The nave and aisles of St. Quirinus are ample, and its spacious _männerchöre_ in the triforium is like all its fellows in the German churches, an adjunct which adds to the general effect of size.
The church dates from 1209, the period when the Gothic influence was not only making itself felt over the border, in the domain of France and Burgundy, but was already extending its influence elsewhere. But here, westward even of the borders of the Rhine, the round arch lingered on, to the exclusion of any very marked Gothic tendency.
There is an inscription in stone on the south wall of the church which places the date of its erection beyond all doubt. It reads thus:
ANNO . INCARNA. DNI . MC.C.V.I.I.I.I. PMO . IPERII . AN NO . OTTONIS . A DOLFO . COLON
EPO . SOPHIA . A BBA . MAGISTER WOLBERO . PO SUIT . PMU . LAP
IDE . FUNDAME NTI . HUI . TEM PLI . I . DIE . SCI . DI ONISII . MAR.
When a former Count of Clèves founded the primitive church here in the ninth century, it was a collegiate church attached to the abbey of which the mother superior was the Abbess Sophia, presumably the same referred to in the above inscription. The abbey itself was destroyed in 1199 during a civil warfare.
Though not really a massive structure, the church of St. Quirinus is, in every particular, of a strength and solidity which rank it as a masterwork of its age. There is nothing weak and attenuated about it, and its transepts and apses make up in general effect what it lacks in actual area.
The façade is imposing, though decidedly bizarre when compared with the simple flowing lines of Gothic; but, on the whole, the effect is one of a certain grandeur.
The aisles are astonishingly tall when compared with the nave.
There are various meetings of round-arched windows and arcades with those of a pointed nature, but there is not the slightest evidence of a development or transition from one to the other, hence the Gothic strain may be said not to exist.
The general effect of the exterior is polychromatic, which is not according to the best conceptions of ecclesiastical decorations in architecture. A twilight or a moonlight view, however, tones it all down in a manner that makes the fabric appear quite the most imposing church of its size that one may find in these parts.