North front elevation
by SERLIO, Sebastiano, Engraving
Construction of the existing Château d’Ancy-le-Franc began in 1544, at the request of Antoine III de Clermont, brother-in-law of Diane de Poitiers. The design of the building is traditionally attributed to the Italian architect Sebastiano Serlio, who had been invited to France by King Francis I.
Serlio’s original plan, preserved in the manuscript at the Avery Library of the Columbia University (the Columbia manuscript), shows an entire Italianate building with rusticated ground floor and four low square towers at the corners, in the manner of early Renaissance villas on the Venetian mainland.