A ten-minute stroll upstream along the quayside from the Château will bring you to a long flight of steps leading up to the Cathédrale St-Maurice, where the mid-twelfth-century portal shows another version of the Apocalypse, this time in stone. Inside, the unusually wide, aisle-less nave with its dome-like Plantagenet vaulting is illuminated by twelfth-century stained glass. In the choir one window is dedicated to Thomas Becket, murdered on the orders of Henry Plantagenet, Count of Anjou and King of England. The fifteenth-century rose windows in the transepts are particularly impressive, with earthly suffering, in the north transept, facing Christ in Glory to the south. The stone carving on the capitals and the supports for the gallery are beautiful, but the cathedral is overzealously furnished with a grandiose high altar and pulpit and a set of tapestries that can't compete with Angers' other woven treasures.In front of the cathedral, on place Ste-Croix, is the town's favourite carpentry detail, the unlikely genitals of one of the carved characters on the medieval Maison d'Adam. Heading north from place Ste-Croix, you pass place du Ralliement, hub of modern Angers and site of the nineteenth-century Théâtre Municipal. From here, proceed into rue Lenepveu, where a Renaissance mansion (at no. 32) houses the Musée Pincé (mid-June to mid-Sept daily 9am–6.30pm; mid-Sept to mid-June daily except Mon 10am–noon & 2–6pm; €2). It's a mixed bag of antiquities – mostly ceramics from Greece, China and Japan, with a few Japanese caricatures of actors – but the staircase is handsome, as is the carved stone roof on the first floor. Arguably the greatest stoneworks in Angers, however, are the creations of the famous local sculptor David d'Angers (1788–1856), whose Calvary adorns the cathedral. His great civic commissions can be seen all over France, but these large-scale marbles and bronzes are almost all copies of the smaller plaster of Paris works created by the artist himself. It's mostly these plaster originals, often complete with the small nails used for marking out the contours of the resized versions, that are exhibited in the stunning Galerie David d'Angers, 37bis rue Toussaint (mid-June to mid-Sept daily 9am–6.30pm; mid-Sept to mid-June Tues–Sun 10am–noon & 2–6pm; €2). The setting is particularly impressive, with the sculptures littering the nave of a ruined thirteenth-century church, the Église Toussaint, lit by daylight through the all-glass, steeply pitched roof. David d'Angers was a prime activist in mid-nineteenth-century republican struggles in Paris and was close friends with many of the great Romantic artists and thinkers of the time, many of whom are featured on the mezzanine level in busts or bronze medallions. The Musée des Beaux-Arts next door, entered from 10 rue du Musée (closed for restoration until at least 2004), is home to Boucher's Génie des Arts, Lorenzo Lippi's beautiful La Femme au Masque, the highly operatic Paolo et Francesca by Ingres and other representative works from the thirteenth to the twentieth centuries.
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