Images
Panoramas
VR Tour
Historical Images and Plans
Notes
History
Courmelles was a parish closely linked with the abbey of Notre-Dame of Soissons.
Date
Begun 12th century
Plan
An aisled wooden-roofed basilica with projecting vaulted transept and eastern apse. The rib vaulted five-segment apse and western portal survives from the initial construction of the church circa 1160. The architectural forms are plastic and heavy. There is wide use of dog-tooth molding and other similar Norman and Beauvaisian decorative work. Transept vaults are from the sixteenth century. Heavily damaged in the 20th-century the church has been extensively rebuilt.
Significance
Bony uses Courmelles to exemplify the thick buildings, noting it is of the same type as Mont-Notre-Dame (no longer in existence). Bony describes a great heavy masonry as "one of the major elements of architectural power...". Courmelles represents a mode of construction of exuberant articulation that formed an alternative mode in the formation of "Gothic:" like Noyon it stands in contrast to Saint-Denis. The highly articulated architectural forms of the exterior at the east, most notably the array of attached colonnettes, do not express clear architectural logic. Connections are local: Notre-Dame of Soissons, Mont-Notre-Dame, Chelles (Oise), Trucy, Bruyères-en-Montbérault.
Location
Bibliography
Bony, Jean, French Gothic Architecture of the 12th and 13th Centuries, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1983.
Blin, Jean-Pierre, "L'église de Courmelles", Congrès archéologique de France 1990, v. 148, p. 297-307, AC C76 - looks like Columbia Lacks this volume- can't get it on borrow direct. Quoique très endommagée par un obus pendant la Guerre de 1914-1918, l'église de Courmelles conserve encore en grande partie son état originel, daté de la seconde moitié du 12e et des premières années du 13e siècle. Le choeur est un bel exemple de l'art roman de cette région.
Lefèvre-Pontalis, E. "Note sur l'église de Courmelles et sa restauration," Bulletin de la Société archéologique de Soissons," 2 sér., 17, 1886, 55.
-----, L'architecture religieuse dans l'ancien diocèse de Soissons, Paris, 1896, vol. 2, 139-145
Sandron, Dany, Picardie gothique, Paris, 2001, 133-138