Following the departure of the English from the city in 1436 and the end of the Hundred Years’ War a decade later, Paris entered a period of intense building activity. The number of ecclesiastical projects rivaled those of three centuries earlier, but unlike the buildings that marked the development of Gothic architecture, these churches have often been viewed as heralds of its decline into an ornamental sophistry that produced monstrous hybrids of flamboyant and classical styles. However, the past forty years have seen a reevaluation of the period beginning with Roland Sanfaçon’s L’architecture flamboyante en France (1971) and followed by Ethan Matt Kavaler’s Renaissance Gothic: Architecture and the Arts in Northern Europe, 1470–1540 (2012). Agnès Bos’s Les églises flamboyantes de Paris (2003) surveys over forty projects and has been complemented by monographic studies, including Anne-Marie Sankovitch’s The Church of Saint-Eustache in the Early French Renaissance (2015). What emerges from this refreshed view is a picture of the inventive variety with which ornament and structure combined to stimulate sensory experience and convey meaning.

Generously illustrated, Saint-Etienne-du-Mont combines a diachronic architectural history of the church, from its origins in the thirteenth century to restoration and modernization as recently as 2003, with a descriptive catalogue of the stained-glass windows, furniture, monuments, paintings, and the organ, organized by medium and location. Anchored to archival sources, the text composes an inventory of the scores of craftsmen who built and decorated the church as well as the artists and patrons who outfitted its spaces and walls.

Located at the summit of the Mont-Sainte-Geneviève on the Left Bank, Saint-Etienne served as the parish church of the abbey of Sainte-Geneviève to which it was physically attached. An early thirteenth-century structure, enlarged during the following century, was replaced by the late Gothic edifice we see today. The first two decades of construction and the character of Saint-Etienne’s original design are contested. Hamon and Gatouillat assert that work documented in the 1490s concerned the addition of chapels, a new facade, and the surviving bell tower to the existing church. Saint-Etienne’s new choir was launched only in 1510 under the direction of master mason Jean Turbillon and briskly built, the vaults installed by Antoine Beaucorps in 1540, marking its completion. Further, the authors suggest that its unique elevation represents a unified architectural vision rather than the result of an intervention in the 1530s, as Agnès Bos claimed, that inserted subsidiary arches and a gallery into the soaring main vessel arcade. The archaeological evidence is equivocal: scars in the stones of the choir piers suggest that these arches were slotted in, but they are integrated flawlessly with the spectacular jubé in place by 1541. Clarifying analysis based on architectural details such as molding profiles might be developed in greater depth. Even with this intrusive belt, the upward attenuation of Saint-Etienne’s arcades together with the short clerestory and huge windows of the ambulatory produce an interior of luminous spaciousness. The design’s filiation remains elusive: the thirteenth-century Le Mans Cathedral choir is invoked along with the contemporary abbey of Saint-Victor in Paris and the church of the Madeleine in Montargis. A deeper context is suggested (58–59) in references to the nearby Cathedral of Notre-Dame, echoed in the columnar main vessel supports as well as the piers between the chapels, and the hall church configuration of the adjacent Sainte-Geneviève. That sixteenth-century architects could draw inspiration from these venerable twelfth-century models while recasting their forms in late Gothic and even classicizing styles reveals the historical awareness that informed their design thinking.

A new nave followed upon the completion of the choir beginning in the 1540s and was roofed, vaulted, and glazed by the late 1580s. While scrupulously respecting the structure and parti of the choir, a classical vocabulary—semicircular arches, egg-and-dart moldings, dentils—dominates the design. A similar multilingual approach rules Claude Guérin’s façade, built between 1607 and 1622, that combines tiers of pedimented temple fronts with a traceried rose window.

Saint-Etienne-du-Mont reminds us that artistic activity operated at the scale of a neighborhood at the same time that it reflected international events and period tastes. Many stories remain to be told of individual artistic careers, the dynamics of patronage, or theories of style. Assembling the craftsmen, churchmen, and bourgeois parishioners who have built, decorated, and maintained Saint-Etienne over its six-century life, Hamon and Gatouillat compile the census that provides the raw material for these future studies.