Calvary (monument)

The oldest surviving calvaire, dating to between 1450 and 1460, is in France at the Chapelle Notre-Dame-de-Tronoën in the town of Saint-Jean-Trolimon, in south Finistère, near the Pointe de la Torche.

[1] Breton calvaries typically include three-dimensional figures, usually representing the Virgin Mary, the apostles, and saints, attending the Crucifixion itself.

[2] A 16th-century calvaire from Louargat, Brittany, transplanted to serve as a World War I memorial, stands at the Carrefour de la Rose near the Belgian town of Boezinge north of Ypres.

In northern France and Belgium, such wayside calvaries erected at the junction of routes and tracks "function both as navigation devices and objects of veneration", Nicholas J. Saunders has observed[5] "Since medieval times they have fixed the landscape, symbolically acquiring it for the Christian faith, in the same way that, previously, Megalithic monuments marked prehistoric landscapes according to presumed religious and ideological imperatives".

A typical variation is the Calabrian calvary, which includes 3 or more paintings of the Passion of Jesus on a wall surmounted by a cross and protected by a low fence.