Review: Le palais du Luxembourg de Marie de Médicis 1611–1631, by Sara Galletti

Abstract

Sara Galletti Le palais du Luxembourg de Marie de Medicis 1611–1631 Trans. Julien Noblet; Paris: Editions Picard, 2012, 294 pp., 6 color and 165 b/w illus. €53.00, ISBN 9782708409354 The Luxembourg Palace is one of those rare early modern buildings that remains central to the day-to-day life of a capital city. This national landmark today houses the Senat, the upper chamber of the French parliament, while from the garden, it is familiar to countless Parisians and tourists. Its origins as a royal palace, however, lie in a radically different context. The palace was begun in 1615 for Maria de’Medici, widow of Henri IV and regent to the young Louis XIII. Despite substantial changes in both appearance and function, the palace still reflects something of the queen’s political position at that time, particularly as a foreigner and a female regent. This exemplary monograph by Sara Galletti reconstructs the early history of the building, offering new details and arguments to several historiographical problems in which the palace plays a leading role. Among the book’s many contributions, two stand out. The first is a new proposal for the sequence of rooms in the royal apartment. The question has received considerable attention from historians, due to the fame of Peter Paul Rubens’s large-scale series, the Life of Maria de’Medici , conceived expressly for the long gallery in the western wing. Galletti penetrates the restrictive and often-secretive social life of the court, to show us how many rooms there were, how they were used, and who was admitted to them. The second advance in our understanding of the building is contained in the final chapter, which undertakes a careful architectural and iconographic reading of the palace. Inspired very self-consciously by the Pitti Palace in Florence, the Luxembourg reveals much about the perception and reception of Italian architecture in France, during a crucial period in the evolution of French classicism. The first three chapters are concerned to fix the chronology of the building. They cover …