“Every man to his trade, as the saying goes. He doesn’t ask for anything when he paints all our patron saints with our faces, and we don’t have the right to ask him to help us bring in the hay.”

 The illustrator became a painter for the Saint-Michel chapel. He switched from pictures on paper to wall-painting, from the small to the large format. The last apostle was painted on the chapel’s internal walls in 1860, and the work would have taken 5 years to complete.

 The wall paintings of the Saint-Michel chapel were dry-painted onto three layers of whitewash laid on top of the coating that covered the walls. The light beige-tone mortar is made of whitewash and grey-yellow sand. On the white background of the whitewash, the painter did an outline in red-brown (using brown chalk), and that can still be seen in some places. The shapes of the halos are often underlined by the preparatory drawing that can be discerned through the yellow colour.

The pictures compel the viewer to recall Epinal, and Epinal’s image that was used as a model was that of Antoine-Marcel Raguin (1756-1841). There are two points that favour that line of thinking: first is the sizing error – the raised hand of the Saint Bartholomew is recopied and badly interpreted on the wall painting, and secondly the roses of the column bases are moved to the top of the leaf arches.

PATOIS
I Metsöta a blocâ é péire qu’an acouley é djyablotën ch’o Lapey de Dzèrjonne.

The bell of the Saint-Michel chapel blocked the stones thrown by the little devils at the rocks of Dzèrjonne. The rocks are located under the Saxon mountain waterway – the ‘bisse’ – upstream of the mountain huts, the ‘mayens’, of Prachavioz, above Haute-Nendaz. The wall painting of the church of Haute-Nendaz recalls this legend.

 What was the first written source for the story of the Deserter? We referred to it at the be-ginning of the journey.

Is your first name inspired by a saint in the calendar? Or is that not the case at all?