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Origin and history

The former church of Saint-André-des-Eaux, located in the Côtes-d'Armor in Brittany, is a religious building dating from the second half of the 11th century or the beginning of the 12th century. It illustrates the beginnings of Romanesque art in Upper Britain, with a simple rectangular plan (nave and choir separated by a diaphragm arch) and an absence of foothills. Built on the remains of an older building abandoned around the year millet, it was sold as a national property at the Revolution to Jean Michel, notary in Evran.

The church, disused in 1895 and partially destroyed in 1892, revealed medieval murals today almost erased. These frescoes, dated from the 11th or 12th century, blended geometric motifs (losanges, saw teeth) and religious scenes like a Crucifixion of the 12th-XIIIth century, close to the models of the Loire Valley. The walls were later covered with modern decorations imitating a false masonry apparatus.

Ranked a historic monument in 1990, the church was the subject of archaeological excavations in 2007-2008 (Mathias Dupuis) and consolidations in 2008. Its architecture, characteristic of the first Breton Romanesque churches, includes a nave of 13 meters, a choir with proportions respecting the number of gold, and heterogeneous materials (granite, limestone, shale). A 15th-XVIth century porch, added in 1418, and a sacristy of 1696 (destroyed) completed the building.

The paintings, documented by records by Charles Chauvet in 1916 for the Musée des Monuments Français, bear witness to successive campaigns: initial Romanesque decorations, Crucifixion of the 12th-XIIIth century, and then modern additions. The site, a communal property, preserves the ruins of the southern wall of the nave, the diaphragm arch and the bedside. Some of his stones were used to build the wall of the present cemetery.

Saint-André-des-Eaux was an enclave of the bishopric of Dol, probably a truce of Plouasne. His textual history remains incomplete, the ancient archives mentioning only these ecclesiastical connections. The building, now in consolidated ruin, offers a rare testimony of Breton Romanesque art and its architectural and pictorial evolutions.

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