Le lit royal à l’aube de la Renaissance

Abstract

The royal account books and inventories of Charles VIII (1483-1498), Louis XII (1498-1515) and Anne of Brittany (Anne de Bretagne, 1491-1514) provide much information about the appearance and the place of the bed in royal residences around the year 1500. During this period, the bed’s wooden structural elements came to be hidden by the fabrics which covered them. Materials, colours and decorative iconographical subjects varied according to the bed’s place and its destination. The sources give precise descriptions of certain beds installed in royal palaces, such as the bed made for Charles VIII for his residence of Plessis-lès-Tours (at La Riche, Indre-et-Loire) or the beds made for Anne de Bretagne when she went to the Loire valley as Queen of France. The commissions for the construction of these beds show how they represented an essential element of royal collections and furniture. They were indispensable items for the day-to-day organisation of the royal household, but also came to be objects of prestige and even of power.

Keywords

• furniture
• tapestry
• Middle Ages
• Renaissance
• bed
• royal collections