Considered the most important French Renaissance church, Saint-Eustache in Paris has long remained an enigma. What new circumstances allowed its parishioners, long desirous of a new church, suddenly to begin buiding it 1532 ? Did Francis I play a role ? Was the obscure Jean Delamarre possibly its architect ? Could the ideas of the Italian theorist, Serlio, have affected his design ? These and other key issues are resolved by the author in a sustained reading of all known evidence. The baffling formal complexity of the church is clarified through lucid analysis that employs hundreds of new photographs executed by the author. The building is studied within the context of sixteenth-century French architecture and its roots in antiquity, the Italian Renaissance, Romanesque and Gothic France, and the Flamboyant Style. Sankovitch’s work will serve as a standard for all those who desire to understand this mysterious building and its times. A bright, clear window revealing an unseen architecture, previously an invisible – or at best murky – episode in the history of art, it is a portal to all future research on the building, and a key to the architectural life of the period.

Table of Contents

Series Editor’s Foreword by Krista De Jonge

Foreword by Jean Guillaume

Response by Étienne Hamon

Anne-Marie Sankovitch and Saint-Eustache by Marvin Trachtenberg

Editor’s Acknowledgments

Anne-Marie Sankovitch, Publications 1994–2006

The Church of Saint-Eustache in the Early French Renaissance

Chapter 1 : A Critical Historiography of Saint-Eustache

Chapter 2 : Problems of the Site and the Struggle to Enlarge the Church

Chapter 3 : A Royal Project : Saint-Eustache Unbound

Chapter 4 : A Revised Building History, the First Master, and Serlio

Chapter 5 : Toward the Identity of the Architect (Jean Delamarre ?)

Chapter 6 : The Presence of the Past at Saint-Eustache from Cluny to Pavia

Chapter 7 : Gothic and Late-Gothic Strategies of Architectural Composition