Maison dite La Ramée
MonumentHidden Treasure
In the heart of Touraine, La Ramée reveals the sober elegance of the French Renaissance: dormer windows with gables, refined pilasters and a curved pediment with a mysterious coat of arms, witness to a sumptuous 16th century.
© Wikimedia Commons
History
Nestling in the market town of Montlouis-sur-Loire, just outside Tours, the house known as La Ramée is one of those discreet jewels that the Loire Valley likes to hide behind its tufa stone facades. Listed as a Historic Monument since 1973, it embodies with distinguished sobriety the aristocratic lifestyle of the French Renaissance, far removed from the ostentation of the great Loire fortresses. What is immediately striking is the architectural coherence of the whole: a main building built around a rectangular staircase tower, a common feature among the bourgeoisie and lesser nobility of 16th-century Tours, but here treated with particular attention to ornamental detail. The doorway to the tower, framed by pilasters and topped by a curved pediment, is a lesson in itself about the spread of antique vocabulary in the provinces, long after the major royal projects in the Blésois and Amboisois regions had popularised these Italian forms. The dormer windows on the north facade, crowned with gables and pinnacles, add a late-Gothic verticality that contrasts delightfully with the classical rigour of the rest of the composition. This dialogue between two architectural grammars is typical of the 1520-1560 period, when Touraine's master masons had not yet completely abandoned the reflexes of the late Middle Ages. A visit to La Ramée is above all a walk through time, on a human scale. There are no large flowerbeds or imposing moats: the building invites intimate contemplation, ideal for those who seek to understand architecture beyond the spectacular. The detail of the window frames, preserved in their original decoration on the north and south-west facades, is enough to measure the exacting standards of those who commissioned the work.
Architecture
La Ramée is typical of the layout of 16th-century residences in Touraine: a rectangular main building with a ground floor, a square first floor and an attic, backed by a rectangular staircase tower on the south side. This functional and elegant arrangement meant that the upper levels did not need any cumbersome internal staircases, freeing up the reception rooms. The most striking feature of the north facade is the opening of cross-headed windows, the sculpted frames of which have retained their original decoration: cavet mouldings, fillets and grooves, in the tufa stone tradition so dear to the stonemasons of the Loire. The dormer windows that pierce the roof are topped with triangular gables flanked by pinnacles, a late Gothic motif that the builders of the provincial Renaissance extended far beyond what one might imagine. The staircase tower, accessed through a neat doorway, features the most classical vocabulary: two pilasters with capitals frame the entrance, supporting an entablature surmounted by a curved pediment - an antiquistic form directly imported from the repertoire of Bramante and Raphael, and popularised in Touraine by the royal building sites. The pediment is adorned with foliage and vases at the top, while the central shield, once bearing the commissioner's coat of arms, has been hammered out. The whole piece is probably carved from white Touraine tufa, the material preferred by regional builders for its ease of cutting and luminosity.
Related Figures
Commanditaire anonyme de la noblesse tourangelle (XVIe siècle) — propriétaire bâtisseur dont les armoiries ont été bûchéesMaître maçon tourangeau inconnu — artisan probable de la sculpture des encadrements et de la porte d'escalierPropriétaires successifs des XVIIe-XIXe siècles — gardiens discrets d'un patrimoine intactService des Monuments Historiques — acteur de l'inscription protectrice de 1973
