François Blondel ( June 1618 – 21 January 1686) was a soldier, engineer of fortifications, mathematician, diplomat, military and civil engineer and architect, called "the Great Blondel", to distinguish him in a dynasty of French architects. He is remembered for his Cours d'architecture which remained a central text for over a century. His precepts placed him in opposition with Claude Perrault in the larger culture war known under the heading Querelle des anciens et des modernes. If François Blondel was not the most highly reputed among the académiciens of his day, his were the writings that most generally circulated among the general public, the Cours de Mathématiques, the Art de jetter les Bombes, the Nouvelle manière de fortifier les places and, above all his Cours d'Architecture.
Early life
Born Nicolas-François Blondel at Ribemont in the Picardy region of France, he was baptized on 15 June 1618. His father was François-Guillaume Blondel, who studied law in Toulouse and bought the position of avocat du roi in Ribemont after receiving his degree in 1624. Nicolas-François' mother was Marie de Louen, whose family belonged to the local nobility. Although his father François-Guillaume was not born a nobleman, he was able to purchase (or inherit via his wife's relations) two close by seigneuries, Gaillardon in 1620 and Les Croisettes before 1635, and was the mayor of Ribemont several times in the 1630s and 1640s. Nicolas-François was well educated in languages as a youth, and participated for a time in the Thirty Years' War.
Career
In 1640 Cardinal Richelieu entrusted Blondel with diplomatic missions in Portugal, Spain and Italy, which gave him an opportunity to study at first hand the fortification systems of those nations. He returned from Italy with a greatly enhanced knowledge of mathematics, and it may have been during this trip that he met Galileo, with whom he later claimed to have studied personally. Blondel subsequently became one of Galileo's earliest French supporters.
Richelieu named Blondel sub-lieutenant of one of his galleys, La Cardinale, aboard which he participated in the attack on the port of Tarragona and served for a time as governor at Palamos. In 1647 Blondel commanded the artillery of the naval expedition against the Spanish at Naples. With the peace he finished his military career with the brevet of maréchal des camps (26 November 1652).
Around 1648 Blondel received his first architectural commission, the grand stables at the Château de Chaumont-la-Guiche in Saint-Bonnet-de-Joux in southern Burgundy. The stables were executed 1648–1652 by the local mason and entrepreneur François Martel, to whom the design has frequently been attributed. However, Blondel mentions that he was responsible in a note in his 1685 edition of Louis Savot's L'architecture françoise, and, according to his biographer Anthony Gerbino, there is no reason to question Blondel's claim. The cross-vaulted ground floor is divided into three aisles by two Tuscan arcades with stalls for more than eighty horses. On the exterior of the entrance front are two impressive double staircases ascending to a large hall on the upper floor. They frame the central portal, strikingly surmounted by a life-sized equestrian statue of the previous seigneur, Philibert de La Guiche. His daughter, Henriette de La Guiche built the stables for her husband, who at the time was , the governor of Provence and a grandson of Charles IX of France. Alais also owned the Château d'Écouen. These royal connections account for the monumentality of the design. Alais probably met Blondel in the military.
In 1652 Blondel became the tutor of the son of the Secretary of State for foreign affairs, Loménie de Brienne, with whom he made the Grand Tour : Langres — Besançon — Basel — Alsace (Brisach) — Strasbourg (where he inspected the mechanism of the famous clock) — Philippsburg — Mannheim — Mayence — The Hague — Hamburg — Lübeck — Kiel — Denmark — Sweden (Stockholm, Uppsala) — Finland — Estonia (Riga) — Königsberg — Dantzig — Cracow — Pressburg — Vienna — Prague — Vence — Rome — Florence — Toulon. His travels would stand him in good stead when he came to compile his Cours d'Architecture. During the 1660s Blondel made a second tour with a son of Jean Baptiste Colbert, of which the itinerary is less known.
In 1656, Blondel was named reader in Mathematics and Fortification at the Collège Royal, where his place was filled during his numerous absences by the astronomer Picard. From 1662 to 1668, Blondel exercised the functions of Syndic of the college.