![]() Lazare, located some 150 miles southwest of Paris and long noted for the immense tympanum of its west portal depicting the Last Judgment signed prominently in bold letters with the inscription quoted above. What revolutionary idealists failed to accomplish had sometimes been started with the best of intentions by pious ecclesiastics merely keeping up with the times as in the case of the Cathedral of St. We are familiar enough with iconoclasm in European church-art history-heads of saints, statues of the Virgin, the whole Bible story as portrayed in stone destroyed for the glory of God, to confound Popery, or, as in the case of French churches during and after the Revolution, to supplant Superstition so that we should all live happily ever afterwards. His magnificent camera technique reveals ten times the detail even the best trained eye could see under ordinary viewing conditions, and puts us into the story as well as the evaluation of the carvings. Franceschi took most of the photographs in this exhibition. Even if we could, those who have endured hours of neck-breaking strain studying church art know that a good photographer is the viewer’s best friend. Few of us, however, can just pop over to Autun on a week-end. The same applies to sculpture-to appreciate it fully one must see it in the round and in the position for which it was made. ![]() And it is true enough that no reproduction, however good, can take the place of a Rembrandt or a Rouault or a Rothko it can only remind one of remembered subtleties. One’s first thought when informed of a show of this sort is the oft-sounded warning against today’s heresy of looking at photographs instead of at original works of art. A limited number of original sculptures by Gislebertus, mostly heads, were included for the de Young showing only, and will be returned to France while the photo-panels continue to tour key cities of the United States under the auspices of the American Federation of Arts. Life-size photographs, ranging in size from four by six inches to eight by nine feet, presenting the arguments and evidence collected by the discoverers, comprise an exhibition which, after circulating throughout Europe this past year, made its American debut at the M. Lazare in Autun, France, and re-establishing the sculptor in the process. He thus left the clue from which three 20th-century scholars, Abbe Grivot, Arnold Fawcus and George Zarnecki, launched an arduous and exciting adventure into art history: rediscovering and reassembling the phenomenal wealth of 12th-century sculptures which originally decorated the famous Romanesque cathedral of St. IN AN AGE WHEN cathedral builders and sculptors were all but anonymous, one artist, more audacious than the others, placed his signature, “I, Gislebertus, created this,” immediately beneath the feet of his Christ in Majesty.
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