Medieval Toulouse & Languedoc - Art & architecture in south-west France

The area is topographically heterogeneous, encompassing the arid limestone hills of the Minervois, the rolling vineyards of Quercy, and the broad and fertile Garonne valley. This varied landscape was never fashioned into a distinct political entity in the course of the middle ages; indeed it was not until the thirteenth century that French royal authority was exercised with any success in Toulouse and Languedoc, and even then the middle Garonne valley sustained a culture at some remove from that of the sparsely populated upland counties around Cahors.

The tour will principally concern itself with the medieval art and architecture of this wider region, though as Toulouse was a substantial Roman city, that antiquity is evident in the Romanesque architecture and sculpture of Languedoc, and we shall seek out what survives of Late Antique Toulouse. It is, however, the medieval culture which predominates and with Romanesque churches of the quality of Saint-Sernin at Toulouse and Cahors, monasteries of the calibre of Moissac, the sculpture of Saint-Lizier and Monastiès, the late Gothic churches of Carcassonne and Albi, the area does not want for masterpieces. Several of these monuments are of outstanding importance – the cloister at Moissac, for instance, encompasses the most varied and complex set of images ever to have adorned a monastic cloister. But equally impressive is the landscape through which we pass - the limestone cliffs and tumbling watercourses of the valleys of the Tarn and Lot, the lush orchards and vineyards to the east of Toulouse and, above all at this time of year, the early moorland flowers of the hills.