MARTELLANGE, Étienne

French architect, painter and draughtsman (also known as Ange, Étienne Martel). He was the grandson of a painter of stained glass and son of a painter from Lyon, and he began his own career as a painter. Martellange trained in Italy from 1586 to 1587 with François Stella (1563-1605), and in 1590 he entered the Jesuit Order at AvignonGLOSSARYThe decision to move the Papacy here was made in August 1308 by Pope Clement V, who had been residing in France since 1305. The actual move was made in 1309. Six pontificates later, in 1377, the Papacy was brought back to Rome by Gregory XI. All the popes elected at Avignon were French, as were 113 of the 134 cardinals appointed during this time. Yet though the period has been called one of 'captivity' to France, the Avignonese residence was not one of uninterrupted truckling to French kings. The city was not on French territory: it belonged to the Angevin princes of Naples. 'Captivity', like Petrarch's 'unholy Babylon', which he likened to the harlot of the Apocalypse 'full of abominations and the filth of her fornication', was mainly a term of abuse directed at a Papacy that had acquired security enough to revive its legal and financial pretensions and to build lavishly and live well. Between 1100 and 1309 the popes had only spent 82 years in Rome. Avignon gave them a long breathing space to assemble the machinery and the values which characterized the Renaissance Papacy after its final resettlement in Rome., with the title of Pictor, taking his vows as a coadjutor brother at Chambéry in 1603; he was not, however, ordained a priest.

Martellange worked throughout France, producing architectural plans and some competent watercolourGLOSSARYPigment ground in gum, usually gum arabic, and applied with brush and water to a painting surface, usually paper; the term also denotes a work of art executed in this medium. The pigment is ordinarily transparent but can be made opaque by mixing with a whiting and in this form is known as body colour, or gouache; it can also be mixed with casein, a phosphoprotein of milk. Watercolour compares in range and variety with any other painting method. Transparent watercolour allows for a freshness and luminosity in its washes and for a deft calligraphic brushwork that makes it a most alluring medium. There is one basic difference between transparent watercolour and all other heavy painting mediums - its transparency. The oil painter can paint one opaque colour over another until he has achieved his desired result. The whites are created with opaque white. The watercolourist's approach is the opposite. In essence, instead of building up he leaves out. The white paper creates the whites. The darkest accents may be placed on the paper with the pigment as it comes out of the tube or with very little water mixed with it. Otherwise the colours are diluted with water. The more water in the wash, the more the paper affects the colours; for example, vermilion, a warm red, will gradually turn into a cool pink as it is thinned with more water. The dry-brush technique - the use of the brush containing pigment but little water, dragged over the rough surface of the paper - creates various granular effects similar to those of crayon drawing. Whole compositions can be made in this way. This technique also may be used over dull washes to enliven them. views of Jesuit establishments where work was in progress. Drawings and estimates were sent to the Jesuit Order in Rome and served as a basis for decisions by the leaders of the Order on the building projects in hand. From the study of his drawings (Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris) it is possible to reconstruct a list of more than 20 Jesuit houses and colleges on which Martellange worked. His active career began in 1605-06 at Moulins (college) and Le Puy (church and college) and included the colleges at Carpentras (1607), Blois, Bourges and Chambéry, as well as work at Dijon (1611), Besançon, Dôle and Lyon (1609-19), where he also designed the church of the TrinityGLOSSARYin Christianity, the term used for the existence of one God in three persons: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. (1617-22). Martellange's college plans usually consisted of two or three rectangular courtyards with the church along one side of the court. The churches generally followed Italian Jesuit prototypes in having a naveGLOSSARYthe main interior space of a church building. It may have parallel aisles on each side, often separated from it by pillars, and is intersected by the transept, which cuts across it at the point where the choir begins. with shallow recesses between the abutments of the transverse arches and galleries above. Ornament was minimal, his overriding concerns being economy and utility.

In 1625 Martellange's design for the Jesuit church of Saint-Louis, Rue St Antoine, Paris, received endorsement from the authorities in Rome, and the foundation stone was laid in 1627. However, two years later he was replaced by François Derand in the continuing construction of the church and its façadeGLOSSARYthe front or principal face of a building, especially one elaborately constructed; a blind façade is a façade that is purely decorative and does not relate to the structure of the building., although Martellange's supporters thought Derand's design would weaken the church. Meanwhile, Martellange had begun work in 1628 on the chapelGLOSSARYa small separate place for worship, either part of a large church or a separate building. at Clermont College, Rue St Jacques, Paris, and from 1630 he designed and built the Jesuit noviciate (destroyed) in the Rue Pot-de-Fer, which was completed in 1642. The church, and in particular the restrained classicism of its façade (copied from Giacomo della Porta's Santa Maria dei Monti in Rome), exerted considerable influence on French religious architecture in the 17th and 18th centuries and helped establish Martellange as one of the most important Jesuit architects in France.