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VII
BASEL AND COLMAR
Basel
After traversing several of the Swiss cantons, the Rhine leaves Switzerland at Basel. After the breaking up of the vast empire of Charlemagne, Basel came first under the authority of the Emperors of Germany, and then under that of the kings of the second house of Burgundy, until 1032, at which time the city became definitely incorporated into the German Empire.
Rudolph of Hapsburg besieged the city in 1274, and through the fourteenth and well into the fifteenth century it was the theatre of many struggles between the bishops and the emperors.
In 1061 and 1431 important councils of the Church were held here.
In 1489, at the village of Dornach, scarce half a dozen miles from Basel, took place that battle between six thousand Swiss and fifteen thousand Austrians which made possible the future independence of Switzerland.
During the sixteenth century Basel enjoyed a glorious era with respect to science and art.
Its university, the oldest in Switzerland, founded by Pius II., shone brilliantly with the reflected light of the philosopher Erasmus, the alchemist Paracelsus, and many theologians and geographers. Hans Holbein was born here in the seventeenth century.
The Rhine divides the city into two unequal parts, which are connected by a bridge which was originally constructed in 1220.
Although Basel bears even yet, in its architecture, the stamp of an imperial city of the middle ages, it must be counted as somewhat modern. Nevertheless, of all the cities of the first rank in Switzerland it resisted the march of innovation the longest. For instance, there was a time when all the clocks of the city were an hour behind those of their neighbours. In 1778, however, the Swiss government decreed that on the first of the following January all the clocks of the city must be regulated by solar time. The innovation excited the indignation of the people exceedingly; but, fifteen days after the date originally set, the city fell in with the new regulation, and took up anew the routine of its life.
"The most magnificent of the Swiss women," says a gallant French writer, "are those of Basel, but they know too much (at all times and all places)," he continued, somewhat dulling the effect of his praises.
"They have an elegance of carriage and dress, which, added to their naturally agreeable qualities, gives them a preëminence over all other women of Switzerland."
All this is as flowery a compliment as the fair sex of any country could receive, and, judging from appearances, as one lingers a few hours or a few days in Basel, it is all true.
The most remarkable of all the edifices of Basel is its cathedral, or münster, dedicated to the Virgin.
In certain of its features one finds a distinct Lombard influence, – in its sculptures and carvings, notably the two carved lions in the crypt, which are the counterparts of others at Modena and Verona in Italy, – though in general it is a Gothic structure.
The cathedral was founded by the Emperor Henry II. of Bavaria in 1010, and was dedicated in 1019.
It is constructed of red sandstone, as are the chief of the architectural monuments along the Rhine, and is an imposing example of the Gothic of that time.
The great portal on the west is richly decorated in the archivolt. It is flanked on either side by an arcade whose buttress pillars are each surmounted by a statue in a canopied niche or baldaquin.
At the foot of the north tower is an equestrian statue of St. George and the Dragon, and at the angle of the southern tower is another of St. Martin.
Two small doorways, each entering the side aisles, flank the arcade of the portal. Above the principal doorway of this façade is a balcon à jour before the great window which lights the main nave.
The towers rise beside this great window, and are of themselves perhaps the most remarkable features of the church.
They are not exactly alike, but they reflect more than any other part of the edifice the characteristics of the Gothic of these parts. The northern tower was completed in 1500, and is sixty-six metres in height. The southern tower is perhaps more ornate, and resembles, if somewhat faintly, Texier's beautiful spire at Chartres.
The ogival windows of the side walls are strong and of ample proportions.
At the extremity of the north transept is a doorway known as the Porte de St. Gall, decorated with statues of the four evangelists. Above is a great round window of the variety so commonly seen in France. It is here known as the "Wheel of Fortune." It is not a particularly graceful design, the rays or spokes being formed of tiny colonnettes, but is interesting nevertheless and quite unusual along the Rhine.
The coping of the roof of the nave is formed of party-coloured tiles, which give it a singular bizarre effect when viewed from near by.
The interior divides itself in the conventional manner into three naves, which are bare and with no ornamentation whatever.
The pulpit is a real work of art, and there are some sculptured capitals in the choir which are quite excellent.
The baptismal fonts are elaborately carved. One of these, bearing the date of 1465, is shaped something like a gigantic egg-cup. Its bowl springs from the stem in eight facets, sculptured to illustrate the baptism of Christ in the waters of the Jordan, with figures of St. Lawrence, St. Jacques, St. Paul, St. Pierre, and St. Martin.
Holbein once made a series of decorations for the organ-case of this church, but they exist no longer.
Beneath the edifice, with its entrance from the choir, is a crypt nearly as large as the nave itself, with a series of massive pillars supporting its vault and the pavement of the church proper.
There are numerous monuments within the church, including one to Erasmus, the illustrious Hollander who had made Basel his second home.
A stairway leads from the church to the chamber where was held, from 1431 to 1444, the famous Council of Basel. It is a vast, bare room, with no furniture whatever, except the benches upon which sat the prelates assembled at the council.
The cloister attached to the cathedral is daintily planned and contains a number of tombs of celebrated persons.
Behind the church is a magnificent terrace known as the Pfalz. It is planted with chestnut-trees, and its elevation, high above the level of the Rhine waters, makes it a magnificent promenade.
The Hôtel of the Three Kings – though it is to-day a modern structure that one sees – was, in the ninth century, the meeting-place of Conrad III., Henry III., and Rudolph III., the last King of Burgundy. Following another tradition, the house derived its nomenclature from the reliques of "the Three Magi," which were lodged here when on their journey, in 1161, from Milan to Cologne.
In the museum at Basel are two of Holbein's, sketches made from statues in the Sainte Chapelle at Bourges in France. They represent the Duke Jean de Berry and his wife, Jeanne de Boulogne. It seems rather curious that a great draughtsman like Holbein should deliberately have set himself to copying from a cast, which is practically what it amounted to in this case, charming though these drawings be.
Colmar
Colmar, the chief town of the "circle of Colmar," was once strongly fortified. It still has something more than fragments left of its seven towered and turreted gates.
Formerly it was the capital of Upper Alsace, and later it was the capital of the Département du Haut-Rhin. As a result of the war of 1871 it became a German city.
To Americans and Frenchmen it will perhaps be most revered as being the birthplace of Auguste Bartholdi, the designer of the celebrated Statue of Liberty at New York. (There is a smaller counterpart at Paris, on the Ile des Cygnes in the Seine, which is often overlooked by visitors to the capital.)
The church of St. Martin is a thirteenth-century Gothic church of more than usual splendour. Its fine foundations date from 1237, and its choir from 1315. It is of the conventional Latin cross form, with two imposing towers and a really grand portal. It is built of red sandstone, and is surmounted with a wonderfully massive steeple, which looks more like an adjunct to a fortification than a dependency of a Christian edifice. There is a counterpart of this feature in the cathedral at Dol in Brittany, but there it has the added detail of a crenelated parapet, which gives it a still more military air.
In other days this great tower on St. Martin's at Colmar served the purposes of a civic belfry as well as that of a Christian campanile.
In the sacristy of this rather grim church is an admirable fifteenth-century work of art, a Virgin surrounded by garlands of roses, executed by Schöngauer, a native of Colmar (1450-88) and one of the greatest painters and sculptors of the fifteenth century.
There is the restored fabric of the famous convent of the Dominicans, known as Unterlinden, which is to be considered as one of the chief curiosities of the town. It was built in 1232, before even the church of St. Martin, and its history was exceedingly prominent in the records of mysticism in Germany.
The conventual establishment was suppressed at the time of the Revolution, but in the mid-nineteenth century it was rebuilt with a great deal of thought for the reproduction of the Gothic architecture of the era of its inception.
VIII
FREIBURG
The steeple of Freiburg is quite the rival of that of Strasburg; some even may think it more beautiful.
It has braved with impunity the winds and tempests of many centuries, and stands to-day as beautiful a work of its kind, when one is away from Strasburg, Chartres, Antwerp, or Malines, as one can well conceive.
Its appearance is indeed magnificent, with a richness of ornament which has not been carried to the excess that would make it tawdry, and an outline which in every proportion is just and true.
Each day brings new admirers to this shrine, and one and all, antiquarians and cursory travellers alike, go away with an enthusiastic regard for its charms.
Freiburg itself does not go very far back into antiquity. It owes its origin to Berthold III., Duke of Zähringen, who founded it in 1118 and made it the capital of Breisgau, one of the most fertile districts of the ancient German duchy.
The cathedral at Freiburg marks the opening of a new era in the Christian architecture of Germany. It was founded in 1122 by the Duke of Zähringen, soon after he took over the guardianship of the city, but it was only in 1513 that it was entirely completed.
Nothing now remains of the primitive church except the transept and the base of the lateral portals. The nave dates from the middle of the thirteenth century, and the choir was mostly rebuilt at the same time. The dedication did not take place until a century and a half later.
The structure is in the conventional form of a Latin cross, with the usual nave and aisles and a series of chapels surrounding the apside.
The façade is remarkable for the porch, which is highly ornamented with sculpture and forms the lowest story of the tower.
The pediment above the entrance is garnished with statuary representing the crowning of the Holy Virgin, while just below, at the sides, are two kneeling figures, with crowns on their heads, bent in prayer.
Besides this gallery of saintly figures, there are also sculptured symbols which, in such a company, might well be thought profane: figures representing Geometry, Music, Arithmetic, and the Arts.
In the tower, above the porch, is a chapel dedicated to St. Michael, lighted by three ogival windows. It is now a bare, uninteresting chamber, its altar and decorations having disappeared.
The third story of the tower forms the belfry, from which springs the gently tapering and beautiful spire which rises to a height only forty feet less than that of Strasburg.
The dwindling spire has a dozen facets which in some mysterious way unite with the octagon of the belfry in a manner that leaves nothing to criticize.
Within the cathedral there are some acceptable mural decorations in the wall space above the western arch of the transept crossing. There are also a number of funeral monuments, finely sculptured and quite remarkable of their kind. One, a "Christ in the Sepulchre," is admirably executed in the sixteenth-century style of Koempf, who is responsible also for the elaborate pulpit.
There are two other churches in Freiburg of more than usual interest; the parish church with a fine fourteenth-century cloister, and the Protestant temple, a modern structure in the Byzantine style, which has been built up on the remains of the church belonging to the ancient Benedictine convent of Tönnenbach, which existed in the twelfth century.
In the chapel of the university are a number of paintings by Holbein.
IX
STRASBURG
The greatest curiosity of Strasburg is the Rhine; after that, its cathedral.
Usually, on entering Strasburg, the first landmark that greets one's eye is the slim, lone spire of the cathedral.
Years ago an itinerant showman travelled about with a model of the celebrated Strasburg clock, and the writer got his first ideas of a great Continental cathedral from the rather crude representation of the Gothic beauties of that at Strasburg, which graced the canvas which hung before the showman's tent.
The clock is still there, in all its mystical incongruity, but one's interest centres in the grace and elegance of the dwindling spire and its substructure of nave, transept, and choir, which dominates all else round about.
Of many eras, the structure of this great Latin-cross cathedral is not harmonious; but, for all that, it is a great Gothic triumph, and one which might well lend most of its details of construction and decoration to any great church, and still add a charm which was hitherto absent.
Strasburg has in all fifteen churches, but the cathedral is possessed of more and greater glories than all the others combined.
From the days when Strasburg was the Argentoratum of the Romans, the city has ever been the scene of an activity which has made its importance known through all the world. It was sacked by Attila and his Huns in 451, and was completely abandoned up to the seventh century, when one of the sons of Clovis built it up anew and gave to it the name of Strateburgum.
Ptolemy is said to be the first writer who mentions Argentoratum, the ancient Strasburg.
What a bitter blow the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, of which Strasburg was the gem, was to France can only be realized by a contemplation of the sentiment which even yet attaches to the event.
That the allied provinces were French in spirit as well as Catholic in religion is demonstrated by the fact that, at the time of the German occupation, there was a population of over a million and a half of souls, of which quite a million and a quarter were of the Roman Catholic faith. About a million and a quarter were natives of Alsace-Lorraine, one hundred thousand were Germans, and thirty odd thousand were foreigners.
The present cathedral was erected on a site that had been consecrated to religion in very early times. It had been a sacred place in the time of the Romans, though the deities worshipped were pagan, a temple to Hercules and Mars having been erected here.
The first Christian church was built, it is believed, in the fifth century, by St. Amand, then Bishop of Strasburg.
This first church of Strasburg, which was a wooden structure, was probably founded by Clovis, 504, and reconstructed by Pepin-le-Bref and Charlemagne. It was mostly destroyed by fire in 873, and in 1002 was pillaged and fired anew by the soldiers of Duke Hermann, who was condemned himself to repair the damage. Lightning destroyed it again in 1007, and, by the time the new structure was thought of, nothing but the crypt of Charlemagne's edifice was visible.
From the proceeds received from Duke Hermann, and contributions from all Christianity, Bishop Werner conceived a vast scheme of a new church which in time was completed and consecrated.
This in turn fell before the ravages of fire, and nothing but a mass of débris remained, from which the present structure was begun in 1277.
The ancient church foundation of Strasburg was peculiarly arranged, after a manner most unusual in a cathedral church. The ground-plan of the ecclesiastical establishment was not unlike those of the monkish communities which were so plentifully scattered over Europe, but it was built for use as a church, and for the bishop and his clerics, instead of being merely a secular monastery.
The following diagram explains this unusual arrangement.
The masonic theory with regard to the construction of these mediæval ecclesiastical monuments is of much interest in connection with Strasburg. The lodge at Strasburg was the earliest in the north of which we have any knowledge, and Ervin von Steinbach himself seems to have been at the head of it, which fact proves that he was one of the first of secular architects engaged upon a great religious work.
Great opportunities and privileges were conferred upon him by Rudolph of Hapsburg, and the masonic lodge of which he was the head had the power, over a wide extent of territory, to maintain order and obedience among the workmen under its jurisdiction.
In 1278 Pope Nicholas III. issued a bull, giving the body absolution, and this was renewed by his successors up to the time of Benedict XII.
Iodoque Dotzinger, master of the works at Strasburg in 1452, formed an alliance between the different lodges of Germany.
It was an appreciative Frenchman – and all Frenchmen are appreciative and fond of Strasburg, because of what it once was to them – that said: "La cathédrale est un merveille unique au monde." Continuing, he said: "Those who have not seen it know not the gaieté lumineuse of a Gothic church."
All of this is of course quite true from some points of view.
There is, however, something pitiful about the general aspect of this great Gothic church. Its lone spire, standing grim and gaunt against a background of sky, makes only the more apparent the incompleteness of the structure.
Its façade is certainly marvellous, quite rivalling those of Reims and Toul, not so very far away across the French border.
The triple porch of the façade is rich in sculpture, the most remarkable groups being "The Wise and Foolish Virgins," "The Prophets," "The Last Judgment," and "Christ and the Twelve Apostles."
A great rose window, a reminiscence of the masterpieces so frequently seen in France, also decorates this elaborate façade.
The south portal is in the form of two round-arched doorways, and is a survival, evidently, of one of the earliest epochs of this style of construction. It is ornamented with bas-reliefs and statues symbolical of the triumph of Christian religion. There has recently been erected before this portal a statue of the great architect of the fabric, Ervin, and another of his son.
The spire, one of the most elevated in Europe, is 440 feet, while that of Cologne is 482 feet, Rouen is 458 feet, and Notre Dame at Paris but 200 feet in height.
Usually church edifices are grim and gray; but Strasburg presents, in its sandstone of the Vosges, a beautiful tone, which in the westering sun of a summer's day can only be described as a rose-pink, and is like no other church edifice in Europe, unless it be the cathedral at Rodez in Mid-France, which Henry James called mouse-coloured, but which in reality is a sort of warm, deep rose.
A fine lacework of colonnettes covers the entire façade, which six centuries have turned to the colour of iridescent copper organ-pipes.
But the real grandeur and dignity of the architecture stands out boldly in spite of the ornate turrets and the mass of sculptured detail, in a way which stamps the fabric imperially as a giant among its kind.
Of the spire, Victor Hugo wrote thus (Strasburg was yet French, and not German as it is to-day): "The truly adorable achievement of the builders of this cathedral is its spire. It is a tiara of stone crowned with a cross. It is prodigious, gigantic, but of great delicacy. I have seen Chartres; I have seen Antwerp. Four escaliers à jour ascend spirally the four towerlets at the angles. The steps are very high and narrow… To mount to the lantern one would have to follow the workmen, who appear to be continually engaged on the fabric. The stairways are no more, simply bars of iron set ladderlike in the masonry.
"From the spire one sees three mountain ranges: the group of the Black Forest to the north; the Vosges to the west; and the Alps to the south.
"One stands so high that the country-side appears no longer as the country-side; but, like the view from the castle at Heidelberg, a mere geographical map.
"At the time of my visit a great cloud rose up from the valley of the Rhine, and framed the panorama for a dozen leagues in truly eerie fashion. As I went from one tower to another, I saw about me la France, la Suisse, and l'Allemagne."
It was in 1277 that the celebrated architect, Ervin von Steinbach, began the construction of the portal of the cathedral at Strasburg, and above its great doorway one may yet read, if he be keen of eyesight and knows where to look for it, this inscription:
ANNO. DOMINI. MCCLXXVII. IN. DIE
BEATI
URBANI. HOC. GLORIOSUM. OPUS
INCOHAVIT
MAGISTER. ERVINUS DE STEINBACH
Ervin died in 1318, and his son continued the work up to the first landing, or platform, of the towers.
In the archives of the cathedral are still to be seen the designs on which father and son worked in achieving the portal and towers, as well as those of the spire, the north porch, the pulpit, and the organ-buffet. Not all of these are contemporary, but the first, at least, are the very drawings which were handled by Maître Ervin and his son in the latter years of the thirteenth century.
The following lines of Longfellow describe the religious fervour of the great architect perhaps more truthfully than could prose.
".. A great master of his craft,
Ervin von Steinbach; but not he alone,
For many generations laboured with him,
Children that came to see these saints in stone,
As day by day out of the blocks they rose,
Grew old and died, and still the work went on,
And on and on and is not yet completed.
".. The architect
Built his great heart into these sculptured stones,
And with him toiled his children, and their lives
Were builded with his own into the walls
As offerings to God."
It is perhaps not possible to write of Strasburg's cathedral without giving its great clock more than a passing thought.
The legendary history of the clock at Strasburg is as follows:
The cathedral being terminated, the magistrates of the city desired to ornament its tower with a great clock which should be unique in all the world.
No one came forth to undertake the commission, until a workman, much advanced in years, agreed for a certain sum to produce a clock which should be superior to all others then existing.
After some years of incessant work, he produced the first of Strasburg's wonderful mechanical clocks full of moving figures and symbols.
In lieu of recompense, the magistrates, desiring that their city should be the sole possessor of such a work, accused the old man of having had resource to the aid of the devil in producing so weird a timepiece, and condemned him to torture and the loss of his eyesight.
Upon a pretext of making some further arrangement of the works before the execution of his sentence, the old man was allowed once more to mount the tower. Instead of adjusting the clock, he deranged it in some way so that its chimes never rang out as intended, and thus the magistrates and the citizens of Strasburg were, in a way, avenged for the injustice done the inventor. This famous clock of Strasburg's tower is now only a memory.
The more recent works of a similar nature have a history less sordid and unpleasant. The first clock of the cathedral, placed inside the church at the crossing, dated from 1352, and of course was a remarkable work for its time.
Two hundred years later it was intended to replace it with another, but the work was never achieved, so a third was begun with an effort to outdo the ingenuity which had made possible the fourteenth-century astronomical wonder.
It was planned in 1571, under the direction of Conrad Dasypodius, of Strasburg, and his friend Daniel Volkenstein, an astronomer of Augsburg. It was completed in 1574, restored in 1669 and 1732, and ceased its labours through the stress of time in 1790.
The present great clock, certainly an unseemly and incongruous adjunct of a great church, was commenced on the 24th of June, 1838, and installed on the 31st of December, 1842. Its construction is supposed to have reflected great credit upon its designer, one Schwilgu, a clock-maker of Strasburg. Nothing was preserved of the more ancient timepiece, except its elaborate case, which was restored and further embellished.
At the base of the tower, on the summit of which is placed the crowing cock, is a portrait of the designer. "This great man," say the local patriots, died an octogenarian in 1856.
In 1723 a subterranean tremor sent the tower of Strasburg's cathedral a foot out of plumb. It speaks well for the solidity of the construction that no ill effects resulted, and to-day there are no evidences, to the casual observer, of this deflection.
The beauty of Strasburg's cathedral was in so great repute in the middle ages that Jean Galeaz Marie, Visconti Sforza, in 1481, demanded of the magistrates of the city the name of an architect capable of completing his cathedral at Milan.
In a vaulted chamber attached to the cathedral proper are two strangely curious memorials. They are nothing more or less than two mummies which, for their better preservation, have been varnished, and the costumes which they anciently wore have from time to time been renewed.
One is the mummy of the Count of Nassau-Saarbruck, who died in the sixteenth century, and the other is that of a young girl of perhaps twenty years, supposed to have been his daughter.
The ancient church of St. Bartholomew is another of Strasburg's ecclesiastical shrines which ranks high among great churches.
It dates from the second half of the thirteenth century, but frequent additions have been made in more recent times.
It possesses a remarkable monument which shows a painted "Danse des Morts," with figures of nearly life size. It is a fresco on the inner walls of the overhanging canopy of a tomb. The painting dates from the fifteenth century, but was only discovered in 1824, on the occasion of a general renovation of the church.
The choir was begun in 1308 and completed in 1345. Its height and its general airiness, and the lightness of its vaulting and arches, unite in making it quite unusual and most worthy of note.
This ancient church to-day is occupied by the Protestants, and the edifice has been divided up in a somewhat sacrilegious manner in order to provide within its walls for a library and a museum.
Strasburg has another great church in St. Thomas, a vast ogival edifice which has some good glass, but which is remarkable above all else for the number of its sepulchral monuments, both ancient and modern.
At the end of the choir is found one of those wonders of French sculpture, an allegorical grouping of figures on the tomb of Maréchal de Saxe.
It was erected in 1777 by Pigalle by the order of Louis XV. For a background it has a pyramid of gray marble, at the base of which is the following inscription:
MAVRITIO SAXONI
CVRLANDIAE ET SEMIGALLIAE DVCI
SVMMO REGIORVM EXERCITVVM
PRAEFECTO
SEMPER VICTORI
LVDOVICVS XV
VICTORIARVM AVCTOR ET IPSE DVX
PONI IVSSIT
OBIIT XXX NOV. ANNO MDCCL. AETATIS
LV
Standing in the centre of the pyramid is a figure of the maréchal descending toward the sarcophagus below. A figure representing Death is lifting the lid, and another, representing France, is endeavouring to stay his hand. Flags, a reversed torch, and other symbols, with another figure representing the genius of war, complete the details of this elaborate monument.
There is little of anything but Gothic, more or less pure, visible at Strasburg; but, in spite of this, it is alleged that, from Carlovingian times onward, there was here a colony of artisans who had been sent from Lombardy on account of the increased interest in the north in church-building. If this is so, they must have pushed onward down the Rhine, as they left but little impression here, and, while Rhenish church-building was manifestly not Gothic in its inception, here at Strasburg there are certainly no evidences of the Comacine builders of Charlemagne's time.
Strasburg's ancient episcopal palace was built in 1731-41 by Cardinal de Rohan. It was bought by the city before the Revolution and transformed into a château impérial, and became later the home of the local university.
The edifice known in early days as the "Maison de l'Oeuvre Notre Dame," and more recently as "Stift zu unser lieben Frauen," was built in 1581, numerous Gothic sculptures from the cathedral being used in its construction. There is here a remarkable spiral staircase in the light and delicate flowered Gothic of its time.
