Walking down the wide, poplar tree-lined path that leads through what is now a sort of jardin, I couldn’t help but notice that the place had not changed in the hundred years since Van Gogh painted this tableau, maybe (probably, no, without a doubt) longer. The Roman sarcophagi lining both sides of the avenue lay empty, raided and desecrated by tomb-thieves throughout the centuries that came before.
It was once said that miracles happened here, ones caused by the beheaded civil servant-made-saint, Saint Genesius, who was entombed here after refusing to write the Roman law of Christian persecution in 250 AD. Then, for a few centuries at least, from the 4th until probably the 12th centuries, this was the place in France, if not one of the very few in Europe, to be buried. Devout Christians had their stone coffins and remains shipped down the Rhône to be laid to rest here. The monks of Arles escorted the departed from the docks to their final resting place.
But things change, as all things do. The stone sarcophagi, once emptied, were taken to build Arles, and the ones that remained were stacked and tossed neatly on either side of the avenue where they sit to this day.
Saint-Honorat, the only church building of the nineteen that used to be here, still stands, empty, devoid of both life and death. In the day, its tower held an eternal lantern to light the way, for both the living and the dead. Now, there is a real quiet beauty here, in the architecture of this space. Rounded arches made of heavy stone intersect above, while the stone floor is sunken in places with puddles of water. This place begs, no demands, a kind of quiet and thoughtfulness that is rarely, if ever, felt in modern architecture.
Painting: Les Alyscamps a Arles by Van Gogh
From French to English
le jardin: the garden
le tableau: the painting
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Tags: arles, les alyscamps, provence, romanesque architecture
