Louis Le Vau

French architect

• Born: 1612
• Birthplace: Paris, France
• Died: October 11, 1670
• Place of death: Paris, France

Le Vau was one of the greatest French architects of the mid-seventeenth century. His blending of native French and baroque Italian styles established a new architectural idiom in buildings, from townhouses to the king’s château at Versailles.

Early Life

Louis Le Vau was born to Louis LeVeau, a master mason on royal projects in Paris and at the château of Fontainebleau. He also served as an inspector of royal buildings. Little is known of young Louis’s early life, though he was probably apprenticed to and trained as a mason by his father, who used his position and skills to become a successful speculative builder and developer. In this business young Louis became quite active around 1638.

By 1641, Louis and his father had built nine houses at the eastern end of the Île-St.-Louis in the Seine River, either for specific customers or on speculation. Louis’s first known design (1640) was for a townhouse (hôtel) for Lambert de Thorigny in this development. Through his father’s connections at court, Louis apparently joined the entourage of Jacques Lemercier, court architect to King Louis XIII, and participated in early work on the Louvre palace in Paris.

In 1639, Louis was named a royal architect. Shortly thereafter, he changed his name to “Le Vau,” perhaps to distinguish himself from his father, with whom he lived in a fine townhouse around the corner from the Louvre. By assiduous study and application Le Vau molded himself—imitating Lemercier—into a sophisticated, learned, and well-traveled (at least within France) man of the court. In 1644, he bought the office of counselor and secretary to the king, a largely symbolic title, but one that placed him firmly at the center of the court. In 1649, Le Vau designed a château for the secretary of finances, Jacques Bordier. From 1654 to 1660, Le Vau worked for Cardinal Jules Mazarin on the royal château complex at Vincennes, near Paris. Through his designs and supervision, the medieval castle was transformed into a splendid and comfortable rural retreat for both the cardinal and his royal guests. Here, for the first time, he began uniting traditional French structures with classical elements, laying the groundwork for a classicizing French Baroque. In 1657, Le Vau purchased the office of intendant of buildings, matching his father’s highest position.

Life’s Work

In 1655, Le Vau was raised to the honor of first architect to the king. Also at this time, he designed the choir and radiating chapels of the important Parisian church of St. Sulpice. The following year he began a five-year project with landscape architectAndré Le Nôtre and painter Charles Le Brun on the Château de Vaux-le-Vícomte for the ambitious royal surintendant of finances, Nicolas Fouquet. Le Vau designed a grand structure that retained the French tradition of amassing differentiated building units rather than establishing a uniform, unified whole. Its classical elements, such as pediments and pilasters, seemed rather out of place, and the whole effect was more provincial than monumental.

Le Vau became increasingly affected, however, by contemporary Italian architectural trends, as exemplified by the Romans Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Francesco Borromini . Though he never visited Italy, Le Vau collected and carefully studied through prints, books, and drawings the works of classical Roman and Renaissance Italian architects and builders, such as Vitruvius, Andrea Palladio, and Sebastiano Serlio.

Le Vau’s first major royal project was the completion of the Garden of the Tuileries in Paris, which continued in stages from 1655 until 1668. In 1662, the executors of the will of Cardinal Mazarin, the regent of France, engaged Le Vau to design and build the cardinal’s Collège des Quatre-Nations (now the Institut de France), a school for sixty boys that was overseen by the University of Paris. After much squabbling, Le Vau had it sited across the Seine River from the Louvre palace in such a way that it completed a major sight-line from the palace’s Cour Carrée (square courtyard). Thus, this independent commission was drawn into the orbit of royal architecture that was beginning to define King Louis XIV and his capital.

The church at the center of the college’s facade served as both a collegiate chapel for the scholars and as a burial chapel for the cardinal. Le Vau utilized the typically baroque oval and topped off his structure with one of Paris’s earliest domes. His overall design of a domed central core with curved outstretching arms reflected the recent remodeling at the church of Sant’Agnese and St. Peter’s in Rome as well as earlier designs for secular architecture, such as the Villa Trissino at Meledo by the Venetian architect Palladio. The school’s library, which housed Mazarin’s book collection, was adapted from the Palazzo Barberini in Rome.

If Paris was to be the capital of a great kingdom, its architects had to adorn it with buildings that echoed those of the Eternal City itself. This held true as well for the Louvre, to which, with the assistance of Le Brun and writer Charles Perrault , Le Vau added a stiff and formal neoclassical colonnade in the colossal order (1667). Le Vau also worked on the south or river wing of the palace with Perrault and Le Brun (1668-1669), though his initial plan for the Louvre’s east wing never developed above the foundations, as Louis briefly engaged Bernini (1664), on loan from the pope, to leave his mark here instead.

When Louis XIV decided to expand his hunting château at Versailles, he relied on Le Vau, as well as Le Brun and Le Notre, to design it and oversee construction. Having worked at Vaux, the three brought a shared vision and sense of cohesion to the undertaking. In 1662, Le Vau began by laying out on the site the menagerie: a zoo, kennel, farmyard, and breeding center. He erected the massive water mill pumps and gravity-feed water tower (1663) that would keep the canals filled and feed the scores of fountains. Work on the château itself started with the ceremonial Marble Court and its facades from Louis XIII’s day. Eventually, Le Vau enclosed the existing structure within what was called the Enveloppe (1668-1673), the new, Italiante central block that would be further expanded by architect Jules Hardouin-Mansart . Le Vau also was responsible at Versailles for the Grotto of Thetis (from about 1664) and his last architectural work, the Porcelain Trianon (1670).

Le Vau engaged also as an entrepreneur in the production of metals and finished metal products. He began in the 1650’s with a small factory for tin roofing material, but in 1665, he opened the Royal Manufactory for Tin in the Niversais, with royal subsidies of 60,000 livres and a thirty-year monopoly. His was a vertically integrated organization that controlled the supply of raw materials as well as production and delivery of finished products. Despite a steady flow of government contracts, poor quality goods, such as flawed iron cannon, undermined the firm’s reputation, and Le Vau died bankrupt in 1670. After his death, Le Vau was further scandalized by claims that he had misused funds (100,000 livres) from the collège project in supporting his failed enterprise.

Significance

As royal architect, Le Vau contributed to the design and construction of many of the most important French buildings of his era, including the Palais de Louvre, the Château de Versailles, and Mazarin’s Collège des Quatre-Nations. Though largely self-educated as an architect in the latest styles, he experimented with Roman neoclassicism and helped transform French royal architecture from provincial late Renaissance to seventeenth century classicism. He also borrowed the latest in baroque from Rome, building one of Paris’s first domes and uniting it with the era’s trendy oval in the collège.

Despite his failures as an industrialist, and his fall from grace, he remained a powerful force in seventeenth century design, perhaps second only to Bernini as an architect of genius.

Bibliography

Ballon, Hilary. Louis LeVau, Mazarin’s Collège, Colbert’s Revenge. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999. A close study of Le Vau’s design and the construction of the Collège des Quatre-Nations, set in the context of his full career as an architect. The only monograph in English on Le Vau.

Berger, Robert. The Palace of the Sun: The Louvre of Louis XIV. College Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993. An architectural study of the building campaigns at the Louvre during the mid-seventeenth century, and Le Vau’s roles in those campaigns.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. A Royal Passion: Louis XIV as Patron of Architecture. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. A unique study in English of Le Vau as a builder, with special attention to his projects at Versailles and Paris and his effort to emulate the Roman emperors as monumental patrons.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Versailles: The Château of Louis XIV. College Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1985. A brief monograph on the building of the château and the roles of the architects and artists.

Pérouse de Montclose, Jean-Marie. Versailles. New York: Abbeville Press, 1991. A lavishly illustrated, large-format study of the entire project at Versailles, Le Vau’s early role and designs, and the accommodations to them made by later architects and contractors.

Tooth, Constance. “The Early Private Houses of Louis LeVau.” Burlington Magazine 109 (September, 1967): 510-518. A study of Le Vau’s earliest domestic designs in Paris and their place in his development as an architect.