The powerful castle of Angers was begun under Count Foulques III Nerra to protect
Anjou from the Normans. After surrender to the Capetians, Louis IX rebuilt Foulques’s
castle in whitestone with contrasting bands of black slate on two levels, and the seventeen
semicircular towers were crowned by overhanging turrets. In the course of the 14th and
15th centuries, the dukes of Anjou continued to embellish the castle: Louis II, nephew of
the French king Charles V, and his wife, Yolande d’Aragon, added the Gothic chapel,
and their son, the “good duke” René d’Anjou, constructed comfortable living quarters
overlooking the Maine. Parts of the castle were dismantled during the Wars of Religion
of the 16th century, but much remains of this magnificent example of medieval military
architecture.
The three square bays of the nave of the cathedral of Saint-Maurice, which were
vaulted with domical, ribbed vaults between 1149 and 1153, exhibit the beginnings of
Angevin Gothic. The exterior walls of the nave, with evenly spaced wall buttresses,
belong to the 12th-century cathe
Angers (Maine-et-Loire), château,
ramparts, and moat. Photograph:
Clarence Ward Collection. Courtesy of
Oberlin College.
dral, which may have been connected to a choir and short transept with chapels excavated
in 1902. This 11th-century nave was covered with either a wooden roof or domes rising
from pendentives (the span of 50 feet is too wide for a barrel vault). The single-nave
vessel appears often in the Romanesque of the region; the single nave, vaulted with
domes, can be found in the Dordogne (Cahors, Souillac) up through western France
(Périgueux, Angoulême to Fontevrault, 35 miles southeast of Angers). In the mid-12th-
century campaign of the cathedral of Angers, new, large wall buttresses were added to the
exterior corners of the three bays, while new thick responds with multiple colonnettes
supported the transverse, diagonal, and longitudinal ribs of the four-part vaults. These
domical vaults have stylistic connections with those in the north and south tower of
Chartres cathedral (1134 and after 1145); the elevation of Angers exhibits connections
with the nave of Le Mans. In spite of these relationships to Chartres, to Le Mans, and to
Medieval france: an encyclopedia 64