Our Spa area gets a makeover: full reopening on May 10
Our Spa area gets a makeover: full reopening on May 10
A stone’s throw from Les Violettes is the basilica of Notre Dame de Thierenbach, a major place of Marian pilgrimage in Alsace. Here we offer you a short guided tour.
After our article devoted to the history of the basilica, let us now enter the building where, as soon as we cross the threshold, a feeling of fullness and calm invades the visitor. The exuberance of the ornaments and decorations of the Baroque style coexists harmoniously with the dark and austere severity of the Gothic buildings.
From the entrance, the volumes give off a soothing atmosphere, somewhat rustic, but still imbued with dignity and majesty. Before discovering the ornamentation of the walls composed of frescoes and paintings, let’s take a little height to appreciate the pillars and the vaults of this building.
These pillars support gracefully and without stiffness, the large capitals from which start wide double arches decorated with red, blue and golden friezes. The enfilade of the two rows of square supports of the nave penetrates into the choir to be transformed into embedded pillars, thus creating a separation between the three bays of this part of the basilica.
The five bays of the nave, of a somewhat curious architecture, because covered in a basket handle on a large spacing, are doubled on one side as on the other by side naves, hardly narrower and lower than the central part. This arrangement of surfaces and volumes gives pride of place to this feeling of homogeneity that emanates from this large rectangular hall measuring thirty meters long and twenty wide. There is the choir at the bedside with three slopes, ideally highlighted by four high semicircular stained glass windows.
The edges of the vaults adorned with a plant decoration are like a staging in the spaces thus delimited, with several compositions of arabesques and small cartouches with pious inscriptions and, in the nave, more imposing medallions where the busts of the saints linked to the history of the basilica.
It presents on a very luminous blue background, set in a richly decorated but nevertheless well balanced decoration, a group of Saints often associated with the Virgin Mary. We can recognize Dagobert, Casimir, Thérèse and François de Sales there.
Let us now descend from these heights and begin a quick tour of the walls of the building. There is an impressive collection of ex-Votos, donations from pilgrims in gratitude for healings, but also many friezes, as well as window tops, extremely varied.
One of the most impressive is by Martin Feuerstein, painter and professor at the “Kunstakademie” in Munich, born in Barr in 1856, and knighted knight. It is true that Alsace, at that time, was annexed to Germany. There are six of his paintings in the choir and in the apses, including “The Wedding at Cana” and “Jesus found in the Temple”.
In the north apse there is a moving scene painted by René Kuder. One can recognize there among the characters paying homage to the Virgin her daughter Marie-France, then aged thirteen.
The painting to the left of the altar of the Virgin, magnificently restored by the Strasbourg artist Marcel Imbs in 1926, represents The Holy Family and echoes the Engagement of the Virgin and Saint Joseph, by Feurstein.
Four enormous canvases embedded in the woodwork dating from the beginning of the 18th century represent the stages of the life of the Virgin.
Still in the choir, a very ornate altarpiece from 1920 has been erected in all its splendor. The altarpiece canvas represents the Assumption. A few other important canvases hang on the south wall of the basilica. Crucifixions from different eras, a portrait representing Saint Louis, and of course still a lot of ex-votos.
We hope to have made your mouth water, so don’t hesitate, take advantage of your stay at Les Violettes to push the door of this amazing Basilica.
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© Les Violettes Hôtel & Spa – All rights reserved. Realization : Annei – the agency for ambitious 🥇 entrepreneurs
© Les Violettes Hôtel & Spa – All rights reserved.
Realization : Annei – the agency for ambitious 🥇 entrepreneurs
© Les Violettes Hôtel & Spa – All rights reserved.
Realization : Annei – the agency for ambitious 🥇 entrepreneurs
