Memory of Stones
Saint-Vincent Church in Fontanges
Church built in 1468. The six-span nave, without a transept, ends with a three-day apse. Seven chapels are built against the side walls. The bell tower has a quadrangular tower at its base, then octagonal, pierced with eight semicircular bays, surmounted by a spire. This tower is the last vestige of the Romanesque church.
On the first floor, a gallery which also overlooks the nave by a lowered arch adorned with protruding moldings and a stone gallery cut open. This tribune has a very good effect in reducing a little the cold uniformity of the lines of the nave.
Gothic church with a Romanesque bell tower. There was originally a Romanesque church, but the expansion of the community of godchildren settled there led to an extension, which was a complete reconstruction from 1468. Square bell at the base, it ends at the top in octagon pierced with eight semi-circular bays
The parish church is old and beautiful; the seven chapels around it are very suitably decorated. The high altar, as well as the panels of the preaching pulpit, are formed of dark green serpentine believed to have been taken from a quarry in the country today untapped and even unknown. Several paintings can be seen in the same church, the most remarkable of which are a Christ and a Preaching by Saint John.
This church consists of a single nave of 30 m. 36 in length in work, 7 m. wide and 11 m. 35 high under keystone. The nave, without a transept, ends on the east with a three-sided apse, and on the west, with a simple wall or gable; it is divided into six bays: the choir and the sanctuary occupy the two upper bays. Under the other bays, open on each side of the pointed arches which give access to chapels leaned against the side walls, three in the south and four in the north. The vaults of the nave and chapels are built of stone, fortified with double arches and adorned with prismatic ribs with keys carved at the intersection. These ribs, as it was then practiced, come down to a point on weak cul-de-lamps or pendants carved with figures and foliage. The appearance offered to the eye by the regularity and lightness of these vaults is most pleasant.
The cross walls of the chapels occur on the outside in the form of thick buttresses which support the walls and butt against the vaults of the nave. Other buttresses also support the solid walls of the choir and the apse.
Three large side high pointed windows, without mullions and without compartments, placed in the first eastern bay, light up the sanctuary and the choir. Unfortunately, the one at the back is blocked by the enormous altarpiece of the high altar. The rest of the nave receives the daylight from the windows of the side chapels, each divided into two compartments by a mullion which, according to the custom of the time, is bypassed by the tympanum in the shape of hearts, flames, lilies. A circular opening in the western wall also serves to illuminate the nave below the vault. The windows of the northern chapels are a bit smaller than the southern ones, although of the same period and style.
