Field Trip!

Yesterday my art history class took a field trip! We went to Lescar, a small town just outside of Pau, to see the cathedral and several examples of medieval art. There was much more to see though, Lescar used to be a walled city and a lot of the wall is still there, so we could walk out on the ramparts and see an amazing view! The bishopric is very close to the cathedral, but it is in ruins now. Lescar is famous for being a stop on the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostella, and the pilgrims would stay at the bishopric when in Lescar. Even today there are a few houses in the city where people making the pilgrimage can stay! Outside the bishopric there is a small square where several Gallo-Roman sarcophagi lie open (and empty of course). Clearly the graves were robbed at some point but it definitely makes me wonder what the people would have thought of them back in the middle ages, and why no one ever moved them but just left them lying around!

The cathedral was interesting from the outside. It is not an enormous or magnificent cathedral, there are no sculptures on the outside or anything, but it was built using many different colors of pink, orange, and yellow stone. It was also rebuilt by Gaston Febus, the same man who built the chateau de Pau, after the ceiling collapsed and he ordered the cathedral built much higher so you can see changes in the building materials. Inside the cathedral looked brand new! It had a gorgeous organ and there were two very richly decorated side altars, they're  not big enough to call them chapels. Just behind the altar there is a special plaque where a king of Navarre was buried. All around the side aisles you can see other headstones in the floor of people who were buried there! There were also mosaics in the floor beside the altar, and an enormous mural! It was a very different cathedral than any others I'd ever been to, but it was still amazing to see. This one had the feeling that it was actually used as a church by the townspeople, it wasn't just some pretty thing to look at.

Our teacher had us look at a lot of things outside the cathedral as well. (We were in teams doing a sort of scavenger hunt :p) The only sculptures outside the church were on the modillons (I don't know the word in English) which rest underneath the eaves of the roof and against the top of the wall, to hold up the overhang of the roof. Typically these are sculpted with mythological beasts, a lot of the ones at this cathedral were rather violent. There was one that we thought looked like Miss Piggy until we noticed she was eating a tiny person. Also outside the church, not necessarily art but still very interesting, you could see tacherons (again don't know the word in English), which are marks that stonemasons would make on each stone they cut, and at the end of each day they would be paid based on how many stones with their marks were used.

The trip was a great little piece of local history, definitely not something you'd see on the normal tourist route!