The Road Goes Ever On

Tuesday, October 24, 2017

Narbonne Cathedral

Narbonne Cathedral is conveniently located right next to the former bishoprical palace and is advertised as having the third highest vaulting of all Medieval cathedrals, behind only Beauvais and Amiens. Having seen these two, we had to go see #3. Like Beauvais, we think Narbonne should have an asterisk by its claim.

Another hemmed-in cathedral, but, as we'll see, actually there
is not that much to hem in

"Oh no, not another cathedral!"

And there it is, right up from the chancel, 13 or 14 flamboyant
stories high

Altar, etc.

Nice choir; but wait! What are all those chairs doing in the
middle of the choir?

And why is there a wall at the back of the
choir with an organ on it? Ans: at Narbonne,
despite the great height, they never got around
to building the transepts or nave; at Beavais
they had at least one transept, so maybe
Narbonne should have 2 asterisks

The cathedral being rather small, we are now
in the Treasury, looking at familiar scenes from
a respectably old Flemish tapisserie; according
to this rendition, they got kicked out not for
eating the forbidden fruit but for having their hands
in their crotches continually

Thus

C. 1350

Back in the cathedral, noting there is no triforium
and it is not glazed

The St. Mary of Bethlehem chapel has some very old and
interesting polychrome carving

Traditionally, Judgment scenes have Hell on God/Jesus/Mary's
left (the viewer's right); here, they seem to occupy the whole
under-piece

"Delivery for Mr. Satan!"

"Right, put them over there by the vat of boiling oil"

I would have made a great gargoyle

Narbonne Archaeological Museum

The archaeological museum occupies a couple floors in one section of the palais of archives. To our pleasant surprise, it included much more than the Roman bits we expected. Everything was from local sites.

The Empire at Hadrian's death, Hadrian being one of the Five
Good Emperors and therefore a personal favorite; also the
maximum extent of the Empire; click to enlarge and see how
current place names evolved from Roman ones

Some nice reconstructed mosaics

Among the best parts, I thought, were displays on Roman
construction methods...here a predecessor to dry wall

Roofing

The hard work of reconstructing paintings from
the thousands of bits uncovered

Among the better ones

Most are shards or less

The best: Victory and Genius, and upper right, a bust of Apollo

Landscape, sort of

Among the Greek pieces found in Narbonne: preparing to do
a triple back-flip/cannonball off the 40m tower...

Thousands of years before the discovery of Melmac

Oil lamps

Nice glass

And quicker than you can say "Ad Majorem
Gloriam Dei" we are in the Medieval section

You can tell because of their great sense of humor

And mastery of biology

And now, shazam!, we are in the paleolithic section with
some seriously nice cave and bone carvings

Trepanation, a cultural universal; not covered by Medicare,
however

I want one of these

Next slide, please

And back into the Medieval/Roman era

And ending with a seriously nice, geometrically interesting floor
mosaic

Narbonne Scenes

The road took us October 10th to Narbonne, a city we had not visited before. Apart from the famous name, a couple of things intrigued and attracted us: 1) the historical museum has (bits of) Roman paintings said to be of high quality and 2) the cathedral is the third highest of all Gothic cathedrals, behind only Beauvais and Amiens. Both claims are somewhat exaggerated, but we found Narbonne to be a beautiful and welcoming place, and we stayed two days.

Just outside the old city, just before the aire-de-camping-cars;
a billboard, no less, regular size; where else in the world would
you see something like this? where else in the world do they
require philosophy 101 for high school graduation? where else
does the entire nation wait to debate the annual high school
philosophy examination questions? where else are there
philosophy magazines at the Presses?

Narbonne's aire; a bit pricey, but they provide electricity and
free bus transportation all around town; and there is a most
wonderful shopping area nearby and a Carrefour that nearly
changed our long-standing travel plans