Cappella di Cillian

A private chapel fulfilled as a wartime vow: in 1954 the Gorris couple built this small quadrangular building in Saint-Vincent's Cillian quarter and asked the Valdostan painter Italo Mus to fresco its facade. The interior is lined with river pebbles.

Why it matters

This is described in the parish-based records as the only private chapel of Saint-Vincent's parish, and its story is unusually personal. Thérèse Borbey and Vincent Gorris vowed during the Second World War to build a chapel if their family came through the war safely; the building of 1954, dedicated to the Holy Innocents, is the vow kept. It also holds real art: Italo Mus — the Valdostan painter, a near-neighbour who died at Saint-Vincent in 1967 — painted both the facade and a major altarpiece for it. The result is a mid-twentieth-century votive chapel with first-rank regional decoration — a rare combination anywhere in the valley.

What to notice

The facade fresco by Italo Mus shows the sacrifice of the Holy Innocents, the chapel's dedication, in the direct, dark-outlined figure style that made Mus the painter of Valdostan peasant life. On the north side, a French inscription invites reflection, reflecting the chapel's relationship to its neighbouring houses. Inside, the walls are lined completely with multicoloured pebbles picked from the Dora Baltea, and a section of white stones marks the centre of the floor; the effect is intimate and tactile rather than decorated. In the choir hangs the second Mus work: a large painting on wood of the Madonna wrapped in a red cloak, crushing the serpent underfoot. Note too the two altars — the original carved with the Sacred Heart, and a post-conciliar altar turned towards the congregation — and the pair of stained-glass windows showing the patron saints of the founders, Vincent and Teresa.

Context and history

The chapel rises on ground that previously held the community's old wine press, in the Cillian quarter at the edge of the town centre. Thérèse Borbey and Vincent Gorris commissioned it as a family chapel in fulfilment of their wartime vow, and it was completed in 1954, when Mus, a painter of the older generation, was near the end of his career. The dedication to the Holy Innocents informs the facade's subject. Unlike the parish's hamlet chapels, the building remains private property and never belonged to the communal church system. Its standing in the regional heritage database recognises exactly this documentary value — a vow chapel, an artist's work and a family's history preserved together.