Venasque No. 1 / Vénasque

Just north of the Romanesque church of Notre-Dame in Venasque there is a little cruciform building with two windows (east and west sides) and each arm of the cross with an apse; the vault of the baptistery is supported on four central square pillars dated probably to the 11th-12th century restoration, whereas the eight granit columns which serve as support to the arches opening to the apses are much older, perhaps from the original (?) late-6th-century building; the columns of the apses are marble, and there appear to be many other parts and fragments recycled from paleo-Christian sarcophagi, but the vault and the font itself are from the second quarter of the 12th century [Enlart (1902) dates it to the 11th cent.]. The same source questions whether it was even a baptistery and not some sort of funerary chapel (a/p description in Narcisse, 1979, p. 25-26, and Labande, 1904, 287ff). An illustration in Chastel (1966, p. [7]) shows a barrel-like container in the middle of the baptistry: "sans support, selon le modele antique [... ] prennent parfois l'aspect d'un cuvier". (ibid., p. 287). The Dictionnaire des églises..., (1966-) dwells on the irregular shape of the structure, which it blames on "la maladresse des ouvriers" and compares the ancient part of this baptistery to the apse at Vaison; it also states that the original building had three windows, one each at the E, W and N apses, but that the last two were walled-in by the expansion. [cf. Index entry for Venasque No. 2 for details of the basin]