Francois Mansart (1598-1666)

Q. Who was Fran�ois Mansart

A. Mansart - also spelt Mansard - was the first really important purveyor of French classicism in architecture and he played a leading role in shaping the French baroque style. Although it seems he never visited Italy - then the home of all that was cutting-edge in both art and architecture - he understood the Italian models instinctively and adapted them freely in his designs.

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Q. Why is he so important

A. His buildings are notable for their subtlety, elegance and harmony. Most of his patrons were members of the middle class who had become rich in the service of the Crown. And they would have to have been very rich indeed, as not only did he draw plans without regard to cost but he also refined and improved the plans - sometimes tearing down what had been built and rebuilding as he went along. According to one contemporary, Mansart had cost one of his early patrons 'more money than the Great Turk himself possesses'.

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Q. What did he build

A. About 1623, Mansart built the Chateau de Berny. In Paris he built the Church of Sainte Marie de la Visitation (1632-33), combining elements of Renaissance and Mannerist detail in its ornamentation. Mansart's Hotel de la Vrilli�re (1635), with its three wings enclosing a walled courtyard, became the prototype of the Parisian town house.

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His most complete surviving work is the ch�teau of Maisons, now called Maisons-Lafitte (commissioned in 1642), is unique in that it is the only building by Mansart in which the interior decoration, with its particularly magnificent stairway, survives.

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Q. What is a mansard roof

A. Technically it is a 'hipped gambrel roof'. A gambrel roof has two slopes on each of its two sides, the upper being less steep than the lower. The mansard has this on four sides, and was widely used in Renaissance and Baroque French architecture and continued to be used well into the 19th century in France and elsewhere, particularly North America.

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Q. Did Mansart invent it

A. No. Though the style is named after him, it had been used by earlier French architects. However, he used it to great effect, most famously at Blois (commissioned in 1635), in his refurbishment of the existing chateau, which had been built in the 15th and 16th centuries.

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Here the courtyard was lower than the ground level outside the building, which meant that on entering the courtyard from the outside you would be surrounded by walls higher than the ones you entered, something Mansart considered a stylistic problem. So he got around this ingeniously by using an adaptation of the 'mansard roof', where the pitch of the top slope on the outside was at less of an angle than the corresponding slope on the inside, thus making the break in the roof lower in the courtyard and giving an impression that the two walls, inner and outer, were the same height.

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By Simon Smith