One of the great misconceptions about medieval churches is that they were austere worlds of bare stone; they were anything but. These extraordinary columns in the church of Sainte-Radegonde in Poitiers date largely from c.1250–1300 and preserve exceptionally rare traces of the colour that once saturated the medieval sacred world. Their heraldic decoration appears to represent local lords and benefactors whose earthly identities were quite literally incorporated into the fabric of the church and that is profoundly Catholic! The medieval church building was not conceived merely as an auditorium in which worship happened. It was both catechesis in stone and an image of redeemed creation: in an age when books were precious and literacy far from universal, colour, sculpture, stained glass, saints and biblical scenes taught the faith to the eye. The church itself became a kind of visual theology, gathering earth and heaven together and ordering the material world towards the worship of God. Christianity did not demand the abandonment of material things, because at its heart stands the astonishing claim that the Word became flesh. Beauty, therefore, was not incidental to worship. Matter itself (stone, wood, pigment, glass, gold) could be enlisted in the proclamation of the Gospel. That makes the iconoclastic impulse of the Reformation particularly significant: when images were smashed, statues broken, walls whitewashed and shrines destroyed, something more than medieval decoration disappeared. An older Catholic sacramental imagination, in which the material world could become a sign pointing beyond itself to divine realities, was being displaced by a very different conception of sacred space. What survives at Sainte-Radegonde gives us a tantalising glimpse of how dazzling the churches of medieval Christendom must once have been!!