Romanico Aragones

Some gleanings from a wonderful Spanish web site devoted to the Romanesque art and architecture of old Catalonia and Navarre.

Here's a nice capital showing the evolution of a classical form into the Romanesque.

Many wonders. Sorry the images are so small, but I have never seen most of these before, so I still marvel at the riches I have found.

Imaginary Architecture of the Revolutionary Age

Delightful essay by Hugh Aldersen-Williams on the unbuilt fantasies of French architecture in the revolutionary period, at Public Domain Review. Aldersen-Williams focuses on the work of Étienne-Louis Boullée and Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, two dreamers who must have been very frustrated that the work they actually built fell so far short of what they imagined. Above, exterior and cross-section of Boullée’s famous design for Newton’s Cenotaph, 1784. This would have been enormous; those are mature trees growing on othe terraces.

Many architectus of the time were fascinated by spheres; here is Ledoux’s design for a public mausoleum, from his book L’architecture considérée sous le rapport de l’art, des moeurs et de la législation, 1804.

Perspectival view of  Ledoux’s design for the forge at Chaux, France, from the same book. Pyramids!

Boullée’s design for a coliseum, ca. 1781–1793. For these architects, decoration was the past, and the future was bold geometry.

More Ledoux, design for a bridge held up by stone classical ships.

And Ledoux's home for a "charpentier de la graduation," an expression beyond either my French, or Google's; master carpenter?

The Fairy Melusine, the House of Lusignan, and the Château de Saint-Jean-d’Angle

The Château de Saint-Jean-d’Angle is a modest castle in the west of France, surrounded by salt marshes along the Seudre River, near the mouth of the Garonne. The original castle was a plain shell keep, a type more common in England than France. The exact date of its contruction is much disputed, with various sources offering dates from the 980s to the 1280s; I lean toward the reign of Henry II of England, 1154-1189. Much of what you see today dates to a major restoration completed in 1624, as shown by a dated stone in the foundation of the hall. But anyway the castle might be quite old, which is crucial to its contemporary reputation. 

Because whenever it was built, it belonged to the Lords of Lusignan. The Lusignan family was famous for two things. First, their part in the Crusades and the Latin East in general; one branch became the Kings of Jerusalem when that title meant ruling mainly over Cyprus. Second, they are supposed to have been made great by the Fairy Melusine. One of the things Melusine is supposed to have done is built a bunch of castles for her Lusignan husband, and the propaganda of the privately owned castle proudly proclaims it the only Lusignan castle remaining from the time of Melusine.

The earliest full version of the Melusine story was The Romance of Poitou or Lusignan, alias the Tale of Melusine, composed around 1390 by Jean d'Arras. Arras said he was following "old chapbooks and spinning tales," and there is no reason to doubt him, since various elements of the story are ancient and widespread. The first historical figure in the House of Lusignan was Hugh I, who would have lived around 900 AD. In fact the first six Lords of Lusignan were all named Hugh, which creates certain difficulties for tying the legend to history, since in the Romance the Lord of Lusignan is named Raymondin. But who cares! Let's just say our castle dates to "the time of Melusine" anyway.

The story of Melusine starts like this:

One day while King Elainas was out hunting he stopped to quench his thirst at a spring, whereby he heard the voice of a woman singing. Here he met the fairy Pressine, though he questioned her he could not learn from where she came. They were married with the one condition that Elainas promise to never interrupt her while she was lying-in. Pressine gave birth to triplets, three daughters; Melusine, Meliot, and Palatine. Upon hearing the news that Pressine had given birth, Elainas could not contain his joy and burst in upon her while she was bathing her daughters. Pressine flew into a wrath of anger and promised that from then on her descendants would avenge her. She left with her daughters for the home of her sister the Queen of the Lost Island.

Medieval illustrators loved this discovery scene

The theme of broken taboos repeats twice more in the story, always leading to disasters. Melusine's personal curse, acquired by violating one of her mother's prohibitions, is that every Saturday her lower body turns into a snake. She eventually marries Raymondin of Lusignan, strictly prohibiting him from ever seeing her on Saturday, which of course he eventually does, but not until after they have had ten sons, each with a different strange deformity, and she has made the family rich and powerful. The Lusignans have lots of descendants, including both the Hapsburgs and the English royal line, so the story became quite famous across Europe.

My personal favorite story from the Romance concerns Geoffrey of the Giant Tooth, one of Melusine's sons, who went crazy and massacred a hundred monks over an incident invovling one of the monastery pigs. Incidentally Melusine didn't die at the end but only sank into a rock, and if you find her golden key you can set her free and marry her. But I'm not sure I recommend her as a spouse.

As a prominent house the Lusignans had many homes much grander than our little castle. Their main seat, Lusignan, is illustrated in the Tres Riches Heures of Jean, Duc de Berry, but nothing of it remains standing.

But back to Le Château de Saint-Jean-d’Angle. Poitou was fought over for centuries by the kings of England and France, and one assumes that the castle had some role in these wars, but neither the usual online sources nor the PowerPoint-mad local historian of Belle Saintonge has any details.

The first known fight at the castle took place in 1568, when it was besieged by Protestant forces during the Wars of Religion. This did "significant damage" to the castle, which is presumably why it needed the major restoration of 1624. The restoration was carried out by Charlotte Saint-Gelais de Lusignan, about whom I have been able to find out nothing else. At that time the castle acquired a carving showing Melusine in her bath, or so written sources say, but it must not look like much because I can't find a picture of it.

By 1990 the castle is pretty bad shape, as this image shows. Removal of the vegetation, I read, revealed "catastrophic" conditions.

In 1994 it was acquired by a businessman named Alain Rousselot. Rousselot got some grants from the French government and restored it, turning it into a "medieval theme park" with trebuchet demonstrations and the like.

Whatever it takes, I guess. And if "from the time of Melusine" helps draw people in, I'm not really going to complain about that, either.

Art Nouveau Helsinki

For reasons that are unclear to me, Helsinki, Finland has a remarkable array of Art Nouveau buildings, mainly contructed between 1898 and 1914. Tyler Cowen called it the best Art Nouveau city, with only Brussels as a possible rival.

The city became the capital of Finland after Russia took it from Sweden in 1812, and the Russians embarked on a major rebuilding program that was basically complete by 1862. So it wasn't politics. I suppose Helsinki was just part of the generaly economic good times of 1896 to 1910, and these buildings were the result.

Kaarlenkatu 11, 1915, from the time when even telephone exchanges could be nice buildings.

More.

Love some of these details.

Scarred by Fires I Never Even Saw

Random Image from Our Report on the Fire Cleanup

Back in 2020 there were catastrophic fires in the hills all around San Francisco Bay. My company had a role in the cleanup from these fires, because many historic structures were destroyed – old ranch houses, a perfectly preserved logging camp from the 1910s, cabins built by the CCC in the 1930s, one of America's first Boy Scout camps, etc. We sent people to these sites to photograph the remains before heavy machinery was brought in to scrape the debris away, and on some sites to monitor the work to try to limit the impact to any historical stuff left behind. I never went to California on this, but I had a support role and reviewed all the documents we produced. This is on my mind because some questions about missing documentation just came back to me two weeks ago.

Ditto, Damage from the CZU Lightning Fire

Back in the 1970s, when I was a young teenager, I went through a phase of wanting to be an architect. I read all the books on architecture I could get from the public library, perused glossy magaines, and so on. At that time there was a lot of excitement about west coast pseudo-ecological design, from million-dollar redwood houses built in redwood groves (with hot tubs and conversation pits) to hippie shacks. Some of these builders made a point of not cutting down any trees but finding ways to nestle their houses among them.

Reading through the material coming back from the fire clean-up I saw dozens of reports of what happened to those houses: burned to nothing. One story that made me particularly sad was about a sort-of hippie town called Last Chance where about twenty like-minded people built cabins or A-frames in the redwoods and lived out their off-the-grid dreams. The place was incinerated, nothing left but the concrete pad on which their community center had sat. Three people were killed because they were too slow to flee.

So, anyway, the NY Times has a feature today about a beautiful little house built on the coast of Washington, where “the steep, six-acre lot is shaded by Douglas fir trees.” The owners say stuff like:

I think it’s amazing. It produces this sense of belonging and quietude by engaging with the site’s circumstances and ambient conditions. It’s a divine place.

And all I can think is, it's going to burn to ashes. If you're thinking that being on the coast of rainy Washington will protect it, sorry, no; western forests burn. All of them. It's just a matter of time.

Renovating the Bailey Mansion

Great feature at the NY Times about the renovation of the Bailey Mansion in Harlem. 

Built by P.T. Barnum's less flamboyant partner in the circus business in 1886-1888, it was featured on the cover of Scientific American in 1890. The architect was Samuel Burrage Reed; the style is one of my favorites, Romanesque Revival.

From 1951 into the 1990s the house was a funeral home run by Marguerite Blake. After she retired from the funeral business she turned into a stereotypical crazy cat lady, and the place started to fall apart.

In 2008, Blake tried to sell the house for $10 million, but inspectors found that the roof had 35 separate leaks and nobody would buy. Toward the end of 2009 the house finally sold for $1.4 million. The eventual buyers said the basement was full of cats and just walking through it they got completely covered with fleas.

The buyers were Martin Spollen and Chen Jie, he from New Jersey and she born in Shanghai. They were not particularly rich and told the Times that they had to borrow money from friends and relatives to raise the purchase price. (Since the house was not safe for occupancy, they couldn't get a mortgage.) They have been restoring it ever since, doing much of the work themsleves.

The Times says, "It has been a monumental effort driven by love and obsession."

They earn some money by renting the house out as a set for movines and television, but the project has still (of course) been a very expensive hobby. Spollen told the Times, "Our main talent is that we are not in a hurry."

One of the prizes of the house is a large collection of stained glass windows by Henry Belcher.

The former embalming room in the basement, now a woodshop.

What an amazing place.