Chapel of Germigny-des-Prés, the stuccos

During the dubious restoration of the church’s architecture, the stucco was completely sacrificed to the point that even the fragments that were retrieved had spent years under a drain pipe before they being collected and entrusted, in 1878, to the Historical and Archaeological Museum of Orléanais. The bombing of Orléans in 1940 damaged and partially destroyed the pieces under conservation. In the early days of the reconstruction in 1874, only the stucco decoration of the windows of the bell tower was still visible. Viollet-le-duc published a drawing and gave a description of them: “These coatings, absent from the lower portion, can only be seen in the inside of the central bell tower and, most notably, on its windows formed by an archivolt resting on two small engaged columns. These structures, the archivolt and the columns, are in fact entirely moulded from a very hard, fine, white stucco, shaped and chiselled while it was still moist”. During the reconstruction of the tower, this decoration (archivolt with flourishes, small columns and fluted intrados) was reproduced to match identically the original.

The pieces in conservation (thirty-six in Orléans and one in the Cabinet des médailles in Paris), for the most part very small, seemed to have been used as material for construction during future restorations, especially in modern times, for filling the windows of the eastern apse. As we have no descriptions of the discoveries to prove otherwise, we can assume that the strips of ornamentation on the inside windows have been conserved. It is also very likely that a fragment of the large palmette stayed in place in the northern niche of the apse.

Such limited material made it almost impossible to reconstitute the original ornamentation, except for the windows. In the interior, the windows were decorated with panels outlined by a coil moulding, each one holding a regular interlace of ribbons, their central openings filled with flowers—with four, six or eight petals and sometimes stamped with a cross. The current rendition of this ornamentation is fairly accurate, despite some liberties—eleven-petal flowers for instance—and a general stiffness in its execution. The ornamentation of solar wheels on the overhead window has no founding but does belong to a decorative vocabulary true to the Early Middle Ages. As for the rest, there are fragments of friezes with palmette, archivolts with flourishes, small Corinthian capitals with double registers of acanthus leaves—but nothing points to their exact location. Most of them could not have come from the eastern apse and may well have decorated the two apsidal chapels that were destroyed.

The restoration of the wall of the apse is purely conjectural but the motifs on which it was based are authentic: friezes of raised palmette, twelve-petal flowers with a systematic use of coiled borders. As for the intrados of the blind arcades, they imitate the motif of the fluting on the windows of the tower and those of the archivolts, and their inspiration comes from the prestigious example of the stucco decoration on St. Maria in Valle, in Cividale (Italy). This presentation has the merit of proposing an image suggestive of the Carolingian sanctuary.

The sources seem characteristic of Carolingian ornamentation with its reliance on a predominantly classical architectural tradition (Corinthian capitals, flourishes and palmette). The all-over interlace ornamentation with its floral motifs are clearly represented in the stone sculptures of the Lombardi and Carolingian chancels (Italy, France and Germany). Certain connections have been established with Sassanid art, especially in relation to the complex cable moulding.   But here again, such a repertory was widespread in the West as a number of Spanish examples testify. Through trade, however small, textiles and small luxury objects made for a widespread diffusion of motifs. On the other hand, the fluted ornamentation of the tower’s windows—apparently for the first time in Carolingian art but well documented for the mosque of Córdoba—may well have been directly influenced from Moorish Spain