Quimper Cathedral: A Gothic Cathedral and Minor Basilica in France
Site at a Glance
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- 4.6
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- Medium
- Country
- France
- Primary era
- Medieval
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Medieval, Early Modern, Modern
- Civilizations
- Duchy of Brittany, French
- Site type
- Religious
- Remains
- Cathedral
On this page15 sections
History
Quimper Cathedral is a Roman Catholic cathedral and minor basilica in Quimper, France, dedicated to Saint Corentin, traditionally regarded as the city’s first bishop. Its Gothic rebuilding began in the thirteenth century and continued through the fifteenth, while later restoration completed and reshaped parts of the building. The cathedral is the seat of the Diocese of Quimper and Léon, having served as Quimper’s cathedral before the French Revolution and as the seat of the reorganized diocese since 1801.
Earlier Sanctuaries and the Romanesque Complex
Several earlier sanctuaries occupied the site, although their history remains difficult to reconstruct because few written records and archaeological excavations survive. A pre-Romanesque cathedral existed under Bishop Félix, who held the see of Cornouaille in 832. A Romanesque cathedral is mentioned in 1128 and 1424, but its form and exact date are uncertain. Construction probably began around 1070, possibly during an urban reorganization linked with Hoël II, Duke and Count of Cornouaille.
The Romanesque cathedral formed part of a larger ecclesiastical complex. A major cemetery was established around 1060 to 1080 on the present Place Laënnec, with paths converging towards the presumed cathedral. The complex also included a probably circular baptistery, a building used for Christian baptism, and a chapel dedicated to the Virgin that a count founded in 1031. The baptistery was still mentioned in 1440. In 1992, an apse found beneath the north arm of the Gothic transept provided further evidence for the earlier arrangement.
The Gothic Choir
The relationship between the Gothic cathedral and its Romanesque predecessor is not certain. One interpretation proposes that only the Romanesque choir was demolished in 1424, while another holds that the entire Romanesque cathedral was taken down at that time. The Gothic building developed through two principal phases, beginning with a Rayonnant Gothic choir in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Rayonnant Gothic is characterized by geometric tracery and radiating window patterns.
Traditional chronology places the beginning of the choir works in 1239, under Bishop Rainaud, after diocesan revenues were assigned to the construction. The choir piers stood by the death of Bishop Hervé de Landeleau in 1261. The north ambulatory, a passage curving around the rear of the choir and leading to chapels, was under construction around 1280. Its first elevation was probably completed and consecrated around 1287, and the Chapel of Our Lady of Victory was complete by the end of the thirteenth century and consecrated in 1295.
Under the traditional chronology, the south ambulatory was built in the 1330s before the War of the Breton Succession interrupted the work. Bishop Gatien de Monceaux completed the high vaults between his accession in 1408 and 1416. A later chronology proposed by the architectural historian Yves Gallet places the principal campaigns later, beginning around 1280 to 1290 and continuing into the first third of the fourteenth century. The long building process therefore included interruptions, changes of plan, and successive construction and demolition phases.
The Fifteenth-Century Rebuilding
The second major phase was the construction of the Flamboyant Gothic façade, nave, and transept during the fifteenth century. Flamboyant Gothic is known for elaborate, flame-like tracery and ornament. Bishop Bertrand de Rosmadec laid the first stone of the western façade on 26 July 1424, with the participation of Duke Jean V of Brittany. The surviving parts of the earlier nave and transept were gradually enclosed by the new work.
The façade and the bases of its two towers were complete before 1433. Side chapels, the eastern bays of the nave and aisles, and the connection with the Rayonnant choir followed. The upper nave was roofed before 1467, although its vaulting and painted decoration were not completed until 1489 to 1493. Work on the transept took place during the second half of the fifteenth century. Its covering was ordered in 1467, the crossing spire followed in 1468, and the north arm was built from 1475 and completed in 1486.
Fire, Furnishings, and Revolution
Fire repeatedly damaged the cathedral’s upper parts. On 10 August 1613, a fire affected the roof of the north tower. Lightning struck the lead spire on 16 February 1620 and caused a fire that destroyed the bell tower. A local legend called the “Devil of Quimper-Corentin” says that the canons extinguished the blaze with relics, holy water, and a rye loaf containing a consecrated host.
New interior furnishings were installed in the 1640s. A choir screen was made in 1643, and the organ and its gallery were built between 1643 and 1646 by Robert Dallam. During the French Revolution, the cathedral became a Temple of Reason, while shops attached to its sides were converted into drinking establishments. Furniture, sacred objects, and polychrome statues were burned or dispersed. The choir screen and choir enclosure were destroyed, and the latter was replaced by an iron grille.
Local tradition holds that the carpenter Daniel Sergent moved the supposed relics of Saint Corentin and Blessed Jean Discalceat to the church of Ergué-Armel for protection. Only Saint Corentin’s relics were later returned. The cathedral resumed its religious function after the Concordat of 1801. The west portal was disfigured in 1820, the ossuary was destroyed in 1847, and the municipality demolished several inns and drinking establishments that stood against or beside the cathedral around 1838.
Nineteenth-Century Restoration
Bishop Joseph-Marie Graveran initiated a major restoration and revived the plan to complete the façade spires. The “sou of Saint Corentin” levy asked each inhabitant of the diocese to contribute one sou annually for five years. Joseph Bigot designed the spires, which were built between 1854 and 1856 by master mason Pierre Nestour and stonecutter Corentin Quéré. The towers rise about 75 metres, and the spires add approximately 36 metres.
Between 1854 and 1875, the glass painter Émile Hirsch produced twenty-three windows under Bigot’s direction. Yan’ Dargent painted parts of the interior between 1871 and 1883. Jules Everaert made the choir grille in 1866 to 1868, with additions above the stalls in 1875 to 1876. The cathedral was classified as a French historic monument in 1862 and became a minor basilica on 11 March 1870. It is also associated with the Tro Breiz, a traditional Breton pilgrimage linking seven historic cathedral cities.
Conservation and Continuing Use
Structural studies in 1982 identified cracks in the choir vaults. A major campaign from the late 1980s through the 2000s consolidated the building, replaced damaged stone, treated surface coatings, restored stained glass and the organ, and partly reconstructed medieval polychromy, the use of several colors on architectural surfaces. The choir was restored from 1988 to 1993, the nave and transept from 1995 to 1999, the organ from 1995 to 2003, the towers and spires from 2004 to 2007, and the west portal from 2007 to 2008.
The choir restoration re-centered structural loads to counter the outward movement of the supports connected with the flying buttresses, external arches that transfer the pressure of a vault to piers. The restored choir was inaugurated on 12 and 13 December 1993, and the west portal restoration was inaugurated on 12 December 2008. Reconstructed polychromy prompted debate because only part of the former decoration could be recreated. The work followed surviving traces and older descriptions, including yellow and red ochre on the choir ribs and red-ochre imitation masonry in the nave vaults.
The cathedral retains a substantial historic collection of furnishings, including twenty-eight elements protected as historic monuments. Nineteenth-century efforts to impose stylistic unity also removed or redistributed some Baroque, neoclassical, and large painted works to other buildings and religious houses. Deterioration of the north belfry led to the replacement of bell ringing by recordings from December 2019. After structural restoration, the bells rang again in December 2023, when a seventh swinging bell, Marie-Corentin, joined the existing six.
Remains
Plan and Gothic Elevation
Quimper Cathedral has a Latin-cross plan. The axis of the choir deviates approximately 10 degrees to the left from that of the nave. Suggested explanations include unstable ground that was formerly wet near the Odet, the retention or connection of an earlier chapel, the position of the episcopal palace and surrounding streets, and a symbolic reference to Christ’s inclined head. The reason remains uncertain.
The four-bay choir has aisles and lateral chapels and continues into an ambulatory with five radiating chapels and an axial chapel dedicated to the Virgin. The choir complex is approximately 30 metres long. Its elevation reflects Norman influence through slender colonnettes, sharply profiled arcades, richly moulded ribs, a shallow frieze above the main arcades, blind triforium openings, and relatively narrow clerestory windows.
The nave has a bay before the west portal and five further bays with two aisles. One aisle is broad, while the narrower aisle was later divided into side chapels whose altars were removed after 1790. The nave rises in three levels, with lowered pointed main arches, a short band-like triforium, an upper gallery, and clerestory windows about three times the height of the triforium. The triforium bays contain five or six pointed arches with trefoiled inner profiles, while the upper gallery has balustrades pierced by six or seven quatrefoils. A frieze above the main arcades combines foliage, animals, small arcades, and quatrefoils.
Western Façade and Towers
The western façade is a tripartite composition with two towers, begun in the fifteenth century and completed under Bishop Graveran. It combines aspects of thirteenth-century Norman Gothic with the tracery of the Flamboyant Gothic period. A central west portal is flanked by two large pointed windows. The lateral portals are placed on the north and south sides at the level of the first aisle bay.
Above the central porch, a triangular gable contains two superimposed round-headed windows with orthogonal tracery, a feature associated with English architectural influence. The towers contain elongated windows and two superimposed open galleries. Their design draws on Norman bell towers and on examples at the Notre-Dame-du-Mur chapel in Morlaix, the Notre-Dame du Kreisker chapel, and Saint-Pierre church in Caen.
The nineteenth-century spires rise from platforms with three-register galleries, quatrefoils, pointed arcades, and open gables. Octagonal pinnacles, crocketed gables, quatrefoils, and eight upper openings complete their design. Joseph Bigot’s spires of 1854 to 1856 draw principally on the fifteenth-century spire of Notre-Dame-de-Roscudon at Pont-Croix and, to a lesser extent, on the spire of Notre-Dame du Kreisker.
West Portal and Gradlon Statue
The central bay of the façade is supported by two rows of buttresses decorated with superimposed niches, canopies, pinnacles, and false mitred arcades. The projecting west portal has a terrace with a quatrefoil-and-mouchette balustrade, seven archivolts, angel figures, foliage scrolls, crocketed ornament, and a finial.
The portal’s central mullion and tympanum were removed in 1820 because the paired entrance openings were too narrow for a processional canopy. Joseph Bigot restored them between 1866 and 1870 with a new iconographic scheme. Before 1793, the mullion carried an equestrian kersanton statue of Duke Jean V. Kersanton is a fine-grained Breton stone used for sculpture and architectural detail. The statue was replaced in 1866 by a granite Christ blessing with his right hand, holding a globe, and trampling a dragon, made by the sculptor Le Brun.
The tympanum is now open and contains a blind radiating rose flanked by smaller roses. The gable bears heraldic imagery associated with Jean V, Jeanne of France, their three sons, Bertrand and Guillaume de Rosmadec, and the nobility of Cornouaille. Much medieval armorial decoration was defaced during the Revolution and later reconstructed in colored and gilded form.
Above the façade stands an equestrian granite statue of the legendary King Gradlon on his horse Morvarc’h. The fifteenth-century lead statue was destroyed during the Revolution on 12 December 1793. The replacement was made by Le Brun after a model by Amédée Ménard and inaugurated on 10 October 1858. It depicts Gradlon with a crown, sceptre, cloak, gold collar, and sword.
Side Portals and Glazing
The south portal, made by the ducal workshop of Le Folgoët, is known as the Portal of the Virgin or Portal of Saint Catherine. Its decoration includes the Virgin and Child, angels with censers, a kersanton statue of Saint Catherine in a buttress niche, heraldic shields, and eight instrument-playing angels in the upper archivolts.
On the north side are the Baptism Portal, the Portal of Our Lady of Candlemas, and a smaller former entrance to the ossuary and cemetery. The Candlemas Portal was built between 1475 and 1479 by the mason Pierre Le Goaraguer and his son Guillaume. It has a single door, a triangular pediment, and archivolts carved with foliage.
The high windows preserve fifteenth-century work, although extensive nineteenth-century restoration makes older and newer sections difficult to distinguish. The high windows were removed in 1942 and reinstalled during the 1950s and 1960s. The high choir windows were made around 1415 to 1417. Their surviving program includes an axial Calvary, saints beneath architectural canopies, and clerical and lay donors. Jean V and Jeanne of France donated the windows around the apse, and differences in technique indicate the participation of at least four workshops.
The axial Calvary and two adjacent damaged windows were replaced by Julien-Léopold Lobin in 1856. Antoine Lusson restored the straight choir bays in 1866 and replaced many southern panels with copies. The windows were restored again from 1989 to 1993 by the Le Bihan and Messonet workshops. Some displaced historic choir panels survive elsewhere, including a Crucifixion reassembled in the chapel of Castelnau-Bretenoux and fragments that entered private collections.
The transept and nave windows were made in the late fifteenth century, probably after 1493. An east window of the south transept bears the date 1496. Their imagery includes long series of saints beneath architectural canopies, with later additions such as the Resurrected Christ and Saint Martin’s Charity. The Le Bihan workshop restored them in 1995. The lower windows are largely post-Revolutionary and include work by Julien-Léopold Lobin, Auguste Steinheil, Émile Hirsch, Eugène-Stanislas Oudinot, Georges-Claudius Lavergne, Hubert de Sainte-Marie, Jean-Jacques Gruber, Josette Mahuzier, and Anna Stein.
Burials, Altars, and Sculpture
Six protected medieval and late-medieval episcopal or canonical funerary slabs remain in the cathedral. They include the 1296 relief slab of Bishop Even de la Forest, the late-fourteenth-century slab of Bishop Geoffroy Le Marhec, slabs associated with Gatien de Monceaux and Bertrand de Rosmadec, the slab of Bishop Raoul Le Moël in the baptistery, and the fifteenth-century monument of Canon Pierre de Quinquis in an ambulatory chapel. Other memorials and burials commemorate figures including Bishops Graveran, René Sergent, René du Louët, Toussaint Conen de Saint-Luc, Lamarche, Duparc, Yves Cabellic, Alain Rivelen, Valleau, Dom Anselme Nouvel de la Flèche, and Francis Barbu.
The thirteenth-century altar table carries an inscription recording its consecration on 15 August 1295 by Alain Ribelin, probably Alain Rivelen, Bishop of Cornouaille from 1290 to 1320. The pulpit was carved and assembled in 1679 and 1680 by Olivier Daniel and Jean Michelet. Made of wood with gilded scenes, it depicts episodes from the life of Saint Corentin.
The Golden Altar is an oak altar covered with gilded and enamelled bronze beneath a canopy of seraphim. Placide Poussielgue-Rusand and Adolphe-Victor Geoffroy-Dechaume made it after designs by Émile Boeswillwald. It was exhibited at the 1867 Universal Exhibition and given to Quimper by Napoleon III.
Other surviving works include a wooden head of Christ probably dating from the twelfth or thirteenth century, a sixteenth-century polychrome and gilded group of Saint Anne with the Virgin and Child, and a sixteenth-century group of Saint Yves between a rich man and a poor man. The collection also includes a 2.15-metre alabaster high relief of Saint John the Baptist, a sixteenth-century alabaster altarpiece showing Christ with the four theological virtues, a statue of Saint Jean Discalceat with a nineteenth-century brass reliquary, and Auguste Ottin’s marble Virgin and Child, Notre-Dame de l’Espérance, dated 1846 and about 1.22 metres high.
A medieval grotesque above the sacristy door shows a crouching figure interacting with a bird. The sculpture belongs to the satirical and humorous tradition of motifs incorporated into Gothic religious architecture.
Bells and Organ
The cathedral’s seven electrically operated swinging bells are distributed between the two towers. The south tower contains the two largest, Cécile-Joséphine, recast in 1837, with a diameter of 1.66 metres and a weight of 3,000 kilograms, and Marie, cast in 1880, with a diameter of 1.56 metres and a weight of 2,200 kilograms. The north tower contains Marie-Joseph, Eugénie, Marguerite-Marie, Marie-Corentin, and Pia. Marie-Corentin was cast in 2024, while the other bells date from 1923 unless otherwise specified.
Three fixed bells formerly connected to the clock stand on the platform between the towers behind Gradlon’s statue. The oldest, Marie, was cast in 1312 and came from the demolished Chapel of Notre-Dame du Guéodet. It measures 0.97 metres in diameter. Two other bells date from 1830 or have no date in the surviving description.
Hervé Guillemyn built an organ in 1524. Robert Dallam replaced it in 1643 to 1646 with a new instrument and case. The organ was revised during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and received pipes from the Jacobins of Morlaix after the Revolution. Aristide Cavaillé-Coll extensively rebuilt it in 1846 while retaining Dallam’s case and some pipes.
Further work took place in 1900 and from 1958 to 1971, followed by interventions between 1990 and 2003. The present instrument retains Dallam’s case, foliage frieze, wooden balustraded balcony, a cromorne, some bourdon pipes, and reed feet. Most of the instrument derives from Cavaillé-Coll and twentieth-century builders. It has fifty-eight stops on four manuals and pedals with mechanical action and registration. The organ was listed as a historic monument in 1989 and classified in 1992.
Cloister and Earlier Burial Ground
Part of the medieval cloister survives on the south side of the cathedral, together with old tombstones from an earlier burial ground. The adjacent Breton Museum displays further sculpture in the space between the museum and the cloister, including a sixteenth-century granite double statue of John the Evangelist and Saint Peter from a calvary at Coat-Queau in Scrignac.
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