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Saint Jean-Batiste Church of Villenouvelle

Historic site and monument, Religious heritage, Church in Montauban

  • Expanding during the Ancien Regime, the district of Villenouvelle brought together a population of textile workers and market gardeners, most of them Catholic.

  • Built in the late fifteenth century, the church of Saint John had proved too small. However, its reconstruction in larger dimensions will only be realized two centuries later. And still it was an unfinished church, deprived of two steeples designed to frame the facade, that will inaugurate the Bishop of Montauban in 1888.
    The architect Leopold Gardelle had drawn the plans at the same time as those of Saint-Orens de Villebourbon. He designed a neo-Gothic building, a style that was then...
    Built in the late fifteenth century, the church of Saint John had proved too small. However, its reconstruction in larger dimensions will only be realized two centuries later. And still it was an unfinished church, deprived of two steeples designed to frame the facade, that will inaugurate the Bishop of Montauban in 1888.
    The architect Leopold Gardelle had drawn the plans at the same time as those of Saint-Orens de Villebourbon. He designed a neo-Gothic building, a style that was then enormously successful in religious architecture.
    We will appreciate the beautiful elevation of the nave supported by flying buttresses, as well as the cross vaults of the arches resting on fine columns.
    A good polychrome effect is obtained, on the buttresses and at the angles, by alternating beds of pink or bistre brick and white stone.
    Inside, in the left aisle, the painter Montalban Gaston Célarié composed a stained glass window commemorating the First World War. It is, in this original form, the monument to the dead of the parish.