Champigny Castle

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Collegiate church

The Champigny Castle , only the economy and the building of the pin chapel are preserved, belongs to the French community Champigny-sur-Veude in Indre-et-Loire in the region Center-Val de Loire . After the chapel had already been placed under monument protection as Monument historique in 1911 , the farm buildings were added to the French list of monuments in September 1945 .

Building history

Louis de Bourbon , Duke of Montpensier, inherited the old Champigny Castle around 1470 . In 1498 he founded a canons' monastery there and began building the monastery chapel. At the beginning of the 16th century he started building a new castle, which his son Louis III after his death in 1520 . de Bourbon , continued but could not quite complete. The chapel was finished in 1543.

The Jupiter Pavilion, access to the farm yard

Around 1625 Cardinal Richelieu built a magnificent castle in the not far away Richelieu , his birthplace. He did not tolerate any comparable building in the area and forced the owner of Champigny Castle to agree to an exchange. Once in possession of the estate, Richelieu began demolishing the castle; only the farm buildings with the remarkable Jupiter portal from the 16th century were spared. The collegiate chapel was also spared this fate because the Pope took it into the legal custody of the Vatican because of its Passion relics .

The original owners later went to court against the Cardinal's heir and, in a twelve-year legal battle, managed to get Anne Marie Louise d'Orléans back. She had the farm buildings designed into an attractive three-winged castle in the classical style.

Collegiate Chapel

The chapel was consecrated to the Holy Cross in 1545. The four- bay hall with a choir closed on three sides mixes the style of the Gothic with that of the Renaissance . You can get inside through a beautiful door from the 16th century with the figures of the cardinal virtues as wood carving. In the middle of the room stands the praying figure Henri de Bourbons , the last male Montpensier.

The stained glass from the mid-16th century is a fine example of French Renaissance glass art and at the same time the chapel's most precious ornament . The founder was Cardinal de Givry, Bishop of Langres around 1550 . The center of the cycle is the crucifixion of Christ in the central window of the choir. Below is St. Louis , one of the most important French kings of the Middle Ages, together with his wife Margaret of Provence . The other windows in the lower part show mainly members of the Bourbon-Montpensier house, above events from the life of St. Louis.

literature

  • Jean-Pierre Babelon: Châteaux de France au siècle de la Renaissance . Flammarion, Paris 1989, ISBN 2-08-012062-X , pp. 357-363 .
  • Wilfried Hansmann : The Loire Valley. Castles, churches and cities in the «Garden of France» . 2nd Edition. DuMont Reiseverlag, Ostfildern 2006, ISBN 3-7701-6614-0 , p. 184-185 .
  • Jean-Marie Pérouse de Montclos, Robert Polidori : Castles in the Loire Valley . Könemann, Cologne 1997, ISBN 3-89508-597-9 , p. 138-143 .
  • Castles on the Loire . The green travel guide. Michelin Reise-Verlag, Landau-Mörlheim 1997, ISBN 2-06-711591-X , pp. 264-265.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Entry of the castle in the Base Mérimée , accessed on July 20, 2009.

Coordinates: 47 ° 4 ′ 2 ″  N , 0 ° 19 ′ 3 ″  E