Priory Buildings
Archaeological excavations have led to new insights into the first church, which was built in the 10th Century. In 960 it was expanded following the model of the Church of Cluny and the entrance hall was extended. A second building phase began in the middle of the 11th Century, which brought the church to approximately its current appearance. A new nave was added around 1070-80.
Later, the church received four turrets and a ring of gables around the Gothic bell tower. The interior of the church was decorated with paintings around the entrance in 1200, and to the choir by 1454. Several of the columns are decorated with roman capitals.
When convent buildings became the seat of the Bernese bailiff in the 16th Century, they were converted and renovated on a large scale. Again in the 19th Century, they were converted when the buildings were used by the school administration.
Read more about this topic: Payerne Priory
Famous quotes containing the words priory and/or buildings:
“Blessing turned to blasphemies,
Holy deeds to despites.
Sin is where our Lady sat,
Heaven turned is to hell,
Sathan sits where our Lord did sway,
Walsingham, Oh farewell!”
—Unknown. A Lament for the Priory of Walsingham (l. 39–44)
“The American who has been confined, in his own country, to the sight of buildings designed after foreign models, is surprised on entering York Minster or St. Peter’s at Rome, by the feeling that these structures are imitations also,—faint copies of an invisible archetype.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)