Sacred Architecture

There are places in Europe where a monastery was built somewhere that seems to defy human possibility, and all three of the greatest are islands. Mont Saint-Michel in Normandy rises from a bay of quicksand and tidal flats like something from a medieval illumination — a granite island crowned by an abbey that has been a place of pilgrimage since the eighth century, connected to the mainland by a causeway that disappears at high tide. The interior is a sequence of spaces built over centuries: the Romanesque nave, the Gothic choir, the cloister garden suspended above the sea. St Michael's Mount in Cornwall is its smaller, quieter cousin — a castle-priory on a granite island in Mount's Bay, accessible on foot at low tide across a cobbled causeway, with a chapel at its summit that has been a place of Christian worship since at least the twelfth century. But the most vertiginous of all may be Skellig Michael off the coast of Kerry — a pyramidal rock rising two hundred metres from the Atlantic, where sixth-century monks carved six hundred steps into the cliff face and built a cluster of dry-stone beehive cells near the summit that have survived intact for fourteen hundred years. There is no mortar. There is no shelter. There is only the wind, the sea, and the extraordinary fact that people chose to live there and pray there, and did so for six centuries. To visit all three is to understand something about the medieval imagination: that the most sacred places were often the most inaccessible.

The medieval church understood that faith needed something to touch. The great relic collections of Europe drew pilgrims across the continent — and the buildings constructed to house them are among the most extraordinary in the world. In Rome, the chains said to have bound St Peter in his Jerusalem imprisonment are kept in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli, in a reliquary beneath Michelangelo's Moses — a work so powerful that Michelangelo is said to have struck the knee of the finished statue and commanded it to speak. In the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, Louis IX built what is essentially a reliquary the size of a chapel to house the Crown of Thorns — fifteen stained glass windows rising thirty metres, the walls dissolved entirely into colour and light. In Canterbury, the cathedral became the most visited pilgrimage site in medieval England after the murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket in 1170 — a killing so shocking that it drew pilgrims from across Europe for three centuries, including Chaucer's motley company of travellers whose stories became the first great work of English literature; the shrine itself was destroyed by Henry VIII, but the cathedral, the worn stone floors and the exact spot where Becket fell are all still there. Whether you believe in the relics or not, the buildings they inspired are among the most beautiful ever made.

The great Benedictine and Cistercian abbeys of Europe were not just places of worship — they were the universities, hospitals, farms and libraries of the medieval world. The Abbaye de Senanque in Provence, founded in 1148 and still home to a community of Cistercian monks, sits in a narrow valley of lavender with no village around it and almost no sound — its cloister and church embodying the Cistercian ideal of absolute simplicity in a landscape that seems designed to reinforce it. In Ravenna, the Basilica of San Vitale is something altogether different: a UNESCO World Heritage site built in 547 AD that contains the finest Byzantine mosaics outside Constantinople, including the famous panels of Emperor Justinian and Empress Theodora — figures of imperial authority rendered in gold and jewel-coloured glass with an intensity that has not dimmed in fifteen hundred years. In Bruges, the Church of Our Lady holds Michelangelo's Madonna and Child — the only sculpture he allowed to leave Italy during his lifetime, looted by Napoleon and again by the Nazis, and now returned to the side chapel where it has stood since 1514, in a city that treats it with the quiet reverence it deserves. In Ireland, the Rock of Cashel in Tipperary rises from the plain of Munster like a vision — a cluster of Romanesque and Gothic buildings on a limestone outcrop, including a round tower, a cathedral and the finest Romanesque chapel in Ireland, all abandoned to the sky in the seventeenth century and left exactly as they fell.

Not all of Europe's sacred architecture announces itself. Some of the most affecting spaces are small — a Romanesque baptistery in a Tuscan village, a side chapel in a Venetian church where a Bellini altarpiece hangs in the light it was painted for, a Baroque oratory in Palermo where Caravaggio's last painting still hangs on the wall where he placed it. In Assisi, the Basilica of San Francesco contains Giotto's fresco cycle of the life of St Francis — twenty-eight scenes painted around 1300 that effectively invented the visual language of Western narrative painting. In Vienna, the Augustinerkirche holds the Herzgruft, the heart crypt of the Habsburg emperors — fifty-four silver urns containing the hearts of the dynasty, in a room that almost no one visits. In Ghent, St Bavo's Cathedral houses the Ghent Altarpiece by the Van Eyck brothers, completed in 1432 and considered the most influential painting in the history of Western art — a polyptych of such complexity and beauty that it has been stolen, dismembered, hidden and recovered more times than any other artwork in Europe, its panels scattered across continents by Napoleon, the Kaiser and Hitler before being reassembled in the cathedral where it was always meant to hang.

These are places that hide in plain sight — a side door left ajar, an island that appears on no itinerary, a room that most visitors walk straight past. The traveller who wanders in without expectation, who climbs the steps not quite knowing what waits at the top, is the one who leaves changed — carrying something that has no name but does not fade. Mont Saint-Michel, Skellig Michael, the chains of St Peter in Rome — abbeys built on impossible islands, relics that drew pilgrims across continents, and the intimate sacred spaces that most visitors walk straight past.