St-Savinien (Melle)

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St Savinien Church

St-Savinien is a profane Romanesque church in Melle ( Deux-Sevres ) in the region Nouvelle-Aquitaine in France . The church has been classified as a monument historique since 1914 .

description

St-Savinien, the oldest Romanesque church in Melle, dates from the late 11th or early 12th century. It is located on a hill in the city center. Her name refers to St. Savinien , one of the Archbishops of Sens . St-Savinien is a single-nave hall church with a transept. It originally served as the palace chapel of a castle, which itself was completely destroyed during the revolution . The building was restored in 1965. It still exudes a great archaic austerity, the high windows are - as almost always in the early Romanesque - small and slender, the walls look extraordinarily massive.

In 1801, despite its age, the church was converted into a prison and it remained that way until 1926. Today it serves as an exhibition space and concert hall for the music festival.

The ship, with its clear, rectangular floor plan, has no stone vaulting. On the unplastered walls of quarry stone masonry , without pillar templates or similar structures, rests the - formerly perhaps open - roof structure, of which only a few wooden tie rods can be seen horizontally spanning the ship . In the 19th century it was clad on the underside with a cross-section of arched wooden formwork, thus simulating a real barrel vault .

The crossing , transept and apse , on the other hand, have stone vaults. The crossing is vaulted by a dome that goes very high into the tower. It rests directly on an octagonal, equilateral drum , which in turn is supported by four trumpets , which lead from the octagon into the shape of the square below. On closer inspection, you can see that the whitewashed dome has eight radial ridges that become flatter towards the top. There is a circular recess in the top of the dome, which is framed by a ring-shaped border of wedge stones.

The largely unadorned west facade may still date from the end of the 11th century and differs from the churches in the area: massive buttresses support the building and frame two high side blind arcades . The portal has a roof-shaped - already heavily weathered - tympanum , which refers to a possibly Auvergnatian building school (see Thuret priory church ). It shows Christ in a round mandorla , accompanied by two lions on the side. The left capital shows a bestiary with standing lions, the right braided bandwork .

The church has a second portal which leads into the south transept; As is customary in Poitou , it has no tympanum, but beautiful archivolt arches . The choir area is also interesting from the outside: the large choir apse is structured by vertical services and is hardly decorated. The two-storey crossing tower is also completely unadorned.

literature

  • Thorsten Droste : The Poitou. Western France between Poitiers and Angoulême - the Atlantic coast from the Loire to the Gironde. DuMont, Cologne 1999, ISBN 3-7701-4456-2 , p. 150ff.
  • Dorothee Seiler: Saint-Hilaire in Melle and the Romanesque hall churches of Poitou. Tuduv-Verlag, Munich 1993, ISBN 3-8316-7489-2 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ St-Savinien in the Base Mérimée of the French Ministry of Culture (French)

Web links

Commons : St-Savinien (Melle)  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Coordinates: 46 ° 13 ′ 14.1 ″  N , 0 ° 8 ′ 42.9 ″  W.