Château de Fontainebleau
CastleHidden Gem
The Château de Fontainebleau is a royal château built predominantly in the Renaissance and classical styles, situated near the heart of the town of Fontainebleau, some sixty kilometres south-east of Paris, in France. The earliest records of a château at Fontainebleau date back to the twelfth century. The most recent works
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History
At the heart of a protected forest of 17,000 hectares, the château de Fontainebleau stands as one of the most fascinating palaces in Europe — not through cold monumentality, but through the organic warmth of an edifice that has never ceased to transform itself in accordance with royal desires. Where Versailles strikes with its absolute symmetry, Fontainebleau astonishes with its labyrinthine complexity, its interlocking courtyards and its apartments that each seem to tell of a different era. What makes Fontainebleau truly unique is that it is the only French royal residence to have been occupied without interruption by every sovereign of France for nearly eight centuries. Capetians, Valois, Bourbons, Bonaparte: each dynasty left its mark here, layering styles upon one another without ever erasing what came before. The galerie François Ier, a masterpiece of the Renaissance introduced to France by Rosso Fiorentino and Primatice, stands alongside the neoclassical apartments of Napoléon and the Gothic chambers of the earliest Capetians. A visit to Fontainebleau is an experience of time travel at several speeds. One lingers in the Salle du Bal, that masterpiece of Henri II, whose gilded coffered ceilings and Italianate frescoes seem to hum with the energy of an endless fête. One is moved in the Salon de l'Abdication, where Napoléon bid farewell to his Garde in 1814, a scene of dramatic intensity unmatched in the history of France. The formal French gardens laid out by Le Nôtre, the more romantically inclined jardin anglais, and the ponds home to centuries-old carp complete a sojourn that one leaves with genuine reluctance. The forest setting further deepens the singular character of the place. Fontainebleau is not a palace of grand display set upon an open plain: it is a hunting lodge and pleasure château intimately bound to its untamed landscape. The sandstone outcrops, the stands of ancient oaks and beeches, the golden light that filters through the trees in the late afternoon across the Cour Ovale — all of this lends the monument a soul that the great ceremonial palaces so often struggle to match.
Architecture
Fontainebleau is a monument to architectural eclecticism, the fruit of eight centuries of layered construction, bound together and harmonised by the genius of successive generations of architects. The château's general plan is articulated around five principal courtyards — the Cour Ovale (the oldest, of medieval origin), the Cour du Cheval-Blanc (or Cour des Adieux), the Cour de la Fontaine, the Cour des Offices and the Cour du Donjon — connected to one another by galleries and residential wings that compose an elegant labyrinth of some 1,500 rooms extending across approximately 130,000 square metres of floor space. The façades bear witness to a layering of styles: the oldest sections, particularly those surrounding the Cour Ovale, retain the imprint of early French Renaissance architecture, with its rusticated pilasters and sculpted dormer windows. The aile Louis XV presents a more serene classical order, whilst the Napoleonic interventions introduce a neoclassical rigour that is clearly legible in the interior decoration. The predominant materials are the grès de Fontainebleau — a local stone of ochre and golden hues that harmonises beautifully with the surrounding forest — and the slate of the French-style rooftops, punctuated by monumental chimney stacks. The interiors constitute an open museum of European decorative arts spanning the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. The galerie François Ier (64 metres in length) remains the monument's absolute masterpiece, its high-relief stucco work framing the paintings of Rosso Fiorentino on the allegorical theme of kingship. The Salle du Bal d'Henri II, the galerie de Diane transformed into a library under Napoléon, and the Appartements des Souverains with their gilded coffered ceilings and marquetry parquet floors together compose a decorative ensemble of unrivalled coherence and richness in France.
Related Figures
François Ier — roi qui transforma Fontainebleau en palace de la RenaissanceRosso Fiorentino — peintre florentin, créateur de la galerie François IerFrancesco Primatice — artiste bolonais, fondateur de l'École de FontainebleauHenri II — continuateur des travaux, commanditaire de la Salle du BalCatherine de Médicis — reine-mère qui fit de Fontainebleau un centre culturel européenHenri IV — auteur du plus grand chantier d'extension du châteauPhilibert de l'Orme — architecte royal sous Henri IINapoléon Ier — dernier grand rénovateur, lié aux Adieux de 1814
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