Robert (1100-1159) is Saint Robert of Newminster because he became the first abbot of the Abbey of Newminster in Northumberland (see map below) in 1138 and died there in 1159, after which time his tomb received many pilgrims and effected many miracles, resulting in his eventual sainthood.
Ho hum. But wait! He’s going to play a part in an interesting play I’ll call The Gaze, and if you are scratching your head over this one, let me lead you gently on. “The Gaze” is a late-twentieth-century buzzword that was first used as such by the French philosopher Michel Foucault to discuss power relationships established via visual accessibility, notably as realized in prison design (1975). Later, c. 1997, Jacques Derrida took up the baton in his studies of human/animal relationships. This buzzword is a lovely onomatopoeic; you can draw out the zzzzz sound just as though you were letting your gazzzzze linger over whatever or whomever it is you’re obsessed with, and it’s a bit aggressive, just like you as you visually appropriate your innocent subject, or like the bee that burrows into irresistible pollen. And, as you might imagine to be the case with such a topic, “The Gaze” is simply a new spin on an ancient question. Before Foucault and Derrida, Jean-Paul Sartre used the French term “regard” to study concepts of self and other; before Sartre, Edmund Burke (1729-1797) needed the Gaze to establish his Sublime and Beautiful (more on that below). And before Burke, Bernard of Clairvaux (1091-1153) used terms like mirandus and conspectus to problematize monks’ views of cloister capitals in his Apologia of c. 1125. It behooves me to stop there, but you can find a million other examples. For this essay, this term will be linked to melancholy (the sweet kind), the irrational, the sublime and the picturesque. Essentially, the idea of The Gaze is grounded in visual ownership. The images we dwell on become the clay of our sculpting minds. We are just too damned creative for the good of others.
Our man Robert was a Cistercian monk, and his story is tied to that of Bernard of Clairvaux, who was the most famous of Cistercian monks. We’ve looked briefly at three monastic stories so far: Simeon Stylites (Weeks 1 & 2), who exemplified the monk as hermit/spectacle during the early development of monasticism; Saint Scholastica, the sister of Benedict (Week 6) who established the rules of the Benedictine Order; and Saint Riquier and the Carolingian monasteries of the ninth century (Weeks 16 & 17). It is from this last period that we have our first traces of architectural evidence related to monasteries, a drawing from c.900 of the Benedictine abbey of Saint Gall. And here, a quick vocabulary detour. All abbeys are monasteries, but not all monasteries are abbeys. Monasteries can be loosely organized groups of monks or nuns, but abbeys must contain an “order” recognized by the pope, and be ruled by an abbot or abbess. The drawing of Saint Gall is a remarkable document, showing a fully-developed abbey with everything neatly labeled. In addition to the essentials; the church, dormitory, refectory or dining hall, and kitchen, we see the support buildings, such as guest quarters, the hospital, and the industrial buildings. All was arranged to ensure that monastic life ran like a clean machine, and variations of this layout were used over and over through the centuries by all orders associated with the Benedictine Rule.
In the late-eleventh century, the Cistercian Order was born of a rebellion against the Abbey of Cluny, which had become as an international corporate power. Established in 909 in Burgundy, it grew over a 200-year period to become the first Benedictine order to control multiple abbeys from a central location. It became one of the three largest church buildings in the West: Saint Peter’s in Rome and Canterbury in England were the others. Cluny was a monastery of wealth and culture; column capitals reflect musical themes that were part of renowned experiments in polyphony, and its library was a destination for many scholars.
A reform movement was looming in the wings in opposition to the successful Clunaics, and in 1075 a Robert who is not ours left Cluny with a few Clunaic buddies to move to the woods, always a sure bet for recovering the simple life. Unfortunately, his bid for isolation proved too popular an idea, his monastic retreat was overcome with others wanting to join him, and in 1098 he decamped yet again to the marshy valley of Cîteaux, which gave its name to the Cistercian Order of monks, an order that sought to restore the purity of the Benedictine Rule in isolated locations. History is made by personalities, and we now witness one of those hinge points linked to a personality, Bernard of Fontaines (1091-1153), who became the famous Saint Bernard of Clairvaux. Bernard, a noble, came to Cîteaux in 1112 with thirty other noblemen, all looking for a career shift, and three years later he decamped to the valley of Clairvaux with twelve monks to create what would become the center of the new order. His fame was due to his zeal, in this case the zeal of someone who had lived in great privilege all his life and was now embracing a powerful conversion to poverty. His bid for reform was a huge success. By the time he died in 1153 he was responsible for 343 Cistercian monasteries, and by the end of the thirteenth century there were at least 742 monasteries and as many nunneries established throughout Europe.
Bernard is forever linked to architecture, as is his contemporary, Abbot Suger of Saint Denis in Paris. Suger, who had grown up in poverty but had been able to attend the same monastery school as the French kings, promoted bling and light: jewel-encrusted reliquaries, stained glass windows, and structural experiments that led to large openings for that stained glass, and to what we call “Gothic” architecture. Bernard promoted simplicity and order, and his Purity Promotion Campaign is perhaps nowhere more strident than in his Apologia 29 (c. 1125), a treatise that rails against architectural decoration with words that reveal his own fascination with same. The Apologia relates to the twentieth-century Gaze in that it claims the monks will appropriate and thus be corrupted by the sculpted figures on the cloister capitals. “What is that ridiculous monstrosity doing, an amazing kind of deformed beauty and yet a beautiful deformity...everywhere so plentiful and astonishing a variety of contradictory forms is seen that one would rather read in the marble than in books…”. And he continues in a detailed description of the offending figures. Art historians have had a field day with the Apologia.
Bernard’s monastery foundation at Clairvaux became the “capital city” of the Order, meaning that once a year, representatives from all the other Cistercian monasteries traveled there to deliver their annual reports and discuss plans for the coming year. But Clairvaux was also built as a physical model to be copied, and in the case of Fountains Abbey in England, which I now reveal as the main topic of this story, Bernard sent his architect/monk Geoffrey d’Aniane to England with plans of Clairvaux to be used for the construction of the new abbey. The architectural elements of the Cistercian model are best summarized in negatives. NO stained glass, only grisaille (grey tinted glass), NO figural representation on column capitals, NO fancy floor decorations; either packed dirt of the simplest of tiles, NO rounded chevets (the eastern end of the church, which was typically rounded in plan), NO paint. NO visual distractions, thank you very much; all was to facilitate meditation. The only Gaze allowed was the one that connected your navel to God.
By now, you’re probably wondering where our man Robert of Newminster went, so let’s get back to him and to the middle part of the story. Robert was a young monk at the Cistercian abbey of St. Mary’s in York, and he took part in a rebellion there in 1132, when he, eleven of his brethren, and the Archbishop Thurston were barricaded in the church for their critique of the abbot and their demands for reform. After they were released, the archbishop led the twelve monks to his palace for three months to lick their wounds, and then north to his estates at Ripon, where he gifted them a wilderness in a river valley. This site would become Fountains Abbey, growing in tandem with the abbey of Rivaulx; the two would become the largest and most powerful Cistercian monasteries in England. The wilderness site at Ripon was every Cistercian’s dream, a place remote from the distractions of urban life, with plentiful natural resources and the possibility of agricultural and/or industrial development.
Fountains was built in three stages, like many other monasteries. At its foundation in 1133 it was an assembly of wooden buildings. By 1136 the stone structures had been erected, and after a fire c. 1146 it was rebuilt to its final form…until…Henry VIII, another of these hingepoint characters, comes along and dissolves all the monasteries in England, Wales, and Ireland beginning in 1534. Fountains was sold as part of a 500-acre parcel to a merchant who then re-sold it to a Stephen Proctor in 1598. Proctor freely borrowed from his newly-acquired “quarry” to build the residence he called Fountains Hall.
Our man Robert didn’t spend much time at Fountains with his fellow reformers. He moved on to Newminster Abbey in 1138, where he was hired as abbot and where he lived until his death in 1159. Now I will exit Robert stage right, but thank him, as he has proved useful as the launching pad for my examination of The Gaze.
Fountains Abbey, even as it was in the twelfth century a massive complex of buildings and a powerful motor of the medieval economy, was also an expression of architecture as a vehicle for meditation as defined by Bernard of Clairvaux, and it essentially guarded its form as such until Henry’s Dissolution, after which time it gradually became what we call “a ruin,” giving up its parts to other buildings. Then, starting in the eighteenth century, it became a pawn in a new game of The Gaze, its identity defined and argued over by those who looked at it. To follow its trajectory, we must first return to the fifteenth century, when a great estate sitting adjacent to Fountains Abbey entered into the Mallory family and was given the name Studley Royal. The two estates sat peacefully side by side for a few centuries, and then the action picked up when John Aislabie, disgraced in a Ponzi scheme, retreated to Studley Royal and began to develop gardens there. John (1670-1742) subscribed to early-eighteenth century views of Gothic architecture, and he was among the first of the great English land-owners to incorporate a Gothic ruin into his landscape plans, the ruin being Fountains Abbey. It didn’t matter that he didn’t own the property; the abbey sat moldering in its valley and John found a way to feature it in the views he had crafted on his grand property.
The Sublime and the Beautiful. John lived at a time when these words mattered, and when Gothic architecture in England was entering a phase of complexity it never dreamed of in its infancy. In the mid-eighteenth century, Gothic architecture was linked to concepts of the Sublime, as defined by Edmund Burke: rough, untamed, irrational, capable of arousing soothing melancholy (those last two words alone are something to chew on!). Such powerful images can’t exist in a vacuum, and, you guessed it; our antagonist is Classical architecture, which personified The Beautiful: harmonious, smooth, regular, rational…The concept package is not a bad one; we need both in our lives like we need both sides of our brains, and eighteenth-century England found the perfect marriage in the landscape paintings of artists like Claude Lorrain (1600-1682), whose subjects were classical ruins in natural settings. The Temple of Vesta at Tivoli was a favorite. And because these paintings were “pictures,” the term “Picturesque” came to mean any scene, painted or real, which invited you to enter mentally into a state of contemplation on human nature. The Brits were hardly the first to come up with this idea; tenth-century Chinese painters and poets had already figured out the benefits of this mental exercise, but that’s another story…
John Aislabie began his work at Studley Park when the concepts described above were in vogue, and he is credited with creating “…one of the most spectacular scenic compositions in England” in his manipulation of the waters of the little River Skell (Hussey). In his re-engineering of the river, he was no different than Robert and his fellow monks who diverted the water to suit their needs—both were concerned with health—John for a mental health that derived from contemplation of the Picturesque, and the Cistercians for their physical and economic health, placing their latrines and infirmaries directly over the river and diverting the water elsewhere to ensure a well-functioning mill or to facilitate the production of the wool they sold. John is also credited for being one of the first to appreciate the Gothic as an element in the landscape and for breaking with earlier formal landscape designs à la Versailles. But he was also from an age when the Picturesque required primarily Classical buildings in a pristine state to contrast with the “wildness” of the nature that surrounded them, so he dutifully added miniature classical temples at critical viewpoints.
John died, his son William inherited, and in 1768 he purchased the Fountains Abbey grounds, and began to paint his own picture of the Picturesque. For William, the Gothic style, while desirable, was still a bit suspect, so he had the abbey “cleaned up.” He cleared away all the offending shrubs and trees that had grown up through the cracks, removed broken tracery from the windows, messed about with the stones to level the ground, and even installed a “…mutilated heathen statue” in the nave. This last remark from the critic William Gilpin, who summed up his essay by saying, “The very idea of giving finished splendor to a ruin is absurd.” William also added new points of interest; one of the best known is “The Surprise View from Anne Boleyn’s Seat.”
By this time the word “sublime” had come fully into use (Edmund Burke gave it official status in his book of 1757 on the Beautiful and the Sublime), and Gothic was headed off the rails. Gothic ruins became as popular as barbeque grills are today, and they were useless unless they were broken shells. Everyone sought to create a set scene of The Primitive State; even classical temple follies were built with unpeeled logs for columns.
And, lest you forget the rule of mutatis mutandis, or “having changed what needs to be changed,” the Gothic would transform yet again, in the late eighteenth century, into a style that was now rational. It was a style with structural and moral rules, a style to be taken seriously, elevated to the national style of England, and soon to be associated with the design of university campuses all across the United States in imitation of the Gothic buildings at Oxford and Cambridge. John Ruskin’s enormously popular Seven Lamps of Architecture, first published in 1849, is your best guide to this shift. Among the seven lamps: sacrifice, truth, power, beauty, life, memory, and obedience. You get the drift.
And so it goes. Fountains Abbey was created to facilitate meditation on simplicity, then by turns became a symbol of the irrational, of “unrestrained licentiousness” (the critic Gilpin again), and then, of structural clarity and of the British national spirit. All thanks to the creative will of the human mind.
The Studley Royal estate gradually became public; it was purchased by a county council in 1966, became a National Trust site in 1983, and then a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1986. Today it is a park, and you too may experience the Surprise View of the abbey from Anne Boleyn’s seat.
Did anyone notice that I’m a week late on this one? I hope to get back on schedule with next Monday’s essay! If you’d like to subscribe and receive these essays automatically in your e mail inbox, please click subscribe. Thank you!
References for Weeks 22 & 23: Robert
Websites:
Studley Royal Park as part of UNESCO: https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/372/
Books and articles
Please note that sources listed here may be available in more recent editions.
Braunfels, Wolfgang. Monasteries of Western Europe: The Architecture of the Orders. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972.
Hussey, Christopher. English Gardens and Landscapes 1700-1750. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1967.
Kinder, Terryl N. Cistercian Europe: Architecture of Contemplation. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002.
Rudolph, Conrad. “Bernard of Clairvaux’s Apologia as a Description of Cluny, and the Controversy over Monastic Art,” in Gesta, Vol. 27, No. 1/2, 1988: 125-132.
Thacker, Christopher. The History of Gardens. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979.
Thompson, Sarah. “Recycling Ruins: The Critical Reception of John Aislabie’s Work at Fountains Abbey and the Changing Functions of the Gothic,” in Third Text, Vol. 25, No. 6, (2011): 675-686. DOI: 10.1080/09528822.2011.624352.