Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday
April 17-19, 2012
Beaune, Burgundy, France

The cold has settled in, although in Beaune it is a bit drier than Besancon to the northeast. This town of 22,000 is justly praised for its charm --which owes a lot to the friendliness of its residents, as well as to the wines for which it is justly famous. Of course, here too, the upcoming election takes up the front pages: the "Gazette" features Francois Hollande in a thoughtful poser, and gives him two pages to explain his program. In the 2011 legislative elections, the Socialist Party picked up one seat, the UMP, Sarkozy's party, one seat, and various left-leaning parties Divers Partis de Gauche (DVG), three seats

Yet the town of Beaune is a comfortable, affluent area, not naturally Socialist territory. This is born out by the legislative election results: Denis Thomas, the head of the local tourist office, won the seat for Sarkozy last year. Beaune is part of the administrative department of Beaune Nord, which includes the town, as well as fourteen other communes, including those that comprise the famous Burgundy terroirs of Mersault, Pommard, and Volnay, with their costly wines.

Beune's small size, and long history, may explain why it has remained unspoiled for so long: the pale buildlings, three stories high, recall the small towns on which Balzac based his multi-volume French saga, The Human Comedy. Steeped in French medieval history --when sumptuary laws forbade the wearing of rich fabrics by those not of a status high enough to wear the purple --Beaune shies away from display, preferring the quiet discretion of a style that is known in France as bon chic, bon genre --B.C.B.G. for short-- "good taste, good family background"

Beaune is also known for the Hospice de Beaune, the charity hospital founded by Nicolas Rollin and his wife Guigone, wealthy Bouguignons when Burgundy included the Netherlands and Belgium, along with the area that comprises modern Burgundy. The Hospice was the first charity hospital founded in France, the predecessor of the Hotel Dieu, as all such charity hospitals came to be called. The building boasts a large interior courtyard with polychromed roof tiles laid out in patterns. Inside are the hospital beds where the poor were nursed until they either returned to health or died. The nurses were nuns with winged wimples the size of a toy sailboat. They were active at the Hospice until the 1950s, when the Hospice was turned into a museum and a new hospital built.

Aside from the furniture and instruments used at the medical facility, and the decoration of the adjoining chapel, the Hospice is also in possession of several tapestries made in Tournai, Belgium in the beginning of the 1500s, at the very end of the Middle Ages. One of them tells the story of Saint Eloi (c.588-660) (Saint Eligius in English), the goldsmith who became counselor to Dagobert, King of the Franks. Saint Eloi gave up gold and jewels to advocate for the poor and subjected himself to many austerities --such as wearing a hair shirt underneath a simple monk's robe. The tapestry in the Hospice is a milllefleurs design five centuries old, but its colors, and the depiction of the principal figures in the story are fresh and engaging, along with the minor figures --pairs of rabbits, birds of different types-- woven into the flowered background.

This tapestry is found in the last room on view in the Hospice, named after Roger van der Weyden, whose masterpiece, the Beaune altarpiece --interior and exterior-- is displayed as two panels in order to display van der Weyden's work in all its glory. The subject of the front of the altarpiece --the part meant to be displayed for the edification of all who saw it-- takes at its subject The Last Judgment. Christ enthroned is topmost, surrounded by saints and prophets. Below, an angel holds in one hand a balance, the right side of which sinks from the weight of the heavy sins of the naked sinner standing there. The left side, in contrast, rises, on account of the lack of serious sin of the equally naked, but more spiritually perfect, sinner whose fate is also in the balance. Beneath this image, a band of --again-- naked men and women, progress in the direction of heaven --at the right of the painting-- or hell, on the left. At the extreme left, bodies are falling into a pit. Flames lick the exposed buttocks of one woman, who flies into the pit head first.

The back of the altarpiece is two panels, one depicting Saint Anthony, the other Saint Sebastian, done in grisaille; and a portrait each of Nicholas Rollin and Guigone. I realize that I am standing in front of two portraits I have seen in reproduction countless times since I first clapped eyes on them in my college art history class, and apprehend better the truth of Huizinga's observation in The Waning Of The Middle Ages that visual spectacle and pageant, organized by the powerful, were meant to edify the understanding of those subject to them. Each, whether participant or spectator, rich lord or servant, was part of the order of things deigned by God, and so interdependent and essential to the other.

In an age when it was rare for anyone to be able to read, images told a story powerfully and directly in language everyone could understand: at the Last Judgement you stand naked before God, your soul in the balance: if your sins are heavy you will find yourself on the road to hell, with the pit the final destination from which there is no escape. If you comply with God's wishes, at the last, you will be helped up to heaven to be near God and the company of his saints.

Nicholas and Guigone Rollin's patronage of Roger van der Weyden's commission for the Beaune altarpiece was an endorsement of that understanding of the world and follows the form of medieval patronage, with all its status hierarchies. The Hospice de Beaune however, gave birth to an idea, the charity hospital, that has outlived them, and which enjoys considerable public support as a particularly French institution.