The church Notre-Dame d' Agonges

The church of Agonges was built on a central mound, in the middle of a series of worked hillocks make of hand of man  or work observation posts of defense. Depending until the revolution of the diocese of Bourges, possession of the abbess of Saint-Menoux, this parish is mentioned for the first time in 1138 pennies the term “Sanctae Mariae de Agongis”.

Built at the end of XIIth century and the beginning of XIIIth, the current building belongs to the Roman style of transition. Indeed, if it is Roman by its general plan ,the ornamentation of her gates and its capitals, its narrow openings in semicircular arch, its apse and its absidioles arched in half dome, it is Gothic by the vault of its nave.
Moreover, built with the crossroads of three dioceses (Bourges, Autun and Clermont), this construction underwent at the same time the influence of the Burgundian schools, from Auvergne and Berry.

The external walls present a stone marriage of size and hardcores of varied colors passing from the gray and white at the pink and the yellow. The stones of gray or pink colour are out of sandstone of the country, the others out of limestone with phrygranes of the valley Allier.

The southern side door is bored in a very projecting pediment, covered of a glazing whose entablature is supported by modillons with carved heads or chips. The bay is framed by three archivolts in arc slightly broken which receive from share and others three columns whose torus is flated and with very simple capitals decorated with scales, foliages and heads.

The western gate does not make not covered on the pinion. Its oven walls are decorated of a post engaged between two barley grains, and internally framed column at Roman base and capital with foliage.

The northern wall of the nave carries the trace of a door in gothic arch which was walled. With the top of this old door, one can see a stone corbel. They are probably the indices of an old vault.

A cord of billets runs around the apse by circumventing the windows. The wall of this apse is reinforced by two flat buttresses.

The pinions of the low-transept seem to have been elevated at one unspecified time. Holes of rolls are still visible in the northern pigon and on the northern wall. let us modilloons of the apse are with simplified chips, those of the building are only grooved.
The sacristy, old vault built subsequently, (probably in XVth century), present of the ogival veins less rudimentary than those of the nave and the more projecting buttresses.

The bell-tower, of Burgundian Roman style, rises of only one jet on the side of the nave. Its higher part present, on each face, three stages of blind arcades or windows. Blind blind arcades formed of three Roman arches and four windows on the higher floor, separated by two simple columns and two twin pillars. The face is presents only two stages of bays and the northern face that only one.

The southern face of the bell-tower presents under the blind arcades, a series of stones of apparatus decorated with low-reliefs of a very popular invoice: characters blowing in a horn, current dog and animals.

The style of these sculpture is to be brought closer that the characters and animal observers on the arcs of the transept and certain capitals. The presence of this unslung bestiary, Eastern origin, could be dependent on the distance of the episcopal capacity, and more facility to be able to transmit a message.

The church is made of a single nave with four spans and of an arched transept of warheadswhich open on an apse in the same way plane, of a vault which prolongs the southern arm of the transept (currently sacristy) and a square bell-tower established on the southernmost side.

The apse, arched in half dome, decorated internally with a blind arcade on colonettes made up of three Roman arches under which the windows open and which two small arcs in blind mitre separate. This type of blind blind arcades “in mitre”, also known as “in pediment”, are found in Bagneux, Montilly, Franchesse, Louroux and Chateloy.
On the internal face of each arc of the transept is archstones decorated with 16 figurines representing of the heads of monsters or faced animals, of the squatted characters or on the back.

The capitals are more interesting: feuilages interlaced, heads of men and deer, characters dancing. We thus have the initiate, laid down on the ground, impregnated its terrestrial and animal part, which is rectified to reach the sky.

It is in Agonges that the history of Notre-Dame of the Round began. Indeed, it is from here this black virgin comes. It is now in the vault of Chazeuil. (See Chazeuil and the legend of the black virgin low)