Chateau de Chambord

The 50km route from Amboise to Chambord is scenic, the air in early April still uncomfortably cold. Visibility is greater from lack of foliage early in Spring. The entrance is grand, the château looks iconic from afar. Not just being a sight from a distance, Chambord revels in opulence at close range. The roof-line’s ornate complexity for instance is best seen. But the centrepiece of this near-perfect example of the French Renaissance is a quintessential double-helix spiral staircase.

While believed is the current stance on who actually conceived or designed it, circumstantial evidence suggests that this could have been conceived by Leonardo da Vinci: François I, a man of grand plans, invites Leonardo in 1516 to the Loire valley. Leonardo dies in 1519 at Clos Lucé, the same year François begins the construction of the château. It is also the same year incidentally the prime architect of Chambord, mysteriously unknown, dies. (No one knows for certain if Leonardo did indeed conceive the whole plan of Chambord.) The latter fact about the architect’s death in effect implies that before the construction began, plans of the château were ready for the work to begin. The other evidence is that the double helix spiral staircase is found in one of Leonardo’s sketches — the Paris Manuscript B, 1488-1490.

Note how the flight of each runs diametrically opposite to the other ensuring that they never meet in the illustration below. It’s interesting that unlike other structures, Chambord’s centrepiece is quite literally the staircase — not only in position, but in its geometric proportions too. For instance, the plan is four times the 9m diameter in both length and width. (Chambord’s inner structure is a square.)

Searching for more led to this interesting article, in which Dr Pells talks about such a staircase in the tenth century in the unlikeliest of places: Ghur province. This story by Rory Stewart in the Aug 2002 NYT Magazine is just as fascinating to read, which I found via a citation in the former article. In Dr. Pells’s words:

This search has taken me from the entry vestibule of the Vatican Museum into the chateaus of the Loire Valley and down a 15th Century well in Orvieto. It ended in the most unexpected place, in a Qantas aeroplane, 35,000 ft above the Simpson Desert, when I saw a single picture of a structure in the badlands of Afghanistan, a structure so remarkable that if it is not the world’s first double helix it deserves to be.

He goes on to suggest that Omar Khayyám, the Persian poet and mathematician, perhaps conceived The minaret of Jam:

The minaret of Jam is covered with geometric and floral brickwork and turquoise-glazed epigraphic bands. One of the many peculiarities of the minaret is its almost exclusive dependence on varieties of angular script at a time when cursive had been in common use for hundreds of years for monumental inscriptions in that region. The sole use of cursive is for the architect’s name, or signature, one Ali ibn Ibrahim al-Nisaburi. This suggests that Ali, or his family, was from the eastern Iranian city of Nishapur. Now this is where it gets very interesting.

Apart from its mines being the world’s source of turquoise (copper aluminium phosphate) for almost 2,000 years, and hence the turquoise ceranuis on the minaret, Nishapur was the home of Omar Khayyam. He lived from 1048CE to 1131CE, about 100 years before the minaret of Jam was built, and whilst most of the westerners know of him as a poet, he was a brilliant mathematician. Given that he cracked the difficult problem of solving cubic equations, by a geometrical method of intersecting a circle with a parabola, I think he would have determined the elegance of a double helix, and worked out its simple geometry,…

Each staircase — the one in Chateau de Chambord and the other in the Minaret of Jam — I suppose is simply catering form to function. Chambord’s is easy, feels almost effortless with low rise, wider treads; whereas the one in the minaret appears intensely steep. And the reason for this is simply because for a typical double-helix staircase to work, it needs adequate diametric width to cross the meeting point with headroom to spare. If the plan diameter is limited, then it is imperative that the rise needs to become steeper.

I digress here.

The chateau and its surrounding is so vast that it is taxing for people going around on foot. With two kids in tow, we did not bother venturing into the gardens around it anyway. Even the rooms, 440 in all, are just too many to cover. The fact that the chateau is sparsely furnished made it somewhat easier to skip most. Instead we chose to head upstairs for a closer look at the complex roof, and the towering terrace above the open staircase column.

It is ironic that the chateau so magnificent had more than its share of neglect, and destruction by the luddites of the revolution, besides bearing the unfinished tag eternally. That it was incrementally built over four centuries makes you look at it in disbelief. An audio-visual prelude featuring the king’s quote at the start of the tour says it best:

If one is worried about finishing, then one would never start anything.