Tourist Office of Eze - The baroque church


Office deTourisme Place du Gl de Gaulle 06360 Eze France Tel : 33 (0) 4 93 41 26 00 Fax : 33 (0) 4 93 41 04 80					*Site Map*

	*The Baroque Church*
		*Eze, The old Village*

With its simple volume, its bell-tower and its nave fixed on the buttresses of the rock, the church of Eze gives to the village its characteristic silhouette.

The Church Our Lady of Assumption

The church Our Lady of the Assumption was built by an Italian architect Antonio Spinelli between 1764 and 1778 to replace an old one which felt in ruins. The church was inaugurated on May 17th 1772 dedicated to Our Lady of the Assumption by Astesan, the lord bishop of Nice.
The building materials and in particular the limestone cut in the quarry of Saint Laurent of Eze, were carried to the village by men.

Spinelli, because of the absence of recess on the facade at the time (the square of the church did not exist) and also undoubtedly for reasons of budget chose a traditional facade aspect with Corinthian pilasters decorated flowered garlands and in the middle a curvilinear oculus. With the origin the arms of the king of Sardinia and a painting of Our Lady of the Assumption were above the entrance of the church. This sobriety in the treatment of outsides accentuates the richness of the interior decorations.

At the interior, a single nave rhythmic by four side chapels, Spinelli exploits the theatrical effects specific to the baroque. If the architect unifies volume by the set of two cornices in false marble, he separates the space crowned of the choir to the nave by a triumphal arch with the pilasters gilded with gold sheet.
In the nave, he includes the same stratagem : to truths windows in half-moon on the right side of the nave, he opposes two other windows in trompe l'œil (false windows) on the left side. Even the pulpit finds its pair in trompe l'œil.

The altarpiece of the first vault on the right while entering the nave is devoted to the deads with the archangel Saint Michel saving the hearts of the purgatory, Saint Sebastian, Saint Antoine of Egypt and Saint Grat - considered in the county of Nice to protect harvests and the olive-trees are represented on the altar piece of the second vault. In the vaults of the left facade, we find successively, Saint Francis of Assise with one of the rare representations of the village of Eze with its castle, then the virgin crushing the demon of the Apocalypse.

Among furniture let us quote a tondo of Florentine school, the baptismal front decorated with the cross of Savoy and armorial bearings of mgr Cluet, abbot of Saint-Pons, bishop of Nice (1462-1501), a reliquary under the major altar containing the reminders of Saint-Germain, martyr of the V e century (496-576?), the beautiful virgin of the Assumption allotted to Muerto and a head of Christ carved in wood of olive-tree by Isidore Aicardi after the fire which devastated the neighbourhoods in 1986.

Bibliography :
Fighiera (Charles-Alexandre), Eze, Nice, éditions Serre, 2000, 448 p.
Foussard (Dominique), Barbier (Georges), Baroque niçois et monégasque, Paris, édition Picard, 1988, 318 p
pp 266-269, notes p 307, biographie de l'architecte Spinelli p 312.

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