Clement Chapel (Trechtingshausen)
The Clement Chapel near Trechtingshausen is a late Romanesque church building on the Middle Rhine . The Clement Chapel has been part of the UNESCO World Heritage Upper Middle Rhine Valley since 2002 .
Location and building history
The former parish church and today's cemetery chapel, consecrated to St. Clemens , is located approx. 1 km south of the village at Reichenstein Castle, directly on the banks of the Rhine. The church was built in the second quarter of the 13th century and has remained largely unchanged. The date of the consecration and the builder are obviously not recorded. At the time of construction, the "Sprengel St. Clemens" was owned by the Imperial Abbey of Kornelimünster . The most important later changes are the Gothic tracery windows on the transept and apse and an equally Gothic corner branch on the tower. During the last renovation at the end of the 20th century, u. a. the colored exterior plaster reconstructed.
investment
The building is a three-nave flat-roofed pillar basilica with a short nave, aligned transept , round apse and asymmetrical west tower. The interior of the transept and choir stand out from the nave with a significantly richer architectural design such as ribbed vaults and circular services with shaft rings and show early Gothic style elements. An eight-part ribbed vault, similar to that of St. Peter's Church in Sinzig, rises above the crossing to form a dome . Fragments of medieval frescoes have been preserved in the apse vault and in the north aisle. The color of the architectural elements inside was reconstructed after 1945.
The exterior structure is also relatively complex with pilaster strips and arched friezes. The narrow height on the side aisles forces the arched friezes to "crawl" over the windows. The tower is octagonal on the upper floors and has windows as narrow as loopholes. There is a six-part rose window in the west gable. Characteristic of the Rhenish Romanesque are the cloverleaf-shaped upper clad windows , as they are numerous on the Middle and Lower Rhine.
Furnishing
The most notable pieces of equipment include five rows of benches from choir stalls from the early 16th century with z. Some figurative carvings and misericords . The rest of the church stalls are neo-Gothic and date from the 19th century. In addition, there are few tombstones and epitaphs from the 15th to 17th centuries.
Michael's Chapel
To the south of the Clement Chapel is a late Gothic chapel, which is dated to the early 16th century. It probably originally served as an ossuary . The exterior structure was heavily reshaped in the 19th century, but the interior has preserved the two-bay cross-ribbed vault. Difficult to interpret graffiti - like wall paintings from the time of construction originally covered all walls of the interior, of which only a small part is exposed on the north wall today.
literature
- Georg Dehio : Handbook of the German art monuments - Rhineland-Palatinate , Saarland . Darmstadt 1985, p. 1022
- Werner Schäfke : The Rhine from Mainz to Cologne, DuMont art travel guide . Cologne 1982, p. 91 f.
Web links
Coordinates: 50 ° 0 '9.58 " N , 7 ° 51' 20.34" E