Mont-Saint-Michel
in pixels

About Mont-Saint-Michel

Mont-Saint-Michel is a small granite island about a kilometre off the coast of Normandy, at the mouth of the Couesnon river. Legend says that in 708 the Archangel Michael appeared to Aubert, Bishop of Avranches, and told him to build a church on the rock. In 966 Duke Richard I of Normandy brought in Benedictine monks, and over the next centuries the abbey grew around and over the summit, with crypts built to carry the church on top.

The most admired part is the Merveille, “the marvel”: two three-storey Gothic buildings set against the steep north face, built between 1211 and 1228 and crowned by the cloister and the refectory. The church’s Romanesque choir collapsed in 1421 and was rebuilt in Flamboyant Gothic; the neoclassical west front dates from 1780. The slender spire was added in 1897, with Emmanuel Frémiet’s gilded statue of Saint Michael on top, about 170 metres above the sea.

The Mont was also a fortress. Ramparts and towers were built round its foot in the late Middle Ages, and during the Hundred Years’ War English forces besieged it in 1423–24 and again in 1433–34 without taking it. After the French Revolution the abbey became a prison, until Napoleon III closed it in 1863. Below the abbey, a village of stone houses climbs the slope along the Grande Rue.

The bay has some of the largest tides in Europe, with a range of up to about 14 metres, so the island is surrounded by sand at low tide and by water at the highest tides. To let the sea flow around it again, the old causeway was replaced by a dam on the Couesnon and a light footbridge by Dietmar Feichtinger, about 760 m long, which opened in 2014. Today the Mont welcomes more than three million visitors a year.

The diorama

The diorama cuts a square out of the bay, built in Three.js and rendered as pixel art: the scene is drawn at a low resolution, every edge gets a dark outline, the colours are reduced to a small palette, and the result is scaled up without smoothing. The granite rock rises in terraces, gentle to the south-east where the village climbs it and steep to the north and west, where a small wood, boulders and the little Chapel of Saint Aubert sit at its foot. Heights are exaggerated so the famous pyramid silhouette reads at pixel scale.

Ramparts with round towers and the gatehouse ring the village of grey stone houses and slate roofs along the Grande Rue. On top, the abbey church shows its nave, transept, Flamboyant Gothic choir with flying buttresses and the spire with the gilded archangel, with the Merveille on the north face and the abbey lodgings on the south. Shuttles run on the footbridge, sheep graze the salt meadows, and over the reel the tide comes in across the sand until, at night, the abbey glows gold above the water.

Things to spot

• The golden Saint Michael on top of the spire
• The shuttle bus running along the footbridge
• Sheep grazing on the salt meadows
• Pilgrims crossing the sand at low tide, before the water comes in
• The cloister garden on top of the Merveille
• The Chapel of Saint Aubert on its rock at the foot of the Mont

What we simplified

• The rock is narrower and much taller than the real one, and the abbey is a simplified massing of its buildings rather than a measured model.
• The village houses are generic Norman stone houses, not the actual buildings along the Grande Rue.
• The tide rises over a few seconds; in the bay it takes hours.