The three-storied Central building with flanking pentagonal towers is connected with semicircular galleries to the one-storied service wings, rectangular in plan with inner courtyards. Along with the palace, an English landscape park was laid out, among the first of the kind in Russia. The brilliant nobleman Grigory Orlov was not destined to live in the new estate as he died in early Shortly thereafter Gatchina was to become his favourite residence. The palace was altered somewhat under the architect Vincenzo Brenna.
In keeping with the pace of fashions, the state rooms were remodelled, formal gardens, park pavilions, stone gates and bridges emerged. Following the ascension of Paul I to the throne in , Gatchina became the imperial residence that the contemporaries referred to as an impregnable fortress with surrounding ramparts, moats, sentry boxes and barriers. After his death the Dowager empress Maria Feodorvna came to own the Gatchina estate.
In the reign of Nicholas I, the Palace underwent a major reconstruction and acquired its present-day look. The Kitchen and Arsenal Wings were dismantled completely and then erected anew as they did not meet modern criteria of comfort. In keeping with the fashion of the time, the Arsenal Wing was designed to accommodate both the private and state rooms for the Imperial family.
In the Kitchen Wing, the chapel was completely rebuilt. To keep the memory of Paul I, his private rooms and the 18th-century state apartments in the Central building were carefully preserved, although it did undergo some alterations, namely, heating was replaced, parquet floors repaired, new pieces of furniture, sculptures and drapery were introduced in some of the halls.
All the stages of reconstruction were carried out under the direction of the architect R. Kuzmin from View Larger Map. Powered by Every Castle - All rights reserved! Get help with directions: View Larger Map. Centre - Loire Valley. Calais, commissioned by Louis XII. It has some stained glass windows by Max Ingrand which show scenes from the chateau's history. Inside the chateau your visit begins in the State room in the oldest part of Blois castle, dating from the thirteenth century.
The States room was used by the Counts of Blois as a courtroom. The salon has two aisles, with a double barrel-vaulted ceiling and numerous columns and arches. The tapestries on the walls date back to the 17th and 18th century.
From here various rooms are filled with mouldings and sculptures from different wings of the chateau. On the first floor you can visit the apartments of Francois I and Catherine de Medici.
They have been restored and decorated in a style of the 16th century. The Queen's Gallery is particularly attractive with its long wall of windows opposite a wall of portraits and with a decorated wooden roof and blue tiled floor.
The Queen's chamber on this floor is the room where Catherine de Medici died in Also on this floor is the only remaining royal Renaissance study in France with its original wooden panelling. This charming room contains Italianate panels dating from the early 16th century. In the neighbouring Council chamber there is a set of paintings exhibiting the Wars of Religion that led to the assassination of the Duke de Guise.
It is characterised by a large room divided into two naves by a series of columns. These were entrusted to the Italian landscape architect Pacello Da Mercoliano. The Renaissance architecture shows all its Italian influences in the spiral staircase adorned with pillars and salamanders emblems of the king and other motifs on the older, courtyard side. The famous balconies that adorn the facade today on the city side were inspired by those created at the Vatican in Rome by the architect Bramante.
Queen Catherine de Medici lived on the first floor of this building in the second half of the 16th century. The Louis XII wing is characteristic of the French Renaissance , its facades decorated with alternating bricks and stones. The decorations of the windows and skylights, and the equestrian statue of the king in a niche above the main portal complete the ensemble.
His projects ended three years later with the birth of his nephew, the future Louis XIV, who permanently replaced him in the line of succession.
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