Église Sainte-Marie-Madeleine

English translation

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History

The church of the Madeleine was founded in 1474, at the initiative of the count of Vendôme Jean VIII. A simple subsidiary chapel, it was elevated to the status of parish church in 1487. After the Trinity, it was the second parish of the historic centre of Vendôme. The building originally presented a very simple plan: the nave covered with a lambrissed roof structure with sculpted and polychrome tie-beams, was terminated by a three-sided chevet. The vestiges of engaged columns visible in the angles suggest that the rib vault with liernes and tiercerons was not the initial mode of covering of the chevet. A bell tower flanked the north-west angle. Its polygonal stone spire, with salient arêtes garnished with crockets, rises above a bell chamber pierced with openings in pointed arch, which is surmounted by an octagonal drum, lit by openings with trilobed tracery, flanked by pinnacles and crowned with an openwork balustrade of flamboyant motifs. The simplicity of design was subsequently abandoned in favour of a building with aisles. In 1523, Jacques Malon, controller of the salt warehouse, had a chapel built at the angle of the nave and the bell tower. In the course of the 16th century, the church received a north aisle, which was subsequently united with the seigniorial chapel of the Malon to form an aisle of six bays covered with rib vaults and opening widely onto the central vessel by pointed arch arcades. The openings rest on half-cylindrical pillars on the side of the nave, and on prismatic mouldings on the side of the aisle. A chapel had been raised in 1532, to the south-east of the chevet. In 1680, shallow chapels and a sacristy were added to the south. The project for reconstruction of the church, given by the Vendômois architect E. Marganne, having been rejected, in the last quarter of the 19th century, the church was enlarged, on the south side, by three last small chapels. A gallery was built to support the organ and a new sacristy was attached to the chevet. Flamboyant gothic left its mark in the tracery of the openings, the sculpted decoration of the buttresses, the penetration of the ribs into the supports which adopt prismatic forms, and above all at the chevet, in the tracery of the great axial opening with its complex play of curves and counter-curves characteristic of the style, and in the ribbed vault. The new conceptions are also read in the clear and open volume that the use of columns and the piercing of great arcades allow. This church of the age of reconstruction has retained, despite the enlargements of which it was the object at various periods, a certain architectural quality. It testifies to the richness of flamboyant gothic architecture at Vendôme which, subsequently, asserted itself without constraint, thanks to the patronage of the countess Marie of Luxembourg, to the bell tower of the church of Saint-Martin, to the chapel of Saint-Jacques and to the exceptional façade of the Trinity. Without equalling by far that older one of the abbey church, the elegant bell tower of the Madeleine marks the urban landscape. To accompany the painted and sculpted decoration carried out between 1878 and 1895, the openings of the aisles were furnished with stained glass designed and manufactured in the principal workshops of the region, by the Tours master glaziers Lucien-Léopold Lobin and his successor, Jean-Prosper Florence, Julien Fournier, and Charles Lorin, of Chartres. This ensemble of stained glass windows constitutes an interesting testimony to the art of stained glass at the end of the 19th century. It illuminates us on the personality, the intentions of the donors, as well as on the circumstances in which these works were commissioned. It restores the aesthetic climate in which religious art was immersed at that time. It must also be emphasised the historical interest of the stained glass of the axial opening which brings together original panels laid at the end of the 15th century, and stained glass windows from the chapel of Jacques Malon.