The porch
A space of transition between the outside world and the abbey church, the porch welcomes visitors and announces what they are about to discover inside: a 12th century building, at the crossroads of the Romanesque and Gothic styles; architecture with simple, uncluttered forms; a soothing decor, characteristic of the Cistercians, without any figurative representations or colours.
In the tympanum, the bare Christian cross says it all: what you've come to see is that there's nothing to see. And yet...
The quotation
In the manuscripts,
"the initials will be in a single colour
and without figurative representations (...)
We forbid sculptures
or paintings in our churches
or in the monastery buildings
because, when you look at them,
you often neglect the benefit
of a good meditation
and the discipline of monastic gravity".
Cistercian regulatory texts (mid-12th century)
Instituta Generalis Capituli, LXXXII et XX, 2, ed. Chrysogonus Waddell, Narrative and Legislative Texts from Early Cîteaux, Cîteaux Commentarii Cistercienses, Studia et Documenta IX, 1999, pp. 362, 333.
The picture
Monochrome initial produced in Pontigny (12th century)
Montpellier, Library of the faculty of Medicine, ms. 92, fol. 1: Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Great Britain), copied around 1160-1175.
To go further
In the Middle Ages, the church was usually a place rich in images. Frescoes on the walls, mosaics on the floors, multicoloured stained glass windows, ornate manuscripts... For the Benedictines, nothing was too good for God.
For the Cistercians, piety and devotion were all that was necessary: they forbade all images and paintings in their monasteries, developing a subtle art of vegetal and geometric forms. Their churches must have seemed strange to the few faithful who entered them.
Glossary
Tympanum :
in a portal, the part that surmounts the gateway, often decorated with magnificent sculptures in the Middle Ages.
Abbey church :
Church where monks or nuns meet to celebrate mass and to sing offices.
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