Chapel of Sainte-Radegonde in Chinon: A Troglodytic Christian Site
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.4
- Popularity
- Very Low
- Country
- France
- Primary era
- Medieval
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Iron Age, Medieval, Modern
- Civilizations
- French
- Site type
- Religious
- Remains
- Chapel
On this page19 sections
History
The Chapel of Sainte-Radegonde in Chinon, France, is a semi-troglodytic Christian complex whose principal medieval form emerged in the eleventh or early twelfth century. The site occupies a hillside above the Vienne valley and is traditionally associated with Jean le Reclus, an early Christian hermit, and Radegonde of Poitiers, a sixth-century Frankish queen and saint connected with the foundation of the Abbey of Sainte-Croix in Poitiers.
Early occupation and Christian tradition
People occupied the Sainte-Radegonde hillside as early as the Hallstatt period, an early Iron Age era in central and western Europe. Surface-settlement remains and pottery fragments found above the chapel indicate this early activity. During Antiquity or the early Christian period, the site was traditionally regarded as a pagan cult place centered on a rock-cut well behind the present chapel. The well and its fittings may belong to Antiquity or the Merovingian period, the early medieval era of the Frankish kingdoms from roughly the fifth to the eighth century.
Water drawn from the well on Saint John’s night, around the summer solstice, was believed to cure illness. The association may have developed later through the memory of Jean le Reclus, also known as Priest John. According to a tradition reported by Gregory of Tours, Jean came from the British Isles, spent time with the religious community of Saint-Mexme, and settled in a cave around 530. The precise position of his hermitage is uncertain. It may have been at the chapel site or in another nearby cave.
Jean gained a reputation for wisdom, and Radegonde visited him several times, including during her journey to establish Sainte-Croix in Poitiers. This tradition explains the dedication of the chapel. It also holds that the oratory became a burial place for other hermits after Jean’s death. The transition from a small oratory to a chapel that received pilgrims cannot be dated precisely, but the site assumed its principal medieval arrangement in the eleventh or early twelfth century, when a nave was cut into the rock and strengthened as its vault was raised.
Medieval enlargement and recorded use
A partial vault collapse, probably in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, left the original building too small for its worshippers and pilgrims. A second nave was constructed, greatly enlarging the chapel. The building appears in written records for the first time in 1269 as an ecclesia, meaning a church or ecclesiastical building.
Chronicles record burials at the chapel between 1388 and 1402. Those buried included two nuns and a notable from Chinon who became a hermit after making a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Rabelais later connected the chapel explicitly with the tradition of Jean le Reclus in Le Tiers Livre, published in 1546.
Plunder, restoration, and secular conversion
The chapel was plundered in 1563 during the Wars of Religion, the conflicts between Catholics and Protestants that caused widespread violence in France during the sixteenth century. The graves were desecrated and Jean’s relics were destroyed. About twenty years later, the building housed caregivers and the families of people affected by an epidemic of plague or typhoid fever in Touraine.
A restoration took place during the seventeenth-century tenure of Canon Louis Breton, who lived in a nearby dwelling cut into the rock. Around 1643, a new altar was inaugurated and a painted cycle showing the life of Sainte Radegonde was created. The chapel was later disused during the French Revolution and sold as a national asset in 1793. Together with adjoining cavities, it was then divided into four dwellings. This arrangement lasted for almost a century, while successive owners excavated the tombs in attempts to recover bones and other furnishings.
Élisabeth Charre purchased the site in the winter of 1878 with the aim of restoring it and returning it to religious use. That purpose was achieved the following year. The nineteenth-century work added furnishings, a recumbent effigy of Jean, and new paintings in the apses, while also restoring earlier decoration. Two annual Masses were celebrated in the early twentieth century, on Saint John’s Day, June 24, and on Sainte Radegonde’s feast, August 13.
Archaeological rediscovery and conservation
The town of Chinon acquired the chapel in 1957 and placed its management in the hands of Les Amis du Vieux Chinon, a local learned society. From 1960, the society cleared, cleaned, and repaired the complex. In 1964, it rediscovered the Royal Hunt mural beneath layers of whitewash and uncovered the well, which had been filled with nineteenth-century waste.
The Musée des Arts et Traditions Populaires du Chinonais was established at the site in 1966. The chapel and all its mural paintings were listed as historic monuments in 1967. The Royal Hunt mural received an initial restoration in 1969. Painting surveys followed in 2006, the Royal Hunt was cleaned and consolidated in 2008, and the paintings in the two small chapels were restored in 2011. Studies carried out in 2019, including carbon-14 analysis of charcoal in the painted plaster, reassessed the mural’s date and technique.
The Royal Hunt’s figures are generally thought likely to represent members of the Plantagenet family, the dynasty that ruled England and held extensive territories in France during the central and later Middle Ages. Their identities and the meaning of the scene remain debated. Interpretations have included a royal falconry scene, Eleanor of Aquitaine’s departure into captivity in 1174 or her release fifteen years later, and the visit to Chinon of John Lackland and Isabella of Angoulême after their marriage on August 24, 1200. A more tentative interpretation made in 1965 connected the scene with the legend of Charlemagne, Saint Giles, and the hind.
Remains
Setting and overall layout
The chapel forms a semi-troglodytic complex cut into the slope of Sainte-Radegonde hill, east of Chinon’s historic center on the right bank of the Vienne valley. The chapel stands at about 77 metres above sea level, while the hilltop reaches approximately 94 metres and the bed of the Vienne lies at about 30 metres. Its cavities are cut into Upper Turonian yellow tuffeau, a sedimentary stone quarried in the middle Loire Valley and its tributaries for construction since Antiquity.
The chapel proper consists of two naves. An ambulatory connects them with the staircase descending to the well and with additional cavities to the north and west. Streets beside the complex may follow an ancient medieval or even antique route toward the Chinon forest, and the route borders numerous other dwellings cut into the rock.
The two naves and adjoining chapels
The northern troglodytic nave
The northern nave is entirely cut into the hillside and is supported by two monolithic pillars with Corinthian capitals. At its western end, close to the presumed position of Jean le Reclus’s tomb, stands a recumbent figure bearing the inscription “He has fallen asleep in the Lord.” An ossuary created in the nineteenth century contains ashes from earlier burials.
Two small chapels open from the north wall. The western Saint-Mexme Chapel lies near Jean’s tomb, while the eastern Sainte-Radegonde Chapel is positioned near the apse. Each has a small altar against its eastern wall. At the eastern end of the main rock-cut nave, the apse has a semi-dome vault, with a nineteenth-century painting above an altar.
The southern open-air nave
The southern nave is now open to the sky and is separated from the rock-cut nave by a medieval colonnade and a modern grille. Its eastern end has a semicircular apse that was temporarily walled up in the seventeenth century. The eastern and western walls are largely cut from rock, while the southern wall and the half-gables that supported the former single-pitched roof are built from large tuffeau blocks. The roof disappeared during the Revolution, and this former nave is now a garden.
Two side-by-side rock-cut burials remain visible in the south-west corner. The bodies were placed with their heads to the west and their feet to the east. Other graves in the southern nave include late-medieval burials with cavities at the head designed to hold the skull.
Entrances and internal connections
The exterior entrance is a Romanesque portal, a medieval doorway with a semicircular arch, set in the middle of the southern eaves wall, which serves as the façade. Two massive buttresses frame and reinforce it. A door and a walled Romanesque bay remain visible in the western gable. Inside the north-east corner of the troglodytic nave, a vaulted ambulatory leads toward the well and the adjoining cavities.
Merovingian sarcophagi and statues from the collections of the Société d’histoire de Chinon Vienne et Loire are displayed in the rock-cut nave. Their presence adds material evidence of early medieval burial and religious use to the architectural remains.
Well, galleries, and former dwellings
The rock-cut well
North-west of the chapel, a steep staircase descends northward in three flights for approximately fifteen metres. It ends at a short vaulted corridor leading to the well and to a basin that collects its water. The basin is fed by groundwater whose level can change abruptly. This physical condition may have contributed to the well’s reputation for miraculous powers.
The northern and western galleries
Two groups of galleries lie north and west of the chapel. Passages cut into the rock connect them, and masonry walls partly divide the spaces. In the nineteenth century, they formed two separate dwellings, both entirely troglodytic, with their own entrances and façade windows. The former dwellings include an old bread oven and now contain eighteenth-century walnut-oil presses and everyday objects displayed by the Chinonais folk-arts museum.
Mural paintings and painted chapels
The troglodytic nave contains decoration from eight identified campaigns extending from the twelfth to the nineteenth century. Some campaigns may have been contemporary, although their relationship remains uncertain. Paintings overlap in places, their preservation varies greatly, and substantial areas of decoration have disappeared from the walls and vaults.
The Royal Hunt
The Royal Hunt mural occupies a high position on the north wall beside Jean’s monument. Measuring approximately 2.15 by 1.15 metres, it shows five horsemen moving east toward the chapel choir. The first and third riders wear crowns, while the fourth carries a bird of prey, probably a falcon, on a gloved fist. Each rider holds the reins in one hand and gestures with the other, forming what appear to be two conversational groups.
The surviving image was probably part of a larger composition. Saltpetre badly damaged its lower section, which could not be preserved during the 1879 restoration, leaving the original treatment of the horses’ companions uncertain. The date is now placed around the middle or second half of the twelfth century on the basis of the 2019 carbon-14 study, although that dating still requires confirmation.
The artists first applied a coarse preparatory plaster layer called arriccio to even the irregular rock surface, followed by a fine-grained layer called intonaco for the painting. They worked in both fresco, applied to wet plaster, and tempera, applied to dry plaster. Preparatory drawing, underpainting, flesh tones, and flat areas were executed in fresco. Highlights, outlines, lighting, framing, and the background were added in tempera. Differences in style and technique indicate the participation of several artists, including separate painters for groups of riders and for the finely rendered horses.
The Saint-Mexme Chapel
The Saint-Mexme Chapel preserves badly damaged traces of twelfth-century painting from two campaigns. An earlier floral garland was covered by plaster carrying a second decoration, which includes part of a boat sailing on water at the beginning of the vault. This second campaign may extend the decoration of the Royal Hunt and uses the same combination of painting techniques.
The Sainte-Radegonde Chapel
The Sainte-Radegonde Chapel contains seventeenth-century scenes from the lives of Radegonde and Jean. Nineteenth-century restoration was extensive, including the repainting of the sky in blue with gold stars. Earlier decoration remains beneath these scenes. Surveys in 2006 revealed a probably thirteenth-century or later angel on the vault, while a bearded man appears on the west wall.
The apse painting and Jean’s monument
The vault of the main apse bears a nineteenth-century image of Christ in glory within a mandorla, an almond-shaped halo, and surrounded by the tetramorph, the four symbolic figures associated with the Evangelists. Matthew and John appear above Christ, with Mark and Luke below. Beneath the composition, red-painted walls carry a gold IHS monogram and are separated from the upper scene by a floral frieze. Flaking paint has exposed an earlier decoration that may have shown a similar subject.
The niche containing Jean’s recumbent figure retains traces of red paint from the fifteenth century on its walls and vault. Together with the nearby chapels, graves, and rock-cut spaces, the monument preserves the physical setting of the traditions that made Sainte-Radegonde a place of Christian memory and pilgrimage.
