Lausanne Cathedral: A Medieval Gothic Cathedral in Switzerland
Site at a Glance
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- 4.6
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- Medium
- Country
- Switzerland
- Primary era
- Medieval
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Medieval, Early Modern, Modern
- Civilizations
- Holy Roman Empire, Swiss
- Site type
- Religious
- Remains
- Cathedral
On this page12 sections
History
Lausanne Cathedral is a Gothic basilica in Lausanne, Switzerland, built through successive medieval projects between approximately 1170 and 1235. Formerly dedicated as Notre-Dame, it replaced several religious buildings on the site, including churches associated first with Saint Thyrsus and later with Saint-Maire. The cathedral became an important Marian pilgrimage center during the Middle Ages and was consecrated to the Nativity of the Virgin Mary on 20 October 1275.
Earlier Churches and Medieval Construction
Christian worship on the site extends back to the sixth century. An early church dedicated to Saint Thyrsus was later known as Saint-Maire, and a Carolingian building was replaced around the year 1000 by an early Romanesque church. The eastern choir project of the present cathedral began around 1160, during the episcopate of Landry de Durnes, bishop of Lausanne from 1160 to 1174.
A more extensive rebuilding began around 1190 under the direction traditionally attributed to the so-called Master of Lausanne. Jean Cotereel probably oversaw the completion of the nave and western end from about 1215. The earliest work retained Romanesque features, but the builders soon adopted Gothic forms influenced by northern France and England. These successive campaigns produced a building composed of several projects while maintaining a strong overall unity.
Construction was completed in the mid-thirteenth century, although the western complex remained unfinished after the consecration. Two fires caused major damage during the building’s early history. The first occurred on 17 August 1235, and the second took place shortly before 1320. In the Middle Ages, the cathedral drew approximately 70,000 pilgrims each year to venerate a miraculous statue of the Virgin, even though Lausanne had only about 7,000 inhabitants.
Late Medieval Changes
The cathedral continued to serve as a religious and political setting in the later Middle Ages. The antipope Felix V, a claimant to the papal office who was not recognized as the legitimate pope by the opposing ecclesiastical authority, was enthroned there on 23 July 1440.
Shortly before the Reformation, Bishop Aymon de Montfalcon undertook major alterations. He closed the road passage that crossed the western part of the church, separating the western complex from the nave and choir, and thereby made the interior a single space. He also commissioned a large Flamboyant Gothic portal, a later Gothic design characterized by flame-like tracery. Begun in 1515, the Montfalcon Portal remained unfinished when the Reformation reached Lausanne.
Reformation and Bernese Rule
Bernese forces took control of the lands of the Prince-Bishopric of Lausanne in 1536. A prince-bishopric was an ecclesiastical territory whose bishop also exercised secular political rule. After a theological disputation that October, Catholic worship was prohibited, Bishop Sébastien de Montfalcon was expelled, and the cathedral became a Reformed church.
The change brought extensive destruction and dispossession. The cloister and most valuable furnishings from the choir and chapels were destroyed, while more than fifty wooden statues of saints and major liturgical works were destroyed or sold. The silver triptych high altarpiece made in 1474 for Bishop Georges de Saluces was melted down in Bern in June 1537. The approximately 6.5-kilogram gilded-silver statue of the enthroned Virgin and Child, a twelfth-century image decorated with silver ornaments and a gold-and-jeweled crown, was also melted down there.
The cathedral treasury was taken to Bern in eighteen carts in 1537. Two carved angels presented by Bishop Benoît de Montferrand, who served from 1476 to 1491, survived and are now held by the Bern Historical Museum. The city of Fribourg acquired most of the valuable manuscripts, which are deposited in its cantonal and university library. The black Saint-Triphon limestone high altar was moved in the winter of 1561 to the Protestant Collegiate Church of Saint Vincent in Bern, where it remains. The choir tapestries were confiscated and are preserved in the Bern Historical Museum.
Under Bernese control, the cathedral continued to receive burials, including those of local notables and patrician families. A monumental pulpit was made in 1633 by Daniel Heintz II and Jörg Freymund. A lightning strike caused another major fire in 1674, after which the old spire was replaced according to designs by the Bernese architect Abraham Dünz I.
Restoration and Continuing Use
Restoration began under Eugène Viollet-le-Duc in 1874 and became his final building project. He died in Lausanne in 1879, and a lengthy campaign from the 1890s to about 1910 continued much of his program. The western Montfalcon Portal was completely reconstructed between 1892 and 1909, with sculpture by Raphaël Lugeon.
The Cathedral Technical Commission, founded in 1898, directed restoration during the twentieth century. The belfry was almost entirely rebuilt in Morlay stone during the 1940s to the 1960s. Major work on the transepts, nave, and painted portal followed from the 1970s to 2000. The lantern tower was restored from 1989 to 1995 in a reassessment of earlier restoration methods that preserved Viollet-le-Duc’s contribution.
A further five-year restoration cycle began in the early 2010s under the Canton of Vaud and addressed the unfinished tower, choir, and roofs. Conservation continued with a gentle cleaning in 2017 and further renovation measures announced in 2020. Lausanne Cathedral has belonged to the Reformed tradition since 1536 and is attached to the Chailly-Cathedral parish within the Evangelical Reformed Church of the Canton of Vaud. It also hosts ecumenical celebrations and cultural events, while some Catholic masses have been authorized in recent years.
The cathedral is listed as a Swiss cultural property of national importance. Its municipal watch service has operated in the belfry continuously since 1405. Originally intended to warn Lausanne of fires, the service continues to announce the hours aloud at night. Renato Häusler has held the function since 2002, and Cassandre Berdoz became the first woman officially appointed as an auxiliary watchkeeper on 16 August 2021.
Remains
Lausanne Cathedral is built mainly from cut molasse, a relatively soft regional sandstone. The Gothic basilica has a three-aisled nave, transept, raised crossing, choir, and ambulatory, a passage running around the choir and providing access to chapels. Its external length is approximately 99.75 metres, the transept measures 42.10 metres across, the nave rises 21 metres, the belfry reaches 67.50 metres, and the lantern tower rises approximately 79.60 metres.
Choir, Crossing, and Transepts
The earliest eastern project, begun around 1160, included an ambulatory with probably five radiating chapels and Romanesque capitals. It was replaced by an early Gothic choir with a polygonal ambulatory and a single chapel on the central axis. The later rebuilding attributed to the Master of Lausanne created a larger choir, two transept arms flanked by towers, and a lantern tower above the crossing.
The crossing, where the transept meets the nave and choir, contains an additional triforium, an intermediate gallery or arcade level above the main arcade, above the nave vaults. A clerestory, or upper row of windows, forms part of the lantern tower, which is finished above by an eight-part umbrella vault. The choir square has a four-part rib vault, and each transept arm contains two vaulted bays. The south transept has a gabled facade with a rose window, while the north transept has rectangular windows. The walls use an unusual double construction associated with Anglo-Norman Gothic, including a hanging arch in the north transept, and the elevation is organized in three levels, including within the lantern tower.
Nave and Western Complex
The nave appears originally to have been planned with three double bays. The design was probably changed around the end of the twelfth or beginning of the thirteenth century to use elongated rectangular bays. Weak piers were strengthened with additional supports on the nave side. The first nave double bay remains in front of the lantern tower, while the other bays have four-part rib vaults.
An unusually large western nave bay is equivalent to roughly one and a half bays at vault level. It originally contained a probably vaulted road passage crossing the cathedral and supporting a broad gallery, which may have been intended for a chapel dedicated to the miraculous Virgin. The unusual spiral staircases leading into the towers at gallery level may relate to this arrangement. From the early thirteenth century, the pilgrimage chapel occupied the ground-floor chapel of the south transept tower.
The road passage survived until the beginning of the sixteenth century, when Aymon de Montfalcon closed it with two blocking walls. Their lower sections imitate the thirteenth-century blind, polylobed arcades, while large Flamboyant Gothic tracery windows identify the later intervention. The bishop’s arms were repeatedly displayed on the work. The western complex was conceived as a triumphal arch to the Virgin. Its southern tower has a massive base with few openings, while its upper section repeats the cathedral’s double-wall principle. Only the southern of the two planned western towers was completed.
The former central western entrance opened into a vestibule with two lateral apses. It was closed in the early sixteenth century by the Montfalcon Portal, commissioned from Jean Contoz and François Magyn. The present western door, made of wood reinforced with iron, dates from the restoration of 1892 to 1906 and bears the mark of the Ballenegger-Thévenaz joinery.
Painted Portal and Rose Window
The painted portal on the south side was built around 1220 to 1230 as an open-sided lateral porch. Its figures from the Old and New Testaments frame the Coronation of the Virgin in the tympanum, the sculpted field above the doorway, above scenes of her Dormition and Assumption. The medieval polychromy, the use of several colors in architectural or sculptural decoration, survives in exceptional condition. The portal gives a prominent place to Christ in Glory while presenting the Virgin in a comparatively modest position. Medieval pilgrims entered through this side entrance.
Restoration of the painted portal lasted forty years and was completed in 2007. The work strengthened the surviving colors rather than recreating all lost paint artificially, and introduced protective measures based on modern architectural techniques.
The thirteenth-century rose window was installed around 1205, before the famous rose windows of Chartres. Almost all of its glazing survives. Painted by Pierre d’Arras between 1231 and 1235, it forms a mappa mundi, a medieval symbolic map of the world rather than a geographically precise modern map. Its imagery includes earth and sea, air and fire, the seasons, months, zodiac signs, and monsters at the edges of the world. A drawing of the rose appears in the collection of Villard de Honnecourt.
The original program probably included Annus, the personification of the year, surrounded by Sol, Luna, Dies, and Nox. During the restoration of the south transept and rose from 1894 to 1909, Edouard Hosch recreated missing panels in a thirteenth-century style and placed the present central figure of God the Father in the window. This arrangement does not reproduce the original central design.
Stained Glass and Interior Decoration
Later stained glass includes heraldic windows by Alfred Gérente in the south aisle from 1866 to 1868 and Paul Robert’s large window, The Law and Grace, in the Montfalcon Chapel from 1892. Competitions held in 1918 to 1919 and in 1928 led to a major cycle of modern windows replacing the plain white glass introduced during the Reformed period. The resulting ensemble includes works by Louis Rivier, François de Ribeaupierre, Charles Clément, Edmond Bille, Alexandre Cingria, and Marcel Poncet, in neo-Chartres, vivid, cubist, and darker expressive styles.
Fragments of architectural polychromy survive inside the cathedral, particularly in the Notre-Dame Chapel. Colored wall paintings remain near the rose window and in the entrance area. The interior’s gray-and-ochre coloring corresponds to its original appearance.
Tombs and Archaeological Finds
The ambulatory contains more than fifty funerary monuments ranging from the ninth century to the beginning of the nineteenth century, including four unidentified episcopal effigies from the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. The monument of Othon I of Grandson, who died in 1328, was erected around 1300 at the outer edge of the choir. Its Carrara marble effigy lies beneath a Rayonnant Gothic canopy, a form characterized by radiating tracery and elaborate window designs. Its position for a layperson reflects Othon’s exceptional social status and incorporates English and French courtly influences.
Several funerary monuments from the Bernese period are carved from black Saint-Triphon limestone. Some are attributed to Louis Dupuis, who worked at the cathedral under the architect Gabriel Delagrange in the mid-eighteenth century. Another, by Johann Friedrich Funk I, includes an alabaster figure of Chronos. The sarcophagus of the Russian princess Catherine Orlow, who died in 1781, was designed by Michel-Vincent Brandoin and carved by Jean-François Doret. A Carrara marble urn for Henriette Canning, who died in 1817, was completed in 1825 by Lorenzo Bartolini and bears an idealized profile of the deceased.
In 1910, the archaeologist Albert Naef discovered an eighth-century Abraxas amulet in a tomb beneath the choir. The silver cross carries an inscription associated with the magical formula “Abracadabra.”
Organs, Bells, and Belfry
Documents from the fifteenth century mention an organ, and another instrument was installed in 1529, although their characteristics are unknown. Organ music was prohibited for almost two centuries after the Reformation, and the instruments were destroyed. Samson Scherrer installed an organ on the west gallery in 1733. It entered regular use in 1743 and remained in service until 1901.
A Kuhn organ replaced it in 1902. Its 77 stops, each a set of pipes with a particular tone color, were arranged in a U shape on the upper nave gallery so that the facade windows remained visible, but its acoustics and pneumatic action were criticized. A larger Kuhn instrument installed in 1955 had 93 stops on four manuals and pedal and lacked a case. Its components were moved to the lower gallery in 1965, and the instrument was replaced in 2003 and transferred to the Baltic Philharmonic in Gdansk.
The present large organ was installed and inaugurated in December 2003. Built by C. B. Fisk, it has multiple manuals, pedal, and digital functions including MIDI recording. Its arrangement supports French classical and symphonic, German Baroque, and German Romantic repertories. A fernwerk, a remote organ division controlled from the main console, was added in 2013 using components from a 1902 Kuhn organ formerly in the Reformed Temple of Saint-George. A smaller organ made by Armagni and Mingot was installed in the nave in 1969 for works involving an orchestra or choir.
Seven bells hang in the cathedral tower, five of them more than 300 years old. The belfry also houses the night-watch service, whose hours are traditionally proclaimed toward the four cardinal directions between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. The medieval alarm bell served to warn Lausanne of fires. Since 1932, the facades have been illuminated at night. Lausanne Cathedral was the city’s first public building to receive exterior illumination, and in 1968 its thirteen incandescent-light projectors were adapted to sodium-vapor lamps, changing the light from white to yellow and extending annual illumination to approximately 2,000 hours.
