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The Musée Sainte-Croix is the largest museum in Poitiers, France. Planned by the architect poitevin Jean Monge and built in 1974, it stands at the site of the former Abbaye Sainte-Croix.
The museum hosts a permanent exhibition on periods from prehistory to the contemporary art, through the medieval period and the Fine arts. Major works include sculptures of Camille Claudel and Auguste Rodin, a reliquary vase from Saint-Savin-sur-Gartempe, paintings by Piet Mondrian and Odilon Redon and the stone sculpture of L'Âme de la France by Charles Marie Louis Joseph Sarrabezolles.
Doune Castle was originally built in the thirteenth century, then probably damaged in the Scottish Wars of Independence, before being rebuilt in its present form in the late 14th century by Robert Stewart, Duke of Albany (c. 1340–1420), the son of King Robert II of Scots, and Regent of Scotland from 1388 until his death. Duke Robert"s stronghold has survived relatively unchanged and complete, and the whole castle was traditionally thought of as the result of a single period of construction at this time. The castle passed to the crown in 1425, when Albany"s son was executed, and was used as a royal hunting lodge and dower house.
In the later 16th century, Doune became the property of the Earls of Moray. The castle saw military action during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms and Glencairn"s rising in the mid-17th century, and during the Jacobite risings of the late 17th century and 18th century.