Alexander at the Château de Fontainebleau

Surrounded by a vast forest of some 17,000 hectares (42,000 acres), which was a source of wealth and a symbol of power, the royal hunting lodge, the Château de Fontainebleau, was transformed during the sixteenth century from its earlier medieval appearance into a Renaissance structure which Giorgio Vasari described as “almost a new Rome,” given also the fact that the king had commissioned copies of ancient statues, some cast in Fontainebleau’s foundry. ¹ Fontainebleau was a hunting stop between Paris and Blois, and the hunt there was primarily for boar, a practice known in ancient Rome, and stags, which was the more noble of the two preferred hunts. ²