On the Tapestry Trail

We visited the château at Châteaudun to see its tapestries. The château is on the Loir river (le Loir in French), which is not the Loire river (la Loire) in Tours. How confusing is that? Anyway…

The walls of the keep (on left) are 4 meters thick!

There’s a lot of history in those stones

One of the kitchens. The entire wall at the far end has flues above – that’s a lot of cooking space

Prison cells – that must have been miserable

Guard graffiti – why do humans have this urge?

The tapestries had much more vibrant colors than most we’d seen

An exhibit on tapestry making mentioned that Angers has both a huge antique tapestry, the Apocalypse (or Revelation) tapestry, and contemporary tapestry museums. So off to Angers we went!

The château at Angers is especially attractive, with black stripes and lots of towers.

And at the base of the walls, a fancy garden:

Even better, this is the only place we’ve been where they let us go up on the ramparts. And what did we find up there? An herb garden and a vineyard!

The courtyard was also planted in a formal style

Pictures of the tapestry on the internet didn’t prepare me for how enormous it is. We’ve seen the Bayeux tapestry, which is long but nowhere near as tall, and that was what I was expecting. This one is much bigger!

It was also missing the racy figures on the Bayeux borders, presumably since this was a religious theme… We had to make do with flowers and the occasional rabbit. It had plenty of death and destruction, however, since it’s illustrating the book of Revelation.

Next we headed to the Musée Jean-Lurçat et de la tapisserie contemporaine. Jean-Lurçat is credited with modernizing tapestry making in the twentieth century.

I was blown away by the colors and designs; M said something along the lines of, “You like this sort of stuff more than I do.” He did find the mini tapestry exhibit interesting (with “tapestry” interpreted as widely as artistically possible).