THE LOUVRE OF FRANCIS I AND ITS SUCCESSORS
One can attribute the demise of the
Old Louvre to the coming of Charles V to Paris in
1539. This royal residence, hastily put in order
to receive his august presence, seemed so coldly inconvenient
and inhospitable to his host, Francis I, that that
monarch decided forthwith upon its complete reconstruction
and enlargement. Owing to various combinations
of circumstances the actual work of reconstruction
was put off until 1546, thus the New Louvre as properly
belongs to the reign of Henri II as to that of his
father.
Francis I, more than any other European
monarch of his time, or, indeed, before or since,
left his mark as an architect of supreme tastes over
every edifice with which he came into personal contact.
His mania was for building when it was
not for affairs of the heart and so daring
was he that when he could not get an old fabric to
remodel he would brave all, as did Louis XIV at Versailles,
and erect a dream palace in the midst of a desert.
This he did at Chambord in the Sologne. At Paris
his difficulties were perhaps no less, but he had his
materials and his workmen ready at hand.
Francis’s repairs and embellishments
to the Old Louvre were by no means perfunctory, but
he saw possibilities greater than he was able to perform
with the means at hand. He first razed the central
tower, or donjon, and scarce before the departure
of his royal guest, was already dreaming of replacing
the entire fabric with another which should bear the
same name. One has read of the monarch’s
thoughts when he was awaiting the coming to Paris
of his old enemy in the peninsula; how he regretted
the moment when he should sally out to meet him and
leave his new-found friend, the Duchesse d’Etampes,
in spite of her pleadings for him to remain by her.
All this is mere historic incident, and has little
to do with Francis’s art instincts and ambitions.
He probably thought this very thing himself when he
replied to the importunate lady: “Duchesse,
I must tear myself away without more ado; I go to
meet my brother monarch at Amboise on the Loire.”
It was Francis I, the passionate lover
of art, who collected the first pictures which formed
the foundation of the present collections of the Musee
National du Louvre. He bought many in foreign
parts, and many others were brought from Italy by
Italian artists, whom he had commanded to the capital:
Primaticcio brought with him, upon his arrival, more
than a hundred antique statues. These art objects
were first assembled at Fontainebleau and ornamented
the apartments of the king. Among them were Da
Vinci’s “La Joconde” and Raphael’s
“Holy Family and Saint Michael.”
Henri II, Henri IV, and Louis XIII
did little to enrich the art collections of the palace,
but Louis XIV charged his minister, Colbert, with
numerous purchases. In 1661 he bought the fine
collection left by Cardinal Mazarin, and ten years
later purchased the contents of the celebrated gallery
belonging to the banker Jacob of Cologne. The
state expended for these acquisitions nearly six hundred
thousand livres, and received for this sum
six hundred paintings and six thousand drawings.
It was at this period that the royal
collections were transferred to Paris, a little before
the death of Colbert, when they were placed in the
galleries of the Louvre; though it was a hundred years
later that a national museum was actually created.
This was virtually brought about from the fact that
the royal collections were transported in a great
part to Versailles, only to be returned to Paris in
1750, transferred again to Versailles, and ultimately
to be returned to Paris under the sheltering wing
of the grand old Louvre.
The Museum of the Louvre, the Museum
National et Central des Arts,
is the outgrowth of a Decree of the Convention, dated
July 27, 1793. It was aided and enriched considerably
under Napoleon I, that passionate lover of the beautiful,
who, none too scrupulously, would even seek to “make
a campaign” in order to acquire art works for
the museum of his capital.
Many of these abducted art treasures
(like the horses of Saint Marc, for instance) were
afterwards returned to their original owners, but the
nucleus of this unrivaled art museum was chiefly due
to the consul and emperor.
As soon as Charles V had left the
Louvre demolition was at once begun by Francis, and
in 1541 an Italian, Serlio, was bidden prepare a set
of plans for the Renaissance glory that was to be.
Serlio, refusing, or debating the price, was cast
aside for the Frenchman, Lescot, whose plan was adopted.
The work can in no way be said to
have suffered by the change of plans, for though Pierre
Lescot was as yet a name unknown in the world of architecture
his talents were sufficiently great, magistrate and
parliamentary counsellor though he was, to give to
Paris what has ever been accounted its chief Renaissance
glory.
Work was begun at once, a work which
was not interrupted by intrigues of court, of love,
of war, nor by the deaths of Francis I nor his successor,
Henri II.
Although the work was begun in an
energetic manner it was 1555 before the western wing
was ready for the hand of the sculptors, but from this
time on, judging from the interpolated monograms of
Charles IX and Henri IV on the south wing, work progressed
less hurriedly. The two other constructions,
which were to enclose the quadrangle to the north and
east, were completed under such circumstances that
there has never been a question as to their period.
For fifteen years the work went on,
when suddenly it was abandoned as were the plans of
Lescot. A sole wing, that following the Seine
and abutting at right angles against the Pavilion
de l’Horloge, had resulted.
The sculptures of its south façade,
as well as certain of its interior decorations, were
entrusted to Jean Goujon (1520-1572), who
became a victim of the horrible night of Saint Bartholomew,
planned in the same Louvre by the wily Medici.
Henri II often dwelt over Lescot’s
plans and devices, and, on one occasion, when the
poet Ronsard was present, demanded of the architect
the meaning of the decorations surrounding a great
oeil-de-boeuf window, two kneeling figures,
one blowing a trumpet, and the other extending a palm
branch. “Victory and Fame,” replied
Lescot. And, in honour of the architect and his
sentiment, Ronsard composed his “Franciade.”
The detail was actually by Goujon, whose design
it was, under the oversight of the master architect.
One may see this chef d’oeuvre to-day
just above the courtyard portal to the west.
At the death of Henri II, Catherine
de Medici came here to live alone, and built the great
extension, which stands to-day and joins the Old Louvre
with that portion along the banks of the Seine by the
double arch, through which swing the autobusses coming
from the Rive Gauche with such a Juggernaut grind
that fears for the foundation of the palace are ever
uppermost in the minds of those responsible for its
preservation.
It is in this Catherine de Medici
portion of the Louvre (1578) that the present
Galerie des Antiques is installed, and
which is usually thronged, in season and out, with
globe-trotting sight-seers who give seldom a thought
to its constructive elegance and its association with
the Medici.
With the first years of the reign
of Charles IX, there is to be remarked a notable slowness
of procedure with regard to the construction of the
New Louvre. This was brought about chiefly by
the conception of the Tuileries and the work which
was actually begun thereon. Soon a gigantic idea
radiated from the ambitious mind of Catherine de Medici.
In this connection it must be remembered, however,
that Catherine, so commonly reviled as “the
Italian,” was not all Italian; French blood flowed
through her veins through that of her mother, Madeleine
de la Tour d’Auvergne. She came first to
France, landing at Marseilles, whence she arrived
from Leghorn, and forthwith commenced her journey Parisward,
arriving finally at the Louvre as the bride of Prince
Henri in the guise of a simple, clever girl, though
indeed she was twenty years the elder.
Now she dreamed of uniting her chateau
of the Tuileries with that of the king by a long,
connecting gallery. She put action to the thought
and under Pierre (II) Chambiges, a relative of the
Chambiges of Fontainebleau and Saint Germain, the
Petite Galerie, a mere means of communication
between the two chateaux, and not the least to be likened
to a defensive structure, was begun and work thereon
carried out between 1564 and 1571, though it remained
for Thibaut Metezeau, in 1595-1596, to carry it on
a stage further under Henri IV.
This architect introduced the notorious
mezzanine, which has so intrigued historians of the
Louvre because of the unequal elevations of the various
floors, a procedure which was unavoidable save by recourse
to a substitution less to be objected to than the existing
fault. Actually the connection with the Tuileries
was made by the prolongation of this gallery by the
Ducerceau brothers in 1595. The work existing
to-day, but only in its reconstructed form, is the
same as that completed by Napoleon III (1863-1868).
Charles IX and Henri III, though making
the Louvre their residence, practically had no hand
in its embellishment. The former gave his energies
and ideals full play in the Saint Bartholomew massacres
and shot at poor unfortunates who fled beneath the
windows of his apartments on the quay-side of the
Louvre. This, if not the chief incident of his
association with the fabric, is at least the best remembered
one. Henri III, too, led a scandalous life within
the walls of the Louvre and fled on horseback, smuggled
out a back door, as it were, on a certain May evening
in 1588, never more to return, for the Dominican monk
Jacques Clement killed him with a knife-thrust before
he had got beyond Saint Cloud.
The accepted tale of the part played
by the famous window of the Louvre in the drama of
Saint Bartholomew’s night is as follows:
As the signal tolled from the belfry of Saint Germain
l’Auxerrois it was answered by another peal
from the great bell of the Palais de Justice, where,
within a small apartment over the watergate of the
Louvre, the queen and her two sons were huddled together
not knowing what might happen next. The multitude
streamed by on the quay before the palace, and, finally,
amid all the horror of Coligny’s murder, and
the throwing of his body from a window of the Louvre
to the street below, Charles IX stood at his window
regarding the fleeing Huguenots as so much small game,
shooting away at them with an arquebuse as they
went by, and with an unholy glee, even boasting that
he had killed a score of heretics in a quarter of an
hour.
Historians of those exciting times
were perhaps none too faithful chroniclers and Charles’s
“excellent shots” in his “royal hunt,”
and hideous oaths and threats such as: “We’ll
have them all, even the women and children,”
are not details as well authenticated as we would like
to have them. Like Rizzio’s blood stains
they lack conviction.
The ambitious white-plumed Henri de
Navarre, when he became Henri IV of France, set about
to connect the tentacle which stretched southward from
the Old Louvre with the Tuileries (a continuation of
the project of Catherine de Medici), and, by the end
of the sixteenth century, had built a long façade
under the advice of the brothers Ducerceau. This
work was added to on the courtyard side under the Second
Empire, when a reconstruction, more likely a strengthening
of underpinning and walls because of their proximity
to the swift-flowing waters of the Seine, of the work
of Henri IV was undertaken.
Joining the Tuileries and this work
of Ducerceau was the celebrated Pavilion de Flore,
a work of the Henri IV period rather than that of
Catherine de Medici.
From the Pavilion de Flore to the
Pavilion de Lesdiguieres ran this long gallery of
the Ducerceau and numerous interstices and unfinished
vaults and arches leading towards the Old Louvre were,
at this epoch, completed by Metezeau and Dupaira.
The chief apartment of this structure became known
as the Galerie Henri IV, and was completed in
1608.
At the death of Henri IV, Richelieu,
who at times builded so well, and who at others was
a base destroyer of monuments, demolished that portion
which remained of the edifice of Charles V. The work
of Pierre Lescot was preserved, however, and to give
symmetry and an additional extent of available space
the rectangle facing Saint Germain l’Auxerrois
to-day was completed, thus enclosing in one corner
of its ample courtyard the foundations of the earlier
work whose outlines are plainly traced in the pavement
that those who view may build anew if they
can the old structure of Philippe Auguste.
In mere magnitude the present quadrangle is something
more than four times the extent of the Louvre of the
time of Charles V.
This courtyard of the Louvre is perhaps
that spot in all Paris which presents the greatest
array of Renaissance art treasures. From ground
to sky-line the façades are embroidered by the works
from the magic hand of the Siecle Italien.
Jean Goujon himself has left his brilliant
souvenirs on all sides, caryatides, festoons, bas-reliefs,
statues and colonnades.
Enthusiasm and devotion knew no bounds
among those old craftsmen, but all is well-ordered,
regular and correct. “He who mentions the
Louvre to a Frenchman gives a greater pleasure than
that of Mehemet-Ali when one praises the pyramids.”
In a way the Louvre is the most magnificent edifice
in the universe; “four palaces one piled up on
another, une ville entiere.” And
when the Louvre was linked with the Tuileries in the
real, what a splendour it must have been for former
generations to marvel at! “La plus belle
et la plus grande chose sous le soleil.”
This work of aggrandizement of the
quadrangle was carried out by the architect Lemercier
on the basis of a project adopted in 1642, and, to
a great extent, completed before the arrival of Anne
d’Autriche, twenty years later.
This queenly personage had ideas of
her own as to what sort of a residence she would have
in Paris, and beyond her personal needs little was
done for the moment towards actually linking up the
various loose ends, each more or less complete in
itself, which now composed the Paris palace of the
French monarchs.
Her son, the king in person if not
in power, was not likely to be endowed with instincts
which would put him in the rank of the traditional
castle or palace builders of his race; it was literature,
music and painting which more particularly flourished
during his reign, and so the Austrian contented herself
at first with merely putting the former apartments
of Catherine de Medici into condition for her personal
use and building a Salle-de-Spectacle, and happy
thought a Salle-des-Bains.
Louis XIV, as he found time, after
the war of the Fronde, actually did bethink himself
of completing, in a way, the work of his elders, and
charged the architect Levau to finish off the north
wing, which was done in 1660. A year later the
Galerie Henri IV was practically destroyed by
fire and rebuilt by Levau, who gave the commission
for its interior decoration to Lebrun.
Soon the south wing was completed,
leaving only the gap for the eastern façade which
was intended to be the chief entrance to the mass of
buildings, which still bore the comprehensive name
of “The Louvre.”
For the accomplishment of this façade,
the demolition of certain dwellings of the nobility
which had clustered around the royal fabric was necessary,
and the Hotels du Petit Bourbon, de Villequier, de
Chaumont, La Force, De Crequy, de Longueville, and
de Choisy fell before the picks of the house-breakers.
Levau commenced work on the façade at once, and made
rapid progress until 1664, when an abrupt order came
for him to stop all work. Political conspiracy,
graft, if you like, was at work, and Colbert, little
favourable towards Levau, made a proposition to the
king to open a competition for the design and execution
of the façade. Willingly enough, his mind doubtless
more occupied with other things, Louis XIV agreed,
and a general call was sent out to all French architects
to enter the lists. Confusion reigned, and Levau
was about to be recalled when Colbert spied an unrolled
parchment in the corner and pounced upon it eagerly
as the means of saving him from the dubious efforts
of the former incumbent.
It was the “non-professional”
plan submitted by a doctor in medicine, one Charles
Perrault. Jealous competitors made all sorts of
criticisms and objections, the chief contention being
that if by any chance an architectural design by a
“pill-roller” proved pleasing to the eye
it was bound to be impracticable from an economic
or constructive point of view, or both. This
is often enough true, and it proved to be so in this
case, for in spite of a certain amount of advice from
an expert Italian builder, who had come to Paris to
help the good doctor with his difficult task (for
he actually received a commission for the work and
completed it in 1674), the façade did not fit the rest
of the fabric with which it was intended to join up,
and to-day it may be observed by the curious as being
several feet out of line with the structure which
faces on the Rue de Rivoli.
Louis XIV practically had no regard
for the Louvre and its architectural traditions; his
palatial garden-city idea, worked out at Versailles,
shows what an innovator he was. He allowed the
Louvre to be filled up with all sorts of riffraff,
who were often given a lodging there in place of a
money payment for some service rendered. The Louvre
thus became a sort of genteel poor-house, while king
and court spent their time in the more ample country-house
behind the Meudon hills.
By 1750 the Louvre had become little
more than an immense ruin, humbled and desecrated;
a veritable orphan. The Marquis de Marigny, Surintendant
des Bâtiments Royaux, obtained the authorization
to chase out the parasites and clean up the Augean
stable and put things in order as best pleased his
esthetic fancy, but only with the early years of the
nineteenth century did the Louvre become a real palace
again and worthy of its traditions.
From 1803 to 1813 the architects Fontaine
and Percier were constantly engaged in the work of
repairs and additions, and built (for Napoleon I)
the gallery which extends from what is now the Place
Jeanne d’Arc to the Pavillon de Rohan,
along the Rue de Rivoli. This detached portion
(bound only to the Tuileries) was finally joined to
the seventeenth century work of Lemercier under Louis
Napoleon in 1852. This gallery, the work of “moderns,”
is no mean example of palace-building, either.
It was the work of Visconti and Lefuel, and with the
adoption of this plan was finally accomplished the
interpolation of that range of pavilions which gives
the architecture of the Louvre one of its principal
distinctions. Named after the principal ministers
of former administrations Donon, Mollien,
Daru, Richelieu, Colbert, Turgot, etc., these
pavilions break up what would otherwise be monotonous,
elongated façades.
The inauguration of this last built
portion of the palace was held on August 14, 1857,
the occasion being celebrated by a banquet given by
Napoleon III to all the architects, artists and labourers
who had been engaged upon the work. In the same
Salle, two years later, which took the name of Salle
des Etats, the emperor gave a diner de
gala to the generals returning from the Italian
campaign.
Still further resume of fact with
regard to the main body of the Louvre, as well as
with respect to its individual components, will open
never-ending vistas and pageants. It is not possible
in a chapter, a book or a five-foot shelf to limn
all that is even of cursory interest. The well-known,
the little-known and the comparatively unknown mingle
in varying proportions, according to the individual
mood or attitude. To some the appeal will lie
in the vastness of the fabric, to others in the varied
casts of characters which have played upon its stage,
still others will be impressed with the dramatic incidents,
and many more will retain only present-day memories
of what they have themselves seen. The Louvre
is a study of a lifetime.
To resume a none too complete chronology,
it is easy to recall the following important events
which have taken place in the Louvre since the days
of Henri III, the period at which only the barest beginnings
of the present structure had been projected.
In 1591 a ghastly procedure took place
when four members of the Conseil des Seize
were hung in the Salle des Caryatides by
orders of the Duc de Mayenne.
Like the horoscope which foretold
the death of Henri III, another royal prophecy was
cast in 1610 that reminds one of that which perhaps
had not a little to do with the making away with the
last of the Valois princes.
The Duc de Vendome, the son of
Henri IV by Gabrielle d’Estrees, handed the
king a documentary horoscope signed by an astrologer
calling himself La Brosse, which warned
the king that he would run a great danger on May 14
in case he went abroad.
“La Brosse is an ass,”
cried the king, and crumpled the paper beneath his
feet.
On the day in question the king started
out to visit his minister, Sully, at the Arsenal.
It was then in turning from the Rue Saint Honore into
the Rue de la Ferroniere that the royal coach, frequently
blocked by crowds, offered the opportunity to the
assassin Ravaillac, who, jumping upon the footboard,
stabbed the king twice in the breast.
After having been wounded the king
was brought dying to the Louvre. His royal coach
drew up beneath the vault through which throngs all
Paris to-day searching for a “short cut”
from the river to Saint Honore. It was but a
short, brief journey to the royal apartments above
in the Pavilion de l’Horloge, but it must have
been an interminable calvary to the gallant Henri
de Navarre. The body was received by Marie de
Medici in tears, and the Ducs de Guise and d’Epernon
clattered out the courtyard on horseback to spread
the false news that the king had suffered no harm.
Fearing the results of too precipitate publishing of
the disaster no other course was open.
A gruesome memory is that the Swiss
Guard at the Louvre surreptitiously acquired a “quartier”
of the dismembered body of the regicide and roasted
it in a fire set alight beneath the balcony of Marie
de Medici as an indication of their faithfulness and
loyalty.
It was Sully, the king’s minister,
who ran first up the stairs to acquaint the queen
of the tragedy faithful ever to the interests
of his royal master. In spite of this, one of
the first acts of Marie de Medici as regent was to
drive the Baron de Rosny and Duc de Sully away.
Such is virtue’s reward sometimes.
“Lying on his bed, his face
uncovered, clad in white satin and a bonnet of red
velvet embroidered with gold, was all that remained
of Henri IV of France and Navarre. Around the
bed were nuns and monks from all the monasteries of
Paris to keep vigil of his soul.”
So ends the chronicle closing the
chapter of the relations of Henri IV with his Paris
palace.
No particularly tragic event took
place here for some years. Henriette de France,
widow of Charles I of England, taking refuge in France
from the troublous revolt at home, lived in the Louvre
in 1644. She had at first been graciously received
by Mazarin, but was finally accorded only the most
strict necessities of life, a mere lodging in the Louvre,
a modest budget and a restricted entourage.
In 1662, under Louis XIV, Moliere
and his troup, in a theatre installed in the Salle
des Caryatides, gave the first “command”
performance on record. The plays produced were,
“Nicodeme” and “Le Docteur Amoureux.”
An “art note” of interest
is that Sylvain Bailly, the first curator of the Musee
du Louvre, was born within its precincts in 1736.
In the dark days of July, 1830, the
populace attempted to pillage and sack the palace,
but after a bloody reprisal retired, leaving hundreds
of dead on the field. The parterre beneath
the famous colonnade was their burial place, though
a decade later the bodies were exhumed and again interred
under the Colonne de Juillet in the Place
de la Bastille.
Le Notre, the gardener of kings, laid
out the first horticultural embellishments of the
palace surroundings under Louis XIV, and with little
change his scheme of decoration lasted until the time
of Louis Philippe, who made away with much that was
distinctive and excellent.
Napoleon III came to the front with
an improved decorative scheme, but the hard flags
of to-day, the dusty gravel and the too sparse architectural
embellishments do not mark the gardens of the Louvre
as being anything remarkable save as a desirable breathing
spot for Paris nursemaids and their charges.
The iron gates of the north, south
and east sides were put into place only in 1855, and
at the Commune served their purpose fairly well in
holding the rabble at bay, a rabble to whose credit
is the fact that it respected the artistic inheritance
enclosed by the Louvre’s walls. No work
of art in the museums was stolen or destroyed, though
the library disappeared.