Vie des saints au début du XIVe siècle dans les verrières démembrées de la cathédrale Saint-Nazaire de Béziers
Authors: Suau Jean-Pierre 
Published: December 2022

Lives of Saints at the Beginning of the 14th Century in the Divided Glass Walls of Saint Nazaire’s Cathedral in Béziers.

Since 1734-39, the new decorative display of the stain glass of the choir in Saint Nazaire’s cathedral in Béziers - which was entirely rearranged and adapted to new cults and tastes - has completely transformed the old gothic glass walls (dating from the beginning of the 14th and mid-15th centuries), which have been re-used as “raw material”. For decorative or economic reasons or for respect ? More particularly, the medallions which were part - at the beginning of the 14th century - of legendary glass walls displaying the lives of Christ and saints and whose subjects, which were cut out and scattered on purpose, have nowadays almost disappeared from the collective memory. After their mutilation, which was often uncontrolled, the scenes of the Lives of Saints have never been described and nobody even at least tried to identify them. Granted, it would be a difficult and tedious endeavour to describe them.

The aim of this study is, first, to try and locate in that huge iconographic jigsaw puzzle the thirty odd pieces of scenes that belong to some Lives of Saints ; to describe them as accurately as possible in a catalogue ; to suggest identifications likely to give an idea of the three original hagiographic cycles that are today entirely scattered in eight windows of the choir and, finally, to rehabilitate them in the history of southern France stain glasses. The largest of those cycles - by the number of pieces (17) that have been preserved - was naturally devoted, as in the old Saint Nazaire’s cathedral in Carcassonne to the two patron saints of the cathedral in Béziers, Nazaire and Celse. But, whereas this glass wall with legendary medallions had originally been put in the sanctuary, not far from the central window devoted to the Life of Christ (childhood and passion), two other hagiographie cycles, a lot less expanded, adorned the windows of the two northern chapels of the nave that had been built a few years after the choir. The shortest one (three pieces preserved) had been put in the small window of Saint Etienne’s chapel, in which the figurative programme devoted to the protomartyr had been cleverly completed by an imposing cycle, painted in a fresco by an Italian artist. Finally, the Life of Saint Eloi, adorned the stain glass of the - larger - window of the neighbouring Saint Eloi’s chapel (9 pieces). In spite of the mutilations, those numerous pieces of hagiographic scenes - miraculously preserved at a time when medieval satin glasses were not considered as an honour to sainthood - show well how, in the first years of the 14th century, beside the traditional and essential central stain glasses dealing with Christ, our region had remained loyal to longer cycles, which were at the time out of date in northern France buildings which were already widely endowed with that type of stain glass in the 13th century. In the cathedral in Béziers, those hagiographic cycles, which were more or less expanded, were meant to be put not only in the liturgical sanctuary - reserved to canons - but also in the lateral northern chapels of the nave, where they have contributed - as early as the beginning of the 14th century - to the teaching of clergymen and the faithful before becoming, in the first decennies of the 18th century, mere decorative ornaments of coloured glass which had been harmoniously reset in the new glass walls of the choir.