Images
Exterior, western frontispiece and towers
Exterior nave
Exterior transept
Exterior chevet
Interior narthex (if present) and nave
Interior crossing and transept arms
Interior chevet
Ancillary buildings (cloister, chapter house, refectory, dormitory etc) and displaced sculpture
Panoramas
VR Tour
Historical Images and Plans
Notes
Date
Begun ca. 1212
Plan
Aisled basilica intersected by a deeply projecting transept and five-aisled chevet. The chevet of this basilica was entirely replaced by Abbot Pierre de Celles starting in the 1160-70s. The new chevet has double aisles and is terminated in the east by a hemicycle with a five generous radiating chapels, the axial one deeper than the rest. Slender columns placed in the chapel mouths receive the ribs and arches of the ambulatory and the chapels, allowing the spaces to fuse together. Soon thereafter a new western frontispiece was built incorporating the twin turrets of the older church where sumptuous articulation includes spolia from Roman monuments. The nave was retrofitted with the extension upwards of a tall clerestory and the installation of rib vaults.
Elevation
The chevet has a four story elevation with linked clerestory and triforium. There are flying buttresses and enormous expanses of glass, especially at gallery level. Delicate articulation includes spectacular columns in the mouths of the chapels.
Chronology
In the 11th-century a great basilica with galleries and a wooden roof, vaulted aisles with an intersecting transept was built. Starting 1160-1170s the chevet was entirely replaced and nave retrofitted by Abbot Pierre de Celles. The building was badly ruined in the bombardments of WWI.
Significance
Saint-Remi was a great fortified monastery going back the 4th and 5th-centuries that held the saint-ampoule - with the unction used in the coronations of the Kings of France and the burial place of Saint-Remi. The old galleried nave with its wooden roof is thought to resemble that of many similar great churches in the North including, for example, Jumièges b-1134. The chevet figures importantly in the story of early gothic architecture. The delicacy of the slender columns refers to Suger's new chevet at S-Denis b-1182. The double columns in the mouth of chapel linkage include Soissons cathedral b-1054 (south transpet), Notre-Dame-en-Vaux, Lagny (never built) and Saint-Germain at Auxerre b-1085 and the Cathedral of Auxerre b-1084. Saint-Remi also has long-reach flyers like those of Notre-Dame of Paris b-1164. Saint-Remi is also a testimony to the antique revival and use of spolia.
Location
Bibliography
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