Notre-Dame de Dijon et la Vierge de Bon-Espoir

Dijon

Behind a façade unique in France, two storeys of false galleries bristling with gargoyles, the church of Notre-Dame, built from the 1220s to the 1250s, keeps in a chapel a small seated wooden Virgin, without hands and without Child, held to be one of the oldest statues of the Virgin preserved in France, of the 11th or 12th century. In the 15th century she was called Notre-Dame de l'Apport. On 11 September 1513, while the Swiss were besieging Dijon, she was carried in procession; on the 13th the besiegers broke camp, and the statue became Notre-Dame de Bon-Espoir. A tapestry woven around 1515 to record the event is today in the musée des Beaux-Arts. The Virgin lost her hands in the 18th century and her Child in 1794. Above all she has a history of colour: painted black in the 16th or 17th century, for reasons unknown, she was long counted among the Black Virgins, until a restoration in 1945 uncovered the Romanesque polychromy beneath the dark layer; the last black tint on the face was removed in 1963. She is thus the material demonstration of what historians say about the Black Virgins: the statue is medieval, the colour was not. At the top of the façade, Jacquemart, the automaton brought back from Courtrai in 1382 by Philip the Bold, strikes the hours; on the north side, the little owl worn away by the hands of passers-by has become the emblem of the city.

Wikipédia — Église Notre-Dame de Dijon ↗

Getting there : Place Notre-Dame, in the pedestrian centre of Dijon, behind the palace of the dukes. Church open every day during the daytime; the Virgin of Bon-Espoir is in a chapel of the transept, the tapestry of 1513 in the musée des Beaux-Arts, in the neighbouring palace of the dukes. Touching the owl with the left hand brings good luck, so they say.

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

Ambient sound