Petite Galerie of the Louvre

The Petite Galerie is a wing of the Louvre Palace, which connects the buildings surrounding the Cour Carrée with the Grande Galerie bordering the River Seine. Begun in 1566, its current structures date mainly from the 17th and 19th centuries. Most of its main floor is now the Galerie d'Apollon, one of the Louvre's most iconic spaces.

History

The foundation of the Petite Galerie was begun in 1566 under Charles IX. Jacques Androuet du Cerceau's ''Les plus excellents bastiments de France'', published in 1576, shows a plan for a single floor, one room wide, that coincides closely with what was actually built.Fonkenell 2004, pp. 24–25. According to Henri Sauval, writing around 1650 but not published until 1724, the wing was one-storey high surmounted by a terrace. He credited the design to an architect named Chambiche (thought to be the stone mason Pierre II Chambiges (1545–1616)). Pierre Lescot, the architect of the Louvre at the time, is generally credited with the initial design, but construction stopped around 1568, as the Wars of Religion gathered momentum, when the walls may not have risen as high as the tops of the windows.

In the late 16th century, during the reign of Henri IV, a second storey was added (''piano nobile'') consisting of a large full-length room decorated as a gallery celebrating former kings and queens of France, known as the or . A portrait of Marie de' Medici by Frans Pourbus the Younger, still in the Louvre, is a rare remnant of this series.

In the second half of the 1650s, the ground floor was lavishly decorated for Anne of Austria as her summer apartment (), whose ornate ceilings partly survive to this day. These rooms had previously been the venue for the King's Council.

A major fire on 6 February 1661 destroyed most of the Galerie des Rois, though not the ground floor. The gallery's exterior was rebuilt in the 1660s with a new design by Louis Le Vau, who added a parallel wing doubling the Petite Galerie to the West. Inside, the upper floor was rebuilt as the Galerie d'Apollon.

In 1849, architect Félix Duban renovated the exterior façades of the Petite Galerie, simultaneously with those of the eastern half of the Grande Galerie facing the Seine. He reversed the changes made by Le Vau and aimed at carefully restoring the designs of the time of Henry IV, based on 17-century engravings by Jean Marot. On the western side, Le Vau's façade became the eastern side of the enclosed in the 1850s in the context of Napoleon III's Louvre expansion.

Description

The exteriors of the Petite Galerie facing the Seine (south) and the (east) have been kept in their state as restored by Duban. Inside, the ground floor is now part of the Louvre's department of classical antiquities, and the first floor is the Galerie d'Apollon.

Namesake exhibition space

In playful reference to the Grande Galerie (whose name is much more widely known to the visiting public than that of the Petite Galerie), the Louvre museum in 2015 renamed an temporary exhibition space of its Richelieu Wing as the "petite galerie", signaling its dedication to displays aimed at younger visitors.

Gallery

File:Israël Silvestre 049-11 Veue du Louure et de la grande Galerie du costé des Offices.jpg, Mid-17th-century view of the Louvre by Israel Silvestre, with Grande Galerie on the right and Petite Galerie connecting it with the Lescot Wing at center
File:Israël Silvestre 049-09 Veüe et Perspectiue de la Galerie du Louure, dans laquelle sont les Portraus des Roys des Reynes et des plus Illustres du Royaume.jpg, East façade of the Petite Galerie before the 1661 fire, by Israel Silvestre
File:Gabriel Pérelle - View and Perspective of the Louvre - WGA17181.jpg, View of the Louvre before 1661, by Gabriel Perelle
File:L'Architecture française (Marot) – Façade sur le quai de l'extrémité de la Galerie d'Apollon – Mauban 1944 Fig 16.jpg, Southern façade of the Petite Galerie before the 1661 fire, by Jean Marot
File:Frans Pourbus (II) - Marie de Médicis, Queen of France - WGA18247.jpg, Marie de' Medici by Frans Pourbus the Younger, a rare surviving item from Henry IV's
File:View of the Louvre Palace from the Pont Neuf – 17th-century French School – Biasini 1989 p12.jpg, Anonymous view of the Louvre in 1666 showing the Petite Galerie as redesigned by Le Vau after the fire
File:Petite Galerie du Louvre et Cour du Sphinx, détail de BnF Destailleur Paris t1, 27.jpg, Drawing of the Louvre in 1828, showing Le Vau's western façade of the wing doubling the Petite Galerie to the West, now in the
File:South facade of the Petite Galerie, Louvre 28 October 2016.jpg, South façade of the Petite Galerie in 2016, as restored by Duban in 1851

See also

* Palace of Fontainebleau#Gallery of Francis I

Notes

Bibliography

* Bresc-Bautier, Genevieve (1995). ''The Louvre: An Architectural History''. New York: The Vendome Press. .
* Bresc-Bautier, Geneviève (2019). ''The Louvre: The History, the Collections, the Architecture'', with photographs by Gérard Rondeau. New York: Rizzoli Electa .
* Fonkenell, Guillaume (2004). "La Petite Galerie avant la galerie d'Apollon", pp. 24–31, in ''La galerie d'Apollon au palais du Louvre'', edited by Geneviève Bresc-Bautier. Paris: Gallimard / Musée du Louvre. .

Louvre Palace
Ancien Régime French architecture

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