Toulouse churches

Last Toulouse post!

First is the main basilica of the city, St Sernin.  It was built between 1080 and 1120 (relatively quickly for such a large structure of the time) on the site of an older church, and was one of the most important churches in medieval Europe.  The existing church was built to be so large and important because Charlemagne had taken a strong interest in the older church, eventually donating a lot of his religious relics and making it into a major pilgrimage site.

It's really hard to get a full picture of the church, but here are some of the outside.  This is one of the side entrances.

The tower from a corner - this is the newest part of the building, with the top two tiers being finished in the 1300's, and the spire dating from a hundred years after that.

The back

And one of the long sides.

This is the largest Romanesque church in Europe, and you can see it's clearly quite different from places like Notre Dame, the Orleans cathedral or Notre Dame de Reims.  Firstly, it's pink, like most things in Toulouse!  Secondly, as is the norm in Romanesque styling, everything is based on round arches and rounded additions (see the photo two above).  It doesn't have the pointiness and decoration of Gothic architecture.

The inside is extremely dark, and I only got a few passable pictures.  Strangely, there isn't too much inside; I would have expected the main church in Toulouse, and one of the most important ones in France, to be more decorated but it wasn't.  It does have a gorgeous organ, but my pictures came out too dark even with flash.

It's one of the earliest churches to have ceiling vaults like this.

There is a crypt below containing lots of saints' relics but we didn't go down.

Next is St Etienne, also known as the Toulouse Cathedral.  This is a truly bizarre structure - not only because parts of it date from vastly different architectural periods but because it's actually comprised of two different church plans that kind of got melded together.  A large cathedral was started here in the early 1200's, stopped about 1230, then another church planned and started on the spot in 1272.  This later one had a different planned layout and axis (since churches of the time were built in the shape of a cross this means the arms and long parts, etc, were on another axis).  These two plans weren't completely integrated into each other for another two hundred years, when the western facade (below) was added, and the tower was finished 100 years after that.  The church ended up completely asymmetrical and not in a cross shape.

Anyway, here is a good picture from Wikipedia of the western front.

We came in the side entrance - here is the approach to it.

This part of the side is sort of halfway between Romanesque and Gothic.

The side portal, which was a mid 15th century addition.

Zoomed in shot of a gargoyle, for my mother!

The trend in Toulouse was to have some of the darkest churches I've ever seen, so again the pictures aren't great.

This chapel was really pretty - the statue and stained glass are 19th century.

Lots of the chapels were in disrepair.

Some earlier stained glass - this church contains the oldest stained glass in Toulouse but I couldn't get a picture of it.

Now we're back in something I feel completely comfortable with (architecturally)!  This, called les Jacobins, is smaller than the others, and it used to be a convent.  It was built in a high Gothic style between the 13th and 14th centuries

Going inside it's very evident that this is not a typical church, and if you've studied much about medieval architecture it's clear it was built to be some kind of monastic space.

Firstly the inside is huge, airy, and not very fancy or decorated.  There are really no side chapels, and unusually, the supporting pillars go right down the middle of the space instead of being on the sides.

The walls are decorated in a simple geometric fashion, one of the indicators of a monastic order.  They believed in simplicity and not having a lot of over-the-top (or vain) decorations, statues, etc.  The colors surprised me - they're a lot brighter in person, but again the darkness messed up my pictures.

Definitely the most remarkable thing about this place was the stained glass, it was absolutely gorgeous.  It might have been just the time of day we went, towards sunset, but the red/orange themes windows made the light coming through look like fire.  This picture does absolutely no justice - the windows are very high up and it's hard to get a good view with the camera.

The design around the top of the pillars give the impression of even more height.  Here is a shot looking at the top of a pillar in a mirror placed at the bottom.

And looking up normally.

St Thomas Aquinas is buried here, this is his altar.

Attached to the church part is a lovely cloister.

This was definitely my favorite church we saw in Toulouse, it was really beautiful and airy.

So that's my final post on the lovely city of Toulouse!  Tomorrow I'm going on a mini-trip to the Loire Valley, so I'll have some posts on that next week, but I also have one scheduled to go while I'm gone!