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Updated: June 26, 2025
It is only in one or two points amidst the great mass of stately buildings which is known as the castle of Chinon that their hand can be traced now. The base of the Tour du Moulay, where tradition says the Grand Master of the Templars was imprisoned by Philippe le Bel, is a fine vault of twelfth-century date, which may have been the work of Henry II., and can hardly be later than his sons.
There Joan of Arc crowned Charles IX; there for centuries the noblest men of France had gone to receive their offices and their honours. A building that belonged to the world. What treasures of beauty for the whole human race in the thousand and more statues in the cathedral! How priceless the twelfth-century stained glass! What paintings which have come down from the masters of Italy!
Its presence here, and at this level, shows that this was the original level of the sills of all the old Norman windows on the outside walls until about the close of the twelfth century. On the east side of this part of the transept, at the clerestory level, are two round-headed windows. Both originally were all of twelfth-century workmanship.
The site of the mitred Abbey of Saint Mary is somewhere hereabouts, but in the time of the suppression of the monasteries every stone of the old abbey was pulled down and carried away; so that the twelfth-century gateway and some remnants of pillars are the sole traces that remain. This gateway, which is a very fine one, is still used as a lodge entrance.
Immediately above the panels of the door, which are covered with twelfth-century metal reliefs, there is a stone plaque or low relief, representing the Passion scene; to the left of it is to be seen a kneeling woman holding a skull in her hand. Evidently it is a weeping, penitent Magdalene.
The northern façade, preceded by an ogival porch so common in Galicia, contains a portal of greater beauty than the Puerta de la Plateria in Santiago, and stands forth in greater prominence than the other named example of twelfth-century art, by not being lost among or depressed by flanking bodies of greater height and mass.
At one end there is the figure of a kneeling man, the head almost touching the ground in the body's fervent prostration in front of the group representing Glory, Trinity, and St. James. Is it a twelfth-century pilgrim whom the artist in a moment of realistic enthusiasm has portrayed here, in the act of praying to his Creator and invoking his mercy?
Anne and in the life of Mary: in the central band, to the left, are the Presentation, the Annunciation, the Visitation; in the middle the Nativity in various scenes; to the right Herod, and the Adoration of the Magi. The whole of these reliefs are twelfth-century work, with the exception of the Presentation, which is thirteenth century.
There were ups and downs, of course, movements and reactions; in some places art was almost always good, in others it was never first-rate; but there was no universal, irreparable depreciation till Norman and Romanesque architecture gave way to Gothic, till twelfth-century sculpture became thirteenth-century figuration.
That death is but the name for another life? Now do not FORCE your faith for me. Tell me your own honest conviction. Do we end? or do we begin again? Be frank and fair and true; according to the very latest science, remember! not according to the latest hocus-pocus of twelfth-century mandate issued from Rome. You see how frank I am, and how entirely I go with you.
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