Gordes Castle
Coordinates: 43 ° 55 ' N , 5 ° 12' E
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Gordes Castle, Château de Gordes |
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|---|---|
| Style / period | Provançal Renaissance |
| Type | Medieval castle Renaissance chateau |
| start of building | 11th century |
| End of construction | between 1525 and 1541 |
| owner | Agoult-Simiane family |
| original use |
Mansion |
| current use |
Museum and Tourist Office |
| Classification | Monument historique (1931) Monument historique (1949) |
| Web presence | www.gordes-village.com/ |
| Coordinates | 43 ° 54'40 "N 5 ° 12'00" E |
| country | France |
| Region (former) | Provence |
| Region (today) | Provence-Alpes-Cote d'Azur |
| department | Vaucluse department |
| local community | Gordes |
The Gordes Castle ( French Château de Gordes ) is located in the center of the settlement on a rock that is about 300 m above the city level. It is a spacious, square Renaissance building. A tour at roof height offers a wonderful view of the County of Venaissin and the valley of Apt .
Gordes is part of the Luberon Regional Nature Park in the Vaucluse department , Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region .
history
The castle has dominated Gordes for a thousand years . The castle is mentioned for the first time in 1031 by Guillaume d'Argoult, one of the first ancestors of this powerful feudal family who built the fortifications in the surrounding towns. His successors strengthened it so much that in 1123 it became the “nobile castrum”, the only one among the numerous castles in the area.
In the middle of the 14th century, the simple castle tower was raised (as in all of Provence and the County of Venaissin) in order to be able to better defend against the raids by Raimond de Turenne , Arnault de Servoie and the raids of the Grandes Compagnies .
It was besieged in vain during the Huguenot Wars . It became the fiefdom of the Famille de Simiane , then the Counts of Soubise and, in the 18th century, the Bourbon-Condé princes .
Bertrand Rambaud de Simiane built the medieval castle in Renaissance style in the center of the village on a rock between 1525 and 1541. Since that time there have been two views: the north facade as a fortified castle and the south facade as a Renaissance castle.
In the 17th and 18th centuries there was no visible change; the respective owners contented themselves with maintaining the manor house.
In 1789 the revolutionaries took possession of the castle without destroying it.
The castle became part of everyday life in Gordes when a café was set up on the ground floor, as old photos from the beginning of the 20th century show. to prove. However, the café later disappeared due to a wall breach.
On July 4, 1931, the castle was classified as a monument historique . The round tower was classified separately on October 28, 1949.
From June 1970 to March 1996 a museum with works by Victor Vasarely was set up. In addition to the tourist office, there is currently a painting museum by the Belgian artist Pol Mara .
For a long time the mayor's office was located on the first floor of the castle. It was then moved to the Simiane family mansion.
Tower in northwest
Detail of the south facade
Detail of a lintel
Spiral staircase inside
Historic Buildings
The castle basically forms an elongated rectangle in an east-west direction with three towers in each corner and a fourth on the northern wall. A large indentation in the southern long wall forms a square courtyard that separates the western part of the castle from the eastern part with its two corner towers. There is no tower in the southwest corner.
The strict north facade is flanked in the western part by two 20 m high round towers with battlements. It consists of two floors with staggered windows. The towers have pitch bays and a terrace for the artillery. The southern facade facing the sun is flanked in the western part by watchtowers and has two floors with cross windows. At the end of the wall, an additional storey grows out of the ground with double-arched windows.
Walls, towers and defense towers have well-arranged loopholes. The tower in the southeast corner is a gun tower with loopholes and later built-in windows.
From the height of the castle the visitor has a great panorama.
Renaissance elements
Numerous elements from the Renaissance period can be found in the castle : doors, window crosses, stairs and, in the large hall on the first floor, an excellent fireplace with the year 1541, which has a decorated door on both sides (the total width is from wall to wall 7 m.). The date corresponds to the end of the lock renewal by Bertrand de Simiane. The carved decoration of this fireplace combines gables, niches, pilasters, entablature and frieze. In the thirteen niches were originally the statuettes of the twelve apostles and in the middle those of Christ. They were destroyed during the revolution .
On the right-hand side of the south facade there is an arched door with a concealed handle and leads into the inner courtyard. On the left side of the courtyard is an entrance door with a Renaissance decor, the limestone gable and pilasters of which have been damaged by weathering.
The great hall on the first floor
A wide spiral staircase leads to the great hall on the first floor. It is 23 m long and 7 m wide and has a beautiful beamed ceiling.
The traces of the old café On old postcards from the first decade of the twentieth century you can discover the openings of the old café at the foot of the wall between the towers on the north side.
Museums in the castle
Since the early 1970s, the fame of the village of Gordes has been closely linked to the work of Victor Vasarely, an artist who bought the castle ruins for a symbolic franc in the late 1960s and had the restoration carried out with his own resources.
Vasarely Museum
Until its final and unexplained closure in 1996, 500 originals by Victor Vasarely were exhibited here and the museum was called "musée didactique Vasarely au château de Gordes". The museum was set up by the artist himself in 1970 and was the first link in the chain of architectural foundations of Aix-en-Provence.
Pol Mara Museum
As a replacement for the Vasareley Museum, a permanent exhibition with 200 works by the Belgian painter and draftsman Leopold Leysen, known as Pol Mara , has been set up in the castle since 1997 .
More information
- Michel Trinquier (* 1931), painter, exhibited here in 1993.
- List of the monuments historiques in Gordes
literature
- Jean-Louis Morand, GORDES: notes d'histoire, Cavaillon , Imp.Rimbaud , 1987, p. 387
- Librairie Hachette et société d'études et de publications économiques, Merveilles des châteaux de Provence , Paris, Collection Réalités Hachette, April 1988, p. 324
Web links
- Le château de Gordes, forteresse médiévale et résidence Renaissance
- L'inauguration du musée Vasarely by Mme Claude Pompidou le 6 juin 1970
Individual evidence
- ↑ Jean-Louis Morand, GORDES, notes d'histoire , mairie de Gordes, pp. 249-253 “Le château de Gordes” and pp. 205–216 “Généalogie des familles”.
- ↑ Entry no. PA00082042 in the Base Mérimée of the French Ministry of Culture (French)
- ↑ Le musée didactique Vasarely au château de Gordes , Musée de Gordes, 1st edition, 1971, p. 74; new edition 1973, éditions George Fall, Paris, p. 79