Château de Gaillon

The somewhat battered and denuded Château de Gaillon, begun in 1502 on ancient foundations[1] was the summer archiepiscopal residence of Georges d'Amboise, Cardinal Archbishop of Rouen; he made of the old château-fort a palatial Early Renaissance structure of unparalleled luxury and magnificence, the most ambitious and significant French building project of its time.

When in 1498 his patron, the duc d'Orléans, acceded to the throne as Louis XII, d'Amboise, who had spent much time in northern Italy on diplomatic missions and had been viceroy in Milan in 1500, where he had met Leonardo da Vinci and other artists and humanists, was suddenly raised to the high position of cardinal and prime minister.

The fountain was commissioned on 14 September 1506 from the Genoese sculptors Agostino Solari, Antonio della Porta and Pace Gazini, as a gift from the Republic of Venice to Cardinal d'Amboise, for having evicted the Sforza from Milan.

It was twenty-two feet high, surmounted by a sculpture of John the Baptist, whose presence was a reminder of such fountains' origins in baptismal fonts, above stacked vase forms with lactating Graces and urinating boys by Bertrand de Meynal and Jérôme Pacherot.

The lower octagonal Carrara marble basin was removed from Gaillon when the fountain was disassembled by the Cardinal de la Rochefoucauld in 1754 and set up in the gardens at Liancourt (Oise).

On the right a long gallery enclosing the parterre separated it from the patterned beds of vegetables and fruit trees on a lower level, beneath a massively buttressed retaining wall.

Gaillon was burned out in a violent fire in 1764, but reconstructed: here the Cardinal de la Rochefoucauld received Benjamin Franklin and Louis XVI as a Carthusian monastery until the Revolution.

Lenoir's collection of architectural remnants stood on land across the Seine from the Louvre, the very ground that the French government provided for the establishment of the École des Beaux-Arts around 1830.