The Salle du Corps de Garde, a former guardhouse at Colmar in Alsace, Grand Est, France, was built in 1575 on the site of a medieval chapel. It features a superbly sculpted Renaissance loggia from which magistrates used to publicly announce convictions and the sentences they handed down to guilty citizens.
Colmar, Alsace, Grand Est, France: the Salle du Corps de Garde, a former guardhouse in Place de la Cathédrale, was built in 1575 on the site of a medieval chapel. Its sculpted loggia, added in 1577-82, features prolific sculptural detail and has been described as a jewel of Rhenish or German Renaissance sculptural art. The building, designed as a town hall by Beier Melchior, stands on the site of the Chapelle Saint-Jacques, first mentioned in 1286, which served as an ossuary for bones removed from the cemetery of the nearby collegiate church of Saint Martin. The chapel, suppressed in 1533, was then turned into an arsenal. Parts of the vaulted ossuary crypt survive below rooms later used for military and police purposes. Although the chapel’s windows and arched openings were blocked in 1588, their outline is still visible in the rear wall of the guardhouse facing Rue des Marchands. A passage connecting the cathedral square with Rue des Marchands used to house a market selling nuts and oilseeds. The Renaissance main portal has an entablature resting on Tuscan columns, adorned with lion heads, with a pediment made up of interlacing scrolls framing a bust medallion. Above it, the loggia features fluted columns, and fine sculptural decoration including palmettes, coats of arms, snapdragons, rosettes and grotesque masks. For a time, the city’s magistrates took their oaths in the loggia and used it to announce convictions and sentences. The date 1575 appears twice in the building, on a door lintel and a beam. The large upstairs room has retained its original decoration, including a niche with a pointed arch and painted ornamentation.
Size: 2789px × 4192px
Location: Colmar, Alsace, Grand Est, France.
Photo credit: © Terence Kerr / Alamy / Afripics
License: Royalty Free
Model Released: No
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