Cardinal Bertrand de Deaux left money in his will for a collegiate church; Innocent VI approved it on 22 November 1355; the first stone went down on 4 May 1356 and the building was consecrated on 20 September 1359. Three years and four months, start to finish. That speed is the point — it makes Saint-Didier a single, unaltered statement of the style the papal court was building in, with none of the century-long compromises most Gothic churches carry.
The type is southern Gothic: a single wide nave under one span, no aisles, chapels sunk into the space between the buttresses, and a plain polygonal apse. It was designed for preaching to a crowd, and if you have come from the vast subdivided interiors of the north it reads as almost aggressively simple. The heavy six-sided bell tower is the other signature, and it is the best-proportioned one in the city.
In the first chapel on the right stands the Portement de Croix, the carrying of the Cross, better known in Avignon as Notre-Dame du Spasme after the fainting Virgin at its centre. King René of Anjou commissioned it from Francesco Laurana in 1478 for the high altar of the Celestins church across town; it was finished by about 1481 and moved here later. It is routinely described as the earliest Renaissance sculpture executed in France — Italian modelling, Italian faces, in a Gothic building twenty years before anyone in Paris was doing anything similar. Stand at the left-hand end of it and follow the row of heads.
The baptistery chapel keeps wall painting that Avignon Tourisme attributes to the school of Siena — the Italian painters the popes brought north. It is fragmentary and badly lit, and it is the only free 14th-century Italian fresco you can see in Avignon without a ticket.
It sits on its own small square in the quiet southern quarter, five minutes below the tourist current on the Rue de la République, and it costs nothing.
