The interior of St. Mary of the Barrens can easily rank as one of the most beautiful church interiors in the United States, and I’ve seen a lot of churches in my life. If you don’t remember my post on Il Gesù from back in November, go back and read it, and then come back here. It will make a lot more sense when I discuss the interior of this church.

This is a church interior that is firmly rooted in the Seventeenth Century, a period of Baroque art, which is style that emphasized the dramatic and theatrical, but also the competing vein of Classicism, with an emphasis on the logical and linear. The huge ceiling painting over the nave, a depiction of what I presume to be the Assumption of St. Vincent de Paul, is straight out of the Jesuit Roman churches of Il Gesù, with its monumental cartouche of a ceiling painting the Triumph of the Name of Jesus by Giovanni Battista Gaulli, but also more particularly the Apotheosis of St. Ignatius of Loyola at the eponymous church by Andrea Pozzo.

The apse of the church features another ceiling painting, this time the Ascension of Christ; the eleven remaining disciples and the Virgin Mary. On the four pendentives, the triangular swaths of masonry that convert the square space of below to a round one above, are the four Evangelists. So John and Mary actually appear twice in the apse, because below…

…we see a massive altarpiece depicting the Virgin Mary in painting that I believe is affixed to the wall above the high altar. It is a beautiful copy of the Walpole Immaculate Conception by Esteban Murillo, so named because it is in the collection of Robert Walpole of England. I find it interesting that a Spanish Baroque painter is seemingly a common inspiration for Missourian Catholic high altars; remember the Old Cathedral in St. Louis has a copy of a Crucifixion by Diego Velazquez.

In the choir loft, we spot another stained glass window with a rich pedigree; the composition is a copy of Raphael’s famous Madonna della Seggola. And I can spot Emil Frei & Associates windows from a mile away; interestingly, at some point in the mid-Twentieth Century new windows were installed in the clerestory.

Like at Il Gesù, there are a series of shallow side altars in what would in a Gothic church be an aisle; instead, there are individual rooms open to the nave.

And like at that Counter Reformation church in Rome, discrete doors allow worshippers to pass between each altar without interfering with mass in the nave.

There’s a beautiful depiction of the Crucifixion, based off archetypes formulated by artists in the late Sixteenth Century. As is typical, the Virgin Mary and St. John are depicted, as based off of scripture. Often St. Mary Magdalen will be shown embracing the base of the cross. There was once an altar below this painting (note the simplified ornament at the base), but it has since been removed.

And perhaps the most important portion of the church is the shrine of the Miraculous Medal, which makes St. Mary of the Barrens a major site of pilgrimmage.

The Miraculous Medal has a church in Paris that I visited, St. Mary Laboure, and this is another location. You can see the front and back of the Medal in the two pendentives below.

Overall, it’s an impressive church, and well worth visiting for its rich paintings and sculpture. In the triumphal arch before the apse is the Latin phrase, “Mary is assumed into Heaven,” or as is known in Catholic theology, the Assumption.

While there has been little change over the years since 1939, you can see below what the church looks liked almost a century ago.