Chambéry Cathedral: A Flamboyant Gothic Cathedral in France
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.5
- Popularity
- Low
- Country
- France
- Primary era
- Early Modern
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Medieval, Early Modern, Modern
- Civilizations
- Duchy of Savoy, French, Kingdom of Sardinia
- Site type
- Religious
- Remains
- Cathedral
On this page11 sections
History
Chambéry Cathedral in Chambéry, France, is a predominantly Flamboyant Gothic church that began as a modest Franciscan chapel around 1420. The Franciscans, also called the Cordeliers, are a Catholic mendicant order founded by Francis of Assisi. Enlarged over time, the church was consecrated on 15 June 1488 and completed in 1585.
The Franciscan church and the Shroud
The building was attached to the Franciscan convent and stood beside Place Métropole, giving rise to the local name “the Métropole.” From the fifteenth century, the Shroud of Turin was sometimes brought to the church of the Cordeliers. Public religious displays of the relic, known as solemn expositions, were accompanied by elaborate services and drew many pilgrims.
The former convent’s Gothic cloister remains associated with the cathedral and now houses the Savoy Museum. This connection preserves part of the complex’s Franciscan setting while the church itself serves a cathedral function.
Cathedral status and diocesan changes
When the Diocese of Chambéry was created in 1779, the church became a cathedral under the invocation of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary and Blessed Amadeus IX of Savoy. A diocese is a territorial jurisdiction governed by a bishop. The church was profaned and extensively damaged during the French Revolution, a period of political upheaval in which revolutionary authorities attacked or reorganized many French religious institutions. It escaped demolition, and its interior was restored in the early nineteenth century.
After the bishopric was restored under the Concordat of 1801, Bishop René des Monstiers de Mérinville dedicated the cathedral to Saint Francis de Sales in 1802. Saint Francis de Sales was a seventeenth-century Catholic bishop and Counter-Reformation writer who was later recognized as a saint and Doctor of the Church.
The ecclesiastical jurisdiction connected with the cathedral incorporated the dioceses of Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne and Tarentaise in 1801. It became an archdiocese in 1817, while those two dioceses were re-established independently in 1825. They were joined again to the Archdiocese of Chambéry in 1966, and the jurisdiction adopted its present name, Archdiocese of Chambéry, Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne and Tarentaise, in 2002.
Protection and later restoration
Chambéry Cathedral has been protected as a French historic monument since 9 August 1906, and its organ received the same protection in 1988. Restoration of the molasse-stone facade, built in 1522, took place from 2006 to 2009. In 2014, the Diocese of Turin gave the cathedral a copy of the Shroud of Turin. It is displayed in the Resurrection Chapel behind the choir with explanatory panels.
Remains
The cathedral stands in Chambéry’s historic center between Place Saint-Léger and Rue de la Croix-d’Or. Its forecourt is called Place Métropole. The building’s Flamboyant Gothic structure has a high central nave, rising 23 metres beneath the vaults, with side aisles on either side. Its interior measures more than 70 metres in length and 34 metres in width.
Structure and chapels
The principal facade is made from molasse, a relatively soft sedimentary stone, and dates from 1522. Its restrained late Gothic design makes the internal arrangement legible from outside. The cathedral’s subsoil is strongly marshy, and tradition holds that its foundations required at least 30,000 larch piles.
The church has no transept. On the south side, the aisle and its lateral chapels are covered by one complex vault. The chapels have polygonal plans and continue toward the axial chapel at the apse, forming nine chapels in all and creating an unusual outer sequence of angled buttresses. On the north side, two apse chapels and the adjoining treasury room are blind, meaning that they have no windows.
Convent connections and treasury
The treasury room stands at the base of the bell tower and is described as the sole surviving part of a thirteenth-century Dominican convent. The Dominicans were a separate Catholic mendicant order founded by Saint Dominic. The treasury’s collection includes a fifteenth-century polychrome wooden Nativity, a thirteenth-century Limoges champlevé-enamel pyx, and a twelfth-century ivory diptych. A pyx is a container for consecrated Eucharistic hosts, while champlevé enamel fills recessed areas cut into a metal surface. An ivory diptych consists of two hinged carved ivory panels.
The remaining chapels on the north side have shallow rectangular plans and are attached to the cloister. The cloister links the cathedral with the nearby local-history museum in the former Franciscan convent, retaining a physical connection between the church and its earlier religious complex.
Painted interior and devotional features
Trompe-l’oeil decoration
The cathedral contains nearly 6,000 square metres of trompe-l’oeil, a painting technique that creates the illusion of three-dimensional architecture or objects on a flat surface. The ensemble is described as Europe’s largest. Fabrizio Sevesi painted an initial scheme in the choir in 1810. Casimir Vicario covered the walls and vaults between 1834 and 1835 in a Flamboyant Gothic manner, including painted skies seen through Gothic tracery.
Bernard Sciolli later painted the choir, ambulatory, right-hand side-aisle chapels, and canonical chapel in a different style in 1885. The ambulatory is the passage running around the choir or apse, and the canonical chapel is associated with the cathedral chapter of canons. Later restoration reinstated Sevesi’s work in the choir and Vicario’s elsewhere, while the canonical chapel retains Sciolli’s decoration.
Labyrinth
A labyrinth nearly 35 metres long was built between 1860 and 1870 and reinstalled in 1989.
Organ
Augustin Zeiger built the cathedral organ in 1847 as a Romantic instrument. It included a complex swell box, a multiplying lever that released the valves, and a modulable “human voice” stop. Zeiger enlarged it in 1848 by adding a large rear positive, a secondary organ division positioned behind the principal manual division. Its first manual contained 56 notes.
Zeiger’s nephew later restored and modified the instrument. Charles Michel-Merklin of Lyon substantially altered it in 1895 and fitted it with a Barker machine, a pneumatic mechanism that reduces the force needed to operate organ keyboards. Victor Gonzalez electrified the keyboard action in 1960 while retaining a neo-Classical approach. Pascal Quoirin completely restored the organ in 2004 in the spirit of Zeiger’s design.
