Maison du 12e siècle (ancienne cure de l'église Sainte-Croix)
MonumentHidden Treasure
Maison du 12e siècle (ancienne cure de l'église Sainte-Croix), located in Tours (Indre-et-Loire), 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
- Tours, Indre-et-Loire, Centre-Val de Loire
- Visit
- Closed to visitors
- GPS
- 47.3936, 0.6815
- Mérimée Reference
- PA00098149
An exceptional Romanesque vestige nestled against the church of Sainte-Croix de Tours, this 12th-century house boasts sculpted columns, human-headed arches and an elegant Gothic stone screw.
© Wikimedia Commons
History
At the heart of old Tours, set against the north side of the église Sainte-Croix, stands one of the oldest civic buildings in the city: a quadrangular edifice whose stones tell nearly nine centuries of urban history. A former parish presbytery, it represents a rare example of medieval domestic architecture in Touraine, at a time when the great majority of civic buildings vanished over the course of wars, fires, and successive rebuilding. What strikes the eye immediately is the architectural coherence of the building despite its chronological layers. The ground floor is organised around a vast single room, whose corners house slender half-columns, borne upon corbels carved with human faces of striking expressiveness. These stone masks, with their grave and stylised features, seem to have watched over the interior space for centuries, poised somewhere between devotion and Romanesque apotropaism. The upper floor reveals another temporal layer: a room vaulted in the thirteenth century, whose supports still bear traces of the original Romanesque vault that was replaced. The capitals adorned with stylised foliage bear witness to the refinement of the Tourangeaux stone-carvers, heirs to a sculptural tradition already flourishing on the great abbatial building sites of the Loire. The polygonal tower added in the fifteenth century at the south-west corner completes the picture by introducing Flamboyant Gothic elegance: its spiral stone staircase is at once a technical solution and an aesthetic signature, calling to mind the stair turrets that adorn the private mansions of the royal city of Tours at that period. The ensemble thus offers a condensed lesson in architecture, from Romanesque to late Gothic, within a few square metres. To visit this house is to immerse oneself in the daily life of a medieval cleric, to picture the parish life that once animated these walls, and to appreciate the remarkable continuity of an urban fabric that the Loire and the hand of man have many times threatened without ever entirely erasing.
Architecture
The building has a compact quadrangular plan, arranged over two superimposed levels, each consisting of a single large room. This straightforward and functional layout is characteristic of medieval curial constructions, which favoured versatile spaces. The masonry, in all likelihood built from tuffeau — the white limestone so characteristic of the banks of the Loire — lends the whole structure a brightness and lightness particular to Touraine architecture. The ground floor forms the Romanesque heart of the building. In the south-east and south-west corners, engaged demi-columns rest upon sculpted corbels depicting human heads with expressive features, a decorative motif typical of twelfth-century Romanesque sculpture. These sculptural elements, at once structural and ornamental, reveal the aesthetic ambition of the patron, who wished to endow his residence with an architectural dignity comparable to that of neighbouring religious buildings. On the upper floor, the thirteenth-century Gothic vault bears upon the preserved supports of the original Romanesque vault, offering an eloquent dialogue between two successive constructive systems. The Gothic capitals, adorned with stylised foliage of precise outline, illustrate the vegetal repertoire fashionable in the region's sculpture workshops at that time. The most striking addition remains the polygonal tower grafted onto the north-west corner of the building in the fifteenth century. Housing a stone spiral staircase, it skilfully articulates two distinct volumes — the western gable of the cure and the eaves wall of the nave of Sainte-Croix — whilst imparting to the whole a Flamboyant Gothic verticality. This turret, characteristic of the architectural output of the royal Loire, constitutes the most legible and most striking hallmark of a building that condenses, within a single volume, the evolution of medieval architecture over three centuries.
Related Figures
Chanoines de l'église Sainte-Croix de Tours (desservants successifs, XIIe-XVIIIe siècle)Maîtres maçons tourangeaux anonymes (constructeurs de l'édifice roman, XIIe siècle)Tailleurs de pierre gothiques de la région de Tours (remaniements du XIIIe siècle)Artisans de la tour polygonale (campagne flamboyante du XVe siècle)Administrateurs des Monuments Historiques (signataires de l'arrêté de protection, 1939)
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Frequently Asked Questions
Where is Maison du 12e siècle (ancienne cure de l'église Sainte-Croix) located?
Maison du 12e siècle (ancienne cure de l'église Sainte-Croix) is located in Tours, Indre-et-Loire department, Centre-Val de Loire region, France.
When was Maison du 12e siècle (ancienne cure de l'église Sainte-Croix) built?
Maison du 12e siècle (ancienne cure de l'église Sainte-Croix) dates back to a period built during the Renaissance (16th century).
Is Maison du 12e siècle (ancienne cure de l'église Sainte-Croix) open to visitors?
Maison du 12e siècle (ancienne cure de l'église Sainte-Croix) is currently closed to visitors.