Palais du Louvre Totally Explained

Everything about Palais Du Louvre totally explained

ť For the museum see Louvre Museum.

The palais du Louvre in Paris, on the Right Bank of the Seine is a former royal palace, situated between the Tuileries Gardens and the church of Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois. Its origins date back to the medieval period and its present structure has evolved in stages since the sixteenth century.
The Louvre—which gets its name from a Frankish word leovar or leower, signifying a fortified place, according to the French historian Henri Sauval (1623-1676)—was the actual seat of power in France until Louis XIV moved to Versailles in 1682, bringing the government perforce with him; the Louvre remained the formal seat of government to the end of the Ancien Régime.

Medieval Louvre

The first royal "Castle of the Louvre"—it was first mentioned under this name in a charter of 1198—was founded on the edge of medieval Paris by King Philip Augustus as a fortified royal palace to defend the western flank of the city on the Rive Droite (right bank). The structure consisted of a rectangular enclosure wall with towers at the corners and the middle of the sides, as well as two strong gates. In the centre of the courtyard of the castle was a tall keep, isolated by its own moat. Charles V remodelled the structure to provide some suitably splendid apartments. Later kings such as François I and Henri II systematically demolished the original castle to build a Renaissance palace. The remains of both the curtains and the keep can be seen in the Medieval Louvre gallery.

The Renaissance

The earliest above ground part of the Palais du Louvre was begun in 1535. The architect Pierre Lescot introduced to Paris the new design vocabulary of the Renaissance, which had been developed in the châteaux of the Loire Valley. His new wing for the old castle defined its status, as the first among the royal palaces. Jacques Androuet du Cerceau also worked on the Louvre.
During his reign (1589-1610), Henry IV added the Grande Galerie. More than a quarter of a mile long and one hundred feet wide, this huge addition was built along the bank of the Seine; at the time of its completion it was the longest building of its kind in the world. Henry IV, a promoter of the arts, invited hundreds of artists and craftsmen to live and work on the building's lower floors. This tradition continued for another 200 years until Napoleon III ended it. Louis XIII (1610-1643) completed the wing now called the Denon Wing, which had been started by Catherine de' Medici in 1560. Today it has been renovated, as a part of the Grand Louvre Renovation Programme.
The Richelieu Wing was also built by Louis XIII, the building first being opened to the public as a museum on November 8, 1793 during the French Revolution.

The Louvre under the Sun King

Commissioned by Louis XIV, architect Claude Perrault's eastern wing (1665-1680), crowned by an uncompromising Italian balustrade along its distinctly non-French flat roof, was a ground-breaking departure in French architecture. His severe design was chosen over a design provided by the great Italian architect Bernini, who had journeyed to Paris specifically to work on the Louvre. Perrault had translated the Roman architect Vitruvius into French. Now Perrault's rhythmical paired columns form a shadowed colonnade with a central pedimented triumphal arch entrance raised on a high, rather defensive basement, in a restrained classicizing baroque manner that has provided models for grand edifices in Europe and America for centuries. The Metropolitan Museum in New York, for one example, reflects Perrault's Louvre design.

Later works

The Louvre was still being added to by Napoleon III. The new wing of 1852-1857, by architects Visconti and Hector Lefuel, represents the Second Empire's version of Neo-baroque, full of detail and laden with sculpture. Work continued until 1876.

Sources

Further Information

Get more info on 'Palais Du Louvre'.

External Link Exchanges

Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:

<a href="http://palais_du_louvre.totallyexplained.com">Palais du Louvre Totally Explained</a>

Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned.