Note 167 — Chapter VI · Six of the Lesser Great Cathedrals: Bourges, Beauvais, Troyes, Tours, Lyons, Le Mans (continued 2)

In Le Mans are two Benedictine churches of archæological interest. De Cultura Dei is now Notre-Dame-de-la-Couture. When the church was rebuilt after a fire in 1180, big Plantagenet Gothic vaults, each section with eight ribs, were flung over the wide nave, which originally had possessed side aisles. Vestiges of a Carolingian church, built a decade before 1000, are in the crypt and the lower walls of choir and transept, where alternance of stone and brick work appears. The chevet is the oldest example now extant of an ambulatory and radiating chapel. In the XII century the upper choir was rebuilt, and again it was retouched during the XIII and XV centuries. The façade and the well-sculptured portal are late XIII century. A charming XVI-century Virgin, by Germain Pilon, on a pier opposite the pulpit, is to be classed with the prolongation of the Region-of-the-Loire school of sculpture whose center was Tours. Across the Sarthe lies the other Benedictine church, the former St. Julien-du-Pré, a Romanesque edifice of the XI and XII centuries, revaulted in the Flamboyant Gothic day.