Le Puy, the frontage

The frontage of the cathedral is drawn up with the top of a large staircase. It comprises five stages of architecture out of polychrome apparatus with stone decoration laid out like a mosaic, and coming from the careers of the area. Some wanted to see the origin of this ornamentation Mozarab in the considerable number of Spaniards who attended, at the Average Age, the pilgrimage with the black Virgin. Others allot it to the influence of the Cross ones.

With its Roman arches, this frontage belongs to the Romance style and can be dated from the end of XIIe century.

A staircase of 102 steps, which is continued under the porch, emerges under the nave. This staircase occupies all the width of the building during the first two spans, then narrows not to have but that of the principal nave more during the two following spans against the walls of which the doors out of carved wooden were placed, which were formerly on the frontage. (Wikipédia)

One called upon a Moorish influence for the polychromy of the frontage: the top is a black, white and red stone mosaic (three colors of alchemical large-work). Around each porch, the alternation of the black and white archstones does not answer only one preoccupation with an esthetics: they draw luminous rays which emanate from the interior of the building.

One can see in the opposition of the dark and clear stones the starter of the initiatory symbolic system of the black virgin Déesse of the life (white), maitress of dead (black) and the initiation which joins together the black and the white: darkness and the light, ignorance and knowledge.

Triple staging of the frontage returns to the trinity, but also to triple constitution of the man (body, heart, spirit), at the three stages of initiatory knowledge, the druidic triads, etc… (Derderian)