St-Blaise and Notre-Dame-des-Malades church in Vichy

by RicardMN Photography

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St-Blaise and Notre-Dame-des-Malades church in Vichy

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RicardMN Photography

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Photograph

Description

St-Blaise and Notre-Dame-des-Malades is a church located in the municipality of Vichy (Allier, Auvergne-Rhône-Alps), France.

Two contrasting churches combine at Église St-Blaise: the concrete outer shell of a 1931 art-deco church, resembling something of a Soviet space rocket, and at the rear an original 17th-century chapel guarding Vichy’s Vierge noire (black Madonna statue). The interior is aglow with 20th-century stained glass and bronzed mosaics, as well as frescoes depicting some of France’s famous churches.

The Virgin tops the outer dome of the church at 138 feet from the ground. A magnificent cross tops the adjacent bell tower, 220 feet up.

The Saint-Blaise church was built in place of the old Merovingian basilica of Sainte-Croix, destroyed in the 10th century and rebuilt in the 12th.

In the 16th century, the Saint-Michel chapel became the Saint-Blaise church. It was enlarged from 1672 to 1714.

Built to meet the needs of the wealthy spa guests, housing the Black Madonna, Notre-Dame des Malades, which was the subject of a pilgrimage, was too small.

Antoine Chanet and Jean Liogier build from 1925 to 1931 the new Notre-Dame-des-Malades church, adjoining the Saint-Blaise church and communicating with it by the ambulatory. Topped with a huge copper-clad dome that covers a circular nave, it is built of reinforced concrete. Its square bell tower, 67 m high, was not completed until 1956.

The interior decor, produced by the Mauméjean brothers, surprises with the richness of the materials used (chancel in marble and steel, altar and ambons in onyx, stalls in mahogany), the quality of their implementation (mosaic, wood and enamel inlay) and the modernity of the lines and graphics evoking Art Deco. The choir is covered with a continuous barrel vault decorated with mosaics illustrating the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit. The pillars with capitals are covered with stucco painted in a lapis lazulis style. The dome is decorated with a mosaic which illustrates different episodes of holy history around the representation of the Trinity. The chapel of the baptismal funds is also decorated with a mosaic representing the baptism of Clovis. (Description from pop.culture.gouv.fr and lonelyplanet.com)

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December 16th, 2019

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