A pale, chalky block of limestone sits on the floor of the Chapel of St. Martin in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. This is the story of where it came from, how it came to the Cathedral, who brought it there, and why it is an historic stone.
Behind and above the stone, a marble sculpture of St. Joan of Arc stands flush against the wall. Joan folds her hands in prayer. Her contemplative expression suggests that though her body is armored for battle, her mind is far away from the battlefield.
Perhaps she is listening for the voice of the archangel Michael, which she first heard as a child, as depicted in the window across from the sculpture.
Joan lived her last five months in a tower of the Château de Rouen, or Rouen Castle, held in chains while a rigged ecclesiastical court convicted her on charges of idolatry, heresy, and sorcery. There she spent her final hours before her execution.
The stone on the chapel’s floor was once part of this tower, now known as the Tour de la Pucelle (the Maid’s Tower).
Rouen Castle
Rouen Castle was built amid the conflict over control of the rich lands that would become the modern nation of France
In the twelfth century, most of western France was under the control of England’s Plantagenet kings (Henry II, Richard I, and John). In 1200, French forces under King Philip II, also known as Philip Augustus, began retaking the Plantagenet territory.
Once he had retaken Normandy, Philip built a massive castle in Rouen, the region’s principal city, as a defense against a return of the English. The castle, constructed between 1204 and 1210, had ten towers and was surrounded by a moat. Its round towers were the latest thing in castle building. According to Philip’s biographer: “No one contributed more to the introduction of round towers in castle design … Round towers, which were better designed to prevent damage from throwing engines or mining than rectangular towers, were the design of the future for castle architecture.”
Beginning in 1337, English and French forces fought one another in what became known as the Hundred Years War. In 1419, Henry V of England took Rouen after a six-month siege. He fortified the castle to withstand artillery fire and made it the base for his further campaigns. The English, in an alliance with the Duke of Burgundy, soon controlled much of northern France.
It was the regime of Henry V and his son, Henry VI, that Joan of Arc sought to overthrow. After some initial successes on the battlefield, she was captured by the Burgundians, sold to the English, and held at Rouen Castle from December 23, 1430, until her martyrdom on May 30, 1431.
The illustration above identifies two of the towers. Joan’s prison cell was in the smaller tower, the Tour de la Pucelle.
The donjon, the large central tower, was the castle keep. It is the only part of the castle to survive its demolition, which began in the late sixteenth century. Today, the donjon is a tourist attraction known as the Tour Jeanne d’Arc. Joan is known to have been in the donjon only once, to be threatened with instruments of torture.
The Tour de la Pucelle survived the demolition, at least in part, until the early nineteenth century. The illustration below, from the Bulletin des Amis des Monuments Rouennais (1910), gives 1809 as the date of its demolition.
The tower’s foundations remained in place until 1912, when a developer began to excavate the site to build an office building, as seen below:
Today, there is a plaque and relief carving of Rouen Castle above the modest entrance to the office building at 102 Rue Jeanne d’Arc. Inside, one may view a few stones from the foundations along with the remains of a well that once provided water for the tower.
102 Rue Jeanne d’Arc in Rouen, exterior and interior. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
How did a stone from the Tour de la Pucelle make its way from Rouen’s Place de la Pucelle to New York’s Amsterdam Avenue? Enter the members of the Joan of Arc Statue Committee.
The Joan of Arc Statue Committee
In 1909, a small group of civic-minded New Yorkers formed the Joan of Arc Statue Committee with the intention of raising a public monument to mark the quincentennial of Joan’s birth. (While there is no written record of Joan’s birth date, a long tradition has it as the Feast of the Epiphany, January 6, 1412.) The committee’s efforts would result in an equestrian statue of Joan on Manhattan’s Riverside Drive and, later, the sculpture in St. Martin’s Chapel.
The idea for a monument to Joan may have originated with John Sanford Saltus (1854-1922), the committee’s honorary president and primary source of funding for both statues.
Saltus (1854-1922) was a classic Gilded Age character. Heir to a steel fortune, he was a gentleman scholar, a connoisseur and patron of the arts, the sponsor of a fencing team, and a bon vivant with a passion for masquerade balls where his elaborate costumes always won first prize. A Francophile, Saltus had an abiding fascination with Joan of Arc, which he pursued by commissioning statues of her for cities in the United States and Europe.
It was Saltus who brought sculptor Anna Vaughn Hyatt to the committee’s attention. (This article identifies the sculptor by the name with which she signed her work prior to 1923, when she married Archer Huntington and became Anna Hyatt Huntington.)
The committee’s president and secretary were George Frederic Kunz (1856-1932) and Edward Hagaman Hall (1858-1936). Hall was a former journalist turned historian and preservationist. Kunz was an eminent mineralogist and Tiffany & Co.’s chief advisor on gemology. Kunz and Saltus were both active in the American Numismatic Society, where Kunz was a member and Saltus, a major benefactor.
Kunz and Hall were frequent collaborators. They were both officers of the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society. They had worked together to plan the Hudson-Fulton Celebration of 1909. In addition, Kunz and Hall were both officers of the Laymen’s Club of St. John the Divine. The guidebooks that Hall wrote for the Cathedral, and continuously updated, are still essential resources for anyone with an interest in its art and iconography
The Statue and the Stone
As the Statue Committee considered the form that the monument might take, Anna Hyatt was working in Paris on a sculpture of Joan that would become the basis for the bronze equestrian statue that now overlooks Riverside Drive at West 93rd Street.
It may have been destined that Hyatt (1876-1973) would become a renowned sculptor of animals, for her mother was an artist and her father a professor of zoology at Harvard University.
Hyatt studied sculpture at the New York’s Art Students League with Gutzon Borglum, among other instructors, and spent many days at the Bronx Zoo observing the anatomy of animals. In 1906 she traveled to Paris, where she worked on animal subjects for the next four years.
In 1910, she exhibited her equestrian statue of Joan of Arc at the prestigious annual exhibition known as the Salon. The following account of the work is from the catalog for an exhibition of her sculpture at Columbia University’s Wallach Art Gallery:
Anna Hyatt Huntington told stories about her long search for the perfect horse. Candidates were rejected because they were too small or too delicate. Finally, the artist found one massive enough … The monumental sculpted horse she exhibited at the 1910 Paris Salon was indeed astonishingly large. It proved, however, to be only an accessory to its rider, Joan of Arc. Clad in armor from head to toe, she rose from her steed to raise a weapon to heaven … Despite the Salon jury’s doubts about whether she could have executed the life-size sculpture all by herself, they awarded her an honorable mention.
J. Sanford Saltus saw Hyatt’s work at the Salon and recommended her to the Statue Committee, which commissioned her to proceed in 1913. The finished work follows its antecedent closely with some minor alterations. To ensure historical accuracy, Hyatt studied the armor in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Hyatt’s niece, Clara Hunter Hyatt, posed for the figure of Joan astride a barrel that stood in for the horse. The fire department of Gloucester, Massachusetts provided a horse to model for the magnificently muscular steed carrying Joan into battle.
Architect John van Pelt was commissioned to design the statue’s base of Mohegan granite from a quarry in Yorktown, New York. The same quarry supplied much of the granite for St. John the Divine, as Roger Murphy explains elsewhere on the Divine Stone site: https://divinestone.org/blog/mohegan-golden-granite/
Meanwhile in Rouen, builders were laying plans to construct an office building on the site of the Tour de la Pucelle. By this time, only the tower’s foundations were intact. When the news reached Kunz in 1912, he contacted the owners of the property.
The property owners put Kunz in touch with Jean de Beaurepaire, who was conducting an archaeological survey of the site prior to demolition. Beaurepaire was a nephew of Charles Robillard de Beaurepaire, an eminent historian of Rouen and the author of a study of Joan’s heresy trial. Beaurepaire ultimately salvaged many of the stones and arranged for 229 limestone blocks to be shipped to New York in 1914.
Some of the stones – it is unclear how many – were incorporated into the statue’s base. The base also incorporates a stone from Reims Cathedral, where Joan stood alongside Charles VII at his coronation as the rightful king of France. The finished base bears an inscription with the particulars of Joan’s birth and death. On the day I stopped by, a previous visitor had adorned the base with a rose of red, the liturgical color of martyrdom.
At least one of the stones from Rouen made its way to St. John the Divine. In the Cathedral’s archives, I came across a copy of the committee’s press release for the dedication of the statue in 1915. At the bottom of the page is a handwritten note from Hall to a Mr. Nash (presumed to be Rev. E. Briggs Nash, the Cathedral’s Canon Sacrist 1914-1921): “Would the Cathedral like to have one of these JOA stones for the floor of the French chapel?”
The Cathedral apparently agreed to the offer, because in December 1915, Kunz sent a typewritten letter to Dean William Grosvenor confirming the stone’s authenticity, stating:
It will be a most interesting object in the French chapel, either in its natural condition or worked up into the pedestal of the statue of the Maid which, I understand, is sometime to adorn one of the niches of the arch.
Kunz added a postscript in his own hand: “Dr. Hall will select the finest piece that we have suitable for your purposes.”
The historic stone in St. Martin’s Chapel preceded the statue of Joan by six years. It was not until May 1921 that the Cathedral’s Committee on the Fabric received a letter from Kunz, who wrote on behalf of the Statue Committee to offer a gift of a sculpture of Joan for the chapel, “the statue to take the form of a kneeling figure facing one of the walls of the chapel.”
Hyatt was retained to create the sculpture, which she completed in 1922. The posture and placement proposed by Kunz was reconsidered after consultation with architect Ralph Adams Cram. This time Hyatt’s model was Renee Weill, a dancer with the ballet troupe of Michel Fokine. Joan’s face is Hyatt’s idealization. The idea of incorporating the stone into the statue’s base was abandoned in favor of leaving it be, though with one corner slightly chiseled down.
The roughly-cut stone – such a contrast to the chapel’s sleek stone surfaces – may be the closest we will ever come to having a tangible connection to Joan’s earthly life. Due to the nature of her death, there are no genuine relics of Joan’s person. Strictly speaking, the stone probably does not qualify as a relic. There is no evidence that Joan ever touched it or that the randomly-selected stone was once in her cell (as the chapel’s signage has it).
Nevertheless, some visitors sense an aura of holiness around the stone. It affects not only the faithful but even the irreligious. When I bring visitors to the chapel and explain the stone’s significance, they are often visibly moved. Some reach out to touch it, as medieval pilgrims might have done in the presence of a sacred object.
Six hundred years after her death, Joan’s story continues to fascinate, judging from the torrent of historical, novelistic, artistic, dramatic, and cinematic works about her. There are still many who might agree with the opinion expressed by Mark Twain, one of her greatest admirers, that Joan of Arc was “easily and by far the most extraordinary person the human race has ever produced.”
Thanks to diocesan archivist Wayne Kempton for access to the archival sources consulted for this article.
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Sources
Publications: Butler, Declan. “Joan of Arc’s relics exposed as forgery, Nature, April 5, 2007 ● Bradbury, Jim. Philip Augustus: King of France 1180-1223 (London: Longman, 1998) ● Farmer, David Hugh. The Oxford Dictionary of Saints (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978) ● Higonnet, Anne. Goddess, Heroine, Beast: Anna Hyatt Huntington’s New York Sculpture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014) ● Sypher, Francis J., Jr. Strangers & Pilgrims: A Centennial History of the Laymen’s Club (New York: The Laymen’s Club, 2012) ● Twain, Mark. Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989) ● “Joan of Arc Statue Here,” New York Times, December 8, 1922. Digital Sources: Donjon de Rouen site https://www.donjonderouen.com/histoire/ ● NYC Department of Parks & Recreation site https://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/riverside-park/monuments/819 ● Newman Numismatic Portal – Saltus bio https://nnp.wustl.edu/library/PersonDetail/1702 ● Salmagundi Club – Saltus bio https://salmagundi.org/comedy-and-tragedy-the-life-of-john-sanford-saltus/ ● Les secrets de Jeanne site https://www.jeannedomremy.fr/ ●Syracuse University – Anna Hyatt Huntington Papers http://library.syr.edu/digital/guides/h/huntington_ah.htm Cathedral Archives: Joan of Arc Statue Committee Press release, December 4, 1915, and dedication pamphlet, December 6, 1915 ● Letter from George Kunz to Dean Grosvenor, December 13, 1915.● Letter from George Kunz, May 24, 1921. ● Letter to Dean Morton re model for Joan of Arc statue, February 27, 1990. ● Minutes of the Committee on the Fabric 1915-1922.
One reply on “The Joan of Arc Stone”
Nicely done