François Mansart

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François Mansart

François Mansart (actually Nicolas François Mansart, also Mansard ; born January 23, 1598 in Paris, † September 23, 1666 in Paris) was a French architect and builder .

life and work

childhood and education

Mansart was the sixth of seven children of a royal carpenter and came from a distinguished family of architects, builders and sculptors .

When he was twelve years old, his father died; a year later his mother married a master baker. From 1612 to 1617 he lived with his brother-in-law Germain Gaultier , sculptor and city architect of Rennes . He then moved to his uncle Marcel Le Roy , a respected master bricklayer and bridge builder in Toulouse , with whom he lived from 1618 to 1621 and for whom he worked there on the Pont Neuf . Involved early on in increasingly larger projects, he learned his craft from scratch: architecture , bricklaying and civil engineering were still closely interlinked in the 17th century. He was one of Salomon de Brosse's students .

First orders

The young Mansart was also active in church building , but was more and more well known for his pronounced talent in secular building . Courtly absolutism was approaching its climax in France and demonstratively showed power and wealth in architectural splendor.

Soon the young architect became famous for his ornate portals , stairs and roofs and attracted the attention of wealthy clients. Members of the royal family, civil servants , ambassadors and influential nobles became his customers. As a first major commission, he built the so-called "Gastons d'Orléans wing" in Blois Castle on the Loire for the king's youngest brother, the Duke of Orléans . It is one of the first more important buildings on which the double columns that later shaped the official French architectural style were used to design the facade.

Architect of the king

In 1625 he was named “architect of the king” and thus the chief builder for all official building projects in the centrally administered France of Louis XIII. He also held this office after the death of Louis XIII. In 1643 under his widow, the regent Anna of Austria , and later under the young Louis XIV , who thought very highly of him (see anecdote below).

Mansart's architectural style combined the strict elements of his predecessors with influences from the more playful Italian baroque . He designed and built castles and churches and, above all, the famous hôtels in Paris, large, prestigious townhouses and administrative buildings. The majority of them were later demolished or integrated into other buildings, such as the Hôtel Mazarin (1645), which was rebuilt several times and now part of the French National Library . However, Mansart's construction activity is well documented by an extensive inventory of drafts, construction plans and engravings . He also emerged as a civil engineer and constructed canals and aqueducts , among other things . Maisons-Laffitte Castle with its parks (1642–1651) is considered to be his main work .

Personal life and scandals

François Mansart, unmarried and childless throughout his life, was considered one of the richest gentry men in Paris in his time and invested his enormous fortune mainly in real estate and pensions . Contemporaries report his keen sense of elegant clothing and a cultivated lifestyle. The only surviving portrait of him shows the portrait of a narrow-faced, melancholy- looking man with a pronounced nose.

His lavish lifestyle as well as rumors of bribes , favorites , despite fees he did not pay at all or jobs carried out on his behalf by others, brought him not only friends in Parisian society. At times the so-called mansarades , written by anonymous authors, were circulating , in which piquant details from the alleged homosexual's private life were blasphemed and negligent craftsmanship such as miscalculations in the construction, delayed construction times and waste of material were denounced. The builder, who is under the highest protection, could never be proven.

How much of the rumors were true is difficult to determine today. What is certain is that Mansart was artistically a genius , but far less organizationally gifted: he tended to take on several assignments at the same time - whether out of greed or out of work zeal, it is an open question - and get bogged down in the process. Since he was also a perfectionist and never satisfied with the result of his work, the construction work on the individual projects often dragged on for years. The construction management for the major project of the monastery and church Val-de-Grâce (from 1645) was withdrawn from him for this reason and passed on to a colleague.

Recognition and aftermath

Despite all the scandals, prominent contemporaries thought a lot of the architecture of François Mansart: For the famous fairy tale collector Charles Perrault , Maisons-Laffitte Castle was "one of the most beautiful things we have in France". However, it is precisely this castle complex that is not entirely uncontroversial in terms of authorship, since a partial fee statement has been preserved, but not drafts or building plans.

Voltaire praised his "artistic genius".

Today François Mansart, together with Louis Le Vau, is considered to be the finisher of French classicism with Parisian influences. In the cityscape of the French capital, however, his buildings were largely displaced by the spacious, magnificent buildings and public spaces that his great-nephew and successor Jules Hardouin-Mansart had built and laid out under the "Sun King" Louis XIV. The excesses of the French Revolution at the end of the 18th century, to which many of the private hôtels of the nobility fell victim, did their part.

The mansard roofs attributed to him or his nephew as an invention and therefore named after them , they both gladly built into their designs - but they did not invent them.

anecdote

When the young King Louis XIV was walking on a hot summer's day with the not so young architect François Mansart in the park of the Palace of Versailles to discuss new building projects, the sun was hot on the head of the bareheaded architect. Contrary to the strict court etiquette , the Sun King then handed him his hat. When his courtiers asked him in amazement why he had done that, Ludwig replied:

“If I want, I can make a thousand new dukes in a single day ; but not a single new Mansart in a thousand years. "

Major works

literature

  • Anthony Blunt : François Mansart and the Origins of French Classical Architecture . Somerset Publications, New York 1941.
  • Allan Braham, Peter Smith: François Mansart . 2 volumes. Zwemmer, London 1973, ISBN 0-302-02251-1 ( Studies in architecture . No. 13).

Web links

Commons : François Mansart  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Mansart, François
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Mansart, Nicolas François; Mansard, Nicolas François
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French architect and builder
DATE OF BIRTH January 23, 1598
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH September 23, 1666
Place of death Paris