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 History of Château de Bagnols, continued...
The second and most glorious epoch at Bagnols was during the Renaissance. Lyon's commerce and industry, in particular its silk industry, had raised the city to a magnificent position in Renaissance Europe. Huge fortunes were amassed, and the newly rich and ennobled merchants began to buy out the declining medieval lords.
Jean Camus, one of these merchants, a Burgundian importer of almonds, rice and other commodities, rose to be a leading citizen. He helped develop Lyon's silk trade, became an adviser and secretary to the king and married into the aristocracy. Jean bought Bagnols in 1566, the first of three Camus family generations to live there. While they still added defences - the porch with its drawbridge, the portcullis and the imposing main gate with its surrounding, rusticated stonework - they also gave the Grand Salon its beamed ceiling supported on carved stone corbels. It was the Dugué family who over three further generations, from 1619 to 1711, gave Bagnols its greatest glories. Gaspard Dugué, appointed Treasurer of France in 1614, used some of his increasing wealth to buy the château and the five surrounding villages, including 'oats, wheat, rye, barley, oil, chickens, hens and quails, manorial rights and obligations'.
Gaspard Dugué was the first owner of Bagnols to make it his favourite residence, and the building greatly benefited from this preference. Bagnols became a stately home, a mere day's journey by horse from Lyon and ideal for holidays and special celebrations.
Major changes were needed. The east entrance was given a fixed bridge so carriages could enter the inner court and set down their passengers in the vaulted loggia (now the kitchens). Inside, large rooms were organised to have anterooms and closets. Access was by one staircase to the rooms and another, grander staircase to the ceremonial rooms. An Italian arcade added to the upper storey overlooked the courtyard. The rooms were extravagantly decorated with wall paintings and grand beds hung with taffeta, braided serge and needlework and furnished with walnut tables and chests of drawers. In winter, the walls were hung with tapestries from Flanders, Rouen and Bergamo and fires lit in the great hearths.
The now famous wall paintings are the most extensive and of the highest quality yet found in a provincial French château. With the few others surviving in the area, they display a distinct Lyonnais school of painting inspired by the city's textiles industry, known as the Grande Fabrique de Lyon, whose velvet, silks and damasks by now outshone those of Italy and the East. Similar paintings created at Grigny for the de Merle family, friends of the Dugués, suggest that Lyon artisans worked as itinerant decorators. They worked fast, taking as their inspiration the latest Lyonnais fabric designs and mixing them with Renaissance ideas found in books of engravings.
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