The Château de Talcy is a historical building in Talcy, Loir-et-Cher, France. It lies to the north of the river Loire, in the Loire Valley, known for its 16th-century châteaux. From a fortification in existence in the 13th century additional wings were added in the 1620s. Modernised in the 18th century the interiors have been preserved. A Historical Monument first registered in 1906 it has been owned by the state since 1933. It is open to visitors.
History
It was first referenced in an act in 1221, although no description of the building is given. The title of Seigneur de Talcy was used in reference to the St Lazare family. It was bought in 1466 by a Parisian lawyer: Pierre Simon. The central tower was built by the Simon family in 1480. Three generations of the Simon family lived there before the family line died out on the death of Jean Simon, Bishop of Paris in 1502. His sister, Marie was the final owner. The building was bought from Marie Simon in 1517 by Roberto Bernard Salviati, a Florentine banker and his wife Francoise (née Doucet). Bernard Salviati requested that the building be fortified, the request was granted in 1520 by Jean d'Orleans-Longueville, archbishop of Toulouse and Seigneur of Beaugency. However limitations were placed on Salviati as to Seigneural rights: he could not keep an armed guard. Salviati was in a difficult situation, needing to be close to king François 1, as his banker yet not a French citizen.
The estate is better known in literary, rather than architectural history. Salviati's daughter and granddaughter, Cassandre and Diane, were the muses of two leading French poets of the time, Pierre de Ronsard and Théodore-Agrippa d'Aubigné, respectively.
Ronsard fell in love with the 15-year-old Cassandre in 1545, whom he met at a ball in Blois. He dedicated to her some of the best known sonnets in the French language. They were not allowed to marry as Ronsard was not considered a suitable match. She was married to Jean III de Peigné in 1546. Diane was the daughter of Cassandra's brother Jean Salviati. D'Aubigné, dedicated to Diane in 1571 the collection of sonnets, ballads, and idylls entitled Le Printemps and at her death the finest of his poems, Les Tragiques. Due to his strong Hugonout religion and her Catholism the couple were unable to marry, her family objected most strongly.
Vegetable garden
In the château is the "Chambre de la Médicis" where Catherine de' Medici and her son Charles IX are said to have planned the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew's Day during the "Conference of Talcy" 28 and 29 June 1572.
Jean Salviati, Seigneur de Talcy passed the château to his son Foréze Salviati and it then passed to his daughter Isabella Salviati, who extended the east wing of the château in 1638, when the gable of the church was rebuilt. Isabella had bought the château from her mother (Isabeau née Sardini) although she was married to Louis de la Marck, with whom she had four children. There are engraved marks of YS on the doors of the tower, denoting Isabella Salviati. The Salvatie family sold the estate in 1682. Although this may have been earlier as Antoine de Preuilly was registered to have sold it to Blanchard de St. Martin in 1674. From there the house was passed down through the family and it is known that Jeremie's Burgeat had inherited it, recorded on his accent to the peerage in 1720. The Burgeat family owned the property between 1704 and 1780. They carried out extensive modernisation of the building and redeveloped the gardens. Andre Burgeat sold the château in 1780 to Elizabeth Gastebois.
The Gastebois family, from La Rochelle were a Huguenot family and Elizabeth (1758–1830) had married Francois Charles Vincens (1757–1796), the Vincens being also Huguenot. Their daughter Marie Madeleine Pierrette Vincens (1778–1854) married Philipp Albert Stapfer in 1798 and their family moved into the chateau.
The chateau remained intact throughout the revolution due to the families (Gastebois, Vincens and Stapfer) strong egalitarian beliefs. Philipp and Marie had two sons: Charles Louis (1799–1880) and (Frederic) Albert (1802–1892). Charles Louis was the father of Paul Stapfer.
Albert spent his youth as a liberal journalist for le Globe and continued to support egalitarian policies, manning the barricades in the 1830 revolution. Retiring to Talcy after his marriage to Clarey Louise Vincens in 1835, he gained an interest in daguerreotypes, taking a series of pictures of the chateau, still on view there.
During the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, Albert hosted General Antoine Chanzy there, but he was driven out by the Prussians in the Battle of Beaugency (1870) in December 1870.
Albert died there in 1892, leaving it to his three children: Leon (Protestant minister at Jones, Le Mans and Blois), Genevieve (married Raoul Debaste) and Valentine. Leon retired to Talcy in 1906 and died in 1930. In 1933 Valentine and Helene Genevieve sold it to the state, on condition that the 18th-century interiors would be preserved intact.
The château is visited by 20,000 tourists annually.
Architecture
The central square tower is likely the remains of the 1480 building with dramatic fortifications that were added in the 1520s.
There are no accurate records currently available as to the extent of the building at this time, but a later drawing shows two wings, on either side of the tower. The east wing also extended north to meet the church. This section was known to have been further extended in 1638 by Isabelle Salviati whilst the church was being worked on. The west wing was destroyed in a fire in 1723. The joining edge can be seen on the northwest corner of the tower. The two wings and tower enclosed the great courtyard of the chateau that contains the well. This is covered with a distinctive roof held on stone columns built in 1814 that has become emblematic of the chateau.
From the courtyard there is a central gate that leads into a more agriculture courtyard surrounded by barns and outbuildings also containing a large circular dove cote. This has been suggested to have been part of the medieval fortifications that was later converted. One of the barns still contains a wine press from 1808
The 1st floor windows were enlarged and the corridors and interiors modified in the 1780s by the Burgeat family. Later residents, the Stapfer, also built in a ground-floor room a place of worship (they were a strongly Protestant family), and there is still a wooden plaque over the fireplace inscribed "Cult Evangelical Protestant".
Whilst predominantly dating from the Renaissance the building has a strongly medieval feel due to the central tower. The Salviati family did not build the wings in a heavy Renaissance manner, that was becoming very popular at the time due to their wish to play down their Italian background.
The chateau was listed in 1906, with later listings for the larger environment and sold to the state by Valentine Stapfer in 1933 on the proviso that the building and interiors remain intact. The large library collection was sold in 1931.
The Renaissance is a period in history and a cultural movement marking the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity, covering the 15th and 16th centuries and characterized by an effort to revive and surpass the ideas and achievements of classical antiquity; it occurred after the crisis of the Late Middle Ages and was associated with great social change in most fields and disciplines, including art, architecture, politics, literature, exploration and science. In addition to the standard periodization, proponents of a "long Renaissance" may put its beginning in the 14th century and its end in the 17th century. The traditional view focuses more on the Renaissance's early modern aspects and argues that it was a break from the past, but many historians today focus more on its medieval aspects and argue that it was an extension of the Middle Ages. The beginnings of the period—the early Renaissance of the 15th century and the Italian Proto-Renaissance from around 1250 or 1300—overlap considerably with the Late Middle Ages, conventionally dated to c. 1350–1500, and the Middle Ages themselves were a long period filled with gradual changes, like the modern age; as a transitional period between both, the Renaissance has close similarities to both, especially the late and early sub-periods of either.
Renaissance
The Renaissance's intellectual basis was its version of humanism, derived from the concept of Roman humanitas and the rediscovery of classical Greek philosophy, such as that of Protagoras, who said that "man is the measure of all things". Early examples were the development of perspective in oil painting and the revived knowledge of how to make concrete. Although the invention of metal movable type sped the dissemination of ideas from the later 15th century, the changes of the Renaissance were not uniform across Europe: the first traces appear in Italy as early as the late 13th century, in particular with the writings of Dante and the paintings of Giotto.
As a cultural movement, the Renaissance encompassed innovative flowering of Latin and vernacular literatures, beginning with the 14th-century resurgence of learning based on classical sources, which contemporaries credited to Petrarch; the development of linear perspective and other techniques of rendering a more natural reality in painting; and gradual but widespread educational reform. In politics, the Renaissance contributed to the development of the customs and conventions of diplomacy, and in science to an increased reliance on observation and inductive reasoning. Although the Renaissance saw revolutions in many intellectual and social scientific pursuits, as well as the introduction of modern banking and the field of accounting, it is perhaps best known for its artistic developments and the contributions of such polymaths as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, who inspired the term "Renaissance man".
The Renaissance began in Florence, one of the many states of Italy. Various theories have been proposed to account for its origins and characteristics, focusing on a variety of factors, including Florence's social and civic peculiarities at the time: its political structure, the patronage of its dominant family, the Medici, and the migration of Greek scholars and their texts to Italy following the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks. Other major centers were Venice, Genoa, Milan, Rome during the Renaissance Papacy, and Naples. From Italy, the Renaissance spread throughout Europe and also to American, African and Asian territories ruled by the European colonial powers of the time or where Christian missionaries were active.
The Renaissance has a long and complex historiography, and in line with general skepticism of discrete periodizations, there has been much debate among historians reacting to the 19th-century glorification of the "Renaissance" and individual cultural heroes as "Renaissance men", questioning the usefulness of Renaissance as a term and as a historical delineation. Some observers have questioned whether the Renaissance was a cultural "advance" from the Middle Ages, instead seeing it as a period of pessimism and nostalgia for classical antiquity, while social and economic historians, especially of the longue durée, have instead focused on the continuity between the two eras, which are linked, as Panofsky observed, "by a thousand ties".
The term rinascita ("rebirth") first appeared in Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists (c. 1550), the corresponding French word, renaissance, was adopted into English as the term for this period during the 1830s. The word has also been extended to other historical and cultural movements, such as the Carolingian Renaissance (8th and 9th centuries), Ottonian Renaissance (10th and 11th century), and the Renaissance of the 12th century.
The Renaissance was a cultural movement that profoundly affected European intellectual life in the early modern period. Beginning in Italy, and spreading to the rest of Europe by the 16th century, its influence was felt in art, architecture, philosophy, literature, music, science, technology, politics, religion, and other aspects of intellectual inquiry. Renaissance scholars employed the humanist method in study, and searched for realism and human emotion in art.
Renaissance humanists such as Poggio Bracciolini sought out in Europe's monastic libraries the Latin literary, historical, and oratorical texts of antiquity, while the fall of Constantinople (1453) generated a wave of émigré Greek scholars bringing precious manuscripts in ancient Greek, many of which had fallen into obscurity in the West. It was in their new focus on literary and historical texts that Renaissance scholars differed so markedly from the medieval scholars of the Renaissance of the 12th century, who had focused on studying Greek and Arabic works of natural sciences, philosophy, and mathematics, rather than on such cultural texts.
In the revival of neoplatonism, Renaissance humanists did not reject Christianity; on the contrary, many of the Renaissance's greatest works were devoted to it, and the Church patronized many works of Renaissance art. But a subtle shift took place in the way that intellectuals approached religion that was reflected in many other areas of cultural life. In addition, many Greek Christian works, including the Greek New Testament, were brought back from Byzantium to Western Europe and engaged Western scholars for the first time since late antiquity. This new engagement with Greek Christian works, and particularly the return to the original Greek of the New Testament promoted by humanists Lorenzo Valla and Erasmus, helped pave the way for the Reformation.
Well after the first artistic return to classicism had been exemplified in the sculpture of Nicola Pisano, Florentine painters led by Masaccio strove to portray the human form realistically, developing techniques to render perspective and light more naturally. Political philosophers, most famously Niccolò Machiavelli, sought to describe political life as it really was, that is to understand it rationally. A critical contribution to Italian Renaissance humanism, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola wrote De hominis dignitate (Oration on the Dignity of Man, 1486), a series of theses on philosophy, natural thought, faith, and magic defended against any opponent on the grounds of reason. In addition to studying classical Latin and Greek, Renaissance authors also began increasingly to use vernacular languages; combined with the introduction of the printing press, this allowed many more people access to books, especially the Bible.
In all, the Renaissance can be viewed as an attempt by intellectuals to study and improve the secular and worldly, both through the revival of ideas from antiquity and through novel approaches to thought. Hans Kohn describes it as an age where "Men looked for new foundations"; some like Erasmus and Thomas More envisioned new reformed spiritual foundations, others. in the words of Machiavelli, una lunga sperienza delle cose moderne ed una continua lezione delle antiche (a long experience with modern life and a continuous learning from antiquity)
Some scholars, such as Rodney Stark, play down the Renaissance in favor of the earlier innovations of the Italian city-states in the High Middle Ages, which married responsive government, Christianity and the birth of capitalism. This analysis argues that, whereas the great European states (France and Spain) were absolute monarchies, and others were under direct Church control, the independent city-republics of Italy took over the principles of capitalism invented on monastic estates and set off a vast unprecedented Commercial Revolution that preceded and financed the Renaissance.
Leon Poliakov offers a critical view in his seminal study of European racist thought: The Aryan Myth. According to Poliakov, the use of ethnic origin myths are first used by Renaissance humanists "in the service of a new born chauvinism".
