ART AND ARCHITECTURE UNDER LOUIS XIV
letter, called Paris "a School of Architecture, the best probably at
this Day in Europe". The most important it certainly was. While
Wren was in Paris, Louis XIV, who intended to rebuild the east
parts of the Louvre, had invited Bernini to come and contribute
designs. He did so, but his plans, a colossal square on the Roman
pattern with giant orders of detached columns on the outer and the
courtyard fronts and with a vigorous top cornice crowned by a balus-
trade, plans which Wren only succeeded in examining for a short,
precious few minutes, were dropped as soon as the great man left.
They were replaced by the famous east front with the colonnades
which Claude Perrault (1613-88) designed in 1665.
The choice of Perrault was characteristic. He was an amateur, a
distinguished doctor, his brother was a lawyer and courtier, author
of a mediocre poem on Le Sihle de Louis le Grand> and had in 1664
been made Inspector-General of the King's buildings. In the history
of French literature he is chiefly known as one of the leaders in the
Querelle des Andens et des Modernes. Boileau defended Antiquity,
Perrault a contemporary style—which of course did not really
mean more than a certain amount of freedom in applying the rules
of the ancients.
Claude Perrault's Louvre front (pi. LXXXVI) goes beyond Mansart
and Levau in several ways. It represents the change from Mazarin
to Colbert, or from early to mature Louis XIV. It has a disciplined
formality to which Perrault's knowledge of Bernini's project con-
tributed two important motifs. Bernini as well as Perrault have flat
balustraded roofs, and Bernini as well as Perrault model their fronts
without any marked projections or recesses of wings. Both these
features were new in France. Otherwise, however,Perraultis wholly
national. French in feeling, though very original and so un-academic
that his less adventurous contemporaries never forgave him, are
the slim coupled giant columns of the main story raised up on the
tall smooth podium-like ground floor. French are the segment-
headed windows, and French (of direct Lescot derivation) the oval
shields with garlands hanging down from them.
The whole is a of grandeur and yet a precise elegance that the I7th
century, in spite of Blois and Maisons, had never before achieved,
and that the architects of Louis XIV's later years never surpassed.
Perrault has summed up to perfection the various, sometimes
seemingly contradictory tendencies of the sihle de Louis XIV9 the
gravity and raison of late Poussin, Corneille and Boileau, the re-
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