When someone occasionally tells you that if you’ve seen one great cathedral you’ve seen them all, you can tell them that sometimes if you’ve seen one cathedral you haven’t really seen all of it. Case in point: Rouen.
Its facade is as ornate as most Gothic churches’ are, but the decoration seems focused more on intricate stonework and tracery than on sculpture, making its appearance seem to shift as you move and the light changes.
Obviously, we’re not the first to note what a chameleon Rouen’s cathedral can be; Claude Monet spent a good part of 1892 and 1893 painting the main facade in different light and different times of day, showing many of its aspects. He made over 30 paintings, working mainly from a second-floor window across the street.
After working on them more in his studio, he showed the 20 he thought best in 1895; eight were sold during the first exhibition. I’ve seen numbers of them over the years in different museums, sometimes several of them re-united for an exhibition. In large part, it’s what drew us to Rouen for a day.
Here, you get just a hint of what lies ahead, approaching the Cathedral from the Rue du Gros Horloge, with the famous clock at your back. And then, suddenly, you’re facing the full facade.
Even without the drastic changes of light and time of Monet’s work, the differences stand out in photos as you move position and angle.
The changes in angle are especially important because a lot of the church’s drama takes place not on the facade, but just in front of it, where the almost lace-lake quality of stone openwork acts as a screen to expose or hide what lies behind it.
But the openwork is not all there is to see. There are sections of mosaic silhouettes that seem almost like paper cut-outs. Intricately-carved figures that seem to interrupt not pillars but curtains. And, at higher levels, wedding-cake features.
At the base, the illusion of perfection is broken by the strong but primitive carvings seen here, almost as if they were a reminder that all things refined and artful rest on basic skills and earlier work.
Inside, ornate detail fades in comparison to the tall, narrow shape, with two galleries above the ground floor.
And an elaborate and graceful ‘stairway to heaven’ which actually, of course, ends on the upper gallery.
A line of saints awaits…
More glass, and a passageway in one of the older sections of the building.
Outdoors, we can see a square that was once a cloister garden, and a bell tower.
Attached to one corner of the building, these houses may once have been occupied by church officials.
Although the cathedral faces a spacious plaza, its other approaches show how densely medieval towns built around their churches, sometimes even right to their walls.
