It has "curved machicolations going from one buttress to the next," and is considered one of the most complete types of the fortified churches of the Middle Ages, "which are ranged in a line along the coast."
The church of Maguelonne has fine Romanesque windows, and arches of full half-circle, and resembles a fortress almost more than a church.
The inside is very dark and solemn, stirring in the grave simplicity of its style. True Provençal Romanesque in its structure of vast arches and apses; the Roman idea but little modified except in the capitals of the columns where the classic flow and grace yields to the naïveté of early Christian sentiment. Indeed, that sentiment very seriously pervades the whole building. There is none of the sumptuous triumphant spirit of a grand classic edifice, although the general lines are the same in both cases. A careful draughtsman, conscientiously rendering the church of Maguelonne, might produce a portrait correct and unrecognisable, as many portraits are; the bare lines without the meaning behind them, the matter without the spirit; and a portrait of that sort might be indistinguishable from that of some great Roman interior--palace, bath, hall of justice. The painted hall of the Villa Madama on the hillside above the Milvian bridge near Rome is constructed on the same broad scheme of arch and apse, and above, on vault and spandril, garlanded, arabesqued, a riot of rosy gods and goddesses--the exquisite work of Giulio Romano--voluptuous, expansive, rich in beauty and power. Maguelonne with its classic structure--a style which had been developed during centuries for stronger and stronger expression of Pagan magnificence--nevertheless breathes forth the sentiment of poverty and asceticism, the spirit that drove men and women into the wilderness, that set them writhing under the consciousness of sin, or exalted them to the state of emotion wherein the pains of martyrdom were transfigured into ecstasy. Truly a thing of potency the human spirit! How, by the same general means, it can express emotions at once so strong and so completely opposed is one of the great mysteries of art.
[Illustration: MAGUELONNE FROM THE LAGOON. _By E. M. Synge._]