A restoration nearing completion at Saint-Sernin in Toulouse has shed light on the building sequence and the role of St. Raymond Gairard, credited by 15th- and 16th-century vitae with completing the "corpus" up to the windows before his death. New evidence suggests that Raymond's "corpus" included the inception of an ambitiously conceived tower façade and vestibule left unfinished in an unsuccessful post-Raymondine campaign to vault the nave in solid brick masonry. The correlation of different masonry types and footings with architectural carving such as bases, moldings, and capital styles, as well as masons' marks leads to the further conclusion that the choir with crossing and transepts was completed in several major campaigns, the last two of which were undertaken after Raymond's nave walls. If the Vita Raimundi excludes Raymond from participation in a "capitis membrum" as historians have believed, it either errs or uses "corpus" to denote the entire crossing and the nave together and "capitis membrum" to denote the crypt wall with its surrounding ambulatory. Whichever the case, the date of 1118 given for Raymond's death in the necrology is not consonant with the archaeological evidence, including the probable date of the transept sculpture toward 1100. Raymond, in this view, would have been most active between 1080 and 1100, the period suggested by primary documents, when he designed the ambitious five-aisled nave and west tower façade, and adopted exposed alternating stone and brick masonry to complete the transepts. The sculpture of Bernardus Gelduinus and the Porte Miègeville Master may both testify to his last active years.
Role of defects in fatigue damage mechanisms of cast polycrystalline superalloy MAR-M 247