Seite - 297 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Band 1

297Imperial Architect: Background 74 Androuet du Cerceau/ Thomson 1988, p. 103: ‘Feu François de Valois, Roy de France <…> choisit un endroit [in the forest of St Germain] pres d’un petit marescage <…> où les bestes rousses lassees du travail de la chasse se retiroyent: et y feit dresser ceste maison, pour avoir le plaisir de veoir la fin d’icelles, et la nomma la Muette, comme lieu secret, & separé, & fermé de bois de tous costez <…>’. and ibid., p. 104. 75 ibid. p. 108. François i built a similar hunting lodge at Challuau, near Fontainebleau, for his mistress, the Duchesse d’Étampes, according to Du Cerceau again because ‘qu’audict bois prochain y avoit grande quantité de cerfs’, ibid. p. 291. Girouard 1978 cites English instances of hunting lodges that conform to the pattern, often located in special game preserves, from the fifteenth and early sixteenth (pp. 76–78) and the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries (pp. 106–108). If they knew about Chambord, which had been built for Francis i, king of France and husband of their aunt Eleanor, they may have known about La Muette, another project of Francis i that provides an interesting parallel to Mariemont and the hunting-lodges in Prague and Vienna [Figs. 5.63–5.64]. La Muette was a hunting lodge built between 1542 and 1549 in the park of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, and its very name implies its function as a retreat from the pressures at court. But it also served as a belvedere from which (the ladies of?) the court could follow the hunt in the surrounding wood at leisure. Both functions are explicitly referred to in the relevant entry in Du Cerceau’s Les plus excellents bastiments de France: The late François de Valois, King of France, chose a site close to a small marsh where the red deer, exhausted from the chase, hid themselves, and he had this house built here, to have the pleasure of seeing how they were done to death; and he called it La Muette, for being in a secret and remote place, and surrounded by forest on all sides.74 In his comment David Thomson points out that ‘the form of hunting lodges or pleasure houses was always the object of daring experiments’, and that is cer- tainly the case at La Muette: like Mariemont it is a tall block-like pavilion in the midst of a wood, but it is built on a quite audacious centralized plan, consisting of a square tower with smaller, almost detached towers or pavilions on each corner, and a chapel and staircase tower tacked onto two of its facades. Such parallels leave little doubt about the function of the Archdukes’ two similar lodges: both were built likewise in wooded country rich in big game, in par- ticular deer. They offered a convenient place to meet for the hunt, to cater for and enjoy the huntsmen’s picnic, and to provide shelter and entertainment for participants and invited onlookers in case of adverse .75 5.3.2 The Function of the Prater Lusthaus and Hvězda Such outings, providing small-scale entertainment for a select group of close friends or important guests may also have been organized independently from