The sculpted portal of the Cathedral of Saint-Maurice of Angers is unique for several reasons. Dating from around 1150, it is one of the earliest examples of Gothic sculptural programs: it was executed only a decade later than the Royal Portal of Chartres, which inspired it (Chartres features prominently in many of the articles). Protected for much of its history by a gallery and a whitewash, the portal is one of a very small number that preserves considerable traces of medieval polychrome painting.
Between 2009 and 2019, a major restauration campaign of the portal was conducted by Drac Pays de la Loire. It was followed by a smaller project of restauration of the formidable twelfth-century doors of the cathedral, which began in 2022. In 2021, in the immediate aftermath of the main restauration campaign, an international colloquium was organized. In 2024, the present hefty volume—there are no fewer than 661 pages—was published. The volume is divided into three parts: (1) the portal from the middle of the twelfth century; (2) the portal and its polychromy; and (3) the portal restored and protected. The volume examines the portal from many different angles, including its construction, its materials, its polychromy, its material context within the cathedral complex, its iconography and its many restauration campaigns, from the Middle Ages to the present. The volume also pays significant attention to comparable works: in addition to abundant references to the Royal Portal of Chartres, there are separate articles on the portals of the cathedrals of Le Mans, Santiago de Compostela, and Lausanne, as well as on the portals of the former cathedral of Senlis and the monastery of Santa Maria de Ripoll.
The volume puts into stark relief the fact that, from its very inception, the cathedral and, more specifically, the portal, were—and still are—constantly in the process of evolving. Some elements were damaged or destroyed (either by time, human agency or what insurers still call “acts of God,” such as the violent storm of 1617, when lightning struck the cathedral), others were removed, the third were altered, and the fourth were added. Most of the changes, including medieval and early modern ones, left a trace in the written and visual sources, which, when it comes to the portal, the authors discuss in detail. Although this might seem obvious, it is worth repeating that no moment in the past can be singled out as that of the “original” appearance of the cathedral.
The volume allots a significant amount of space to these changes, some of which tell much about the period when they were made. A trumeau with the sculpture of the Virgin was the centerpiece of the portal; in 1429, the Virgin was replaced by St. Maurice; in 1745 the entire trumeau was removed along with the sculptures of the two saints found on the piedroits to facilitate the yearly Eucharistic procession known as the Grand Sacre d’Angers. A gallery, which protected the portal from the elements and ensured the survival of polychromy, was added in the early thirteenth century. In the fifteenth century, the gallery housed a manuscript bookshop, to the displeasure to some among the clergy. In the sixteenth century, bones of a whale were hung in the gallery, probably intended to recall the story of Jonah and the Whale, but also an episode involving a giant fish and a local saint (the bones are now to be found in the Muséum des Sciences Naturelles d’Angers). In the seventeenth century, when the portal was painted afresh, an inscription, in Hebrew, was added to an angel’s scroll, a testimony to the erudition of the clergy overseeing the project. The gallery was removed in 1807 and the portal was whitewashed at the same time, which saved the polychromy from destruction. When the decision to once again expose the polychromy to view was made, the necessity of protecting the portal became apparent. A new gallery, designed by Japanese architect Kengo Kuma (b. 1954), was finished soon after the volume went into print.
Several articles—including one by Kuma—deal with the newest addition to the cathedral, the gallery that is designed to protect the portal. It is fascinating—especially for those interested in modern architecture and in the integration of the old and the new—to see the plans of the gallery, which the jury ended up rejecting in favor of Kuma’s. A cluster of articles contextualizes the modern gallery: one is dedicated to archaeological remains of the medieval gallery; another to the medieval gallery as we can reconstructed it from visual sources; others to comparable galleries elsewhere.
Spread across a number of articles, there are discussion of other parts of the cathedral, their decorations (such as twelfth-century carved modillions of the nave or a thirteenth-century cycle of mural paintings) or the objects that they contained (such as the funerary monument of René of Anjou and of Isabelle of Lorraine, the remains of which can be found in the Musée des Beaux-Arts d'Angers). One article is dedicated to the wooden doors of the Cathedral.
A particularly large and fascinating cluster of articles deals with the polychromy of the portal, which were discovered under the whitewash in 1993. Both a specialist in polychromy and its restauration and someone with a more casual interest in the subject has much to learn from these pages. The articles detail the many challenges that surfaced during the restauration of the polychromy as well as some of the solutions that restorers came up. Numerous illustrations of (digital) reconstitutions of polychromy in Angers and elsewhere challenge the viewer to remember that this portal—and many contemporaneous ones—as they came down to us, completely or largely devoid of polychromy, are “incomplete.”
Taken together, the articles demonstrate in this cluster clearly that the polychromy was much more than an afterthought in Angers and other places. There is evidence that when sculptors conceived of their works, they already had polychromy in mind, and there is a strong possibility that many of them were sculptors-painters, which makes it possible to describe the portal of Angers and similar works as “three-dimensional paintings” (271). Expensive pigments, including lapis-lazuli or cinnabar, were used, evidence that the donors were willing to spend considerable sums to have sculpted portals painted. At the same time, it is important to remember that polychromy was not omnipresent on contemporaneous portals, but was only one of the artistic choices.
Because of the focus on the portal and its restauration, there are many topics that have not made it, understandably, into the volume. One wishes, for example, for a greater participation by historians, as there is only one among the many authors (the respective article deals with patron saints of the cathedral). However, the very fact that one longs to learn more about medieval Angers and its cathedral should be counted as an indication of the volume’s success.
Many readers will be grateful to the publisher for allowing the authors and the editors to include numerous high-quality illustrations. There are illustrations, among others, of the sculptures of the portal (with close-ups), other portals that serve as points of comparison, historical drawings and photographs, digital restitutions, microscopic images, maps and numerous figures dealing with technical observations. Many readers will also be grateful for the relative affordability of the volume, which should find its place on the shelves not only of major libraries, but also smaller ones and even of individual scholars and enthusiasts.
To conclude, the portal of the Cathedral of Saint-Maurice is lucky to have been subject not only to a decade-long restauration and to construction of an addition, which is safeguarding the results of the restauration, but also to careful—and passionate—attention by the authors, editors and publishers of the volume. The volume is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in Gothic sculpture and architecture, medieval archaeology and especially conservation and restauration of medieval sculptural monuments and of medieval polychromy. On the one hand, I am convinced that this volume will serve as an inspiration for future volumes on recently restored medieval (or, more generally, historical) monuments. On the other hand, I hope that it will lead to further scholarly attention being paid to the portal, the cathedral and the medieval and early modern town of Angers. The amount of information and the number of images under one cover certainly should make many researchers’ task easier.