Maison du 16e siècle
MonumentHidden Treasure
In Langon, this late 16th-century town house boasts a facade of rare elegance: fluted pilasters, expressive masks and sculpted mermaids make up a striking Mannerist décor.
History
In the heart of Langon, a Gironde town that once thrived on the wine and salt trades, stands a house that encapsulates all the decorative sophistication of the urban bourgeoisie of the late French Renaissance. Listed as a Historic Monument since 2000, it bears witness to an art of living and a taste for ornament that reached its apogee between the 1580s and the first decades of the 17th century. What immediately sets this residence apart is the richness of its eastern façade. Whereas most merchants' houses made do with plain ashlar, the owner of this building called on the services of an ornamentalist who was clearly well versed in Italian Renaissance architecture and Flemish engravings. On the first and second floors, fluted pilasters, split bosses, cushion balls, garlands of foliage and fleshy fruit, grimacing masks and mermaids with intertwined bodies are all part of a composition that is both skilful and exuberant. The building is part of a well-established tradition in Gironde and south-west Aquitaine, where merchant families enriched by trading in Bordeaux wine and Garonne products competed in architectural ostentation to assert their social standing. This house is one of the best-preserved examples of this type of regional urban civil architecture, in which the Mannerist ornamental vocabulary of Italian origin blends with more northerly motifs. The attentive visitor will take the time to stop in front of each bay to decipher this iconographic programme: mermaids, ambivalent figures of seduction and danger, stand side by side with masks - perhaps allegorical representations of the seasons or the winds - and plant motifs evoking abundance and fertility. A veritable cabinet of curiosities carved in stone. While the interior has unfortunately lost almost all of its original decoration, the façade alone is well worth a visit for any lover of late Renaissance architecture and French provincial mannerism.
Architecture
The urban layout of the house is typical of late 16th-century middle-class residences in south-west Aquitaine: a ground floor, probably originally used for commercial purposes or storage, topped by two habitable levels. It is on the east facade - the main facade facing the street - that most of the architectural interest is concentrated. The sculpted decoration on the first and second floors is the centrepiece of the building. The bays - probably transoms or mullioned windows - are framed by fluted pilasters with composite capitals, treated in the pure vocabulary of the Italianate Renaissance as disseminated in France by the engravings of Jacques Androuet du Cerceau and his contemporaries. The rusticated, folded panels that enliven the overmantels and frames add a plastic dimension and Mannerist vigour to the composition. The bays are topped with pediments or crowns adorned with cushion balls - a typically Renaissance motif - and garlands of foliage and fruit, motifs borrowed from the repertoire of Roman antiquity revisited by the Renaissance. The sculpted masks, sometimes grimacing and sometimes smiling, and the mermaids with female bodies ending in intertwined fish tails, bear witness to a skilful iconography combining mythological references and moral symbolism. The materials used are those of the Gironde building tradition: local limestone, soft to work with but with a beautiful chromatic coherence, is used for both the structure and the sculpted decoration.
Related Figures
Commanditaire anonyme (fin XVIe siècle) — vraisemblablement un négociant ou officier royal langonnais ayant fait édifier la demeureJacques Androuet du Cerceau (1510-1584) — architecte et graveur dont les modèles ornementaux ont très probablement inspiré le décor de la façadeHenri IV (1553-1610) — roi de France dont le règne pacificateur coïncide avec l'achèvement de la demeure et la reprise du mécénat architectural en provinceOrnemaniste anonyme (fin XVIe siècle) — sculpteur de talent, probablement formé à Bordeaux ou dans l'entourage des ateliers périgourdins, auteur du décor de la façade
