Kurzbeschreibung
The Chateau de Maulnes (1566-1573) is one of the thirty French Renaissance chateaux to have had the honour of being listed in Jacques Androuet Ducerceau's work "Les plus excellents bastiments de France" while it was still under construction. This decision was entirely justified, as there is no doubt that the chateau is one of the epoch's most highly individual creations. It is built on a pentagonal ground plan, and completely undecorated. The corps de logis in the middle contains a natural spring, housed monumentally in a stairwell. The stairs themselves are a domain of the outside space in the centre of the building, allowing the elements water, light, wind and weather unrestricted access. The man who commissioned it, Antoine de Crussol, had this architectural enclosure for the elements built while affected by the religiously motivated violence of the Huguenot wars. This produced a building that presents the elements almost to be worshipped in a nature religion, a place that turns away from ecclesiastically formulated and dogmatically defined orthodoxy to reconnecting religious sensibility with the divine presence in nature. Maulnes did not stand alone in his confessional positioning in relation to the epoch's conflicts over faith, and in the second part of the book this is placed in the context of comparable programmatic building by the royal court, by confessional partisans and supporters of civil tolerance. The Chateau de Maulnes, which has survived to a significant extent, was recorded in full detail in eighteen survey campaigns, and subjected to comprehensive architectural research. The result was a documentation of this key French Renaissance building which made it possible also to answer questions about the sense and significance of the overall concept and about the individual architectural forms.
Synopsis
The Chateau de Maulnes (1566-1573) is one of the thirty French Renaissance chateaux to have had the honour of being listed in Jacques Androuet Ducerceau's work "Les plus excellents bastiments de France" while it was still under construction. This decision was entirely justified, as there is no doubt that the chateau is one of the epoch's most highly individual creations. It is built on a pentagonal ground plan, and completely undecorated. The corps de logis in the middle contains a natural spring, housed monumentally in a stairwell. The stairs themselves are a domain of the outside space in the centre of the building, allowing the elements water, light, wind and weather unrestricted access. The man who commissioned it, Antoine de Crussol, had this architectural enclosure for the elements built while affected by the religiously motivated violence of the Huguenot wars. This produced a building that presents the elements almost to be worshipped in a nature religion, a place that turns away from ecclesiastically formulated and dogmatically defined orthodoxy to reconnecting religious sensibility with the divine presence in nature.
Maulnes did not stand alone in his confessional positioning in relation to the epoch's conflicts over faith, and in the second part of the book this is placed in the context of comparable programmatic building by the royal court, by confessional partisans and supporters of civil tolerance. The Chateau de Maulnes, which has survived to a significant extent, was recorded in full detail in eighteen survey campaigns, and subjected to comprehensive architectural research. The result was a documentation of this key French Renaissance building which made it possible also to answer questions about the sense and significance of the overall concept and about the individual architectural forms.