the cupolas on the pendentives of Fontevrault, Saint-Maurice is a creative synthesis of
Romanesque and Early Gothic characteristics.
Between the completion of the nave of Saint-Maurice in the mid-12th century and the
construction of its transepts and choir in the 13th, several monuments in Angers reveal
stages in the evolving Angevin Gothic. At Saint-Martin, excavated by an American team
under George H. Forsyth, Jr., a small Merovingian church of the 7th century was
enlarged in two campaigns in the 9th and 10th centuries by the addition of crossing,
transepts, and choir with chapels on the ends of each. Surmounting the crossing was a
wooden tower. In the 11th century, the lower section of the crossing tower was
reinforced. Finally, after the middle of the 12th century, a new Gothic choir was
constructed in two stages: the western square bay and the eastern bay and apse. This
western bay is crowned by a domical vault supported by two transverse ribs, two wall
ribs, two diagonal ribs, ridge ribs, and two ribs springing from a column between the
windows. Thus, twelve ribs strengthen the webbing of the vault. The middle bay is
Angers, Saint-Maurice, plan. After
Conant.
more domical in profile and with the same number but thinner ribs. The windows of the
middle bay are considerably larger. Finally, the eastern apse has five even larger
windows with more complicated frames of three colonnettes supporting the archivolts.
This choir, ca. 1150–80, led stylistically to the vaulting of the transept and choir of the
cathedral of Angers in the first half of the 13th century.
One other monument in Angers was built before the transept and choir of the
cathedral, the Hospice Saint-Jean. Founded in 1180 with a papal bull and two charters
signed by King Henry II in 1181, the Hospice consisted of a three-aisled rectangle of
eight bays, square chapel, cloister, and separate granary. The room for the sick has aisles
and nave of the same height covered with four-part, domical vaults with thin rounded
ribs. Used as a hospital until 1865, the spaces were originally divided into wards by
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