The Norman Ambulatory of Le Mans Cathedral and the Chevet of the Cathedral of Coutances

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to help define the place of Bourges Cathedral in the development of Gothic architecture by examining, rather than its antecedents, some of the structures that follow it. The focus is on the two standing French cathedrals which most closely resemble Bourges: Coutances and Le Mans. Their chevets are studied in relation to each other and to Bourges as a possible prototype. If the stepped section at Le Mans derives from Coutances, they both could be understood as provincial interpretations of Bourges, established at Coutances and repeated at Le Mans. Stylistic comparisons, however, prove that the Norman master of the Le Mans ambulatory was trained in the choir workshop at Bayeux, and the similarities between Le Mans and Coutances are due only to their both following the Bourges-type section and to certain shared Norman features. These similarities are not due, therefore, to a common parentage at Bourges. While Branner defined the "monumental family" of Bourges in terms of an overriding spatial unity, Coutances and Le Mans, with Saint Martin at Tours, are characterized by a particular kind, and an unusual degree, of spatial division. They must derive from an earlier tradition of the stepped section which does not require spatial unity, as at Cluny III. In the unification of its space, Bourges becomes even more extraordinary than has been thought by scholars in the past.