Church of Saint-Saturnin

A first Romanesque church existed in the first half of the XNUMXth century with a single nave of two square bays probably covered with cupolas on pendentives, buttressed on the outside by thick buttresses.

Former perpetual vicarage under the cathedral chapter of Angoulême in 1110, the church of Saint Saturnin was later attributed to the archdeaconry and linked to a conventual priory.
A first Romanesque church existed in the first half of the XNUMXth century with a single nave of two square bays probably covered with cupolas on pendentives, buttressed on the outside by thick buttresses. Of the narrower choir which followed this nave, nothing has survived.
Following the enlargements of the building towards the west, at the end of the XNUMXth century, the Romanesque facade was taken up again. A new portal with four arches is confined by two narrow blind arcades. The sculpted eardrums of the primitive facade are reused and repositioned above the ground floor. The first sculpted group, to the north, represents two figures, a saint and a bishop. The sculptures of the south tympanum represent Christ flanked by the Virgin and Saint John.
The finesse of the sculpture, the pleating of the clothes, the quality of execution recalls the style of the workshops of sculptors who worked on the facade of the cathedral of Angoulême around 1122.
The church seems to have suffered enough during the Hundred Years' War, leading to major alterations in the XNUMXth century: the choir with a flat apse, the oval-shaped dome on pendentives on which rises a polygonal bell tower, the two eastern vaulted bays.
The set was restored around 1870 and then in 2010.
The remains of the priory, much altered in the XNUMXth, XNUMXth and XNUMXth centuries, unfold to the south, around the rectangular location of the cloister which has disappeared.

Listed as a Historic Monument in 1973.

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