Musée dauphinois

Origin of the monastery

This monastery of the Order of the Visitation of Holy Mary was first founded in the context of the Counter-Reformation in the 17th century. The congregation, only for women, was created in 1610 by saint Francis de Sales and saint Jane Frances de Chantal who settled their fourth house in Grenoble and named it the monastery of Sainte-Marie-d’en-Haut. The building was erected between 1619 and 1621 on the right bank of the Isère river, above the city, at the bottom of the Bastille hill’s slopes, long of Chalemont sloping road. At that time, Chalemont road, a former Roman road, was no longer the historical entry of the city thanks to a new road, dug in the rocks along the river. This new road was added a new door in 1620, known as Porte de France (France’s Gate) thanks to the duke of Lesdiguières.

The differents occupiers

This monastery welcomed several kinds of occupiers. During the French Revolution, it became a national belonging and was transformed into a jail for anti-revolutionary people such as local important men like Chérubin Beyle, father of the writer Stendhal, the cabinetmaker Jean-François Hache, chartreux Fathers and non-juring priests. In 1804, nuns of the Order of the Holy Heart led by Philippine Duchesne settled in the monastery and devoted their time to educating young girls. Then, the Ursulines settled there from 1851 to April 1905, when they were expelled and their furniture was put up for auction. From 1906 to 1920, the army quartered soldiers in the place. Afterwards, from 1920 the City lacking housing used the building to accommodate 150 families coming from Italy. When they were settled elsewhere at the end of the 1950s, the former monastery welcomed for a few years students of the Grenoble School of Architecture. Eventually, the building was restored by the City.

The building and the chapel

Most of the monastery parts’ have been preserved, such as the cloister, the choir with its grille from which the Visitandines nuns attended to masses, and to finish, the richly-decorated baroque chapel. This chapel is accessible by a long and vaulted corridor ending in the nuns’ choir, which is built at right angle from the chapel, in order to allow the nuns to be invisible from the audience in the chapel. Jane de Chantal was knelling at the bottom of the grille on December 16t^h, 1622 when she received the revelation of Francis de Sales’ death.

Chapel’s ceiling

The Visitation Chapel is a great example of French Baroque style, with its walls painted by Toussaint Largeot and completed in 1662, during the celebrations organised by a Jesuit Father named Claude-François Ménestrier, for the beatification of Francis de Sales. The chapel also contains an altarpiece in golden wood that started to be executed in 1622 thanks to the generosity of François de Bonne de Créqui, Grenoble’s military governor, who also was Lesdiguières’ grandson. The altar was realised one century later by the sculptor François Tanzi, coming from Tuscany, in 1747, on the occasion of the beatification of Jane de Chantal. A small lateral chapel is decorated with pictures telling the life of Francis de Sales.

In 1890, the inhabitants of Grenoble wanted to have a Protective Virgin, as it existed in other cities, named Notre-Dame-d’en-Haut. Architect Alfred Berruyer, who also realized a basilica at La Salette, an important local pilgrimage place, built against the chapel a 30 meters high tower (98,5 ft) surmounted by a statue of the Virgin in golden cast-iron which was 36 meters (118 feet) high and weighed 1,8 tons. Below this statue, four other ones located in the angles, 12 meters (39 feet) high, represented the four saints protecting the city : saint Bruno, saint Ferjus, saint Francis de Sales and saint Hugh. The whole building was inaugurated on October 25, 1891, in presence of the bischop, His Eminence Fava. But a few decades later, this building caused dangerous cracks in the chapel’s vault and was close to crolling. For that reason, the demolition was decided in 1935 and completed on January 18, 1936. The four sculptures disappeared, apart from the one of saint Francis de Sales which was found again in 2007, in the garden of a former private clinic.

The chapel was listed on the historical register on June 19, 1936.

Cloister Garden

The cloister garden, with a sundial in the centre, is representative of 17th century gardens with box hedges organised around four grass squares. Another Roman sundial is exposed below an arcade. It is rock-sculpted and represents a reversed celestial vault with the twelve hours of the day, from dawn to dusk.

Gravestones with epitaphs from the Roman period of Cularo, one of the former names of Grenoble, are set down the cloister’s arcades and come from the first archaeological museum of Grenoble in the neighbourhood of Saint-Laurent, created in 1859. East of the museum, there are terrace gardens long of Chalemont road. They used to be cultivated as vineyards and vegetable gardens and they now give to the visitors an exceptional panorama, 30 meters above the downtown.

These terraces and the building of the museum are listed on the historical register since November 3, 1965.

Collections and documentary center

The museum owns 90000 objects but only 5% of them are exposed. It also has a collection of 25000 iconographical documents and 125000 photographs. A digitalisation program of all the collections started in 2007. A first set of notices is available on the museum Internet website. The Musée Dauphinois regularly enlarges its collections thanks to donations, objects found during archaeological prospects and purchasing, such as the portrait of bishop Philibert de Bruillard, dated circa 1825, in 2011.