Chapelle des Moines de Berzé-la-Ville, la Sixtine romane des moines de Cluny

Berzé-la-Ville

Cluny has lost almost all of its paintings; it is to a tiny chapel among the vines of the Mâconnais that one must come to see what Cluniac colour once was. The estate of Berzé was the favourite retreat of Saint Hugh of Semur, the towering abbot who governed Cluny for sixty years and launched the building of the largest church in Christendom. He made this promontory a priory where he received distinguished guests and came in search of calm, far from the tensions of the mother abbey. In the upper chapel, built on two levels, the monks had a decoration painted in the early 12th century that ranks among the summits of Romanesque painting in France: in the half-dome of the apse, a Christ in Majesty nearly four metres high, surrounded by the apostles, is enthroned in a glory of deep colours — purples, blues, golds — of a workmanship so Byzantine that one sees in it the direct echo of the workshops then at work in Cluny itself, nourished by models from Rome and Constantinople. Covered over with limewash down the centuries, the frescoes were rediscovered and then uncovered, and their state of preservation is exceptional. One leaves this "Romanesque Sistine Chapel" dazzled, with the rare feeling of having seen, almost intact, what the monks of Saint Hugh's day saw. The site, managed with the Académie de Mâcon, has to be earned: little roads through the vines, the promontory, and that low doorway opening onto a sky painted nine hundred years ago.

Getting there : Hamlet of Le Château, Berzé-la-Ville, some ten kilometres south-east of Cluny (D17). Admission charge (about €5, free for EU under-26s); seasonal opening, telephone before coming. Coordinates given for the chapel.

Opening times and access details are given as a guide only: check before you set out.

Ambient sound