Saint-Germain-des-Prés Abbey Church

Church · Saint-Germain-des-Prés (6th)Paris,France

The oldest church tower still standing in Paris, over a nave painted blue and gold with twenty scenes running along its walls.

Saint-Germain-des-Prés keeps the oldest church tower still standing in Paris, finished around the year 1000, and inside, the nave is painted blue and gold from floor to vault. Gold stars cross the deep blue vaults and the columns are painted red and green. Twenty large scenes run in pairs along the nave walls, the Old Testament on one side and the New on the other. Most visitors expect bare stone inside an old church, but that bare look is itself a later fashion. This blue and gold interior is far newer than the church carrying it: nineteenth-century work, two painters, twenty-one years, and a full cleaning in our own time. The abbey behind it is much older. A Frankish king founded it in meadows outside the city, and prés is still French for meadows. Later it passed to Benedictine scholars who made themselves useful in an unexpected way — they worked out how to tell a genuine medieval charter from a forgery. The Revolution shut them out. Go outside and look at the choir end: two more towers once stood there, and they were cut down to stumps.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Come when the sun is out and stand halfway down the nave — The windows are small and set high, so on a grey day the upper scenes sink into brown.
Use your phone's zoom on the wall scenes — They hang high above the arches, and the faces, haloes and painted borders only come clear once you magnify them.
Start at the back, under the organ — From there you see both painted walls at once, all the way down the five sections of the nave to the lit choir.
Keep to the side aisles when a service is running — This is a working parish, the nave chairs are for the congregation, and people come here to pray rather than to look.
Walk straight in; there is no ticket desk — Chapels are cleaned one at a time, so one may be boarded off. The tower is not open to climb.

Things to do

1
Find the hammered faces over the west door
Before you go in, stand under the stone porch at the west end and look up at the carved panel over the doorway. It shows Christ and the apostles at table. Revolutionary crowds chiselled every head flat in 1792. The plain round columns beside you replaced a row of carved stone kings, which were destroyed as well.
2
Sit in the nave and match the Old Testament scenes to the New
Take a chair in the middle of the nave and look up above the arches. The south wall carries painted scenes from the Old Testament, and the north wall scenes from the New. Each scene faces its partner across the nave, because the older story was believed to announce the later one. There are ten pairs in all, spread across the five sections of the nave.
3
Hunt for reused marble in the walkway behind the altar
Walk past the altar into the curved walkway behind the choir, then look up at the small row of arches above the main ones. The slim marble columns that carry them are older than the arcade they stand in. Scholars think they were cut for the sixth-century church on this site and put back to use when the choir was rebuilt.
4
Find the ruins of the chapel in the garden next door
Leave by the west door and walk round to the small railed garden on the church's north side, off rue de l'Abbaye. Carved arches and column bases stand in the grass. They are all that is left of the abbey's Lady Chapel, which was wrecked when gunpowder stored in the abbey exploded in 1794. Among them stands a bronze head of a woman that Picasso gave the city in 1959.