Musée national de la Renaissance

Château d'Écouen
General information
Type	Château
Architectural style	Renaissance
Town or city	Écouen
Country	France
Design and construction
Architect	Jean Bullant

The Château d'Écouen is a historic château in the city of Écouen, north of Paris, France, which today houses the Musée national de la Renaissance (National Museum of the Renaissance).

The château was built between 1538 and 1550 by the architect Jean Bullant for Anne de Montmorency, who was made Connétable de France in 1538.

Anne de Montmorency had inherited the château in 1515, and his building campaigns were informed by his first-hand experience in overseeing royal works at Saint-Germain-en-Laye and Fontainebleau.

Jean Bullant is likely to have been the architect, for he was commissioned to design the Grand Constable's tomb, but it has also been suggested that Pierre Tâcheron had a hand in the château's design. The colossal order is rare in French architecture before Bullant; his characteristic use of it might be its first appearance in France here, on the pavilion on the court side.

Anne de Montmorency was a major patron of the arts in France, and a protector of artists: his chapel was decorated with sculptures by Jean Goujon, and Jean Bullant, Barthélemy Prieur, Bernard Palissy. Some of the Androuet du Cerceau family found protection and work at Écouen. Unhappily, no building accounts survive, so the precise sequence of the construction cannot be closely followed; panels of grisaille stained glass in the gallery of the west wing are dated 1542 and 1544, and the east wing was paved in 1549-50. The building was frescoed and furnished during the 1550s, in the style of the School of Fontainebleau.

Écouen was illustrated in engravings in Jacques Androuet du Cerceau's Les Plus excellents bastiments de France, 1576.

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