Innocent VI was elected in 1352 and immediately gave away his own house. His cardinal’s residence at Villeneuve, plus land around it, became the Chartreuse Notre-Dame-du-Val-de-Bénédiction, planned first for twelve monks and expanded by his successors until it was the biggest charterhouse in France: a church, three cloisters, a chapter house, a refectory, a laundry, gardens, and forty individual cells, each a small house with its own walled garden, because Carthusians live as hermits who meet only for the offices. Walking the great cloister and looking into the cells is the clearest picture in France of how that order actually worked.
The reason for our audience to cross the river is the Chapelle des Fresques, dedicated to St John the Baptist and standing next to the Tinel. Matteo Giovannetti — the Viterbo priest-painter who did the Chapelle Saint-Martial in the Palais des Papes — painted it in 1355: the life of the Baptist, framed in painted trompe-l’œil architecture, under a ceiling of blue and emerald sky with pink clouds and angels. Much of the upper register has gone, and the losses are honest and visible. But the chapel is small and rarely busy, which after the queues in the palace is the whole difference: here you can stand still in front of Giovannetti’s work for as long as you like.
Innocent VI’s tomb is in the funerary chapel on the south side of the church. He ordered it in his own lifetime, from 1361, from the master of works of the papal palaces; the effigy rests on a lion, on a chest of Pernes stone that once held rows of small alabaster figures. At the Revolution the monastery was sold off in lots, the tomb ended up in the house of a vine-grower who broke up the base to make a cupboard and sold the statues one at a time, and after Prosper Mérimée intervened it went to the town hospice. It was put back in the church in 1959.
One piece of practical unfairness: the monastery’s greatest painting is not here. Enguerrand Quarton’s Coronation of the Virgin was commissioned in 1453 for this church and now hangs in the Musée Pierre-de-Luxembourg, a few minutes’ walk away.
Since 1973 the buildings have housed the national centre for playwriting, so parts of it are a working artists’ residence.
