Saint-Maclou Church and the breakout of flamboyant gothic architecture

The charred site of Joan of Arc’s execution had barely cooled when northern France ignited a fiery new style of gothic architecture. Now, I’m not saying they’re related. But you don’t cheat death as many times as I have by putting stock in coincidence. And while there are plenty of possible origins of the flamboyant gothic style, Saint-Maclou Church in Rouen seems as significant a spark as any.

Across northern France, the flamboyant style licked the cathedrals of Rouen and Bayeux – but never engulfed them. Saint-Maclou Church was an exception. Built in a parish devastated by the Black Death and in the wake of the burning at the stake of Joan of Arc in Rouen’s Old Marketplace, Saint-Maclou Church was among the earliest built entirely in the flamboyant style.

…in the porch of St. Maclou at Rouen the sculptured flames burst out of the Hades gate, and flicker up, in writhing tongues of stone, through the interstices of the niches, as if the church itself were on fire.

So writes English art historian John Ruskin in The Nature of Gothic. Rouen’s flamboyant gothic architecture, named for its flame-like tracery, provided Ruskin a good example of naturalism – one of his six elements of gothic architecture. Neither wholly bad nor entirely good, the gothic architect “makes the fire as like real fire as he can”. As capable of ruination as it is of purification.

As Ami Ronnberg and Kathleen Martin observe in The Book of Symbols:

In myth as in reality, fire […] often destroys so that from the purified residue or ashy essence a new world may come into being.

For the English who ruled Rouen at its ground-breaking, maybe the flamboyant Saint-Maclou stood for the destruction of heretical ideas. For the French who had reclaimed the region by its completion, they may have meant the chance to start over. There is, as they say, no smoke without fire.

In any case, why is it so cold inside? In the column of light falling from the lantern tower, my breath fogs in the cold. The only warmth comes from the flames winding the staircase next to the organ case. Behind her desk, the lone custodian huddles beneath coat and scarf.

Writing in his book Normandy, Its Gothic Architecture and History, F. G. Stephens notes:

As is the case with many Flamboyant churches, the interior of St. Maclou does not rival the exterior in beauty.

If you’re in the area, the Musée Le Secq des Tournelles in Rouen holds a collection of fire-wrought iron items in a 16th-century church. And if you’re in the mood, cathedrals in Chartres, France, and Burgos, Spain, feature flamboyant gothic elements to varying degrees.