Deux maisons
MonumentHidden Treasure
Deux maisons, located in Quintin (Département 22), is a Renaissance château built in the 16th century. The monument is currently closed to visitors.
Key facts
- Type
- autre
- Period
- Renaissance (16th century)
- Location
- Quintin, Département 22, Bretagne
- Visit
- Closed to visitors
- GPS
- 48.4035, -2.9093
- Mérimée Reference
- PA00089565
In the heart of Quintin, two seventeenth-century Renaissance houses boast exceptional façades: round-headed doors flanked by pilasters, cornices with mutules and triangular pediments, precious witnesses to the Breton art of stonework.
History
Nestled in the cobbled lanes of Quintin, a small town of character in the Côtes-d'Armor, these two bourgeois dwellings form one of the most eloquent architectural ensembles of the Breton Renaissance. Their listing as Monuments Historiques as early as 1951 bears witness to the heritage value recognised in them by experts, on a par with the hôtels particuliers and manor houses that punctuate this region of central Brittany. What sets these houses apart from the ordinary buildings of the period is the sophistication of their decorative vocabulary. The façades display an ornamental repertoire of remarkable precision: columns and pilasters framing the doorways, capitals with leafy motifs, ovolo mouldings crowning the spandrels, and those characteristic cornices treated as a succession of corbels or mutules evoking mediaeval machicolations. This blending of Gothic heritage and Renaissance idiom is a hallmark of Breton craftsmen of the seventeenth century. The first house immediately strikes the visitor with the delicacy of its semicircular arch, whose sculpted keystone is adorned with scrolled banderole forms, a motif that is quintessentially humanist in spirit. The second, slightly more restrained in its ornamentation, compensates with a more ambitious composition: a semicircular doorway with geometric jambs supports a tall triangular pediment, lending the whole an almost palatial air for a town house. To visit these two houses is to give oneself over to wandering through mediaeval and Renaissance Quintin, a town that was, in the seventeenth century, a prosperous centre for the manufacture of linen and hemp cloth. The atmosphere of grey granite, the narrow alleyways, and the Breton light that glides across the sculpted reliefs together create a setting of rare authenticity. The attentive visitor will discover in these façades the social and cultural ambition of a merchant bourgeoisie that sought to proclaim its success in stone.
Architecture
These two houses illustrate the Breton Renaissance style as it was practised in the towns of central Brittany in the seventeenth century: an architecture of grey granite with sober volumes, whose elegance is concentrated entirely on the façades and singularly around the doorways. Granite, the region's foremost material, imposes its constraints and its nobility: it calls for clean reliefs, crisp edges, and precise sculpture that is sparing in superfluous detail. The first house is distinguished by its semicircular arched doorway, whose keystone is carved with a motif of rolled banderoles, a direct humanist reference to the cartouches and phylacteries of Renaissance engraving. The columns or pilasters framing the opening are crowned with capitals bearing stylised plant motifs. At the level of the spandrels, a continuous moulding decorated with ovolo — a motif inherited from Antiquity — underscores the composition horizontally. The upper cornice, treated as a succession of corbels or mutules, creates a characteristic rhythmic effect, formally reminiscent of the machicolations of mediaeval fortifications. The second house adopts a more vertical and more monumental composition. Its door jambs are decorated with pilasters featuring geometric motifs, restrained yet elegant, and the semicircular arch of the doorway is surmounted by a tall triangular pediment that lends the whole an almost classical dignity. The presence of this triangular pediment, borrowed from the repertoire of learned architecture, signals the cultural ambition of the patron and the skill of the craftsman who was able to adapt it to the constructive logic of Breton granite.
Related Figures
Artisans tailleurs de pierre bretons du XVIIe siècle, transmetteurs du vocabulaire Renaissance en BretagneBourgeois négociants en toiles de Quintin, commanditaires présumés des façadesInspecteurs des Monuments Historiques (service des Beaux-Arts, arrêté de 1951)
Tags
Frequently Asked Questions
Where is Deux maisons located?
Deux maisons is located in Quintin, Département 22 department, Bretagne region, France.
When was Deux maisons built?
Deux maisons dates back to a period built during the Renaissance (16th century).
Is Deux maisons open to visitors?
Deux maisons is currently closed to visitors.