Bourgogne romane: Saint-Marcel In Iguerande
If, as we have seen, the Atlantic province of Saintonge has a wealth of Romanesque churches from the 1100s, Burgundy is every bit as wealthy, or almost, and its Romanesque churches are often older by a good 100 years, if not more.
Even though Burgundy is far closer to home for me, I still haven’t been to all the churches I would like to see. Those visits take time to be enjoyed properly, and this kind of photography is slow and deliberate, which means restaurants and hotel nights, and these are activities whose desirability has been seriously curtailed by the pandemic over the past two years. Nevertheless, I have recently been photographing a couple of those old churches during day trips, and I will begin uploading the results, beginning today. I hope you will enjoy them.
Dedicated to Saint Marcel, the church we are visiting today is located in the village of Iguerande, in the Brionnais part of southern Burgundy.
Built in the golden sandstone that’s typical of the area (it’s the concentration of iron oxide in the ground that colors the stone), it is a large but squat church with three naves, a short transept and a harmonious and well-proportioned bell tower.
The sides were reinforced by truly massive, large-apparel buttresses.
It was built around 1050 with the typical exaggerated care of the architects and masons of the early Romanesque age, unsure about the resistance of materials and worried about the ability of their constructions to withstand the test of time.
Compare the careful, low-arching vaults of Iguerande to the slender audacity of the Vienne basilica I uploaded a few days ago: twice as high and three times thinner, even though it was built 600 years before! Then you can truly measure how much knowledge had been lost in-between...
This lovely church is the only building that remains of a Benedictine priory that was once a dependence of the abbeys of Cluny, then Marcigny.
The northern arm of the transept and the nave, seen from the apse. Notice the general harmony of this architecture that says “peaceful” to me, the purity of the lines, the few decorated capitals, and the low-hanging barrel vaults for greater solidity.
Bourgogne romane: Saint-Marcel In Iguerande
If, as we have seen, the Atlantic province of Saintonge has a wealth of Romanesque churches from the 1100s, Burgundy is every bit as wealthy, or almost, and its Romanesque churches are often older by a good 100 years, if not more.
Even though Burgundy is far closer to home for me, I still haven’t been to all the churches I would like to see. Those visits take time to be enjoyed properly, and this kind of photography is slow and deliberate, which means restaurants and hotel nights, and these are activities whose desirability has been seriously curtailed by the pandemic over the past two years. Nevertheless, I have recently been photographing a couple of those old churches during day trips, and I will begin uploading the results, beginning today. I hope you will enjoy them.
Dedicated to Saint Marcel, the church we are visiting today is located in the village of Iguerande, in the Brionnais part of southern Burgundy.
Built in the golden sandstone that’s typical of the area (it’s the concentration of iron oxide in the ground that colors the stone), it is a large but squat church with three naves, a short transept and a harmonious and well-proportioned bell tower.
The sides were reinforced by truly massive, large-apparel buttresses.
It was built around 1050 with the typical exaggerated care of the architects and masons of the early Romanesque age, unsure about the resistance of materials and worried about the ability of their constructions to withstand the test of time.
Compare the careful, low-arching vaults of Iguerande to the slender audacity of the Vienne basilica I uploaded a few days ago: twice as high and three times thinner, even though it was built 600 years before! Then you can truly measure how much knowledge had been lost in-between...
This lovely church is the only building that remains of a Benedictine priory that was once a dependence of the abbeys of Cluny, then Marcigny.
The northern arm of the transept and the nave, seen from the apse. Notice the general harmony of this architecture that says “peaceful” to me, the purity of the lines, the few decorated capitals, and the low-hanging barrel vaults for greater solidity.