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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Blue439" data-source="post: 829096" data-attributes="member: 53455">More about the Saint-Gilles abbey church (2022)To complete the story of the Benedictine abbey church of Saint-Gilles, and in particular the discussion we had about the crypt photos I posted above, here is a panorama photograph of the eastern part of that very large church. The built-up part you see in the background is the transept. On top of the central nave (the one with a pointy arch footprint) was the bell tower I mentioned in my explanations of yesterday. You can appreciate how it was “cut down to size” by the vandals during the French Revolution.The rest of the photo shows the ruined choir and wide ambulatory, designed to accommodate very large crowds of pilgrims. This part of the church was dismantled and sold piecemeal during and after the French Revolution, during which all religious buildings, churches, monasteries, etc., were seized by the State and sold to private owners. Some (many, to tell the truth) were protected and saved, but a number of others, including major ones like Saint-Gilles or Cluny, were used as stone quarries. Many stones from the abbey church can be spotted in the walls of 19th century homes in the town of Saint-Gilles... The quartering of this unfortunate church stopped only when it was put on the first list of French Historic Landmarks in 1840.As usual, the PTGui stitching software I used to assemble the five-shot panorama stripped the EXIF, so this was shot with a Nikon Z7 II and a Nikkor 19mm, ƒ/4 PC-E tilt-shift lens, manual focus, on a Gitzo tripod with a Benro geared head. I shifted the lens horizontally from left to right to obtain the field of view I needed. I couldn’t step back any further, as my back was already up against the wall of what used to be the church’s apse...[ATTACH=full]415324[/ATTACH]</blockquote>

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