Medieval Champagne - Architecture, sculpture and stained glass

Champagne is better known for its wine than its monumental culture, though along with neighbouring Burgundy it abounds in architecturally distinguished towns. The old county also played a major role in the development of Gothic architecture and retains more medieval statuary and stained glass than any other region in France. The Middle Ages made for Champagne.

The old county recognised three principal towns, Reims, Provins and Troyes – all of them sites of major European annual fairs (indeed the system of measurement used for weighing gold at the fairs in Troyes remains in use to this day). This lent a cosmopolitanism to medieval Champagne – an openness and suggestibility evident in its material culture, above all in the surviving later medieval sculpture and stained glass. It is in recognition of this that a major extension to the old stained-glass museum – the Cité du Vitrail – was recently inaugurated in Troyes. But Champagne should equally be celebrated for its earlier monuments – particularly the 11th and 12th-century buildings, and as the art and architecture of southern Champagne is inextricably entwined with that of Burgundy’s far north, the tour will drift over the border to examine Châtillon-sur-Seine, Pontigny and Auxerre.

The greatest of the 11th-century buildings are the mighty abbey of St-Remi at Reims and the tiny hill-top church at Châtillon, while for the 12th century one is spoiled for choice – Notre-Dame-en-Vaux at Châlons-en-Champagne, Orbais, Pontigny. Gothic arrived early, and there began a second wave of experimentation – tentative at first, but the 13th century soon saw Champagne at the cutting edge of Europe. At Reims, the tracery window was invented, at Troyes the clerestory was perhaps first glazed, and throughout Champagne elaborate sculptural ensembles clambered aboard the churches. Moreover, the patrons invested heavily in glass, blazing interiors with a heady combination of light, imagery and colour. The latest of the 13th-century churches marks something of a change of direction, however, and though it boasts the modest intimacy of a chapel, St-Urbain at Troyes is one of the keys to late medieval architecture in Europe.

In common with most of France, Champagne suffered grievously during the Hundred Years War, and recovery was protracted and uneven. That prodigious concentration of sculptural and glazing shops responsible for the glazing and jubé of La Madeleine at Troyes only reached saturation in the first quarter of the 16th century, but there remains much to savour here as well, and in the neighbouring churches of Chaource and Villemaur-sur-Vanne.