Château d'Écouen occupant National Museum of the Renaissance
The Château d'Écouen is an historic château in the commune of Écouen, some 20 km north of Paris, France, and a notable example of French Renaissance architecture. Since 1975, it has housed the collections of the Musée national de la Renaissance (National Museum of the Renaissance).The château was built between 1539 and 1555 for Anne de Montmorency, the  Connétable de France or Grand Constable, chief minister and commander of the French army for King Francois I, and later for Henri II.  It contains important collections of paintings, sculptures, ceramics, stained glass, furniture, textiles and other arts of the French Renaissance.History of the château
Records show that a fortress has existed on this hilltop site since the 12th century. The fortress guarded the Plain of France, the historic invasion route from the north. Anne de Montmorency, a nobleman, senior minister and childhood companion of King Francis I, inherited the fortress in 1515. In 1538, the King named Montmorency Constable of France, commander of the armed forces, and the grand master of the household of the King. Montmorency decided to reconstruct the castle completely in order to make it suitable for receiving the King in grand style.The château was laid out following the plan of the royal Château of Chambord in the Loire Valley.  It was set on a terrace overlooking the countryside below, encircled by a false moat with a fortified wall surrounded with bastions, probably symbolizing the Constable's role as commander of the army. The château was in the form of a rectangle around a central courtyard, with square pavilions on the corners.  It was composed of two three-story residential wings, connected by a one-story entrance wing. Both of the residential wings had monumental stairways in their centers to provide access to the suites on the upper floors.The Constable and his wife, Madeleine of Savoy, resided in the south wing, which contained their private chapel and apartments.  The north wing was entirely devoted to royal visitors: It contained the suite of the Queen on the first floor and the suite of the King on the floor above. The top floors of the three main wings feature rows of lucarnes, or dormer windows.Records of the construction have been lost, so the name of the building's original architect is uncertain, but it is known that the royal architect Jean Bullant, who later designed the Grand Constable's tomb, participated in decoration of the château, particularly in the design of the north wing's ornate neo-classical peristyles employing the colossal order, that face both the inner courtyard and the exterior north gardens.  Bullant's addition of classical columns and entablature elements to the north wing is an early example of the merging of classical and medieval forms, which became a distinguishing feature of French Renaissance architecture.Anne de Montmorency invited some of the most prominent French artists of the Renaissance to participate in the sculpture and decoration.  His chapel was decorated with sculptures by Jean Goujon, Jean Bullant, Barthélemy Prieur and Bernard Palissy. Some members of the Androuet du Cerceau family found protection and work at Écouen.   Much of the glass from Écouen is now at the Musée Condé, and the east wing was paved in 1549-50. The building was frescoed and furnished during the 1550s, in the style of the School of Fontainebleau. No building accounts survive, so it is not possible to follow the precise sequence of the construction.  However, panels of grisaille stained glass in the gallery of the west wing are dated 1542 and 1544, and engravings of  Écouen were included in Jacques Androuet du Cerceau's Les Plus excellents bastiments de France, 1576.
The château remained in the Montmorency family until 1632, when it became the property of the Bourbon-Condé branch of the royal family.  In 1787, shortly before the French Revolution.  the original east entrance portal, topped by an equestrian statue of Montmorency, was demolished by the new owner, Louis Joseph de Bourbon, prince de Condé. When he emigrated during the Revolution, the château was confiscated by the French state. In 1806, Napoleon Bonaparte granted the château to the Legion d'Honneur and it became a school for the daughters of the chevaliers of the order. Eugène de Beauharnais erected the Fontaine Hortense in the park. However, after the restoration of Louis XVIII of France the estate was returned to Louis Henri, Prince of Condé. He left it to Sophie Dawes, Baronne de Feuchères, on condition that she used it to establish an orphanage for the descendants of soldiers in his army, with his residuary heir, Henri d'Orléans, Duke of Aumale, to pay for the running costs. She died in 1840. Little use was made of the property until 1850, ten years after the death of Dawes, when Louis Napoléon Bonaparte decided to reestablish the school of the Legion d'Honneur there, and it continued to serve this purpose until 1962. In 1862, the château was declared a Monument historique. In 1969, Minister of Culture André Malraux proposed that the château become the home of the collection of Renaissance art of the Cluny Museum, and in 1977 it opened as the French National Museum of the Renaissance.
resident inhabitant tenant dweller occupier