Jacques Androuet du Cerceau, les dessins des plus excellents bâtiments de France

In 1886, a superb collection of 116 drawings on velum paper entered the British Museum. It was a donation from Queen Victoria, who had inherited it from her royal ancestors. At the time no one was fully aware but it is one of the summits of Renaissance culture. We are convinced of it today as we visit the exhibition at the Cité de l’architecture or when we leaf through this book that reproduces for the first time the complete collection of these drawings Jacques Androuet du Cerceau did in pen, enhancing some of them with color. As he was active during the period of the religious wars he was not able to build, or hardly. On the other hand, he did put down on paper the most beautiful castles of his time, precise to the least millimetre. He produced in particular drawings from up high – an amazing feat of the imagination for a man who lived two centuries before the first hot-air balloons. We can see to the finest detail the towers of Chambord, the walls of Amboise, the staircase of Blois, the façades of the Louvre. There are also names that had their period of glory but are only memories now, destroyed by time, wars and the Revolution: flowerbeds at the Tuileries, the sumptuous dwellings of Folembray, Montargis, Challuau, La Muette and the famous castle from Madrid that was in the woods of Boulogne and which François Ist wanted to be as luxurious as the location he was made prisoner in in Spain.

•Jacques Androuet du Cerceau, les dessins des plus excellents bâtiments de France, by Françoise Boudon et Claude Mignot, co-edition Picard/Cité de l’architecture/Le Passage, 2010, 256 p., 49 €