Church of St. Ouen, Rouen
Encyclopedia
Ouen
Audoin, Audoen or Ouen, and Dado to his contemporaries, , was a Frankish bishop, courtier, chronicler, and Catholic saint....
is a large Gothic Roman Catholic church in Rouen
Rouen
Rouen , in northern France on the River Seine, is the capital of the Haute-Normandie region and the historic capital city of Normandy. Once one of the largest and most prosperous cities of medieval Europe , it was the seat of the Exchequer of Normandy in the Middle Ages...
, northern France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
, famous for both its architecture and its large, unaltered Cavaillé-Coll
Aristide Cavaillé-Coll
Aristide Cavaillé-Coll was a French organ builder. He is considered by many to be the greatest organ builder of the 19th century because he combined both science and art to make his instruments...
organ
Pipe organ
The pipe organ is a musical instrument that produces sound by driving pressurized air through pipes selected via a keyboard. Because each organ pipe produces a single pitch, the pipes are provided in sets called ranks, each of which has a common timbre and volume throughout the keyboard compass...
, which Charles-Marie Widor
Charles-Marie Widor
Charles-Marie Jean Albert Widor was a French organist, composer and teacher.-Life:Widor was born in Lyon, to a family of organ builders, and initially studied music there with his father, François-Charles Widor, titular organist of Saint-François-de-Sales from 1838 to 1889...
described as "a Michelangelo
Michelangelo
Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni , commonly known as Michelangelo, was an Italian Renaissance painter, sculptor, architect, poet, and engineer who exerted an unparalleled influence on the development of Western art...
of an organ". Built on a similar scale to nearby Rouen Cathedral
Rouen Cathedral
Rouen Cathedral is a Roman Catholic Gothic cathedral in Rouen, in northwestern France. It is the seat of the Archbishop of Rouen and Normandy.-History:...
, it is, along with church of Saint Maclou
Church of Saint-Maclou
The Church of Saint-Maclou is a Roman Catholic Flamboyant church in Rouen, France. Along with Rouen Cathedral and the Church of St. Ouen, Saint-Maclou is considered one of the best examples of Gothic architecture in Rouen and is cited as a church of monumental design in...
, one of the principal Gothic
Gothic architecture
Gothic architecture is a style of architecture that flourished during the high and late medieval period. It evolved from Romanesque architecture and was succeeded by Renaissance architecture....
monuments of Rouen.
The Abbey
Hundred Years' War
The Hundred Years' War was a series of separate wars waged from 1337 to 1453 by the House of Valois and the House of Plantagenet, also known as the House of Anjou, for the French throne, which had become vacant upon the extinction of the senior Capetian line of French kings...
and sacked and badly damaged during the Harelle
Harelle
The Harelle was a revolt that occurred in the French city of Rouen in 1382 followed by the Maillotins Revolt a few days later in Paris, and numerous other revolts across France in the subsequent week. France was in the midst of the Hundred Years War, and had seen decades of warfare, widespread...
. It was completed in the 15th century in the Flamboyant
Flamboyant
Flamboyant is the name given to a florid style of late Gothic architecture in vogue in France from the 14th to the early 16th century, a version of which spread to Spain and Portugal during the 15th century; the equivalent stylistic period in English architecture is called the Decorated Style, and...
style.
The foundation of St. Ouen's Abbey has been variously credited, among others, to Clothair I and to St. Clothilda, but evidence is scanty. It was dedicated at first to St. Peter when the body of St. Ouen, Archbishop of Rouen
Archbishop of Rouen
The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Rouen is an Archdiocese of the Latin Rite of the Roman Catholic Church in France. As one of the fifteen Archbishops of France, the ecclesiastical province of the archdiocese comprises the majority of Normandy....
(d. 678), was buried there; the name of St. Peter and St. Ouen became common and finally St. Ouen only. The history of the abbey, on record from the 1000, is unremarkable; a list of abbots is in Gallia Christiana
Gallia Christiana
The Gallia Christiana, a type of work of which there have been several editions, is a documentary catalogue or list, with brief historical notices, of all the Catholic dioceses and abbeys of France from the earliest times, also of their occupants....
XI, 140. In 1660 the monastery was united to the Congregation of St. Maur, and when suppressed, in 1794, the community numbered twenty-four. The abbey building itself was vacated by the time of the French Revolution
French Revolution
The French Revolution , sometimes distinguished as the 'Great French Revolution' , was a period of radical social and political upheaval in France and Europe. The absolute monarchy that had ruled France for centuries collapsed in three years...
and was subsequently occupied by the Town Hall of Rouen.
Architecture
The church is 137 m long under 33 m high vaultRib vault
The intersection of two or three barrel vaults produces a rib vault or ribbed vault when they are edged with an armature of piped masonry often carved in decorative patterns; compare groin vault, an older form of vault construction...
s. The central crossing is surmounted by an unusual lantern-style tower similar to that at Ely Cathedral
Ely Cathedral
Ely Cathedral is the principal church of the Diocese of Ely, in Cambridgeshire, England, and is the seat of the Bishop of Ely and a suffragan bishop, the Bishop of Huntingdon...
in England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
. The tower was done in the Flamboyant style. The well-preserved stained glass
Stained glass
The term stained glass can refer to coloured glass as a material or to works produced from it. Throughout its thousand-year history, the term has been applied almost exclusively to the windows of churches and other significant buildings...
is predominantly from the 14th century, featuring jewel tones among panels of clear and frosted white glass, and leading to a brighter interior than is usual with Gothic churches. The hitherto unfinished façade was completed between 1846 and 1851.
Organ
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- Couplers: Tirasse G.O., Tirasse Pos., Tirasse Réc., Appel G.O., Pos./G.O., Réc./G.O., Bomb./G.O., Pos./Réc., Bomb./Réc., Oct. gr. G.O., Oct. gr. Réc./G.O., Oct. gr. Réc., Oct. aiguë Réc., Anches Péd., Anches G.O., Anches Pos., Anches Réc., Anches Bomb., Trémolo Réc., Expression Réc., Orage