Église Saint-Nicolas

English translation

The text above is the record as published by the Ministère de la Culture, in French. The English below is a machine translation made by TreeAlive, not by the Ministère de la Culture; it has not been checked by a person. Where the two differ, the original is the record. Report a translation error: privacy@treealive.com

History

The territory of Saint-Nicolas constituted the marches of the viscounty of Lomagne, facing the abbey of Saint-Pierre de Moissac established at the river and road crossing; the viscounts established a castle there and the abbey a priory. Around 1135, the prior, on the orders of the abbot of Moissac Guillaume and with the assent of the viscount Saxtet de Lomagne, grants a charter of customs to the town which becomes the «sauveté» of Saint-Nicolas. Around 1335, a new charter of customs is granted to Saint-Nicolas, making it an important commercial centre. The new town takes the form of a bastide, and the church is built at the edge of the central square. It is rebuilt in 1547 (date inscribed on the small building with a pediment which crowns the portal), under the abbacy of Jean II de Lettes. Of this building, seriously damaged during the Wars of Religion, only the substructions of the south chapels would remain; the church would then have been almost entirely rebuilt between the end of the 16th century and the beginning of the 17th century and the porch tower built around 1685. Important works are carried out in the 19th century on the porch tower, the vaults of the chapels and the covering of the nave (succeeding an "old timber ceiling", a vault made of battens covered with plaster would have been put in place in 1845). The painted decoration would have been carried out in 1847 by a local painter, taken up and completed by the Toulouse painter Gaillard-Lala in 1946.

Description

The architecture of the building, austere, reflects the persistence of forms of southern Gothic. The single nave of four oblong bays covered with rib vaults is extended by a choir with three slopes preceded by a bay. On the south side, four lateral chapels are housed between the buttresses. The church is preceded by a heavily buttressed porch tower which opens on three sides by arcades surmounted by a cornice and oculi. The bell tower in late Toulouse style has no crowning gallery. The west side of the porch is decorated with a stone portal surmounted by an aedicule formed of columns set against pilasters, resting on powerful richly decorated consoles and supporting a pediment surmounted by fire pots in acroterion arranged in the middle of confronted volutes with lobes. The decoration of the central part and the coffers of the cornice have been tooled away, but one can nevertheless read the date of 1547. The whole suggests variations on the formula of the "fenestra à l'antique" which developed in Toulouse from 1538 onwards (hôtel de Bagis, by the architect and stone carver Nicolas Bachelier) and until the early 1550s. The ornamental repertory is close to that of the grand staircase of the château de Castelnau d'Estretefonds (1539-1546, workshop of Antoine Lescalle and Nicolas Bachelier). In the southern chapels, the brick rib vaults rest on capitals and corbels in stone, some of which testify to great technical quality and a search for variations and inventions "à l'antique" based on Vitruvian Doric and Corinthian capitals. This diversity of capitals can be related to the decorative richness of the courtyard of honour of the hôtel de Bernuy (1530-1536) which presents both composite and Corinthian capitals. One of the best-preserved corbels presents a fine specimen of Corinthian capital surmounted by a section of entablature both drawn from the French edition of the manual by Diego de Sagredo, Raison d'architecture anticque extraicte de Vitruve (circa 1536). The architectural vocabulary employed seems to indicate that these corbels were the object of a distinct campaign, slightly earlier than that of the portal