High Chapel of Saint-Chef

Saint-Chef boasts an abbatial church which is a French benchmark in religious heritage. Its rich collection of 12th-century Romanesque frescoes are among the best-conserved examples yet they are perhaps the least known to the general public.
An identical model of this exemplary church was produced by historians and exhibited around 1940 at the cité de l'architecture et du patrimoine at the Trocadero in Paris. On entering the high chapel, the visitor is stunned by the decoration of the entire room. The floor (approximately 100 m²) is covered in gold and blue mosaic and the vault is entirely ochre. Matched only by the church of Saint-Savin-sur-Gartempe, a French reference when it comes to Romanesque frescoes, this small chapel has an enormous symbolic dimension as it depicts Saint John's Heavenly Jerusalem.