The façade | ©Lsmpascal / CC-BY-SABelgian painter Jean Daret made here a gorgeous trompe l’oeil staircase, in 1654, for Jean-François d'Aimar d'Albi, baron de Châteaurenard. Today, the building houses a welfare office, but we can visit it...
The staircase
So what about that staircase? The decoration’s theme is about arts, personified by a muse and her genius: grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, music, painting, arithmetic, astronomy, geometry. This trompe l’oeil is a real masterpiece!
Look at this character, emerging from his red curtain: in fact, he was a domestic, wearing d’Aimar’s livery! And here: hanging to a nail planted in a column, we have a cage with a parrot inside!
In a niche, we can see Hercules wearing a lion skin. In two other niches, we have Roman emperor in front of king Solomon. On the ceiling, ″the Virtue’s immortality″ symbolized by a winged Pallas in the sky.
A royal visit
The baron hosted king of France Louis XIV in his house, in 1660: a sun King completely flabbergasted by what he saw here! He really liked the staircase.
