Mansart.
Meanwhile, the foundations of Baroque classicism in architecture were
laid by a group of designers whose most distinguished member was
Francois
Mansart
(1598-1666).
Apparently he never visited Italy, but other
French architects had already imported and acclimatized some aspects of
the Roman Early Baroque, especially in church design, so that Mansart
was not unfamiliar with the new Italian style. What he owed to it,
however, is hard to determine. His most important buildings are
chateaux, and in this field the French Renaissance tradition outweighed
any direct Italian Baroque influences. The Chateau of Maisons near
Paris, built for a newly risen administrative official, shows Mansart's
mature style at its best. The vestibule leading to the grand staircase (fig.
813) has a
particularly beautiful effect, severe yet festive. On seeing the
classically pure articulation of the walls, one first thinks of Palladio,
whose
treatise Mansart certainly knew and admired. But sculpture is used here
in the characteristically French way as an integral part of
architectural design. The complex curves of the vaulting further inform
us that this structure, for all its classicism, belongs to the Baroque.
813.
Francois
Mansart.
Vestibule, Chateau of Maisons. 1642-50
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François Mansart
François Mansart, Mansart also spelled Mansard (born January
1598, Paris—died September 1666), architect important for
establishing classicism in Baroque architecture in
mid-17th-century France. His buildings are notable for their
subtlety, elegance, and harmony. His most complete surviving
work is the château of Maisons.
Early years and works.
Mansart was the grandson of a
master mason and the son of a master carpenter. One of his
uncles was a sculptor, another an architect. When his father
died in 1610, Mansart’s training was taken over by his
brother-in-law, an architect and sculptor. Later, Mansart
was apprenticed to and heavily influenced by Salomon de
Brosse, a distinguished and successful architect during the
reign of Henry IV and the regency of Marie de Médicis,
mother of Louis XIII.
The 1600s, which saw the end of de
Brosse’s career and the beginning of Mansart’s, could not
have been more favourable for a young architect. Henry IV’s
entrance into Paris in 1594 as king of France signaled the
beginning of a period of burgeoning political and social
aspiration. Architecture reflected this aspiration, for the
kings wanted their capital and their palaces to reflect the
power of the crown; and the bourgeoisie commissioned
châteaus (country houses) and hotels (town mansions) large
enough for their coaches, stables of horses, and retinue of
servants and splendid enough to receive the king and his
entourage.
Most of Mansart’s patrons were members of
the middle class who had become rich in the service of the
crown. They would have to have been very rich indeed to be
Mansart’s patrons. Not only did he draw up plans without
regard to expense but he also refined and improved the
plans—tearing down what had been built and rebuilding—as he
went along. According to a contemporary, Mansart had cost
one of his early patrons “more money than the Great Turk
himself possesses.”
Mansart’s career can be traced from 1623,
when he designed the facade of the chapel of the church of
the Feuillants in the Rue Saint-Honoré in Paris (no longer
standing). Of his early works, the only one that survives is
the château of Balleroy (begun c. 1626), near Bayeux, in the
département of Calvados. Built for Jean de Choisy,
chancellor to Gaston, duc d’Orléans, the brother of Louis
XIII, the château consists of three blocks—a massive,
free-standing main building to which two small pavilions are
subordinated. One of the facades of the main building
overlooks a court, the other a garden. The materials and
treatment of the walls are characteristic of much of the
work built during the reign of Henry IV. The walls are
mainly of rough, brownish yellow brick with little
architectural ornament but emphasized by white stone quoins
(corners) and white stone frames around the windows.
In 1635 Gaston commissioned Mansart to
reconstruct his château at Blois, which had been built in
the 15th and 16th centuries and used as a royal residence by
three kings. Mansart proposed rebuilding it entirely, but
only the north wing facing the gardens was reconstructed.
The main building, flanked by pavilions, is subtly
articulated by superimposed classical orders (Doric on the
ground floor, Ionic on the first, and Corinthian on the
second). The court entrance to the main building is
approached on both sides by a curving colonnade. Mansart
used the high-pitched, two-sloped roof that bears his name,
mansard. (In fact, the roof had been used by earlier French
architects.) The details are precise and restrained, the
proportions of the masses harmonious.
In the same period, Phélypeaux de La
Vrillière, an officer of the crown, commissioned Mansart to
build a town house in Paris (rebuilt after Mansart’s death).
The building, known from engravings, was a fine example of
Mansart’s ability to arrive at subtle, ingenious, and
dignified solutions to the problems of building on awkwardly
shaped sites.
The château of Maisons.
In 1642 René de Longeuil, an immensely wealthy financier
and officer of the royal treasury, commissioned Mansart to
build a château on his estate. The château of Maisons (now
called Maisons-Laffitte, in the chief town of the
département of Yvelines) is unique in that it is the only
building by Mansart in which the interior decoration (graced
particularly by a magnificent stairway) survives. The
symmetrical design of the building (as well as the mansard
roof) is similar to that of Mansart’s earlier châteaus, but
here there is a greater emphasis on relief. The central
building is a free-standing block with a prominent
rectangular frontispiece that projects from the main wall in
a series of shallow steps. Two short wings, flanking the
main building, stand out from it in clean, unbroken
rectangular sections. Extending from each of the wings is a
low, one-story block. The restrained play of subtly
differentiated rectangular motifs lends grace and harmony.
Because it is now surrounded by roads and
houses, one can only imagine how noble the château looked,
in the setting of terraced gardens designed for it by
Mansart, when it opened with a reception for Anne of Austria
and her son, the boy-king Louis XIV. At times during the
château’s construction, de Longeuil must have been sorely
tried by Mansart’s stubborn, independent, generally
difficult personality, but on this day he was surely pleased
with the architect he had chosen.
Last years.
Perhaps Mansart’s personality was responsible for the
setbacks he began to encounter, the first of which was a
royal commission he received in 1645 and lost in 1646. Anne
of Austria asked Mansart to draw up plans for the convent
and church of the Val-de-Grâce in Paris, which the sovereign
had vowed to build if she bore a son. When the costs of
laying the foundation exceeded the funds provided, Mansart
was replaced by Jacques Lemercier, who more or less followed
the original plans.
Along with a large fortune, Mansart had
accumulated many enemies who accused him of capriciousness
in the building and rebuilding of his projects, of wild
extravagance, and of dishonesty. In 1651 a pamphlet entitled
“La Mansarade” (possibly written by political enemies of the
prime minister, Cardinal Mazarin, for whom Mansart had
worked) accused him of having made deals with contractors
and charged him with profligacy. The attack did not prevent
him from continuing to work for prominent people.
With the accession of Louis XIV to the
throne in 1661, private patrons became fewer and fewer.
Architects, painters, sculptors, and craftsmen were called
upon to build, decorate, and furnish structures commissioned
by the king. When, in 1664, Louis decided to complete the
palace of the Louvre, his chief minister and surintendant
des bâtiments (roughly, “superintendent of buildings”),
Jean-Baptiste Colbert, asked Mansart to draw up plans for
the east wing (the colonnaded wing). Possibly because he
could not produce and keep to any final plan, Mansart lost
the commission.
In 1665 Colbert again asked Mansart to
produce designs—this time for a chapel for the tombs of the
royal family of the Bourbons to be built at the end of the
Saint-Denis basilica. Mansart planned his design (which was
never executed) around a central, domed space, which later
inspired his grandnephew Jules Hardouin-Mansart in his
design for the dome of the church of Les Invalides.
When Mansart died the world was quite
different from the one in which his career had begun. France
had become the centre of Europe and Louis the centre of
France—not only politically but also in matters of culture
and taste. French architects, artists, and craftsmen were
trained and employed by the crown for one end: the
glorification of the state in the person of the king, who
had declared himself to be the state. But the world was
different, too, in that it had been enriched by the work of
the independent and individualistic genius of François
Mansart.
Encyclopædia
Britannica
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Church of Val-de-Grace
Chateau de Maisons
Chateau de Balleroy
Façade principale de l’hotel de Toulouse
LOUIS XIV, COLBERT, AND THE LOUVRE.
Mansart died too soon to have a share in the climactic phase of Baroque
classicism, ft began with the first great project Colbert directed, the
completion of the Louvre. Work on the palace had proceeded
intermittently for over a century, along the lines of Lescot's design
(see fig.
735). What remained to be
done was to close the square court on the east side with an impressive
facade. Colbert, dissatisfied with the proposals of French architects,
invited Bernini to Paris in the hope that the most famous master of the
Roman Baroque would do for the French king what he had already done so
magnificently for the Church. Bernini spent several months in Paris in
1665 and submitted three
designs, all of them on a scale that would have completely engulfed the
existing palace. After much argument and intrigue, Louis XIV rejected
these plans and turned over the problem of a final solution to a
committee of three: Charles Lebrun, his court painter; Louis Le Vau
(1612-1670), his court
architect, who had worked on the project before; and Claude Perrault
(1613-1688), who was a
student of ancient architecture, not a professional architect. All three
were responsible for the structure that was actually built (fig.
814), although
Perrault is usually credited with the major share.
The design in some ways suggests the mind of an archaeologist, but
one who knew how to select those features of classical architecture that
would link Louis XIV with the glory of the Caesars and still be
compatible with the older parts of the palace. The center pavilion is a
Roman temple front, and the wings look like the flanks of that temple
folded outward. The temple theme demanded a single order of
free-standing columns, but the Louvre had three stones. This difficulty
was skillfully resolved by treating the ground story as the podium of
the temple and recessing the upper two behind the screen of the
colonnade. The entire design combines grandeur and elegance in a way
that fully justifies its fame. The East Front of the Louvre signaled the
victory of French classicism over Italian Baroque as the royal style.
Ironically, this great example proved too pure, and Perrault soon faded
from favor.
814. Claude Perrault. East Front of the
Louvre, Paris. 1667-70
Claude Perrault. East Front of the Louvre, Paris. 1667-70
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Claude Perrault
Claude Perrault, (born Sept. 25, 1613, Paris, France—died
Oct. 9, 1688, Paris), French physician and amateur architect
who, together with Louis Le Vau, Charles Le Brun, and
François d’Orbay, designed the eastern facade of the Louvre.
Perrault’s training was in mathematics and
medicine, and he was a practicing physician. He was elected
a member of the newly founded Academy of Sciences in 1666,
and in 1673 he produced a renowned French annotated
translation of Vitruvius’s architectural treatise. Claude’s
brother, Charles, was assistant to J.-B. Colbert, the
superintendent of works under Louis XIV, and Charles saw to
it that Claude, who had little practical experience, was
appointed to the three-man commission responsible for the
rebuilding of the Louvre.
Claude Perrault collaborated in the final
design of the Colonnade, a massive row of paired columns
that rises above the unadorned first story and dominates the
majestic east facade of the Louvre. Perrault claimed
responsibility for this design, but it is now thought that
he collaborated on it with Le Vau and d’Orbay and helped
solve the engineering problems associated with the
Colonnade’s construction. Perrault was probably the designer
of the Paris Observatory, which still stands.
Perrault’s foremost scientific pursuit was
as a director of a team that performed dissections on
various animals; his death is attributed to a disease
contracted while dissecting a camel.
Encyclopædia Britannica
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815.
Louis Le Vau and Jules Hardouin-Mansart. Garden Front, center block, Palace of Versailles.
1669-85
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Louis Le Vau
Louis Le Vau (1612 – 11 October 1670) was a French Classical
architect who worked for Louis XIV of France.[1] He was born
and died in Paris.
He was responsible, with André Le Nôtre
and Charles Le Brun, for the redesign of the château of
Vaux-le-Vicomte. His later works included the Palace of
Versailles and his collaboration with Claude Perrault on the
Palais du Louvre. Le Vau also designed two mirroring
additions across the Parterre to the evergrowing Château de
Vincennes, the Château du Raincy, the Hotel Tambonneau, the
Collège des Quatre-Nations (now housing the Institut de
France), the church of St. Sulpice, and Hôtel Lambert, on
the Île Saint-Louis, Paris.
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PALACE OF VERSAILLES.
The king's largest enterprise was the Palace of Versailles, located If
miles from the center of Paris. It was begun in 1
669
by Le Vau, who designed the elevation of
the Garden Front (fig. 815)
but died within a year. Under Jules Hardouin-Mansart
(1646-1708), a
great-nephew of Franfois Mansart, the entire project was greatly
expanded to accommodate the ever-growing royal household. The Garden
Front, intended by Le Vau to be the principal view of the palace, was
stretched to an enormous length with no modification of the
architectural membering, so that his original facade design, a less
severe variant of the East Front of the Louvre, now looks repetitious
and out of scale. The whole center block contains a single room, the
famous Galerie des Glaces (Hall of Mirrors, fig.
816), with the Salon de la
Guerre (War) and its counterpart, the Salon de la Paix (Peace), at
either end.
Baroque features, although not officially acknowledged, reappeared
inside the Palace of Versailles. This shift corresponded to the king's
own taste. Louis XIV was interested less in architectural theory and
monumental exteriors than in the lavish interiors that would make
suitable settings for himself and his court. Thus the man to whom he
really listened was not an architect, but the painter
Le Brun.
Lebrun's goal was in itself Baroque: to subordinate all the arts to the
glorification of Louis XIV. To accomplish it, he drew freely on his
memories of Rome. Although a disciple of Poussin, Lebrun must have been
impressed by the great decorative schemes of the Baroque, for they stood
him in good stead 20 years
later, both in the Louvre and at Versailles. He became a superb
decorator, utilizing the combined labors of architects, sculptors,
painters, and artisans for ensembles of unheard-of splendor. The Salon
de la Guerre at Versailles (fig. 817)
is closer in many ways to the Cornaro Chapel than
to the vestibule at Maisons (compare figs.
769 and
813). If his ensemble is
less adventurous than Bernini's, Lebrun has emphasized surface
decoration just as much. And, as in so many Italian Baroque interiors,
the separate ingredients are less impressive than the effect of the
whole.
816. Jules Hardouin-Mansart,
Le Brun,
and Coysevox. Galerie des Glaces (Hall of Mirrors), Palace of Versailles
817. Jules
Hardouin-Mansart,
Le Brun,
and Coysevox. Salon de la Guerre, Palace of Versailles. Begun
1678
GARDENS OF VERSAILLES.
Apart from the magnificent interior, the most impressive aspect of
Versailles is the park extending west of the Garden Front for several
miles (fig.
818).
Its design, by Andre Le Notre
(1613-1700), is so strictly correlated with the
plan of the palace that it becomes a continuation of the architectural
space. Like the interiors, these formal gardens, with their terraces,
basins, clipped hedges, and statuary, were meant to provide an
appropriate setting for the king's appearances in public. They form a
series of "outdoor rooms" for the splendid fetes and spectacles that
Louis XIV so enjoyed. The spirit of absolutism is even more striking in
this geometric regularity imposed upon an entire countryside than it is
in the palace itself.
818. Charles Riviere. Perspective
View of the Chateau and Gardens of Versailles. Lithograph.
HARDOUIN-MANSART.
At Versailles, Jules Hardouin-Mansart worked as a member of a
team, constrained by the design of Le Vau. His own architectural style
can be better seen in the Church of the Invalides (figs.
819 and
820), named after the
institution for disabled soldiers of which it formed one part. The
building presents a combination of Italian Renaissance and Baroque
features, but reinterpreted in a distinctly French manner. The plan,
consisting of a Greek cross with four corner chapels, is based
ultimately (with various French intermediaries) on Michelangelo's plan
for St. Peter's (see fig. 661);
its only Baroque element is the oval choir. The
dome, too, reflects the influence of Michelangelo (figs.
660 and
662), and the classicistic
vocabulary of the facade is reminiscent of the East Front of the Louvre,
but the exterior as a whole is unmistakably Baroque. It breaks forward
repeatedly in the crescendo effect introduced by Maderno (see fig.
754). And, as
in Borromini's S. Agnese in Yiuzm Navona (see fig.
761), the facade and dome
are closely correlated. The dome itself is the most original, and the
most Baroque, feature of Hardouin-Mansart's design. Tall and slender, it
rises in one continuous curve from the base of the drum to the spire
atop the lantern. On the first drum rests, surprisingly, a second,
narrower drum. Its windows provide light for the painted vision of
heavenly glory inside the dome, but they themselves are hidden behind a
"pseudo-shell" with a large opening at the top, so that the heavenly
glory seems mysteriously illuminated and suspended in space.
"Theatrical" lighting so boldly directed would do honor to any Italian
Baroque architect.
819. Jules
Hardouin-Mansart. Church of the Invalides,
Paris. 1680-91
820. Plan of the Church of the Invalides
Jules Hardouin-Mansart. Church of the
Invalides, Paris. (detail)
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Jules
Hardouin-Mansart
Jules Hardouin-Mansart, (born , c. April 16, 1646 Paris,
Fr.—died May 11, 1708, Marly-le-Roi), French architect and
city planner to King Louis XIV who completed the design of
Versailles.
Mansart in 1668 adopted the surname of his
granduncle by marriage, the distinguished architect François
Mansart. By 1674, when he was commissioned to rebuild the
château of Clagny for Louis XIV’s mistress Madame de
Montespan, he was already launched on a brilliant career.
Among his earlier achievements were many private houses,
including his own, the Hôtel de Lorges, later the Hôtel de
Conti.
In 1675 Mansart became official architect
to the king and from 1678 was occupied with redesigning and
enlarging the palace of Versailles. He directed a legion of
collaborators and protégés, many of whom became the leading
architects of the following age. Starting from plans of
architect Louis Le Vau, Mansart built the new Hall of
Mirrors, the Orangerie, the Grand Trianon, and the north and
south wings. At the time of his death he was working on the
chapel. The vast complex, with an exquisite expanse of
gardens designed by André Le Nôtre, was a harmonious
expression of French Baroque classicism and a model that
other courts of Europe sought to emulate.
Although occupied with this enormous
project for much of his life, Mansart built many other
public buildings, churches, and sumptuous houses. Thought to
be most reflective of his individual ability to combine
classical and Baroque architectural design is the chapel of
Les Invalides, Paris. Admirable contributions to city
planning include his Place Vendôme and Place des Victoires,
Paris.
Encyclopædia
Britannica
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Jules Hardouin-Mansart.
Place Vendome in Paris
Jules Hardouin-Mansart.
Grand Trianon in Versailles
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