Autun Cathedral: A Romanesque Pilgrimage Church in France
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.6
- Popularity
- Medium
- Country
- France
- Primary era
- Medieval
- Eras represented
- Medieval, Modern
- Civilizations
- Duchy of Burgundy, French
- Site type
- Religious
- Remains
- Cathedral
On this page14 sections
History
Autun Cathedral, also known as the Cathedral of Saint Lazarus, is a Roman Catholic cathedral in Autun, France, built as a Romanesque pilgrimage church in the twelfth century. It was founded to house relics believed to belong to Lazarus of Bethany, the figure in the Gospel of John whom Christ raises from the dead, although the relics were actually those of Lazarus of Aix, a different Christian saint. The cathedral became the seat of the Diocese of Autun and was designed to serve pilgrims travelling toward Santiago de Compostela.
Earlier Cathedral and the New Pilgrimage Church
Autun already had a cathedral from the fifth century onward. This earlier church was later dedicated to Saint Nazaire, and its relics of Saints Nazarius and Celsus attracted pilgrims. A surviving chapel connected with it dates from the fourteenth century. The new cathedral dedicated to Saint Lazarus was built to the north of the earlier building as pilgrimage traffic increased.
Bishop Étienne de Baugé initiated construction around 1120. The design followed the Cluniac tradition, a reform movement associated with the Abbey of Cluny and its network of affiliated monasteries, and took the church at Paray-le-Monial as its principal model. The building was consecrated in 1132 and was substantially complete by 1146. The relics were transferred from Saint Nazaire in 1146 or 1147, while the main portico was completed several years later, probably near the end of the twelfth century.
For a period, the two cathedrals functioned together. Saint Lazarus served as the summer cathedral from Easter to All Saints’ Day, while Saint Nazaire served as the winter cathedral. Saint Lazarus became Autun’s sole cathedral in 1195, and the earlier cathedral was eventually demolished. Since the twelfth century, the church has remained under the invocation and patronage of Lazarus resurrected by Christ, despite preserving relics associated with Lazarus of Aix. Pope Pius VII confirmed this dedication in 1801 through the bull Qui Christi Domini.
Medieval Sculpture and Later Alterations
The cathedral’s building and sculpture were conceived as a religious teaching program. Its imagery presented Christian ethics and the consequences of salvation and sin to pilgrims, including people unable to read. The sculptor Gislebertus, a twelfth-century Romanesque artist associated with Burgundy, is linked to the great portal and to more than sixty narrative capitals inside the church.
A Romanesque bell tower was later destroyed by lightning. Between 1462 and 1469, Bishop Jean Rolin commissioned a replacement, including the Gothic spire above the crossing. In 1476, Cardinal Jean Rolin donated the large bell Marthe. The fifteenth-century choir was rebuilt in the Gothic style, while side chapels and other elements were added or altered over later centuries.
In 1766, the cathedral chapter attempted to modernize the interior in a Baroque manner. The side portal and its tympanum were destroyed, with their stones reused in neighboring houses. The jubé, a screen separating the choir from the nave, and the monumental Tomb of Saint Lazarus were dismantled. The medieval choir, including its twelfth-century mosaic, was removed and replaced with new paving.
The Last Judgment tympanum was covered with plaster in the same year because the canons considered it unattractive. This protected much of the sculpture from the vandalism directed at church portals during the French Revolution. The work was rediscovered in 1837 and restored. Christ’s detached head was kept at the Rolin Museum before Canon Denis Grivot recovered it and returned it to the tympanum in 1948.
Protection, Restoration, and Musical Heritage
Prosper Mérimée’s work helped place the cathedral on France’s first list of historic monuments in 1840. Since 1973, the cathedral and parts of Autun’s Upper and Middle Towns have formed part of a protected sector covering 74 hectares.
The tympanum underwent a major conservation treatment from June to October 2009. Specialists used micro-laser cleaning, micro-abrasion, and stone-sensitive solvents. Seven fragments from the Rolin Museum were returned to the sculpture, including a lock of Christ’s hair, and the head was slightly repositioned. The restored tympanum was inaugurated on 13 November 2009. In 2011, older choir furnishings were replaced by a new altar, ambo, and cathedra designed by the artist Goudji for the liturgical space.
The principal organ began as Louis Callinet’s 1820 instrument. Joseph Merklin replaced it in 1876 while retaining some earlier elements. It was overhauled in 1893, electrified in 1921, altered in 1943, overhauled again in 1952, and restored by Jean Deloye and Jean-Pierre Swiderski in 1983. The great organ has three manuals and pedal, fifty-seven stops, pneumatic action, and a Barker machine for the great organ; it is currently silent while awaiting major restoration. A smaller organ by Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, identified as his opus 190, has two manuals and pedal, eleven stops, and mechanical action.
Remains
Autun Cathedral follows a Latin-cross plan with a seven-bay nave, two aisles, a plain transept, and a three-stage choir ending in a semicircle. A two-bay narthex, or entrance hall, with two towers stands before the nave and screens the main portal. The transept projects to the width of two nave bays. The building remains predominantly Romanesque, although the later choir, spire, side chapels, and rebuilt western towers show Gothic or later interventions.
Structure and Interior
The nave elevation has three levels: a grand arcade, a triforium, which is an upper gallery or arcade above the main arcade, and a clerestory, the highest windowed level of the nave. Cornices mark each level. Pointed arches made this tall arrangement possible, and transverse ribs divide the bays at the vault. The central and lateral vessels have pointed barrel vaults. Flying buttresses, added in the thirteenth century, strengthened the structure after the original vaulting proved unstable.
The west towers were rebuilt in the nineteenth century in a Romanesque manner inspired by Paray-le-Monial. The Gothic spire rises above the crossing, and the roofs are covered with multicolored glazed tiles arranged in geometric patterns. The fifteenth-century Gothic choir and later side chapels form part of the complex’s layered appearance.
Portal Sculpture
Last Judgment Tympanum
The main portal contains the cathedral’s most extensive sculptural feature, the Last Judgment tympanum. A tympanum is the sculpted field above a doorway. The work is attributed to Gislebertus and bears the inscription Gyslebertus hoc fecit, although the inscription has also been interpreted as naming a patron rather than the sculptor. Double lintels, horizontal elements directly below the tympanum, and a central supporting column carry the large composition.
Christ appears at the center inside a mandorla, the almond-shaped enclosure used around sacred figures. Angels surround him. Saint Peter receives the righteous into Paradise, the Virgin Mary intercedes above, and the archangel Michael weighs a soul. Demons try to influence the weighing, but the soul is favorably received. This arrangement has been read as an unusually hopeful vision of the Last Judgment.
The wider scene includes the heavenly Jerusalem, apostles and prophets, the damned, angels sounding the hour of judgment, demons drawing the condemned toward Hell, and resurrected figures emerging from their tombs. The lintel includes Adam and Eve, an angel separating the saved from the damned, an angel rescuing three children, and a woman whose breasts are bitten by serpents as an image of Lust. Pilgrims appear among the figures carrying a scallop shell and a cross.
An inscription beneath the tympanum presents the scene as a warning to people bound by earthly error. Two archivolts, decorated arches surrounding an opening, frame the sculpture. The inner archivolt has foliage, while the outer one contains about thirty circular medallions. These alternate the signs of the zodiac with seasonal and monthly labors, including heating beside a fire, pouring water, pruning vines or a fruit tree, feeding livestock, preparing a horse and equipment, harvesting fruit and hay, threshing wheat, weighing, trampling grapes, gathering acorns for pigs, collecting deadwood, and slaughtering pigs. Floral motifs, a possible solar disk, and figures contrasting foresight with improvidence and wisdom with folly complete the cycle. A seated figure at the summer solstice may represent the year, although that interpretation remains uncertain.
Portal Supports and Destroyed North Portal
The nineteenth-century trumeau, the central vertical support dividing a doorway, depicts Saint Lazarus with his sisters Mary and Martha. The north portal once carried the high-relief Temptation of Eve, probably made during the 1130s alongside the Last Judgment and the narrative capitals. Eve reclines beside the Tree of Knowledge and reaches behind her for the apple while the devil’s clawed hand bends a branch toward her. The relief was rediscovered in the nineteenth century by the architect Jean Roidot-Houdaille and transferred to the Rolin Museum in 1935.
Other surviving fragments from the destroyed portal include an Assumption of the Virgin and a sculpture of a monk. The Rolin Museum also preserves remains of the Tomb of Saint Lazarus and several cathedral capitals. A twelfth-century head of Saint Peter from the tomb is held by the Louvre, while a Virgin and Child formerly in the cathedral is displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Romanesque Capitals
Nave Capitals
The nave columns carry historiated Romanesque capitals, carved with narrative scenes, many of them attributed to Gislebertus. Their subjects include music, Saint Vincent protected by two angels, the Fall of Simon Magus, Noah’s Ark, Christ appearing to Mary Magdalene, the Annunciation, the Flight into Egypt, the Adoration of the Magi, Cain and Abel, Saint Peter, Samson, Habakkuk, Christ and the Apostles, and contrasts between virtues and vices.
The compositions use the curling tendrils of Corinthian capitals as frames for their stories. Charity overcoming Greed and Patience overcoming Wrath present moral virtues against demonic embodiments of vice. In the capital of the Three Magi, an angel wakes the sleeping Magi and points toward the star. The Flight into Egypt shows Mary presenting the child while seated on a pony in a posture resembling an enthroned Madonna and Child. The Suicide of Judas depicts Judas hanging while demons pull him upward; a Corinthian tendril forms the means of hanging, and the demons’ fiery hair evokes Hell.
Chapter-House Capitals
The near-collapse of the central tower in the nineteenth century led to the replacement of the capitals beneath it with replicas. Many originals were removed to the former library, now the chapter house, where about thirty capitals are preserved. Most are attributed to Gislebertus and were extracted during Eugène Viollet-le-Duc’s renovation of the tower supports.
The chapter-house collection includes the questioning and death of Cain, the Adoration and Sleep of the Magi, the Flight into Egypt, the Hanging of Judas, the Presentation of a church, and extraordinary creatures. One capital shows Judas standing on the demon of Greed, represented by a large purse, while extending a chalice toward a figure representing the Synagogue.
Stained Glass, Monuments, and Paintings
The choir’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century stained glass includes a series made in 1868 by the Lusson workshop of Paris. The windows depict episodes from the life of Saint Leger, the seventh-century bishop and martyr of Autun traditionally dated to about 616–678. Scenes show his episcopal consecration, his presentation to King Childeric II, his arrest by soldiers of Ebroin, and his decapitation.
Near the chapter-house entrance stand funerary statues of Pierre Jeannin and Anne Gueniot, associated with saving many lives during the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre. Their tomb, belonging to the former president of the Parliament of Burgundy and his wife, was destroyed during the French Revolution, and the statues were returned to the cathedral in 1807.
The sixteenth-century Noli me tangere shows Mary Magdalene and Christ on opposite sides of a tree bearing the patrons’ arms. A partly broken scroll carries Christ’s words, “Noli me tangere,” meaning “Do not touch me.” The cathedral also contains Dominique Ingres’s large Martyrdom of Saint Symphorian, dated 1834 and placed at the entrance to the sacristy, as well as François-Joseph Heim’s Resurrection of Lazarus, a Pieta attributed to Guercino, and a Dead Christ by Daniel Seyter. Heim’s painting represents Lazarus of the Gospel rather than Lazarus of Aix, the saint honored by the cathedral.
Bell and Organs
Marthe, the large bell donated by Cardinal Jean Rolin in 1476, weighs 3,360 kilograms and has a diameter of 1.69 meters. It rings with three other bells cast in 1854. The cathedral’s musical furnishings also include the large Merklin organ, which incorporates elements from Callinet’s earlier instrument, and the smaller Cavaillé-Coll organ with its eleven stops distributed across two manuals and pedal.
