Philibert de l'Orme

• 1. Introduction

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  Philibert de l'Orme was born in Lyon sometime between the 3rd and the 9th of June 1514, the son of a master mason who employed three hundred workers and built prestigious buildings for the city's elite. That origin would follow him his whole career, shaping what he believed architecture should be and earning him the contempt of rivals who thought his background too common for a man of royal courts. He became one of the great masters of French Renaissance architecture, supervising all of King Henry II's building projects for eleven years and leaving works at some of France's most celebrated sites. Yet when his patron died, he was dismissed within two days, and his reputation would be attacked and rehabilitated more than once across the centuries that followed. How did the son of a masonry contractor rise to shape royal France, and why did a 1626 portrait of him end up misrepresenting an entirely different man in Belarusian publications throughout the twentieth century?

• 2. Rome and a Royal Connection

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  At nineteen, Philibert left Lyon for Italy, where he spent three years working on building projects for Pope Paul III. In Rome he met Cardinal Jean du Bellay, who served as the Ambassador of King François I to the Vatican. Du Bellay became his protector and his client, and the connection proved decisive. Du Bellay was also the patron of Francois Rabelais, the writer and humanist, which placed de l'Orme within a circle of considerable cultural ambition. Around 1540, de l'Orme moved to Paris, and royal commissions followed quickly. The first major building he completed was the Château of Saint Maur in 1541, built for Cardinal du Bellay himself. Its plan showed the influence of Italian villas, and like those Italian buildings, it was decorated with frescoes. The relationship with du Bellay thus produced de l'Orme's earliest surviving credit and introduced him to the style of patronage that would define his career.

• 3. Architect to Henry II

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  On the 3rd of April 1548, Henry II formally named de l'Orme as architect of the King. For the next eleven years, he supervised virtually every royal architectural project in France, with one notable exception: changes to the Louvre were handled by another royal architect, Pierre Lescot. The list of works de l'Orme commanded reads like a tour of French royal power. He worked on the Château de St Maur-des-Fossés, the Château de Chenonceau in the Loire Valley, the royal Château de Madrid in the Bois de Boulogne, and the Château de Vincennes, among others. His masterpiece during this period, built for Diane de Poitiers between 1552 and 1559, was the Château d'Anet. Its plans survive in Jacques Androuet du Cerceau's book, "Plus excellens bastimens de France", and the court facade was later moved to Paris, where it is attached to the front wall of the chapel of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and can be seen from Rue Bonaparte. Along with these commissions, he completed the tomb of François I at the Basilica of Saint-Denis in 1547, which the source describes as a perfect specimen of his art.

• 4. The Builder Who Could Count

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  In 1555, de l'Orme demonstrated before the King a new method he had invented for constructing the wooden frameworks needed to support stone buildings. He called it charpente à petits bois. The technique was faster and less expensive than previous methods, and it used significantly less wood. He put it to practical use at the royal Château de Montceaux and at the royal hunting lodge La Muette in the Forest of Saint-Germain-en-Laye. This invention reflected something de l'Orme argued throughout his career: that an architect had to master every dimension of building, not just its aesthetic appearance. He insisted that architects needed formal training in classical architecture, geometry, astronomy, and the sciences, alongside hands-on experience in actual construction. In his view, a proper architect had to manage everything from designing volumes to adding up costs, to making detailed three-dimensional drawings of vaults, to knowing whether the wood was dry enough to use, to recognizing when a foundation had reached sand and digging had to stop. He had scorn for those who could design a facade but had no real knowledge of how buildings were made. His opponents, in turn, scorned him for being the son of a masonry contractor.

• 5. Fall and Return

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  Henry II died on the 10th of July 1559, and de l'Orme lost everything almost immediately. Two days after the King's death, he was dismissed from his official posts. His replacement was Francesco Primaticcio, an Italian artist and architect whose work was then very much in fashion. Having joined a religious order, de l'Orme turned to meditation, scholarship, and writing. He made another trip to Rome to study Michelangelo's new works. Beginning in 1565, he wrote the first volume of a work on architectural theory that was both scientific and philosophical. It was published in 1567, with further editions appearing in 1576, 1626, and 1648, long after his death. His rehabilitation came under Charles IX and Catherine de Medici, who brought him back into royal favor. In 1563 he was employed on the enlargement of the Chateau of Saint Maur, and in 1564 he began work alongside Jean Bullant on additions to the Tuileries Palace. He died in Paris in 1570 while that project was still underway.

• 6. A Contested Legacy

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  In 1664, the grand stairway de l'Orme had built at the Tuileries Palace was demolished to make way for classical structures. His Château de Saint-Léger followed in 1668. Then, in 1683, François Blondel of the Royal Academy denounced him by name for what Blondel called his "villainous Gothic ornaments" and his "petty manner". His theoretical writings survived these attacks and continued to be used as important textbooks and regularly republished. His reputation turned again in the eighteenth century, when Dezallier d'Argenville wrote in 1787 that de l'Orme had "abandoned the Gothic covering in order to redress French architecture in the style Ancient Greece." D'Argenville also wrote the first biography and catalog of de l'Orme's works. Academic interest continued in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through art historians including H. Clouzot and Anthony Blunt. The peculiar coda to his posthumous life came when a 1626 engraved portrait of de l'Orme was reused in 1919 by the Belarusian bibliophile Ramuald Ziamkievič, who adapted it as a purported sixteenth-century portrait of the Belarusian humanist Wasyl Ciapiński. That misidentified image circulated in Belarusian publications throughout the twentieth century, long after the engraving's true subject had been forgotten by the people who reproduced it.