Church of St. Martin, Angers, France
St. Martin has undergone many rebuildings. The first building was constructed in the 5th century, with new churches built on the site in the 9th and 12th centuries and later renovated in the Gothic style. Abandoned during the French Revolution in 1790, it became a wood store and later a tobacco warehouse, leading to rapid deterioration. Nearly demolished, it was rediscovered in the early 1900s, sparking efforts to research and restore it.
The main purposes of the excavation:
- To trace the historical development of St. Martin's, reviewing its phases of human occupation from Roman times to the present.
- To correlate this sequence with the broader historical development of the surrounding city and region, placing each phase in proper historical perspective.
- To interpret the successive structures on the site, especially the first two churches, in relation to architectural history, emphasizing their significance as architectural types and functional forms.
The field work of surveying St. Martin’s and excavating under it required six summers. (1929, 1930-1933, and 1936)
Over the next five years, while also working as a professor of art and archeology at Princeton, he devoted his free time to organizing the architectural and archaeological observations with historical data and creating essential architectural drawings.
Important findings included a statue of the Virgin and Child, which was discovered in 1931 along with Gallo-Roman potsherds (broken ceramics).
The Virgin figure found was ranked by authorities as one of the half dozen best examples of fourteenth century French sculpture.
