Architectural Design as an Expression of Religious Tolerance:The Case of Sainte-Madeleine in Montargis

The inventive hybridity of early modern ecclesiastical architecture in France mixes the traditional and local forms derived from the medieval past with neoclassical ones imported from Italy and ultimately derived from antiquity. Although this combination of seemingly disparate styles generally characterizes sixteenth-century French churches, the flying buttresses of the Church of Sainte-Madeleine in Montargis remain exceptional in their classicizing reimagination of a conventional architectural typology. In Architectural Design as an Expression of Religious Tolerance: The Case of Sainte-Madeleine in Montargis, Maile Hutterer suggests that the unusual form of the Montargis buttresses derives from the political and religious circumstances of their creation. Calvinist Jacques Androuet du Cerceau I is the most likely designer of the Montargis buttresses, and they were constructed while Montargis was part of the holdings of Protestant sympathizer Renée de France. The designer's careful balancing of orthodoxy and heterodoxy paralleled Renée's carefully constructed position between Catholicism and Calvinism.