Break your head over this

Recently we attended a lecture with the subject “le culte celte des têtes coupées” with as a starting point a few sculpted heads embedded in the walls of the Romanesque church of Santilly.

Santilly

The origins of these sort of sculptures is obscure, and is often attributed to the Celts during the Gallo-Roman period. The lecture was trying to establish a link between these heads and head hunters or “simple” beheadings, from the head hunters in Papua New-Guinea via Indian tribes in South America to Greek and Roman human sacrifices. The whole story had “Chariots of the Gods” by von Däniken written all over it.

Modillons - Saint-Laurent-en-Brionnais

The lecture still left me with the question what is the background of these sort of sculptures. And here I am not talking of the sculpted modillons acting as consoles at the edge of a church roof (e.g. Saint-Laurent-en-Brionnais). They sometimes show different, often grotesque heads, but also depict animals, geometric patterns, etc. These sort of decorations do not seem to be illogical when a sculptor wants to decorate relatively small pieces of stone.
Another example is the tympanum of the church in Ormes. That is, again according certain sources, a remnant of Gallo-Roman (in origin Celtic) devotion, which existed for quite some time parallel to Christianity, certainly in the French country side.

Sucellus - Ormes

This head is supposed to be the god Sucellus, the god with the mallet. And for an agnostic contemplator there is not much difference between a Majestas Domini on a tympanum and a God with a mallet.
I am actually more intrigued by the solitary heads, seemingly without any logic attached to the walls of churches or bell towers. An interesting example can be seen on the bell tower of the church in Saint-Gengoux-le-National.
One can find them on a relatively big number of Romanesque churches in Saône-et-Loire. He who can explain their origin and background, let him speak up….

Saint-Gengoux-le-National

The link to the website of La Tuilerie de Chazelle can be found here.

A pleasant surprise

It does not happen very often, but sometimes…..

Did I come back for this??? Noooo....

One goes somewhere to take some pictures, and when returning home one remembers something that might have been interesting, but one forgot to take a picture of it. It is getting even worse, when that day there had been 4 photo sessions, and one does not remember in which place these pictures should have been taken.
After having visited 4 different churches in the Brionnais I remembered some promising heaps of stones on a piece of grass just outside a church, which I wanted to explore further. I forgot to do so, as well as I had forgotten the name of the place the church was in. During a next visit to the Brionnais we were close to 3 of the 4 places we had visited previously, and they were certainly not that place. Elimination gave us the name of the place we were looking for: Saint-Laurent-en-Brionnais. Google Maps could have helped us more quickly; it was the only church out of those 4 with a piece of grass next to it!

Well, I certainly did not go back for this!

A third visit solved my problem, and brought two surprises. The first (unpleasant) surprise was that the stones were hardly worth photographing. The second surprise however was a pleasant one. During our first visit there was a choir rehearsal going on. Even though the choir was of an abominable quality I considered it to be rude and impolite to march through the church, investigating every stone, using flash, etc. in short, to disturb them. Hence I did not use flash, avoided the part of the church they were using, and kept well out of their way. The whole session resulting in very few pictures of mediocre quality.

Elaborately carved capitals

During this second visit the choir was, thank heavens, nowhere to be seen, which gave me the opportunity to wander around at my own leisure. And it turned out that I had missed out on quite some interesting things during that first visit.
Not only does the church have a number of very interesting capitals, but a number of columns possesses also interestingly sculpted column bases; there were snakes, a rabbit, some crowned heads, etc.
Which proves, that it sometimes pays off to return to the scene of the crime!

Columnbase with rabbit

For my album of Saint-Laurent, click here.

The Brionnais, and not just Saint-Laurent, is more than wort a daytrip from La Tuilerie de Chazelle.