly blue and gold like fine brocade all 325 feet of it. The walls are covered with pictures of saints, battles, madonnas, etc. There are also very large areas of trompe l’oeil columns and geometric designs. The front wall – more than 100 feet high, I would guess, has the soaring pipes of an organ up top. ( I’d love to hear that.) Then it has a three level painting of Judgment Day. The saints with halos are on the top sitting quietly and primly in order, the next row down are just virtuous people, many of them clerics. They might be portraits, they seem so specific. They too are orderly as eggs in a carton. Then you get to naked people with hands in prayer walking into their graves at ground level. Some of them get raised up but some crash down through to HELL and things get interesting. If you sit in the pews, you have to crane your neck up to see the heavenly layers, but hell is just a little above eye level. Everything is squirming around like worms in a bucket. There are cauldrons of boiling sinners being stirred by Bosch like monsters, nasty things are happening to buxom ladies, people are being turned on a wheel over the infernal flames. Someone has a funnel and is pouring something into one man’s throat. (JP thinks that is he paying for all the wine he has drunk.) There are snakes and dragons and creepy crawly beaked things. Oy It is terrific. Clearly it was the fun stuff to paint and we bought postcards of all of it. In a newly refurbished back room there was a museum with lots of reliquaries. Richly presented arm and jaw bones. I think I saw two skulls of Saint Cecilia, one big,(shown),one little. Lousy French makes for startling history.
There is also a Toulouse Lautrec museum here but we decided that could be another day. We left Albi and drove south on the tenuous possibility that there was an art store in “ Puygouzon on the road to Castres”. That was what we were told in the hardware store here by the British lady who interrupted my painful attempts to ask about paint. “Perhaps I could help?” You bet your boots! She had heard there was a store somewhere in that area. We drove out of Albi, and things looked less and less likely. Why would there be an art shop out here in the fields? Same reason as back home: Urban sprawl. We found a feeder road that was essentially an industrial park. There were a lot of big new places to buy brick, kitchens, what all, and Kalidescope, a pad on grade shed full of craft supplies. Michaels, in other words. They had everything; good oil paints, paper, brushes, scrapbooking papers, mosaic supplies, wool, even some large slabs of clay and some German casting plaster. Another time I could skip bringing my own supplies. “Another time”, what sweet words. We came back, stopping at a Corsican restaurant just outside of Cordes where JP had spectacular pate, and I had Truite Aveyron. Finally, a French cream sauce. It was wonderful even on lettuce. I resisted licking my plate though it crossed my mind. The French close shop from 1-3 or 2-4. It isn’t so you can take a long time to eat; it’s so you can eat wonderful food and take a nice nap. Which we did. JP has now gone out to the Chateau B***** to do drawings for the next painting.
Au Revoir mes amis!
No comments:
Post a Comment