Note 199 — Chapter VII · Plantagenet Gothic Architecture[174]
Reading edition
St. Savin lies thirty miles from Poitiers. Its choir and transept belong to the early part of the XII century, and its nave was erected about thirty years after. Its donjonlike tower was crowned later by a spire, the highest in southwest France with St. Michel’s at Bordeaux. Like Etruscan vase ornamentation are its unique frescoes giving Genesis, Exodus, and the Apocalypse. On the route from Poitiers to St. Savin lies Chauvigny, “the pearl of Poitou,” with the ruins of several castles. Its church of St. Pierre has a decorated apse and some eight-branch Plantagenet vaults; its church of Notre Dame possesses some XV-century frescoes.
Another of the chief Poitou-Romanesque churches is at St. Maixent, thirty miles from Poitiers, via Niort. The nave is XII century, the choir, Angevin Gothic, and the tower, Flamboyant; its crypt capitals are noticeable.
The abbey church at St. Jouin-de-Marnes, near Montcontour, has a good façade, a fine Romanesque tower, a transept of the end of the XI century, and a XII-century choir and nave, only three of whose vault sections, however, are the primitive ones. In the XIII century the present elaborate masonry roof was substituted. It belongs to the Third Period of the Plantagenet school, with three lines of keystones. Airvault abbey church, not far away, built a similar much-ramified vault, the prototype for that of Toussaint, at Angers.
Parthenay can be included in the trip from Poitiers to St. Jouin-de-Marnes. In its venerable church took place the scene when St. Bernard rose in majesty at the altar and compelled the giant sinner Guillaume X of Aquitaine to repent.
Three miles from Poitiers lies St. Benoit’s Romanesque church, with a XIII-century spire, and five miles away is Ligugé, where St. Martin, under St. Hilary’s guidance, founded the first monastery in Gaul. Dom Prosper Guéranger restored Ligugé in 1864, and here J. K. Huysmans lived, as he has described in l’Oblat. The XV-century church was rebuilt by that prelate of the Renaissance, Geoffrey d’Estissac, whom Rabelais came to visit.
Congrès Archéologique, 1910, St. Savin; p. 119, Airvault; p. 108, St. Jouin-de-Marnes, and the latter also in the Congrès of 1903; Prosper Merimée, Les peintures de St. Savin (Paris, 1845), folio; Ch. Tranchant, Guide pour la visite des monuments de Chauvigny en Poitou (Paris, 1901).