United States or Malawi ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Saint Germain, above the first story, is essentially a construction of bricks, but the effect is even now, as Chambiges originally intended, an edifice with its main constructive elements of lower sustaining walls and buttresses of stone binding together the slighter fabric, or filling, above.
M.E. Mareuse, secretary of the Committee of Inscriptions, affirms that Domenico must be considered the unique architecte of our old Municipal Palace: other writers claim with equal confidence Pierre Chambiges as the architect.
The establishment of Charles V in no way satisfying the artistic ambitions of Francis I, that monarch gave the task of reconstruction to the architect Pierre Chambiges, in 1539, preserving only the Saint Chapelle of Saint Louis and the donjon. The building must have gone forward with an extreme rapidity for at the architect's death, in 1544, it had reached nearly the level of the rooftop.
The principal entrance to the palace opens out from the Place Solferino and gives access immediately to the Cour du Cheval Blanc of Chambiges, which, since that eventful day in Napoleonic history nearly a hundred years ago, has become better known as the Cour des Adieux. At the rear rises the famous horseshoe stair, certainly much better expressed in French as the Escalier en Fer
Chambiges' successor was his son-in-law, Guillaume Guillain, who, without changing the primitive plan, completed the work in 1548.
Word Of The Day