The following information and commentary on the gallery are primarily about the material aspects of the gallery. The documents are given in three parts as related to the construction of the gallery, the decoration of it, and the execution of its woodwork. Within this division the documents are presented chronologically according to the dates of the documents although in certain cases the substance of the documents provides earlier dates of greater significance for an understanding of the chronology of the gallery. Only documents that specifically refer to the gallery are transcribed here. The majority of the documents are from Les Comptes des Bâtiments du Roi (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, ms. fr. 11.179), a compilation of sixteenth century sources made in or around the 1660s,1 and the Dépenses secrètes de François Ier (Paris, Archives nationales), both published by Laborde, I, 1877, and II, 1880. The documents have all been checked except those documents and passages placed in brackets.2
1On the history of this manuscript, which is a resumé and a collection of extracts of lost original sixteenth century records with annotations by Jean-François Félibien des Avaux (d.1733), see Paul Vanaise, “Les Comptes des Batiments du Roi de 1528 à 1571. De Rekeningen van de Koninklijke Kastelen Fontainebleau, Boulogne, Villers-Cotterêts, Saint-Germain-en-Laye en la Muette, en het Louvre,” Gentse Bijdragen tot de Kunstjeschiedenis, XVI, 1955–1956, 213–235, with French resumé, 236–240, and Vanaise, 1973, 137–138.
2 Except where noted, the documents were checked by Françoise Gasparri in 1979, to whom I am most grateful.