Medieval Churches of the Alpes-Maritimes.
Snoeck| N° d'inventaire | 23312 |
| Format | 25 x 28 |
| Détails | 319 p., paperback with flaps. |
| Publication | Gent, 2021 |
| Etat | Nine |
| ISBN | 9789461617491 |
Expertly discussed by Jacques Thirion in his book Alpes romanes published forty years ago, and since reexamined in monographic studies or at the congress of the French Archaeological Society in 2010, medieval religious heritage deserved to be explored further, by taking a fresh look at it. For this publication, it was not easy to determine the buildings that would be discussed. Each building, each ruin had its own meaning and history. Choices were made, however: some buildings were essential, others were chosen for the strong medieval imprint they could still bear. To open the book, a general presentation of the Christian monuments of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages seemed necessary, as the scattering of places of worship, which was established in successive layers from the 5th to the 10th century, influenced the construction of the Romanesque monumental landscape. This picture of a Christianization that widely irrigates the territory and continues, despite political instability, with the Carolingian period, takes us to the beginning of the 11th century, when, thanks to the action of certain actors, bishops, monastic orders, lords, a vast construction movement called "Romanesque architecture" began. Thus the first Romanesque age appears as a time of reorganization where structuring forces are at work, notably that of the regular clergy. This wave of construction gives rise to buildings that are distinguished by their plan, the presence of a crypt, the technical and aesthetic quality of the apparatus, its decoration and sometimes its polychromy. Simplicity and austerity are then the key words of the second Romanesque age whose construction sites continue, much more than elsewhere, until the second half of the 13th century. All its elegance is due to the talent of the craftsmen and their mastery of the tools to produce homogeneous and harmonious facings, characteristic of this period. It is in this mastered art of carving that the buildings of Valbonne or Grasse are inscribed. The corpus also demonstrates the links that are established with architectural formulas adopted in the north of Italy, Languedoc and beyond, Catalonia. Once the framework was established, the authors endeavored to resume, for each building, the examination of historical sources and to base their new interpretations on field observations. Each monograph evokes the written sources, provides an archaeological description of the building, highlights its evolutions in order to propose, ultimately, the dating. In many files, knowledge was refined by new analyses; the Saint-Sauveur chapel on the island of Saint-Honorat is thus better understood thanks to the excavations carried out by Yann Codou, the Saint-Gervais church in Sospel or the Saint-Véran church in Ascros are rediscovered thanks to the analyses of Catherine Poteur, the Vence cathedral stands out as a model in the innovative construction sites of the first Romanesque age. The work renews scientific knowledge on this architecture of which exceptional examples are preserved and which make the Alpes-Maritimes a high place of the origins of Romanesque art.
Expertly discussed by Jacques Thirion in his book Alpes romanes published forty years ago, and since reexamined in monographic studies or at the congress of the French Archaeological Society in 2010, medieval religious heritage deserved to be explored further, by taking a fresh look at it. For this publication, it was not easy to determine the buildings that would be discussed. Each building, each ruin had its own meaning and history. Choices were made, however: some buildings were essential, others were chosen for the strong medieval imprint they could still bear. To open the book, a general presentation of the Christian monuments of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages seemed necessary, as the scattering of places of worship, which was established in successive layers from the 5th to the 10th century, influenced the construction of the Romanesque monumental landscape. This picture of a Christianization that widely irrigates the territory and continues, despite political instability, with the Carolingian period, takes us to the beginning of the 11th century, when, thanks to the action of certain actors, bishops, monastic orders, lords, a vast construction movement called "Romanesque architecture" began. Thus the first Romanesque age appears as a time of reorganization where structuring forces are at work, notably that of the regular clergy. This wave of construction gives rise to buildings that are distinguished by their plan, the presence of a crypt, the technical and aesthetic quality of the apparatus, its decoration and sometimes its polychromy. Simplicity and austerity are then the key words of the second Romanesque age whose construction sites continue, much more than elsewhere, until the second half of the 13th century. All its elegance is due to the talent of the craftsmen and their mastery of the tools to produce homogeneous and harmonious facings, characteristic of this period. It is in this mastered art of carving that the buildings of Valbonne or Grasse are inscribed. The corpus also demonstrates the links that are established with architectural formulas adopted in the north of Italy, Languedoc and beyond, Catalonia. Once the framework was established, the authors endeavored to resume, for each building, the examination of historical sources and to base their new interpretations on field observations. Each monograph evokes the written sources, provides an archaeological description of the building, highlights its evolutions in order to propose, ultimately, the dating. In many files, knowledge was refined by new analyses; the Saint-Sauveur chapel on the island of Saint-Honorat is thus better understood thanks to the excavations carried out by Yann Codou, the Saint-Gervais church in Sospel or the Saint-Véran church in Ascros are rediscovered thanks to the analyses of Catherine Poteur, the Vence cathedral stands out as a model in the innovative construction sites of the first Romanesque age. The work renews scientific knowledge on this architecture of which exceptional examples are preserved and which make the Alpes-Maritimes a high place of the origins of Romanesque art.