Timeline

Heritage classified

Key figures

Origin and history

The chapel of Saint Louis, also known as Chapelle Henri-IV, was built between 1608 and 1613 in Poitiers by the Jesuits shortly after their installation in the city in 1604. It served as a place of worship for the adjacent college, founded by order. Its atypical architecture, with a unique nave and a choir oriented to the south due to the slope of the terrain, combines Gothic elements (ogival vaults) and classical elements (ionic capitals). The façade, which remained unfinished, reflects the constraints of the period.

The interior is marked by a monumental Baroque altarpiece offered around 1615 by Charlotte Flandrine de Nassau, abbess of Sainte-Croix and daughter of Guillaume le Taciturne. This carved stone altarpiece incorporates a painting by Louis Finson (The Circumcision of Christ), now partially masked by a Boulle-style tabernacle added in 1698. The statues of the evangelists and a Pieta, attributed to the workshop of Gervais de la Barre, as well as anonymous paintings glorifying Saint Louis (like Louis XIII and young Louis XIV) complete the whole. During the Revolution, the chapel, transformed into a meeting place, lost some of its woodwork.

The sacristy, built in 1664, preserved its original walnut woodwork and paintings of the New Testament by the Jesuits. Among them are representations of Saint Ignatius of Loyola and Saint Francis-Xavier. The college buildings, built in the seventeenth century, have a sober facade with a central pavilion decorated with busts of Henry IV and Louis XIV (added in the nineteenth century). The chapel, its altarpiece and this pavilion have been classified as Historic Monuments since 1908.

The building illustrates the influence of the Jesuits in the religious and educational planning of Poitiers. Its decor, although modified (painted in the 1840s, grey bandage hiding original motifs in false marble), remains a major testimony of provincial baroque art. The two side doors of the altarpiece still retain their original polychromy, rare vestige of the decorative style of the early seventeenth century.

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