Pomp and Pleasure: palaces & gardens of French nobility

The tower was originally accessed from the castle through an entrance some 30 feet above the ground level. At its base, the walls are up to 13 feet thick. This is among the biggest and best preserved keeps from the Middle Ages anywhere in France.

Keeps were the the safest part of castles. Stone was held in place with lime mortar made by heating chalk or limestone and adding water and sand. Often the a thick wall was made of loose stones sandwiched between solid mortared inner and outer layers.

We are now looking up. Even though this is the bottom of three levels, there is a domed ceiling made of stone above us. The second story also has a domed stone ceiling. The top floor has a ceiling made of timber.

It is located on the second story, the main floor in a substantial French home. Here are enormous fireplaces, portraits of those that owned this property, and paintings meant to look like sculpture and architecture.

Let’s look up! The room has no columns, its impressive size is made possible by massive beams above our heads that span the full width of the room. The trees these were made from would have been enormous, making rooms of this scale rare.

A massive fireplace tall enough to walk into dominates the Great Hall. Above the mantle a painting depicts a castle near Paris where the Duke of Sully was born. Look at the framing columns, they are paint, not stone!

The walls are hung with large oil paintings depicting the descendants of the Duke of Sully, minister to king Henry IV, and who purchased the castle in 1602.

The window alcoves are also painted illusionistically to look as if they hold large stone sculptures set in niches under carved stone arch. In reality, this is all just paint.

These modern recreations are based on drawings and descriptions found in Leonardo’s famous notebooks. While Leonardo is best known as the painter of the Mona Lisa, he was also interested in physics, anatomy, botany, hydraulics and many other branches of science and engineering.

Here is a model of one of Leonardo’s best known sketches, an armored vehicle often seen as a prototype of the modern tank. Its round form is designed to deflect fire and to allow its guns to fire in any direction.

Leonardo’s design for a parachute made of linen over a pyramid-shaped wooden frame was to be some 22 feet tall. A full scale model was tested and reportedly worked well during a jump from nearly 10,000 feet (though the heavy rigid structure is dangerous during landing).

One of the most effective weapons against a castle was a large catapult (made to hurl objects like stones). Here is a design developed by Leonardo for his patron, the Duke of Milan.

On the left you can see broad stone step rising and moving away from us in a clockwise motion. On the right you can see the underside of an opposing staircase that seems to descend in a clockwise direction.

Above our heads the complex ceiling is a checkerboard of squares called coffers. Each coffer is decorated with either a capital “F” for Francis I or with his emblem, a crowned salamander.

The Grand Salon is oval in shape, a design likely borrowed from Italy. It is double height walls are pierced with windows, bringing the sky and the gardens into this dramatic open space.

The Grand Salon is filled with details that recall classical Greece and Rome. Above the window hand garlands, between them are herms, male figures with tapered rectangles instead of legs. Below are pilasters and sculptured busts (a head, shoulders, and chest), in a Roman style.