This website requires JavaScript.

Châteaurenard townhouse: trompe l'oeil and royal visit

The façade | Lsmpascal / CC-BY-SA
Festivities Town house Louis XIV Châteaurenard townhouse

Belgian 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.

About the the author

Vinaigrette
I'm fond of strolls and History, with juicy and spicy details!