page_title: Vézelay Abbey
section_title: Lower compartments
hierarchical_section_title: Vézelay Abbey / Interpretation of the tympanum / Lower compartments
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Le tympan central du narthex (sculpté vers 1125-1130),détail: le Christ en gloire. Basilique Sainte-Marie-Madeleine de Vézelay.
context_page_description: Vézelay Abbey is a Benedictine and Cluniac monastery in Vézelay in the east-central French department of Yonne. It was constructed between 1120 and 1150. The Benedictine abbey church, now the Basilica of Sainte-Marie-Madeleine, with its complex program of imagery in sculpted capitals and portals, is one of the outstanding masterpieces of Burgundian Romanesque art and architecture. Sacked by the Huguenots in 1569, the building suffered neglect in the 17th and the 18th centuries and some further damage during the period of the French Revolution.
  The church and hill at Vézelay were added to the UNESCO list of World Heritage Sites in 1979.
  Alleged relics of Mary Magdalene can be seen inside the Basilica.
context_section_description: The lower four compartments of the Vézelay tympanum show the nations that had already received the Gospels.  They include the Byzantines, Armenians, and Ethiopians.  The inclusion of the Byzantines is particularly important because it was the Byzantines who initially requested a Crusade to the holy land.  The Byzantines had lost Jerusalem to the Seljuk Turks through warfare, and they were eager to seek western military support to reclaim that territory.
  The characters in the lower Vézelay compartments are regal and well proportioned.  They are a direct contrast to their "heathen" counterparts in the lintel.  They are human as opposed to monstrous.  In the eyes of the designers, they had received God's grace and are thus pictured as fully human in every detail.  These compartments can, therefore, can be seen as an allegory for the crusading nations.  The Crusader armies were made up of many different nationalities bound only by faith in the same God. Nations that had previously warred with one another were suddenly united for a common goal.  The lower tympanum compartments are an expression of this newfound solidarity.
caption: Detail of centre
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