Yesterday I posted some photos of the church in Saint-Aignan-sur-Cher, where we live. It was built in the 11th and 12th centuries over and even older church that the Michelin green guide calls une église des grottes, which now serves as the crypt of the "newer" church. Here's a two-minute slideshow made up of a dozen photos of the wall paintings in that crypt.
I've posted at least some of these photos before, but I have re-processed them for this slideshow using Photoshop. It's pretty dark down in the crypt, so I'm sure I used the camera's flash to take them. There are half a dozen still photos of some the paintings in this post from 2013.
These paintings seem very beautiful to me. And I end up wanting to see more of them and wanting to know all about the lives of the people who made them.
ReplyDeleteFor some strange unknown reason these paintings made me think of that small church, in the middle of nowhere, near the Chartreuse du Liget! Maybe because we tried to photograph the paintings inside through the closed door?
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Look at this.
DeleteThank you for the link.
DeleteI would like to know what the Latin says. I wonder if the people were speaking in a regional dialect at the time the crypt was being built. Last night my twitter feed showed the protesters in DC singing "Lean on Me" with their cell phones used like candles. It was beautiful.
ReplyDeleteI can't help with the Latin. I'm sure that the language spoken here 800 or a thousand years ago didn't resemble modern-day French much at all. When I was in grad school in Illinois, a group of us staged a performance of a play in medieval French. We worked with the head of the French department, a linguist who specialized in Old French, to get the pronunciation as right as we could. So I speak from experience. By the way, I played God.
DeleteMon Dieu! Shades of Beowulf.
DeleteThe quality of these photos is really great, Ken -- thanks!
ReplyDeleteThe paintings seem in very good condition. Many of our local ones are either crumbling, or have been very badly 'restored'.
ReplyDeleteThe Cadogan guide for the Loire Valley says that 19th century restorers didn't do a great job in the upper church at Saint-Aignan. But they didn't work on the crypt because in the 19th century it was being used by a wine merchant to store his wines.
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