Chambord Castle
Chambord Castle ( French Château de Chambord , historically also Chambourg ) is the largest castle in the Loire Valley . It is located about 15 kilometers east of Blois in an extensive former hunting area. It was built in the first half of the 16th century under King Francis I as a magnificent and hunting palace near Chambord and is considered the most magnificent of all Loire castles .
historical overview
16th and 17th centuries
When Francis I came to power, the Loire Valley with its palaces and castles was the social and cultural center of courtly France. Under the influence and patronage of the king, the art of the Italian Renaissance finally established itself in the country and led to numerous new buildings that still shape the region of the Loire Valley today.
In addition to the Castle of Fontainebleau , the Chambord Castle, begun in 1519, was Franz I's most elaborate project. The castle was a building of great importance: On the one hand, it was intended to serve the court as a hunting lodge, but more important, with the building as a symbol of power, performance and strength France to demonstrate - similar to the Palace of Versailles of the Sun King a century and a half later. Franz I hoped to wrest the crown from Emperor Charles V and gain control of the Holy Roman Empire in his place . For this undertaking, Chambord was to serve as a stone symbol of French supremacy. The king's hopes were not fulfilled, and so Chambord was nothing but an oversized hunting lodge; it did not serve as a permanent residence for him or any other French ruler. King Franz, who failed because of his ambitious plans, only spent a few weeks in Chambord. At least he managed to invite the Habsburg rival Charles V to visit him in 1539, who described the castle as the epitome of what human art is capable of producing .
Even if no permanent court was established in Chambord, the castle played an important role as a hunting seat. Several thousand people were housed here during the great hunts. Apart from the hunting parties, the gigantic building was largely empty. In 1552 the Treaty of Chambord was signed here. The Sun King Louis XIV occasionally used it for opulent celebrations. During his reign, Molière's ballet Der Bürger als Edelmann was premiered in the castle in 1670. Like all early royal castles that were not the main residence (in contrast to the later Palace of Versailles), Chambord was not permanently furnished. If it was to be used for hunting or other purposes, staff and furniture had to be brought from the royal furniture depots.
18th century
From 1725 to 1733 the castle served as the residence of the exiled Polish king Stanislaus I. Leszczyński . From 1748 until his death in 1750, the French Marshal Moritz von Sachsen received it as his residence. The general, popular with his soldiers and unbeaten throughout his life, had the surrounding swamps drained to prevent the risk of epidemics. He also had a large menagerie near the castle. In February 1738, he applied to the Elector of Saxony for 100 live deer to be sent for their equipment. Saxon forest workers were supposed to catch fawns, raise them all year round and bring them to Torgau in autumn . From there the deer were to be brought to Paris by ship via Hamburg.
The marshal had the apartment he lived in comfortably furnished: the bare stone walls were covered with wood paneling, parquet was laid, and - the most important increase in comfort - Moritz had four huge tiled stoves made of faience in his home and set up in his rooms. With these stoves he was able to solve the heating problem, which was only poorly alleviated by the existing open chimneys. The marshal also had a theater built in one of the corridors.
The four ovens that Count Moritz von Sachsen purchased for Chambord Castle are not made of Meissen porcelain , but of faience and were made by the master potter JM Schmidt in Danzig in 1748/49 . The Saxon coat of arms under the crown of the stove bears, contrary to the usual coat of arms with the Saxon diamond that runs diagonally to the right, a so-called bastard thread with a diamond that runs diagonally to the left .
At the time of the French Revolution , the castle was looted and the few remaining inventory stolen. For a while, Chambord was even threatened with demolition.
From the 19th century to the present
When the poet Gustave Flaubert strolled through the orphaned rooms of the huge castle in the 19th century, he pondered its strange fate: Everything was given as if nobody wanted to have it or keep it. It looks like it has almost never been used and has always been too big. It's like an abandoned hotel with travelers not even leaving their names on the walls.
Napoléon handed the castle over to Louis-Alexandre Berthier at the beginning of the 19th century . It served as a military hospital during the Franco-Prussian War from 1870 to 1871, and parts of the Louvre's collections were relocated here during the Second World War .
Chambord Castle was the model for the reconstruction and new construction of the original Schwerin Castle between 1845 and 1857. Chambord Castle and its park have been on the UNESCO World Heritage List since 1981 . It is the largest and most famous of the Loire castles and is open to the public. The state rooms in the palace can be viewed, and it also houses changing exhibitions on various topics. In 2000, the numerous castles on the Loire as well as the natural landscape of the Loire Valley between the cities of Sully-sur-Loire and Chalonnes-sur-Loire were grouped under the entry "Valley of the Loire between Sully-sur-Loire and Chalonnes" in the UNESCO World Heritage List .
Castle complex
Architecture of the building
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The construction, made of tuff quarried nearby, is of the Italian style, which is characterized by French execution, and contains both sacred and military elements. The palace's builders are probably Leonardo da Vinci , who provided the idea, and Domenico da Cortona , who created the construction plans. There are close connections to the architectural world of Leonardo, so that his involvement in the early planning consultations is likely. The master builders were the brothers Jacques and Denis Sourdeau.
Construction began in 1519, and in 1539, when the king received Emperor Charles V there , it was still not completed. The core building, the so-called Donjon, was completed around 1540. In accordance with the building project, as it were a large hunting camp for a number of high-ranking guests of almost the same rank, Chambord Castle offered a large number of similarly sized and similarly equipped manorial apartments without any architectural emphasis of a special apartment for the royal host.
Until the builder's death in 1547, work was carried out on two extension wings to the left and right, now with separate royal living areas, but these were no longer completed. The construction work was very complex: 1,800 workers drove wooden stakes five meters into the marshy ground as foundations. Masons layered stone on stone for over 15 years. The castle has six tall towers, 440 rooms, 365 fire places and 84 stairs. Overall, the construction time lasted 25 years - but even longer with modifications and improvements.
The most striking feature of the castle is the unusually rich roof landscape, which is almost unique in this form. Particularly here there are asymmetrically arranged chimneys, windows and turrets in the two castle wings. The large round towers also show strong asymmetries in the arrangement of the windows, which extend to the ground floor, which does not occur to this extent in Renaissance architecture . The cross-shaped floor plan of the Corps de Logis is surmounted by four steep pyramid roofs above the corner apartments, which merge directly into the conical roofs of the corner towers. Where the cross-shaped corridors are located on the floors below, the roof is accessible at this point, so that the structures, which consist of various hatches , chimneys and lanterns, give the impression of an urban landscape. The writer Chateaubriand compared the contrast of the smooth facades and the overflowing roof structure with a woman with hair disheveled by the wind . The slate roofing and the number of pinnacles in the flamboyant style of the late Gothic form a contrast to the symmetrical structure of the property in the Renaissance style.
The floor plan is regular: the corps de logis, which is also often referred to as a donjon , has the basic shape of a square, the corners of which merge into a tower. The middle of this square is the staircase , which is open to the top and is dominated by a huge double staircase that extends to the roof. This staircase leads to a ciborium-like open lantern. The double-flight staircase, which was unique during the construction period, may be based on an idea by Leonardo da Vinci. From this Wendelstein , four large corridors lead off on each floor in a cross shape and orthogonally to the sides of the square. In the corners of the square , i.e. on the left and right of each corridor, there are apartments . H. self-contained apartments for one person each, consisting of an anteroom, room and cabinet or cloakroom. There is also one such apartment per floor in each of the towers, so that there are a total of eight apartments on each floor (four in the corners and four in the towers). The corps des logis is flanked by two gallery wings that end in two further towers (the western one houses the castle chapel), which in turn form two of the corner points of the entire complex. On the courtyard side, the palace is surrounded by three low utility wings, the opposite corners of which are emphasized by low tower stumps.
The concept of the castle, which is architecturally consistent and subject to design considerations alone, lacks any living comfort. The interiors are partly connected by open galleries on the outer walls, the large rooms could hardly be heated by the chimneys. Nevertheless, the (few) sanitary facilities are of astonishing sophistication: the latrines that lead the rubbish into the basement are ventilated like the large waste collection basin via ventilation shafts leading from the basement to the roof, in which the wind blowing through the roof-side openings creates a negative pressure and thus which discharges gases and odors through the roof. Under Moritz von Sachsen some changes were made to the interior, which were not only redecorated to match the taste of the time, but were now also easier to heat with tall tiled stoves from Saxony.
symbolism
The new building of the renaissance castle was a building of purely symbolic importance; magnificent, but in principle uninhabitable. The design was inspired by the description of the New Jerusalem coming down to earth from the Revelation of John . The gigantic castle was always only a splendid expression of a failed idea of a new, glorious Holy Roman Empire under the rule of France.
The apparent ability to defend itself was without any defense-related significance. The basic structure of the building also reflects medieval thinking. The massive substructure symbolizes the (earthly world) with the cross of the axes of the four cardinal directions, at the intersection of which the world axis (in the form of the double staircase) connects the underworld with the earthly and supernatural world. It ends in the dominant lantern, which symbolizes both Christ (hence the tabernacle shape) and his earthly representative (through the monogram of Francis I and the royal lily). A roofscape of battlements, turrets, chimneys, gables and dormers rises from it (representing clergy and nobility?). There are two rooms in the tower. Everywhere there is symbolically the "F", the amalgamation of Franz and France, as well as the fire-breathing salamander surrounded by fire, the king's heraldic animal and embodiment of the motto "I feed on it and I extinguish it" (Latin Nutrisco et extinguo , French: Je m'en nourris et je l'éteins ) - Franz I. Idea of the fire salamander living in and from fire - transferred: life from good fire (spirit) - annihilation of bad fires.
Park and hunting area
The castle stands on a rectangular base measuring 156 by 117 meters. Based on the medieval model, it is surrounded by moats or by the Cosson, a tributary of the Loire, which is canalized here. The main and courtyard facades have large, simple lawn parterres , and the castle area leads widely into the landscape. The castle and the park are surrounded by a 32-kilometer wall, which was measured at the time for eight leagues. In the adjacent forest, Franz I staged his par force hunts , in which wild boars and deer were chased to death. At 5,433 hectares, the hunting area was almost as large as the area of Paris.
Chambord Castle in the film
Chambord has been a popular film location for feature films since the 1920s. It was one of the locations in the film adaptation of the novel The Princess of Clèves by Jean Delannoy (1961), with Jean Marais in the role of the prince and Marina Vlady as the princess.
- Documentation
- Splendor and splendor on the Loire: Chambord Castle. (OT: Chambord. Le château, le roi et l'architecte. ) Documentary with scenic documentation, France, 2015, 91 min. , Script and direction: Marc Jampolsky, production: arte France, Gédéon Programs, Inrap, CNRS Images, first broadcast : December 5, 2015 at arte, table of contents by arte.
- Chambord - A castle in the air made of stone. Documentary, Germany, 1999, 14:50 min., Script and director: Thomas Uhlmann, production: SWR , series: Schätze der Welt , first broadcast: December 19, 1999 on SWR, video and film text by SWR.
- Da Vinci Code on the Loire: the secret of Chambord Castle . zdf 2020. ( https://www.zdf.de/dokumentation/zdfinfo-doku ) (accessed on August 15, 2020)
literature
- Monique Chatenet: Chambord . Paris 2001, ISBN 2-85822-660-1 .
- Claudine Lagoutte: The Loire Castle Chambord. Ouest France, Rennes ISBN 2-85882-921-7 ; Edition Geisselbrecht, Lübeck 1986, ISBN 3-89031-094-X .
- Wolfgang Metternich: Chambord Castle on the Loire. The construction from 1519–1524. Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 1985, ISBN 3-534-01580-0 .
- Wolfgang Metternich: Chambord Castle on the Loire - elements of castle construction in a castle on the Loire. In: Hartmut Hofrichter (Hrsg.): The castle - a cultural-historical phenomenon. (= Publications of the Deutsche Burgenvereinigung eV, series B, publications volume 2 and special issue castles and palaces ). Theiss, Stuttgart 1994, ISBN 3-8062-1134-5 , pp. 110-118.
- Manfred Franz: History and Iconology of the Schwerin Castle. (Art-historical part of the restoration concept, typescript. 8 vol.). Developed on behalf of the Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania State Parliament and the Monument Protection Foundation, viewable - not loanable - u. a. in the state parliament library MVPs and the library of the Schwerin Castle Museum (wrongly under the title "Building report"). In it: Chapter about Chambord Castle and extensive literature references and a. on the Omphalos theme.
- Rainer G. Richter: The ovens of the Dresden arts and crafts museum. A little museum and furnace history in Saxony. In: Yearbook of the State Art Collections Dresden. ISSN 0419-733X , 2009 (35), Dresden 2011, pp. 8-27 (especially pp. 20 and 21).
Web links
- Domaine national de Chambord
- Chambord Castle in: france.fr (German)
- Chambord Castle as a 3D model in SketchUp's 3D warehouse
Individual evidence
- ↑ Quoted in: The natural and cultural wonders of the world: All natural and cultural sites on the UNESCO World Heritage List . Chronik-Verlag, Gütersloh 2006, ISBN 978-3-577-14640-1 , p. 132, reading sample .
- ^ Rainer G. Richter: The ovens of the Dresden Museum of Applied Arts. A little museum and furnace history in Saxony . In: Yearbook of the Dresden State Art Collections 35 . 2011, ISSN 0419-733X , p. 20th f .
- ^ Exhibition Made in Chambord (2009), ( Memento from March 29, 2009 in the web archive archive.today ).
- ^ The Loire Valley between Sully-sur-Loire and Chalonnes. In: UNESCO , 2000.
- ↑ [1]
- ↑ Chatenet 2001.
- ↑ Florian von Heintze: Art and Architecture. Wissenmedia Verlag, 2006, ISBN 978-3-577-07560-2 , p. 134 ( limited preview in Google book search).
- ^ Quote from Chateaubriand. ( Memento of February 5, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) In: lunay.com
- ↑ IMDb
Coordinates: 47 ° 36 ′ 57.5 ″ N , 1 ° 31 ′ 2 ″ E