City: Saint-Chef is a French municipality
in Rhône Alpes, in the northwest of the department Isère.
It is in this welcoming country where forests, ponds of water
and plateaux favorable for wine-growing are evident, moreover,
one can also find the most beautiful Romanesque art treasures
in France, i.e. the splendid fresco’s of the 12th century.
A little bit of history
Saint-Chef is today a grand municipality which numbers
more than 3,000 inhabitants, spread over an area of 2,716
hectares. The irregular relief of this vast area culminates
in an altitude of 308 meters. The village was built around
a convent, founded in the 6th century. This religious community
was, before its decline, one of the most powerful in France.
They left the area at the end of the 18th century. The abbey
was built over a period of time. The abbey church dates from
the 10th and 11th century. After around this time that seven
other municipalities were built at Saint-Chef.
Building: Abbey church Saint Theudère
This Romanesque church was placed on the list of primary
historical monuments in 1840, by Prosper Mérimée
and protects a high chapel decorated with frescos. In the
chapels Saint-Theudère, Saint Clément and especially
in the already mentioned high chapel “of the angels”,
there are Romanesque frescos from the end of the 11th century,
which are exceptionally well preserved.
The main events of the Holy Scriptures are depicted as
an illustrated Bible: the celestial Jerusalem, the crowning
of Christ as a king and the four rivers originating in Eden.
The object:
Placed under the roof of the apses we can see a radiating
tetragrammaton in Hebrew.
