Noé Badillo
1622 N. Sawtelle Ave.
Tucson, AZ 85716
520-721-5794
eon_badillo@hotmail.com
Henri Le Secq: Strasbourg and Amiens Cathedral
Noé Badillo
Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain. -Psalm 127:1
Henri Jean-Louis Le Secq's photographs of the Gothic church during the mid-nineteenth
century are a reification of the divine spirit of the ecclesial body. Intended as a didactic survey
of the physiognomy of Catholic churches, his photographs are a record of the Gothic structures
in the aftermath of the French Revolution. However, the meaning of these photographs goes far
beyond documentation. There is a primacy of form and structure in Le Secq's images that form a
strength in which the photograph becomes the very resurrection of the Gothic cathedral. His
image of Strasbourg Cathedral's west façade from 1851, as well as his image of Amiens
Cathedral from 1852, are two prime examples of photographs that exemplify the cathedrals'
presence as structures that exude an eternal strength and formidable presence, whose spirit
remains unaffected by the destructive onslaughts of the prior revolution. The defense of this
spirit in the Gothic church is reinforced by æsthetic philosophers' reactionary views to the
enlightenment. Henri Le Secq's photographs are a buttress, seemingly intended to counteract the
onslaughts of destruction, degradation and desecration of these sacred edifices that occurred
during the anti-theological movements that led up to the French Revolution, and finally the
French Revolution itself.
2
Henri Le Secq began his artistic career as a sculptor and a painter, and later learned
photography from fellow painter and friend Gustave Le Gray. (fig. 1) Le Gray taught Le Secq
the technique of using paper negatives that were treated with beeswax. Le Gray not only
conveyed the technical aspects of the wax-paper negative, which included easier transport; he
also conveyed the æsthetic differences to Le Secq in contrast with the wet-plate technique or the
Daguerreotype.1
In 1851, Le Secq founded the first photographic organization in the world: the Société
Héliographique. The Commission des Monuments Historiques, which was an organization of the
government of France, soon noticed the endeavors of the société and the pragmatic usefulness of
their skills in photography. After reviewing a portfolio of Le Secq's paper negatives, The
Commission des Monuments Historiques offered Le Secq the first photographic commission on
January 10, 1851, just a year after founding the Société. This commission was part of what
would become known as Mission Héliographique, which also included the photographers
Gustave Le Gray, Edouard Baldus, Hippolyte Bayard and O. Mestral. However, the Commission
des Monuments mysteriously never displayed the results of the project. According to Joel
Herschman of Queens College, "the results of this survey, some 300 pieces in all, were neither
exhibited nor published at the conclusion of the mission."2
The purpose of the Mission Héliographique was to document architectural structures
within the Republic of France, in order that the architect Emmanuel Viollet-de-luc might use the
images as guides for restoration. The need for the restoration, however, was due not only to
weathering and age. The enlightenment, the French Revolution and the years that followed led
to both a neglect and a revolt against the religious dictums of the Catholic Church. Countless
churches were destroyed during the revolution, and later used as stone quarries to construct
3
secular buildings.
Churches that remained, such as Cathedral Notre Dame de Paris, were
defaced of certain elements, such as Notre Dame's central tympanum which contained a scene of
the last judgment. Victor Hugo (fig. 2), in his letter 'guerre aux démolisseurs'3 expressed the
ravages of the Revolution, declaring that "there was not one hour in France that some national
monument was not destroyed."4
Mission Héliographique came out of this, as a way to
counteract this national destruction. According to photo historian Eugenia Parry Janis, "Le Secq
was in complete accord with the Commission des Monuments Historiques' feeling of urgency in
protecting France's medieval patrimony.”5
From the late seventeenth-century until its culmination with the French Revolution, the
Enlightenment expressed sociopolitical as well as ideological frustrations caused by strong
opposition to the church. German idealism and Romanticism also came about, which presented
philosophies that counteracted the empirical models that the Enlightenment presented.
Although the enlightenment presented a new realm of reason and rationality, it went against the
faculties of the spirit.
As Novalis said about the age of the Enlightenment, "[i]t made
imagination and emotion heretical, as well as morality and love of art."6 Henri Le Secq's images
of Gothic Churches in France after the Revolution exist as a reawakening of this spirit that
became dormant during the age of reason. The romantic philosophers as well as the æsthetic
philosophers of the eighteenth and nineteenth century offer a basis of knowledge and a
foundation by which to ascertain the meaning of Le Secq's images within an æsthetic context.
Le Secq's mission sent him through France, and then northeastward, to the Alsace
region between France and Germany. He photographed numerous churches and cathedrals (fig.
3) in and around Paris, as well as Chartres Cathedral, Reims, the Cathedral Notre Dame of
Strasbourg, and in the regions of Champagne, Alsace and Lorraine.7 He documented views of
4
the entire churches, as well as detail images of the Saints that line the voissoirs of the archivolts,
(fig. 4) or elegant views of portal archways, or the high balustrade and lancets of a massive bell
tower. However, his images are far more than mere documents. His image of the portal of
Strasbourg Cathedral is a depiction of the massive strength of the church, which is contrasted by
elegant tracery, quatrefoils and the stained glass of the rose window. His image Amiens, 1852,
indicates the effects of quarrying the church for its stone that became so prominent after the
French Revolution.
Both images attest to an æsthetic which, according to Frederick von
Schlegel's writings on The Principles of Gothic Architecture, "allures and fascinates the soul…"8
In the photography of Henri Le Secq, light has become the method of reconstruction by
which the church is revisited. The Commission des Monuments Historiques must have, through
looking at his photographs, seen a church that is not only in need of restoration, but that is being
spiritually revived by Le Secq's powerful images. Quoting from Henri de Lacretelle's article in
La Lumière:
That which we would never discover by our own eyes, he has seen it for us…One
might say that the saint artists of the Middle Ages had foreseen photography…the
entire cathedral is reconstructed, course by course, with marvelous effects of sun,
shadow and rain. M. Le Secq makes this cathedral also his own monument.9
The photography of these churches act as a metaphysical reification; the light through Henri Le
Secq's lens becomes the spiritual substantiation of these holy bodies.
Henri Le Secq's image of the central portal of Strasbourg Cathedral's west façade in 1851
is an image of pure power and strength. (fig. 5) He employs a frontal locus for the image, where
the portal, with its tympanum and archivolts, intricately carved with statues within baldachins,
stands triumphantly in the bottom-center of the image. Above the door is a large pointed Gothic
arch, lined with finials. Intricate tracery of an openwork gablet extends upward from behind the
pinnacles of the arch toward a lintel. Above the lintel, there is a glorious rose window, also
5
delicately lined with intricate tracery. Le Secq frames the image so that exactly half of the large
rose window is in the image. On either side of the window are marmosets set in tabernacles atop
high, narrow buttresses. What is paramount in the image is the massive structure of the ecclesia.
The image of the façade has an upward thrust, as if the church rose to ascendancy out of the
ground.
Le Secq achieves a level of abstraction by way of what Gwyneth Anne Thayer calls his
practice of fragmentation, which "isolated foreground elements of the Gothic cathedral that went
unnoticed."10 However, it is not only the detail and foreground elements that are overlooked.
Rather, Le Secq's approach to photographing the cathedrals in 'fragments', in which the structure
is broken down into abstract principles, coincides with the ideas of French æstheticians of a
century prior, such as Yves-Marie André and Jean Baptiste DuBos. The new approach to
æsthetic theory was one in which the locus of the object and of the subject in some ways
"switched places". The object, which was thought of as that which exists externally, became
seen as important from the perspective of ourselves as the subject. The significance of this in Le
Secq's photograph of Strasbourg Cathedral is one in which the forms within the façade becomes
subject to that which William Henry Hayes Jr. calls the "only [sic] object which we know as it
actually is, our own consciousness, that is, the state of a subject."11
Le Secq's image of
Strasbourg is thus not a merely a document for the files of the Mission Héliographique; it
appears to be a record of the photographer's conscious experience of the church. And it is his
reliance on this as a source of his inspiration that puts the image on a level of abstraction that
predates modernism.12
Within the abstracted view of the façade is a rationality of geometric form. The Jesuit
scholar Yves-Marie André's æsthetics is formed through "[A] geometric beauty [which] forms
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the Creator's art, [and] which furnishes Him all the models for the marvels of nature..."13 There
is a core dialectic however in Le Secq's image between this type of geometric rationalism and a
strong emotive resonance. The concept in French æsthetics of cogito and affectus, states that
aesthetic judgments are made in a way in which cognition and emotion are 'fused'. This idea can
be applied to Le Secq's photograph of the façade; both aphoristically, as well as thought of as a
kind of dynamic tension.14
The German intellectual Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (fig. 6) studied in Strasbourg, and
had a great love for Strasbourg Cathedral.15 Goethe transferred to the University of Strasbourg
from Frankfurt to finish law school, where he met other great minds of his day, including
Novalis and the philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder. Goethe and his contemporaries were
involved in the movement of Romanticism, which, while not separate from the Enlightenment
itself, acted as a counterweight against the Enlightenment's cold rationality and rejection of the
spiritual. Goethe believed that the Gothic church is a tree that would take root in German soil.16
Goethe's essay Von Deutscher Baukunst expresses the romantic fervor of Strasbourg
Cathedral, and venerates the cathedral's master architect, Erwin von Steinbach. Le Secq's image
of Strasbourg's central portal is eloquently expressed in the following passage:
Diversify the overwhelming wall which you are to build toward heaven so that it
rises like a tall, sublime, wide-spreading tree of God, which, with a thousand
branches, millions of twigs and leaves as the sands of the sea, proclaims to the
country round about the glory of the Lord, its Master.17
The way in which Goethe's brilliant description of Strasbourg describes through aphorism the
intricate structure of the building is evocative of ekphrasis. His description of Strasbourg as a
kind of cosmic tree strengthens the notion of the church as the axis mundi. It also resounds the
enlightenment concept of man's relationship to nature. The enlightenment philosopher Friedrich
Wilhelm Joseph Schelling proclaimed that nature was the true objective manifestation of the
7
absolute.18 As such the Gothic church does not exist as a tabula rasa, but rather it is manifested
as that which is an expression of what truly and eternally exists; it is a cosmological
encapsulation.
And it was Kant's critical eye against the empirical onslaughts of the
enlightenment that "any system built on the tabula rasa must be false."19 The church does not
exist as stone and mortar, but rather it is a manifestation of the absolute eternal presence of God
that is there.
Henri Le Secq's image of Amiens Cathedral from 1852 (fig. 7) is taken from a vantage
point some twenty yards or so from the church at a three-quarter angle. The cathedral is rising
up from a mass of stone brick and rubble that clearly display the effects of quarrying that were
prevalent in post-revolution France. However, Le Secq's regenerative intentions to dignify and
lift Amiens Cathedral out of this morass of destruction are clear. The tall vertical buttresses
between each of the radiating chapels of the ambulatory arise out of the rubble. In between
them, slender and powerful lancet windows sit like refractors of holy light. Each window is
separated by a mullion and at the top there are triple trifoils. Above each of them is a small
gabled roof. Above the level of the ambulatory, the flying buttresses rise up vertically, and the
arch toward the clerestory and the central nave. At the top of each abutment as it rises out of the
ambulatory, there is a delicately formed finial that is topped with tabernacle pinnacles. Between
each flying buttress, there are large, tall lancet windows with triple mullions, topped with a six
lobed foil and an openwork gable. This portion of the image is seemingly where Le Secq
focused the sharpness of his lens, as it has the most detail, as well as richness of tone. The eye
follows the image from the tip of the gabled roof of the nave, at a downward angle toward an
enormous black spire, which rises all the way up out of the frame of the image. The triumphant
presence of this tenebrous and powerful pinnacle is a signification of the ferocious power of the
8
cathedral. The view of the north transept is represented so that the tone of the stone is the same
as the sky. Hence, the structure is only separated from its environment by what would be like
delicate line work in a pencil or metalpoint drawing. There is a thin line along the top of the
gabled roof that is adjoined with the side of the transept. Between the north wall and the
buttresses that circumnavigate the church, there is another wider lancet window. The light on
this section of the building appears to be a sunlit glow; as if the day was possibly somewhat
hazy, and yet the sun shone through in a way that illuminated the church in a heavenly glow.
Henri Le Secq's image of Amiens is situated at a time in French history in which
churches such as this were often forgotten, left to fall into disrepair, or in this case, used as stone
quarries in order to construct secular buildings. Forced secularization drove priests, monks and
nuns from religious life in convents and monasteries. During the reign of terror of 1793,
thousands of priests were imprisoned or beheaded in the guillotine.20 What Le Secq sees through
his lens is the aftermath of what occurred in this violent unleashing of anti-religious fervor.
The architectonics of the Gothic church are full of mathematical proportions and complex
geometry. In Frederick von Schlegel's writings on gothic architecture, he speaks of the "beauty
of proportion and exquisite symmetry"21 of the Gothic structure. This symmetry, as well as
coincidence between the rational and orderly is representative of the harmony that exists between
the mind and the soul. The idea that the rationality of the mind, as well as its true nature exists in
God is a Kantian principle; and æsthetically applied, the church, Amiens Cathedral, is a bridge
between God and man. As the priests which once inhabited the churches are the pontificate, or
ponte, as they act as a bridge between God and man, so are Le Secq's photographs a catalyst
which seem intended to resurrect the past when priests still celebrated mass in the holy ecclesia.
9
There is, within Le Secq's photographs, an emphasis on the surface of materials that is
brought about by abstracted or "fragmented" compositions. Within the subtle tonality of the
black and white image; devoid of form, shape, texture and color, this effect is accentuated. Le
Secq's method of making salt paper prints brings this abstraction out further, as the soft texture of
the paper inhibits the harsh extenuation of structure over light.
The light's effect on the
architectural features creates a liminal effect; the viewer feels attracted simultaneously to the
effects of luminosity directly on the light sensitive paper, as well as to the structure of the stone
itself. It is an awareness simultaneously of the factura present within the very substance of the
paper photograph and the solid substance of the church. In this quote from Jules Michelet in
Gwyneth Anne Thayer's Breathing Life Into the Gothic, there is a representation of church
through facture; in which Le Secq finds the core of spirituality in the stone:
For inert matter to become spirit, action, art, for it to become human and put on
flesh, it must be subdued, it must suffer. It must allow itself to be divided, torn,
beaten, sculptured, changed. It must endure the hammer, the chisel, the anvil,;
must cry, hiss, groan. This is its passion.22
This sense of suffering is ever present within the philosophy of the romantics. The labor of
quarrying, moving, carving and building these massive Gothic churches out of solid stone far
outweighs the suffering eventually caused by the violence of the French Revolution.
The
strength of the church is immensurable in contrast to anything destructive that anyone could
possibly bring upon it. Schlegel attests to the glorious achievement that is the construction of the
Gothic church:
The most striking characteristic of these old marble churches, is a manifest
struggle to attain and display the rich exuberance of fancy which so remarkably
distinguishes Gothic architecture, it being impossible to carry skill and delicacy of
workmanship to the same degree of perfection in marble as in the soft sandstone
of the north.23
10
Friedrich Schiller also believed in the importance of this kind of struggle discussed by Schlegel.
Schiller believed that suffering (πάυος) manifested dignity24, and that through suffering one sets
forth the sublime.
In the verticality, strength and austerity of Henri Le Secq's images of
Strasbourg and Amiens we find this dignity. It is clear that what are formally intended to be
documentary photographs capture something that is clearly of the spiritual and of the sublime.
Furthermore, it becomes evident that these images are meant to psychospatially "reconstruct" the
church, "by 'collecting' it carefully, if fragmentarily, in photographs."25
As the photographic image is the record of light which manifests the impression of an
image on paper, so do Henri Le Secq's images of Strasbourg and Amiens become more than a
record, but a reconstruction of these ecclesial edifices. The light that passes through the lens of
Le Secq's camera can be seen as a remembrance of what originally manifested the church into
stone. As Friedrich Schelling states that nature is the absolute, it is light that eternally feeds it,
and it is this eternal light that Le Secq's camera captures.
The fervent need for the revitalization, not only of the physical structure of these
churches, but of their spirituality exists in exigentia within these images. Henri Le Secq's
photographs are a brilliant capturing of what is truly spiritual about these massive structures.
The strength of his photographs act as a bastion against destructive forces that once threatened
the church during the French Revolution. This idea of the eternal spirituality of the church is
supported by the Romantic thinkers who defended the importance of spirituality during the
Enlightenment.
The destruction of the Gothic church was due to frustration of the church's association
with the Monarchy, with their ownership of land and with their greed. According to Gwyneth
Anne Thayer, "Cathedrals suffered execution, like kings, in symbolic punishment for ancient
11
crimes."26 However, the church is not merely a place of sociopolitical events. The church is a
place of the divine, and whatever may have transpired on earth, the true meaning of the church is
one which transcends the culpability of mankind to one another. According to Donald Dietrich,
"[t]he revitalized theological consciousness in the nineteenth century helped evolve perspectives
of the Church…"27 This revitalization is brought about most eloquently by Henri Le Secq's
photographs of the Gothic churches of France.
12
Bibliography
Dietrich, Donald J., The Goethezeit and the Metamorphosis of Catholic Theology in the Age of
Idealism. Berne: Peter Lang Publishers Ltd., 1979
Hayes, Jr., William Henry. French Aesthetic Theories, 1700-1750. Dissertation (Ph.D.)-University of California, Berkeley, 1967.
Herschman, Joel A. and William W. Clark. Un voyage héliographique à faire. The Mission of
1851: The First Photographic Survey of Historical Monuments in France. Flushing, NY:
Godwin Ternbach Museum at Queens College, 1981.
Parry, Eugenia, Henri Le Secq, and Josiane Sartre. Henri Le Secq, photographe de 1850 à
1860: catalogue raisonné de la collection de la Bibliothèque des arts décoratifs, Paris.
Paris: Musée des arts décoratifs, 1986.
Schlegel, Frederick von. Aesthetic and Miscellaneous Works of Frederick von Schlegel. ed. E.J.
Millington. London: Henry G. Bohn, York Street, Covent Garden, 1849.
Schwartz, Joan M.; Ryan, James R., Picturing Place: Photography and the Geographical
Imagination. London, New York: I.B. Tauris, 2003.
Thayer, Gwyneth Anne. Breathing life into the Gothic: Henri Le Secq's architectural
photography as a resurrection of the Medieval past. Thesis (M.A.)--University of Texas
at Austin, 1997.
Thomas, Calvin. The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller. New York: Henry Holt and
Company, 1901.
Von Kalnein, Wend. Architecture in France in the Eighteenth Century. New Haven and London:
Yale University Press, 1972.
Eugenia Parry Janis and Josiane Sartre, Henri Le Secq, photographe de 1850 à 1860: catalogue raisonné de la
collection de la Bibliothèque des arts décoratifs, Paris (Paris: Musée des arts décoratifs, 1986), 22.
2
Joel A. Herschman and William W. Clark, Un voyage héliographique à faire (Flushing, NY: Godwin-Ternbach
Museum at Queens College), 7.
3
French: "war on demolition."
4
Joan M. Schwartz & James R. Ryan, Picturing Place: Photography and the Geographical Imagination. (London,
New York: I.B. Tauris, 2003), 32.
5
Janis & Sartre, Henri Le Secq, 6.
6
As cited in Gwyneth Anne Thayer, Breathing Life into the Gothic: Henri Le Secq's architectural photography as a
resurrection of the Medieval past. (Thesis (M.A.)--University of Texas at Austin, 1997), 15.
7
Janis & Sartre, Henri Le Secq, 6.
8
Frederick von Schlegel, Aesthetic and Miscellaneous Works of Frederick von Schlegel, ed. E.J. Millington
(London: Henry G. Bohn, York Street, Covent Garden, 1849), 187.
9
Schwartz and Ryan, Picturing Place, 47.
10
Thayer, Breathing Life, 2.
1
13
11
William Henry Hayes Jr., French Aesthetic Theories. 1700-1750. (Dissertation (Ph.D.)--University of California,
Berkeley, 1967), 8.
12
Janis, Henri le Secq, 15. This idea relates to Eugenia Parry Janis' statement that "His unmistakable photographic
style also transcends the parameters of late romanticism with forms that seem wholly modern."
13
Hayes Jr., French Aesthetic Theories, 80. "un beau géométrique [qui] forme l'art du Créatur, [et] qui lui fournit
tous les modèles des merveilles de la nature, que nous allons considerer.”
14
ibid., French Aesthetic Theories, 2.
15
For more information on Goethe and Strasbourg, refer to Von Kalnein, Wend. Architecture in France in the
Eighteenth Century. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), 206.
16
Thayer, Breathing Life, 11.
17
Thayer, Breathing Life, 12.
18
See Dietrich, The Goethezeit, 25.
19
ibid., 25.
20
21
Schlegel, Aesthetic and Miscellaneous Works, 160.
Thayer, Breathing Life, 47.
23
ibid., 162.
24
see Calvin Thomas, The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1901), 276.
25
Janis & Sartre, Henri Le Secq, 7.
26
Thayer, Breathing Life, 7.
27
Dietrich, The Goethezeit, 10.
22