Urban Beekeeping, or, Honey Made of Clay

As our last two posts featured beehives, I thought I'd keep the ball rolling with a pair of photos I took years ago with the idea of doing a post on unusual or esoteric symbols found throughout Toulouse, but I never got around to using them.  

So, without further ado, this is a beehive found on a downtown facade about ten feet up and squarely between two first-floor windows.  I've never found out why it's there, or if it was made at the instigation of the neighborhood, an individual, or some sort of guild or fraternity.  All I know is that it's made of terra-cotta, a local specialty, and that it's located on the left side of the Rue. St. Rome when facing Place Capitole, about halfway between Places Capitole and Esquirol.  

Anyone know why this beehive is here?  

For some fine example of sculpture groups in terra-cotta, one can poke around the nearby Musée des Augustines.  In using terra-cotta, the artists of Toulouse were simply using a common and relatively cheap material at hand.  The local tradition stems from the liberal use of brick in local construction, a feature so dominant in Toulouse and neighboring towns such as (Montauban), that Toulouse has been nicknamed "la Ville Rose" ("the Pink City") because of the effect of the sun brightening the reddish bricks (aka "forains") of its buildings.

Addenda: St. Jean-Baptiste and Iron flowers.

1. RE: The Vandals of Toulouse

Last week I was at the Église St. Jean-Baptiste in Ondes.  This week it was the 14th-century Église St. Jean-Baptiste in Le Burgaud.  For a guy with no head, John the Baptist gets around.

I happened to be sipping a Trappist ale and looking at the church yesterday, the form of the clock-tower and it's roof coming together in my mind as an obelisk.

I turned to my friend P---- and mentioned the common LoS speculation that church architecture featuring two bell-towers flanking the facade has its roots nourished in the black soil of the Nile Valley.

For an idea of what the Egyptian precedent looked like, check out the image these model makers have, an Egyptian temple entrance on a page for a model called, oddly enough, Temple Entrance (made from mold #98, or so we're informed in sentence one).

The description of the model states, almost in a severe tone it seems to me:

"You will need to cast mold #98 eight times to build the entrance shown here."

Which sounds more like witchcraft ritual than model building.

This picture of the obelisks at Luxor isn't actually the best image with which to make my case, as only one obelisk is pictured.  But the base is still there and we can see where it was located.

This was in my mind as I walked to the church and reflected on what I knew about the history of the village.  Not much.  The Knights Templar had a commandery here and there was a leper colony of sorts, but that's about it.  Even that info was flawed; turns out it was the Hospitallers and I still have no idea where they penned up the lepers.

The obelisk of the bell-tower, alas, was not the ferpect mefathor, as there was only one, The tower is primarily a functional feature of the structure; to hold the clock, of course, but also to make space for the stairs.

If you're not too familiar with the architecture of the Midi, I'm sure that even from afar the thin wall rising up from the facade tickled yer elmo.  This is a clocher-mur ["bell-wall"], or bell gable.

The odd thing thing is that at either side of the base of the pointy isosceles triangle that forms a sort of pediment of the clocher-mur, there are two clear-as-day make-no-mistake-about-it obelisks.  Stumpy, but clearly defined.  A search of Google images France for "mur-clocher Toulousain" has a few other examples where these horn-like obelisks pop up.

French Wickerpodiologe has a section dedicated to the bell gables of the Midi.  No less a personage than Eugène Viollet-le-Duc (1814-1879), popular architect and General Inspector of Diocesan Buildings--churches in other words--noted the use of brick in their construction in his influential architectural dictionary.  Wicketsnoodle suggests that the use of brick accounts for the exceptional development of the bell gable in the Midi.  Makes sense.  Brick is lighter, cheaper, easier to work with, faster and more flexible than working with cut stone. 

The commander of the Hospitallers here lived in a house attached to the church, itself  a part of the town's ramparts.  This accounts for the presence of arrow slits in its walls.  It was the Hospitallers, in fact, who ordered the church built.  I assume their presence here was due to Le Burgaud being a stop on the road to Santiago de Compostela, but the surrounding forest, the Aubets spring and high places were sacred places before their Christianization.

The sheer face of the wall, the small rose window, the massive brick piers that buttress the facade do give the church a somewhat fortified appearance, but the ramparts and city walls that once encircled the village are long gone, dismantled in more peaceful times to be cannibalized for the stone and bricks

The church is undergoing renovations, but one can still see the traces of a graffito that had been tagged on the church:  the anarchist symbol and the phrase "Un pays sans dieu."  A country without God.

On a side note, this Hospitaller church was built to replace a chapel dedicated to Saint Leonard of Noblac, a patron of prisoners.  He was invoked to secure freedom and even during his lifetime, attracted a lot of ex-cons to his abbey, many of whom stayed to work the land he provided for them.  Leonard was strongly associated with the road to Compostela, which probably accounts for the presence of a chapel here.  I wonder if his association with Compostela was bound up with is role as patron of prisoners; presumably criminals would be tempted to go to Compostela for the plenary indulgence offered to those who made it.  Wiping the slate clean of sin would have special appeal for them.

Leonard often was also invoked for assistance in childbirth; this and a special role for prisoners is interesting for those interested in the cult of the Virgin.  Despite having no record of any veneration or church dedications to Leonard since his death in the 6th century, his cult took off in the 11th, just as the cult of the Virgin was in full flower after the influence of St. Bernard.  Obviously, people had the same worries everywhere and the Virgin couldn't handle the caseload alone.  We've seen male saints take on attributes of the Virgin before (e.g. St. Fris).  The cults of many saints exploded at this time, globalized as it were, beyond being obscure local cults (e.g. St. Fris or Stes. Liberata and Quiteria), due to the passage of so many people through the south of France on the way to Compostela.  Of course, the influence of the Troubadours as transmitters and relaters of popular culture cannot be overestimated.

Speaking of culture, in the late-sixties a café was created in Le Burgaud that still exists today, a small beacon of culture in the cornfields featuring theater and music, often very avant-garde stuff which would be not so common even in Paris, let alone a one-Solex town in a poor farming area.  The original idea was to take young people in difficulty, often ex-cons, who would come to the healthier environment of the country and work and live at the café, assisting and performing in its productions.  Today it's more of a cultural association, but on some nights groups of young people from the inner city will be working in the café.  A fascinating continuity with Saint Leonard's project and the musical diffusion of his legend--the café has been a stop for numerous poor musicians, who play in exchange for a meal, a carafe of wine, a place to crash and gas money for the next tavern or music hall.  It reminds me of when I learned Toulouse had a reputation as a tolerant and cosmopolitan city, known for its large number of students and vagabonds, since the early middle ages.  This, too, is still true today.

For more about Le Burgaud, see:  Notre Dame des Aubets.

2. RE:  Aucamville Project 11: Mary on the Cross (redux)

Basically, this is just another example of a cemetery marker in wrought-iron, also typical of the Midi, with a floral motif.  We would suppose this plant metaphor refers to the death and resurrection of Christ, reborn like the plant world in Spring.  Jesus as vegetal god!

The details on some of these crosses show that the cross isn't being overrun by flora, but is itself a tree, possibility the Tree of Life....

The French often have a family tomb with a plaque for each member therein interred.  The grieving, instead of laying a new stone after each death, merely add the plaque and then leave small votive plaques, porcelain flowers, religious icons:  "Dearest Mother and Wife", "Our beloved Uncle", etc.  Thus the cemetery is a cluttered place.  France being France, the religious usually honor Toussaint by going to a special mass.  Everybody goes to the cemetery to lay flowers, but only chrysanthemums.  More restrained than Todos Santos, or Dia de los Muertos, and without the macabre joys of Halloween aka All Hallows Even.

OK, sorry for the beleaguered tone of this post; it's my second go-round after the fist version, longer than this, got sucked away into a Blogger bug black hole and I ended up working on this version until long after the midnight oil burned itself out.  Anyway, there are scores of bell gables in the region, I'll try to snap photos of the surrounding villages, almost all of which have a parish church like that at Le Burgaud.  I'll leave you with a photo of Aucamville's church for a comparison.

Photo by Didier Descouens: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aucamville_%28Tarn-et-Garonne%29_Eglise.jpg

The Vandals of Toulouse

I started our last post about one week ago and only published it yesterday.  I hadn't intended to write so much about bricks but the details seemed to become relevant as I went along.  This is somewhat fortuitous because on Saturday I came across a church that grabbed my eye and, as it turns out, was designed by an architect who also created the first industrialized brickworks in Toulouse.

The Église St. Jean-Baptiste d'Ondes is the parish church of Ondes, the next village after our neighboring village of Grenade-sur-Garonne.  It's a small place but is home to a few interesting buildings, one of which is a "haunted mansion" style house that sustained severe fire damage a few years back.

What struck me about the church were two things, the Tetragrammaton in the pediment, a triangle in glory, and the obelisks flanking the facade.

We have traced the use of free-standing architectural elements to delineate the entrance to sacred space back to the Egyptian use of two obelisks at the front of their temples.  This was picked up by the Phoenicians, who used two pillars instead of obelisks.  According to legend, it was Hiram Abiff, Phoenician architect, who used them in his design for Solomon's Temple.  The tale of Hiram and his murder by three unworthy laborers is an important story in Masonic lore.  A Masonic Lodge is ostensibly based on descriptions of Solomon's temple and thus, has an entrance clearly demarcated by two pillars called Jachin and Boaz after their Biblical ancestors.  But we've talked about all this at great length before. (See labels: obelisk and/or pillars).

I was tooling about with a friend when we ran across the church; i's design, atypical of the region, caused us to speculate about the date.   The friend suggested 19th century and I agreed, placing it at about 1830 or even a bit earlier, maybe 1810.  I also wondered if I was mistaken in seeing obelisks these church towers.  This close-up show that the edges of the obelisk are bevelled somewhat, so in a sense they are octagonal.  What struck me was the decorative element at the corner, a scallop or flower-like ornament which almost certainly has a name; but my days of intensively memorizing the architectural orders and their elements have been over for more than 20 years and besides, I don't think we ever got around to this one.

Does anyone have any idea what this element is called?

As luck would have it I saw some movement in the library across the street.  It turns out a ladies' knitting circle was just wrapping up but the most outgoing of the ladies talked to me a bit.  Apparently the church is rarely opened and she didn't know when it was built.  But this was a library, and she had a book in hand, toot sweet.

She leafed through the fat, self-published tome and voila, there was a lot of information about the church.  It was designed by one August Virebent (1792-1857) and work began in 1839.  Kudos for me!  This is pretty much exactly contemporaneous with the peak of the career of Urban Vitry (1802-1863).  Vitry, who we've discussed on LoS in several posts, was city architect of Toulouse from 1830 to 1843.  He put more typical obelisks at the entrance to his Terre Cabade cemetery (approved 1832, opened 1840) and designed a massive obelisk to commemorate the Battle of Toulouse (1814), constructed between 1835 and 1839.

This book also mentioned that one of the Virebents had married a Vitry; Wikipedia reveals that August Virebent's father Jean-Pascal (1746-1831), was not only Vitry's predecessor as city architect (from 1782 to 1830) but also his uncle.  August Virebent and Urban Vitry were cousins.

Both were men of their times, using classical elements liberally in their work.  Virebent was known especially for his use of caryatids and other sculptural motifs on his facades.  The "obelisks" on St. Jean-Baptiste church remind me of Vitry's tomb, the only photo of which I have is unfortunately too cropped to truly grok the similarities.  But the following photo of the Vitry-Bezat (I'm not entirely certain of the second name) family mausoleum is instructive.

You'll notice that the corner elements on the mausoleum are almost identical to those on the church.  So we can see that Virebent's flourish was part of the standard vocabulary of the time--for Vitry and Virebent at least.  Though this isn't "proof" of anything, it does support my reading that these towers on the Église St. Jean-Baptiste are (or refer to) obelisks.

Photo by flikr user christine.petitjean: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tisstit/5182656924/

I was pleased to learn that Virebent and Vitry were family and shared an aesthetic, but in light of my last post about the bricks used in local architecture, it's a happy coincidence the the younger Virebent was also known for being a briquetier, or brick manufacturer.  He developed and registered a patent for the ingredients and process of manufacturing brick; so, Virebent contributed to the Toulousain aesthetic at the most fundamental level.  His process made it easier to create bricks of varying dimensions that were both easier to cut and allowed for mortar to set better.  He also invented a machine that produced a finer, more solid and compact clay to produce a red or white brick-making material that made it easier to create decorative elements and reliefs based on brick.  Virebent is credited with being the first to industrialize the production of both humble bricks and decorative elements based on brick.  Form followed invention and today we see a multitude of forms in brick that had previously required the use of the slower and more expensive  technique of cutting stone.

Virebent's brick works seems to have continued to operate into the 1960's and the machines and processes used in the terra cotta industry today aren't much different from those he developed.

The first mention of a church at Ondes dates to 1538; it was dedicated to Notre Dame de l’Annonciation.  In 1613, the Archbishop of Toulouse judged that it was too small and authorized a replacement.  By the 1830's the church was in such a state of disrepair that instead of renovating it, a new construction was ordered.  The materials were found locally and the ornaments all came from Virebent's brickworks.  All the labor was performed by locals, for free, except for the artisans such as masons and carpenters.  The church was largely finished by 1848, but work on the decoration continued until 1866, by which time Virebent and Vitry were dead.

As for the title of this post, Vitry and the elder Virebent are largely responsible for the look of downtown Toulouse as it appears today, with two large thoroughfares forming a cross at its center.  It was rational and practical but the work, along with other urbanization projects, indiscriminately destroyed many of the cloisters and medieval streets that until then had characterized the center of town.  This earned Toulouse the title "capital of vandalism".

One man's "development" is another man's destruction, something that holds true today.  Toulouse is being transformed at a rate unseen since the days Vitry and Virebent were razing a good chunk of downtown Toulouse, for better or for worse, and a lot of these new projects are still using those red and white bricks.  Vitry and Virebent (the elder) are pretty much synonymous with the Toulouse style, sober and retrained with a strong neo-classical flavor and occasional Egyptian touches.  There is no indication, however, that they were Freemasons, so we can chalk this up to the wider interest in Egypt which spurred the ongoing revival that both preceded and followed their careers.