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I'm trying to identify this building:

romanesque church supposed to be in France

For completeness, this is the unrestored uncropped version:

enter image description here

According to metadata, the image was taken in 1900-1910 and it is captioned as "facade of a building with a Romanesque entrance" and the location is stated as "France", with a "Bassignac" listed as a possible location.

I have checked images of churches from Bassignac (Cantal) and the whole Cantal with no results. I have also tried the two other villages in France named Bassignac.

From other images in the collection we know that the photographer traveled to Carcassonne and Paris, but also into southern Germany and Switzerland and in northern Spain up to Galicia, although most of his photographs were taken in Catalonia - however I don't expect that building to be in Catalonia because it would likely be already identified and because we have very few large Romanesque buildings.

I've tried around Carcassonne, also without results.

The image can be found in Wikimedia Commons or at its original location.

For details about my motives to identify the building, please read the end of the first question in this series - today's one is the third one and I'm afraid this is getting harder as it goes.

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    Oddly, when I view the original image stereoscopically, the leaves in the upper left corner appear to be behind the church rather than in front of it.
    – phoog
    Commented Jul 12, 2020 at 20:53
  • Yes, I tried by crossing my eyes and I experience the same oddity. In the remaining of the building depth seems to be OK, although it's tiny. Maybe that could be worth a question in photography.SE.
    – Pere
    Commented Jul 12, 2020 at 21:01
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    @phoog The images were probably not taken simultaneously with a proper stereoscopic camera, but with a stereoscopic tripod, a tripod with two mounts for a regular camera. If the leaves were moving between the exposures, e.g. swaying in the wind, the depth will appear incorrect. Commented Jul 12, 2020 at 21:26
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    @Tor-EinarJarnbjo - My first idea was that the branch had moved between the two images, too. However the relative position of the leaves is exactly the same as far as I can tell, and wind is unlikely to move the branch without moving the leaves.
    – Pere
    Commented Jul 12, 2020 at 21:35

1 Answer 1

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This is the Église Saint-Nazaire-et-Saint-Celse de Brissac, Herault, Occitanie (Google StreetView). The front has changed, the two rectangular windows seem to be bricked up; their former location is clearly visible on the modern images (different colour of the bricks).

Wikimedia Commons - EmDee / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) Source: Wikimedia Commons / EmDee, CC BY-SA

Detail of the portal:

Saint-Nazaire-et-Saint-Celse de Brissac by Denis Trente-Huittessan Source: Denis Trente-Huittessan on Flickr

Here's a ancient Picture Postcard, showing the church with steeple:

enter image description here
Source: picclick.fr

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    Awesome. I was amazed yesterday that another image was identified in less than one hour and today you got this one in less than 30 minutes. I have no words.
    – Pere
    Commented Jul 12, 2020 at 20:37
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    @Pere thank you, it was possible by a reverse image search; usually, Yandex yields the best results for architecture. In this case, i had to crop the original picture slightly, keeping the front and the arch at the left. The search result contained one of the Wikimedia Commons pics among the first 20 images returned. But this doesn't work in every case - Yandex wasn't able to identify the Béthune Belfry...
    – tohuwawohu
    Commented Jul 12, 2020 at 20:53
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    @tohuwawohu. Thank you for sharing the magic. This is kind of amazing. Commented Jul 14, 2020 at 15:51
  • The “old” windows appear to have been replaced by an “œil-de-boeuf” not present in the original photograph. Commented Jul 14, 2020 at 21:48

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