Chateau d'usse Indre-et-Loire department, France. The castle which was said to have inspired the author of Sleeping Beauty.

Chateau d'usse Indre-et-Loire department, France. The castle which was said to have inspired the author of Sleeping Beauty. Stock Photo
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Image details

Contributor:

Francofile / Alamy Stock Photo

Image ID:

EJN868

File size:

23.4 MB (1.4 MB Compressed download)

Releases:

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Dimensions:

3500 x 2333 px | 29.6 x 19.8 cm | 11.7 x 7.8 inches | 300dpi

Date taken:

21 August 2013

Location:

37420 Rigny-Ussé, France

More information:

The Château d'Ussé is located in the commune of Rigny-Ussé in the Indre-et-Loire département, in France. The stronghold at the edge of the Chinon forest overlooking the Indre Valley was first fortified in the eleventh century by the Norman seigneur of Ussé, Gueldin de Saumur, who surrounded the fort with a palisade on a high terrace. The site passed to the Comte de Blois, who rebuilt in stone. In the fifteenth century, the ruined castle of Ussé was purchased by Jean V de Bueil, a captain-general of Charles VII who became seigneur of Ussé in 1431 and began rebuilding it in the 1440s; his son Antoine de Bueil married in 1462 Jeanne de Valois, the biological daughter of Charles VII and Agnès Sorel, who brought as dowry 40000 golden écus. Antoine was heavily in debt and in 1455, sold the château to Jacques d’Espinay, son of a chamberlain to the Duke of Brittany and himself chamberlain to the king; Espinay built the chapel, completed by his son Charles in 1612, in which the Flamboyant Gothic style is mixed with new Renaissance motifs, and began the process of rebuilding the fifteenth-century château that resulted in the sixteenth-seventeenth century aspect of the structure to be seen today.