Chartreuse de Villeneuve-lès-Avignon, la fondation du pape Innocent VI

Villeneuve-lès-Avignon

Étienne Aubert, a cardinal from the Limousin, owned at Villeneuve, opposite Avignon, a livrée which, having become pope under the name of Innocent VI, he had enlarged from 1352 to 1356 with a great tinel and a Saint-Jean-Baptiste chapel, painted by Matteo Giovannetti, the painter of the Palais des Papes. On 2 June 1356 a bull founded a charterhouse adjoining the palace, Notre-Dame du Val de Bénédiction. Cardinal Guy de Boulogne consecrated the church and the cloister on 19 August 1358, in the presence of the pope; the latter died in 1362 and his tomb, a Gothic mausoleum, was placed in a chapel built for him from 1360. The fire at the palace, in 1365, made it possible to convert its buildings into cells; a second cloister, known as the Saint-Jean cloister, completed in 1372, added twelve more. It was for this house that in 1453 the canon Jean de Montagnac commissioned from Enguerrand Quarton the Coronation of the Virgin, now in the town's museum. The suppression of the orders, in 1790, closed the charterhouse; put up for sale in 1793, it was divided into seventeen lots in 1794 and became a district where up to three hundred families would live. The State began to buy it back in 1909, plot by plot, over more than eighty years, and in 1973 set up there a cultural centre devoted to the writing of theatre. Today one walks through the church and the tomb, the chapel of the frescoes, the great cloister, the Saint-Jean cloister, a show cell with its garden, the bakery and the gardens.

Wikipédia — Chartreuse Notre-Dame-du-Val-de-Bénédiction ↗

Getting there : 58 rue de la République, in the centre of Villeneuve-lès-Avignon; Avignon is a bridge away. Open all year except Mondays outside summer, every day from late June to late August; open all day without a midday break in spring and summer, morning and afternoon in winter; closed on 1 January, 1 November and 25 December (to be checked). Admission charge, free for under-eighteens; combined ticket with the town's other monuments (to be checked). Bookshop, café and restaurant on site. Allow at least an hour and a half.

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

Ambient sound