The Concert Spirituel in the Tuileries palace

Abstract

Frangois I (1515-47) began the westward expansion of Renaissance Paris in 1546, when he had part of the medieval fortress of the Louvre pulled down and commissioned Pierre Lescot to begin a new palace in its place. This became the original component of the modern Louvre's cour carrd, built during the following reign of Henri II (1547-59). The large room on its ground floor (at present an antique sculpture room of the Musde du Louvre) contains the famous musicians' balcony supported by four caryatids sculpted in 155o-51 by Jean Goujon after the Erechtheion at Athens. Catherine de Medicis, the widow of Henri II, greatly extended the new palace. As Queen Mother she also acquired land in 1563-4 further to the west, outside the old city walls, in order to build a palace that would be near the residence of her reigning sons in the Louvre, but separate. Philibert de l'Orme was the architect who drew up the plans for her. He completed the central pavilion and two narrower wings that extended north and south by 1570, and added a square pavilion to the south (PavilIon de Bullant) by 1572. The central portions of the Tuileries palace were thus in place. Religious wars slowed building for the next two decades, but under Henri IV (1589-1610) the Grande Galerie of the Louvre was extended west along the banks of the Seine all the way to the Pavillon de Flore, which was then connected by a new wing (Galerie de Diane) to the Tuileries. The architect Louis Le Vau (1612-70) completed the Tuileries palace in the 166os, early in the reign of Louis XIV (16431715), making it symmetrical by extending to the north. He also enlarged the central pavilion by increasing its height and constructed a grand staircase leading to its main floor. A two-level terrace was added along the length of the western facade, leading to the garden laid out by Andre Le N6tre (1613-1700) in 1664. The Plan Turgot of 1739 shows a bird's eye view of the whole complex (illus.1). The gardens of the Tuileries became famous as a promenade for people of fashion. Musorgsky's artist friend Victor Hartmann put children at play in his picture of the gardens, rendered immortal by Pictures at an exhibition. A century earlier the players were adults, and the name of the game was seduction. Martin Engelbrecht captured the galant tone of amorous dalliance in his bilingually labelled engraving 'Les Promenades du Palais des Thuilleries' (illus.2). The German couplet pells out the message more explicitly than the French, ending as it does with 'hot desire'. One reason the Tuileries functioned for so long as a meeting place for locals and visitors alike is that the palace and gardens were used very little as a royal residence. Louis XIV lived at the Tuileries for only three years, 1664-7. He preferred Versailles subsequently. At his death in 1715 the Regent, Philippe d'Orleans, decided to lodge the five-year-old child who would become Louis XV in the Tuileries, while he took up residence in the Palais Royal. But in 1722 it was decided that the young king should reside at Versailles, leaving the Tuileries free from hordes of royal attendants and guards, and open to the possibility of other uses. The Tuileries was a place of theatrical entertainment as well as a royal residence (mostly in waiting). Le Vau's northern wing housed the vast Salle des Machines built by Gaspare Vigarani and his two sons between 1659 and 1662 at the behest of Cardinal Mazarin, who died the year before completion. It was Mazarin's idea to impose Italian opera on France, and Cavalli's Ercole amante opened the new theatre in 1662. The theatre was so large, Sauval claimed in his Antiquites de la ville de Paris (1724), that as many as 7,000 spectators could be accommodated in the Salle, while the even larger Scene had stage machinery that could elevate more than loo performers at once. There were common complaints that the uman voice was swallowed up in the vastness of these spaces and that the auditors could hear nothing. The Salle des Machines was not long used as an opera house, being replaced by the Opera in a wing of the Palais Royal. The machinist-architect Servandoni found an appropriate use for it, on the other hand, in the spectacular series of pantomime shows he designed and directed there between 1734 and 1758. In 1763 the architects Jacques-Germain Soufflot (1713-80) and Jacques-Ange Gabriel (1698-1782) were commissioned to construct a new theatre for opera in the space of the Salle des Machines after fire gutted the Opera in the Palais Royal. They used only the stage of the old theatre in which to install both stage and auditorium.' A plan of the main floor of the Tuileries palace