Saint-Sauveur cathedral and cloister

Saint-Sauveur is primarily a working cathedral, the seat of the archbishops of Aix-en-Provence, but it is also home to one of the finest panel paintings of 15th-century France. The building itself layers some 1,500 years on one spot. Its baptistery goes back to around the 5th century and still rests on ancient Roman columns, the cloister beside it is Romanesque, and the nave joins Romanesque, Gothic and later work.

The painting people come for is the Burning Bush Triptych by Nicolas Froment, a northern painter who worked in Provence. René of Anjou, Count of Provence and still remembered locally as Good King René, ordered it in 1476 for the Carmelite church in Aix, where a tomb was being prepared for his entrails. The central panel shows Moses with his flock, looking up at the Virgin and Child enthroned on the bush that burns without being consumed. On the wings René and his wife, Jeanne de Laval, kneel with their patron saints, René beside Mary Magdalene, Anthony and Maurice.

The Carmelite convent was destroyed during the Revolution, in 1792, and the triptych reached the cathedral in 1808. After a restoration it went back on view, all half a ton of it, in the cathedral's Saint-Lazare chapel in January 2011.