The Hospices de Beaune’s Flying Circus

I was lucky enough to spend this New Year in Burgundy, eating epoisses, drinking nice wine and so on and also catching my first glimpse of the light display which plays on the side of the venerable building each evening.

I have been to Beaune on numerous occasions but clearly have not been prowling around enough at night as the light display had escaped my notice until last week.

But with nights still falling early at the moment, when my companion and I pootled out of Athenaeum de la Vigne et du Vin around tea-time with our evening’s supplies, there was the Hôtel-Dieu covered in angels passing judgement on mankind.

The projections (for those of you like me that haven’t seen them) include a number of subjects, most if not all of them centred on the region’s rich medieval heritage when Burgundy was effectively an independent territory under its dukes.

There are displays featuring the town’s coat of arms, the famous red-upholstered beds in the hospital itself and centrifugally lambent patterns from various tapestries and illuminations that can be found in the Hôtel-Dieu.

Most fun of all is the fact that these are not simply flashed onto the building as one-note images but rather bits of them slide, pop and whizz into view from all angles courtesy of the wizardry of computers.

The best projection though is the one that includes the aforesaid angels from Rogier van der Weyden’s famous polyptyque, “The Last Judgement” (pictured above), which is the centrepiece of the museum now housed in the Hospices.

Painted between 1443 and 1450, it is a striking piece of late medieval art with, the archangel Michael at its centre under a rainbow, surrounded by heralds and overseen by Christ, weighing the newly resurrected dead in judgement, the saved heading to Heaven and the damned down to Hell.

The projection takes the figure of Michael and the red-robed heralds and spreads them a little wider with a backdrop of clouds, then there comes the impression they are then zooming downwards to Earth. Suddenly the ground appears beneath them and out from holes appear various figures looking either ecstatic or miserable.

Michael’s scales wobble judgementally and the heralds bob up and down on either side of him tooting their golden clarions. Judgement complete they disappear one at a time into the clouds and then so does Michael and the scene changes – to the great rejoicing of my companion and I.

It’s rather wonderful but comedy connoisseurs everywhere (as we two did) will instantly note the uncanny resemblance to the inspired lunacy of “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” and, of course, the cartoon madness of Terry Gilliam.

All we could have hoped for during the archangel sequence was for a giant foot to…