For most of the 14th century the Catholic papacy took up residence in Avignon. This all had to do with French king Philip IV getting in a deadly spat with Pope Boniface VIII. While Rome was in bickering chaos, Philip was bent on centralizing the church. The next seven popes made Avignon their base where Benedict VII built a palace “on the rock of Doms” and Clement VI built a palace because he wanted to do one better. Together the palaces form the largest Gothic building of the Middle Ages.
I’m not sure what exactly I expected visiting this site. Certainly not the Vatican, nor Chartres or Notre Dame. I guess I thought it would be sort of a fortress church made out of granite. And it is all that, but what I wasn’t prepared for was its latest incarnation as an exhibition space.
So in we go to the palace and it’s not too crowded since the weather is cold and windy and it’s Tuesday. (There were a few clustering tourist groups, but I hardly noticed them because, still as marble statues surrounding their guide, they didn’t swarm.) Most of the palace is made up of big empty stone rooms. Some of the rooms were counting houses; some had treasure hidden underneath the granite slabs making up the flooring.
Other rooms held banquets, and others were tricked out for ceremonial pomp. None of this was readily visible, but we were given tablets that, when waved around, filled in the spaces with their original adornments.
But, as I’ve indicated, the vacant palatial rooms are now an exhibition space. They might be empty of any 14th century furnishings, no matter, what was on display was the “thunder rage” of the angry feminist artist Miss. Tic.
And not in just one room, but throughout the place. Miss. Tic (whose real name was Nadhia Rovat) grew to Parisian prominence in the 90s with street art showing stencils of provocatively silhouetted woman accompanied by a poetic political statement.
In one giant echoing hall where once Catholic popes held house, Miss. Tic had a line of posters acknowledging famous independent.women. And who else should be there staring me down, but Simone!
“What did you expect,” Simone scoffed, “a papal blessing? Not even Catholics want to recognize the popes who hid out here in the 14th century while the plague swept through Europe. And later, during the French Revolution, it became a large torture chamber. There’s nothing sacred about this place that an artist couldn’t improve.”
Perhaps, Simone. I can appreciate bare ruined choirs where now the artists reign, or at least try to draw attention, but from what I’ve seen in the people trooping through the Palace of the Popes and staring at the vaulted arches high above the postered art, monuments to power, either religious or political or both, still hold sway.
