| Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye | |
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| General information | |
| Location | Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France |
| Construction started | 1124 |
| Design and construction | |
| Architect(s) | Pierre Chambiges |
The Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye (French pronunciation: [ʃɑtod(ə)sɛ̃ʒɛʁmɛ̃ɑ̃lɛ] ) is a former royal palace in the commune of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, in the department of Yvelines, about 19 km west of Paris, France. Today, it houses the Musée d'Archéologie nationale (National Museum of Archaeology).
The first castle, named the Grand Châtelet, was built on the site by Louis VI in 1124. The castle was expanded by Louis IX in the 1230s.
The Saint Louis chapel at the castle belongs to the Rayonnant phase of French Gothic architecture. A 1238 charter of Louis IX instituting a regular religious service at the chapel is the first mention of a chapel having been built at the royal castle. This was a Sainte Chapelle, to house a relic of the Crown of Thorns or the True Cross. Its plan and architecture prefigure the major Sainte-Chapelle which Louis built within the Palais de la Cité at Paris between 1240 and 1248. Both buildings were built by Louis's favourite architect Pierre de Montreuil, who adapted the architectural formulae invented at Saint Germain for use in Paris. A single nave ends in a chevet, with almost all the wall areas filled by tall narrow glass windows, between which are large exterior buttresses. The ogives of the vault rest on columns between the bays and the column bases are placed behind a low isolated arcade. The building can thus be open and empty of all internal supports. This large number of windows is also enabled by the pierre armée technique, with metal elements built into the structure of the walls to ensure the stones' stability. The west wall is adorned by a large Gothic rose window in the Rayonnant Gothic style. It was in this chapel in 1238 that Baldwin II of Constantinople presented Louis with the relic of the crown of thorns and, though they were intended for the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, they were housed here until the Paris chapel was consecrated in April 1248.
The castle was burned by Edward the Black Prince in 1346; of it, only the Gothic chapel remains from the site's medieval phase. This Château Vieux was rebuilt by Charles V in the 1360s on the old foundations.
The oldest parts of the current château were reconstructed by Francis I in 1539, and have subsequently been expanded several times. On 10 July 1547 a political rivalry came to a head in a legal duel here. Against the odds, Guy I de Chabot, 7th baron de Jarnac triumphed over François de Vivonne, seigneur de la Chasteigneraie, who died the next day after what was called "coup de Jarnac". [1] In September 1548, rooms above the royal suite were refurbished for Mary, Queen of Scots and the children of Henry II of France. [2]
Henry II built a separate new château nearby, to designs by Philibert de l'Orme. It stood at the crest of a slope, which was shaped, under the direction of Étienne du Pérac [3] into three massive descending terraces and narrower subsidiary mediating terraces, which were linked by divided symmetrical stairs and ramps and extended a single axis that finished at the edge of the Seine; the design took many cues from the Villa Lante at Bagnaia. [4] "Étienne du Pérac had spent a long time in Italy, and one manifestation of his interest in gardens of this type is his well-known view of the Villa d'Este, engraved in 1573." [5]
The gardens laid out at Saint-Germain-en-Laye were among a half-dozen gardens introducing the Italian garden style to France that laid the groundwork for the French formal garden. Unlike the parterres that were laid out in casual relation to existing châteaux, often on difficult sites originally selected for defensive reasons, [6] these new gardens extended the central axis of a symmetrical building façade in rigorously symmetrical axial designs of patterned parterres, gravel walks, fountains and basins, and formally planted bosquets; they began the tradition that reached its apex after 1650 in the gardens of André Le Nôtre. [7] According to Claude Mollet's Théâtre des plans et jardinage [8] the parterres were laid out in 1595 for Henry IV by Claude Mollet, trained at Anet and the progenitor of a dynasty of royal gardeners. One of the parterre designs by Mollet at Saint-Germain-en-Laye was illustrated in Olivier de Serres' Le théâtre d'agriculture et mesnage des champs (1600), but the Château Neuf and the whole of its spectacular series of terraces can be fully seen in an engraving after Alexandre Francini, 1614. [9]
Louis XIV was born at the Château Neuf in 1638. One of du Pérac's retaining walls collapsed in 1660, and Louis undertook a renovation of the gardens in 1662. At his majority he established his court here in 1666, but he preferred the Château Vieux: the Château Neuf was abandoned in the 1660s and demolished. From 1663 until 1682, when the King removed definitively to Versailles, the team that he inherited from the unfortunate Nicolas Fouquet—Louis Le Vau, Jules Hardouin-Mansart and André Le Nôtre laboured to give the ancient pile a more suitable aspect.
The gardens were remade by André Le Nôtre from 1669 to 1673, and include a 2.4 kilometre long stone terrace which provides a view over the valley of the Seine and, in the distance, Paris.
Louis XIV turned the château over to King James II of England after his exile from Britain in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. King James lived in the château for thirteen years, and his daughter Louise-Marie Stuart was born in exile here in 1692. King James lies buried in the nearby Church of Saint-Germain; his wife Mary of Modena remained at the château until her death in 1718. Their son James left the château in 1716, ultimately settling in Rome. Many Jacobites—supporters of the exiled Stuarts—remained at the château until the French Revolution, leaving in 1793. The Jacobites often consisted of former members of the Jacobite court, and the apartments left empty in the château by the Jacobite court pensioners upon their death, were often passed down to their widows and children by the caretaker of the château, Adrien Maurice de Noailles, 3rd Duke of Noailles. [10] The Jacobite colony at Saint-Germain was still dominant in the 1750s, when they were however treated with increasing hostility. After the death of the Duke of Noailles in 1766, who had been responsible for the continuing Jacobite dominance because of his preference to give rooms to Jacobites, the British dominance quickly decreased and more French inhabitants were given lodgings in the château: the last member of the Stuart court was Theresa O'Connel, who died in 1778. [10] The last descendants of the British Jacobites, by then mostly bearing French names, were evicted when the building was confiscated by the government during the French revolution in 1793. [10]
In the 19th century, Napoleon I established his cavalry officers' training school here. Napoleon III initiated restoration of the castle by Eugène Millet, starting in 1862. It became the Musée des Antiquités Nationales (National Museum of Antiquities) in 1867, displaying the archeological objects of France.[ citation needed ] Auguste Lafollye took over responsibility for the restoration on Millet's death in 1879, continuing until 1889. His goal, and that of his successor Honoré Daumet, was to restore the French Renaissance style of Francis I. [11]
On September 10, 1919 the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, ending hostilities between the Allies of World War I and Austria, was signed at the château. [12]
During the German occupation (1940–44), the château served as the headquarters of the German Army in France.
The museum was renamed the Musée d'Archéologie Nationale in 2005. [13] Its collections include finds from Paleolithic to Merovingian times.
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| Geographic | |
The Sainte-Chapelle is a royal chapel in the Gothic style, within the medieval Palais de la Cité, the residence of the Kings of France until the 14th century, on the Île de la Cité in the River Seine in Paris, France.
Saint-Germain-en-Laye is a commune in the Yvelines department in the Île-de-France in north-central France. It is located in the western suburbs of Paris, 19.1 km (11.9 mi) from the centre of Paris.
Yvelines is a department in the western part of the Île-de-France region in Northern France. In 2019, it had a population of 1,448,207. Its prefecture is Versailles, home to the Palace of Versailles, the principal residence of the King of France from 1682 until 1789, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1979. Yvelines' subprefectures are Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Mantes-la-Jolie and Rambouillet.
Jules Hardouin-Mansart was a French Baroque architect and builder whose major work included the Place des Victoires (1684–1690); Place Vendôme (1690); the domed chapel of Les Invalides (1690), and the Grand Trianon of the Palace of Versailles. His monumental work was designed to glorify the reign of Louis XIV of France.
A parterre is a part of a formal garden constructed on a level substrate, consisting of symmetrical patterns, made up by plant beds, plats, low hedges or coloured gravels, which are separated and connected by paths. Typically it was the part of the garden nearest the house, perhaps after a terrace. The view of a parterre from inside the house, especially from the upper floors, was a major consideration in its design. The word "parterre" was and is used both for the whole part of the garden containing parterres and for each individual section between the "alleys".
In the French formal garden, a bosquet is a formal plantation of trees in a wide variety of forms, some open at the bottom and others not. At a minimum a bosquet can be five trees of identical species planted as a quincunx, or set in strict regularity as to rank and file, so that the trunks line up as one passes along either face. In large gardens they were dense artificial woodland, often covering large areas, with tall hedges on the outside and other trees inside the hedges. Symbolic of order in a humanized and tamed gardens of the French Renaissance and Baroque French formal gardens, the bosquet is an analogue of the orderly orchard, an amenity that has been intimately associated with pleasure gardening from the earliest Persian gardens of the Achaemenid Empire.
André Mollet was a French garden designer, the son of Claude Mollet—gardener to three French kings—and the grandson of Jacques Mollet, gardener at the château d'Anet, where Italian formal gardening was introduced to France.
Jacques Boyceau, sieur de la Barauderie was a French garden designer, the superintendent of royal gardens under Louis XIII, whose posthumously produced Traité du iardinage selon les raisons de la nature et de l'art. Ensemble divers desseins de parterres, pelouzes, bosquets et autres ornements was published in 1638. Its sixty engravings after Boyceau's designs make it one of the milestones in tracing the history of the Garden à la française. His nephew Jacques de Menours, who produced the volume, included an engraved frontispiece with the portrait of Boyceau.
Claude Mollet, premier jardinier du Roy — first gardener to three French kings, Henry IV, Louis XIII and the young Louis XIV — was a member of the Mollet dynasty of French garden designers in the seventeenth century. His father was Jacques Mollet, gardener at the Château d'Anet, where Italian Renaissance gardening was introduced to France and where Claude apprenticed, and his son was André Mollet, who took the French style to Holland, Sweden and England.
Château de Meudon, also known as the Royal Castle of Meudon or Imperial Palace of Meudon, is a French castle in Meudon, Hauts-de-Seine. At the edge of a wooded plateau, the castle offers views of Paris and the Seine, as well as of the Chalais valley. Located between Paris and Versailles, in the heart of a hunting reserve, the castle has an ideal topography for large gardens.
"... the most beautiful place in the world, both in its layout and in its location. " - J. F. Blondel, Cours d'Architecture ..., 1773, volume 4, p. 132.
Jean-Baptiste Tuby was a French sculptor of Italian origins, best known for the sculpture in the fountains of the Gardens of Versailles. His work expresses the exuberance of the Baroque blended with the classicism of the Louis XIV style.
André Le Nôtre, originally rendered as André Le Nostre, was a French landscape architect and the principal gardener of King Louis XIV of France. He was the landscape architect who designed the gardens of the Palace of Versailles; his work represents the height of the French formal garden style, or jardin à la française.
Tommaso Francini (1571–1651) and his younger brother Alessandro Francini were Florentine hydraulics engineers and garden designers. They worked for Francesco I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, above all at the Villa Medicea di Pratolino, whose water features Francesco de Vieri described thus in 1586: "the statues there turn about, play music, jet streams of water, are so many and such stupendous artworks in hidden places, that one who saw them all together would be in ecstasies over them."
Étienne Dupérac was a French architect, painter, engraver, and garden designer. He is most well known for his topographical studies of Rome and its ruins in the late 16th century.
The French formal garden, also called the jardin à la française, is a style of "landscape" garden based on symmetry and the principle of imposing order on nature. Its epitome is generally considered to be the Gardens of Versailles designed during the 17th century by the landscape architect André Le Nôtre for Louis XIV and widely copied by other European courts.
Gardens of the French Renaissance were initially inspired by the Italian Renaissance garden, which evolved later into the grander and more formal jardin à la française during the reign of Louis XIV, by the middle of the 17th century.
The Château-Neuf de Saint-Germain-en-Laye was a French château in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, now mostly demolished, which served as a royal residence from the second half of the 16th century until 1680. It was built on the grounds of the older Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye, which became known as the Château-Vieux.
The Château de Maintenon is a château, developed from the original castle, situated in the commune of Maintenon in the Eure-et-Loir département of France. It is best known as being the private residence of the second spouse of Louis XIV, Madame de Maintenon.
The Baroque garden was a style of garden based upon symmetry and the principle of imposing order on nature. The style originated in the late-16th century in Italy, in the gardens of the Vatican and the Villa Borghese gardens in Rome and in the gardens of the Villa d'Este in Tivoli, and then spread to France, where it became known as the jardin à la française or French formal garden. The grandest example is found in the Gardens of Versailles designed during the 17th century by the landscape architect André Le Nôtre for Louis XIV. In the 18th century, in imitation of Versailles, very ornate Baroque gardens were built in other parts of Europe, including Germany, Austria, Spain, and in Saint Petersburg, Russia. In the mid-18th century the style was replaced by the less geometric and more natural English landscape garden.
