I don’t consider myself particularly emotional, but I remember clearly several occasions in my life when the tears have flowed. During my childhood I cried from physical pain: my mother accidentally shut the car door on my fingers when I was eight – ouch! As a young adult, the emotional pain of relationship break-up was so intense that I wept copiously on more than one occasion. Injustice has always affected me strongly: the tear ducts opened when, aged 28, I saw a wonderful Italian film, The Tree of Wooden Clogs, in which a poor family is unfairly treated by a landlord after the father cut down a tree to make his son a pair of clogs so he could go to school. Latterly, moments of artistic beauty, especially in music, induce wet cheeks: I cannot keep a dry eye when the Count begs the Countess for forgiveness at the end of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, or Wotan lays his daughter on a rock surrounded by a ring of fire at the end of Die Walküre. Recently I walked around the tribune in the pilgrimage church at Conques wiping away streams of tears with a tissue.
This was my third visit to Conques; it is my favourite Romanesque building. The abbey church is beautifully situated on the rugged slope of a remote valley in the Rouergue, surrounded by a pretty village. The church is named Sainte Foi (St Faith) after a child-martyr in the area, whose relics ended up here toward the end of the first millennium. The village of Conques lies on one of the medieval pilgrimage roads to Compostella in Spain. Sainte Foi is therefore a “pilgrimage church”, the term defining a group of churches which share an architectural style, the finest of the family being the church in Santiago de Compostella, the goal of the pilgrimage. Its construction began about 1050 and it took about 80 years.
The pilgrimage churches were designed to cater for large throngs of pilgrims: they are built on a generous scale, they are stone-vaulted with a barrel vault which provides a wonderful acoustic, they have side-aisles and an ambulatory so that the crowds were able to walk around the whole church easily especially during services, they have radiating chapels for the faithful to pray in, and they also have a tribune vaulted with a half-barrel vault which enabled pilgrims to circulate around the whole building on its first floor. Sainte Foi, though small, is tall, elegant in its lines, beautifully proportioned, and internally spacious. It is the purest and most beautiful example of the mature Romanesque style.
A feature of this building is its sculpture. A tympanum of the Last Judgment on its west front ranks as one of the finest Romanesque works of art in Europe. Carved capitals sit atop the columns at both the arcade and gallery levels throughout the building. Many feature human figures and recount biblical stories. The quality of the sculpture is remarkable, as is its state of preservation because the church’s isolation has meant it has been unaffected by war and revolution.
A community of monks lives in Conques. On summer evenings after nightfall a monk gives an organ recital for half an hour. During this time subdued lighting illuminates the interior, and the tribune is opened to the public. This is a unique experience: nowhere else in Europe over many years have I ever been granted admission to a tribune, probably for safety reasons. It is thus possible to view many of the superb capitals, both high up in the nave and in the tribune at eye level. The arches of the tribune that look out into the nave also provide a striking view of the nave and sanctuary from about 15 metres above floor level.
High up in this magnificent building, among the columns and capitals, in restrained lighting with the organ playing, it felt to me quite otherworldly. This atmosphere had a strongly emotional effect on me – I was walking in one of the most beautiful places I have known.
