Maison du Château et porte romane

English translation

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History

The house, constructed from 1688 for canon Moreau on the site of a canonry house, is used as accommodation for the director of the teacher-training school (I.U.F.M.). The house, which belonged to the chapter of the Château, was sold in 1687 and then rebuilt and enlarged from 1688. The new house, built as a pavilion, consisted of a cellar with kitchen above, upper chamber, a room and cabinet beside. In 1691 were added to it a main dwelling, a garden and the outyard. A second main dwelling was built in 1770, in the form of a pavilion, set against the first. The main façade has been unchanged since its construction. The rectangular entrance door is surmounted by an entablature decorated with two oval escutcheons. Above the entablature, two volute consoles support an interrupted pediment, in wings. A dormer with wings and curved pediment opens in the roof slope. Two round-arch arcades support the vault of the cellar and divide it into two bays. The abacus of the pillar on which the arches spring bears the dolphin flanked by a star and a rose, the arms of the Moreau family. The 12th-century Romanesque door perhaps comes from the church of Saint-Oustrille which was the most important church of a monastic complex perhaps founded before the 6th century. The door would have belonged to the north lateral portal of the church of which there remains only the first bay of the Romanesque nave, the 15th-century rood screen and a garden beneath which lies a crypt. This door with a straight lintel borne by two jambs decorated with small superimposed volutes and supported by two modillions with volutes and foliate ornament, testifies to the penetration of northern Romanesque art into Berry. A row of broken batons treated as flat relief and descending to the ground, associated with foliate ornaments, decorates the internal voussure of the portal. The external voussure comprises curved stems forming foliate scrolls which appear to delineate interlocking figures of eight. This ornamentation disposed according to the radiating principle evokes the Romanesque art of Normandy and Île de France. The tympanum was replaced and decorated in the 18th or 19th century.