Published in Le Républicain Lorrain on 17 May 2018, by Thierry Fedrigo.
Atlas Obscura, the guide for curious travellers, placed Saint-Maximin Church and its stained glass by Jean Cocteau on its world map. The Metz monument thereby joined the places that, according to the site, should be seen before one dies.
The American collaborative platform and digital magazine, also published in print, attracts a vast international readership. It is a kind of essential guide for travellers in search of the absolute, the unusual and places far from established tourist routes.
The definitive map
Every year since 2009, its founders have published a map of extraordinary sights around the world. Fed by contributors and supervised by the Atlas Obscura editorial team, it then listed 13,701 places across the globe. The map changes constantly, and a lifetime would not suffice to see everything.
Although 13,701 sounds like a large number, it remains small on the scale of the planet. Inclusion on this selective list, consulted throughout the English-speaking world, therefore gives a place a certain aura.
Metz was then the only city in the Lorraine corridor represented alongside such curiosities as Toyama Bay’s firefly squid in Japan, the everlasting storm over Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela, Fragonard’s écorchés at the veterinary museum in Alfort and the living root bridges of Cherrapunji in India.
Between Luxembourg and Nancy
Between Luxembourg and Nancy, Atlas Obscura selected only Saint-Maximin Church in Metz’s Outre-Seille district, because of its extraordinary windows designed by Jean Cocteau. Neither the Centre Pompidou-Metz, Place Stanislas nor Saint Stephen’s Cathedral appeared on the map.
The unexpected lies behind the doors of a church built between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries. Saint-Maximin contains the only complete ensemble of stained glass designed by Cocteau. Installed from the late 1960s onwards from drawings made in 1962, the windows are regarded as his last masterpiece because most were realised after his death on 11 October 1963.
A Cocteau masterpiece
Cocteau’s adopted son, Édouard Dermit, supervised the continuation of the Saint-Maximin project. The church had initially been seen as a consolation after Cocteau’s designs for Metz Cathedral were rejected in favour of Bissière, Villon and Chagall.
In the end, the artist gained from the change. Saint-Maximin was placed at his disposal as a complete field of expression. His revenge took the form of fourteen bays and twenty-four windows, acclaimed for their immense artistic value: a masterly achievement that did not escape Atlas Obscura’s attention.
Atlas Obscura’s own English-language presentation describes the windows as Cocteau’s first and final work in stained glass. It notes their theme of immortality, their abstract and Cubist character, their blue tones and their mysterious, almost cave-like human figures. The site also emphasises the absence of overt Christian imagery and Cocteau’s open spirituality, in which myth offered a passage from everyday life towards divine beauty.