ABSTRACT
Above the doorway of the small, twelfth-century church of St-Pierre at Sévignac in northern Béarn sits a surprising gallery of persons, whose bad behavior and perplexing attitudes provide the impetus for this study. Eleven figures seated on the torus of the arc are arrayed in the outer archivolt of the church’s portal (see Figure 10.1). The archivolt sculptures depict drunkards, adulterers, fools, and foreigners. Previous scholars have largely passed over these strange sculptures, observing simply that they are difficult to interpret or summarily that they represent the vices.1 As representations of vice, the subjects in the archivolt may be understood, as Jean Cabanot put it neatly, as “the field of action opened to the apostles,” who are represented by the figureheads of the Church, Peter and Paul, in a depiction in St-Pierre’s tympanum of the Traditio Legis, the translation of the law by Christ to his two chief apostles (see Figure 10.2).2
