The Equestrian Statue of King Louis XIV is a sculpture designed and partially executed by the Italian artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini.

Bernini accepted this invitation, traveling to Paris to construct an equestrian statue and a portrait bust, as well as a new façade of the Louvre Palace.

[3] Bernini's first concept for the planned east façade, which placed a heavy emphasis on curved wings in the Italian style, was almost immediately rejected.

[4] Jean-Baptiste Colbert also stated that Bernini's plans to place the King's own room in the outwardly protruding central pavilion would be a noisy location due to its close proximity to the nearby street and foot traffic.

[4] The third and final draft, which had eliminated the curved wings that Bernini initially envisioned, was praised by Louis, who had held a formal ceremony to lay the cornerstone of the new façade.

The precedent for this was Pietro Tacca's sculpture of Philip IV of Spain in the Parque del Buen Retiro, Madrid (1642) which had been considered to be the first equestrian monument displaying a rearing rider since antiquity.

In his time serving Urban VIII, Bernini was involved in the design of a frescoed vault within the Palazzo Barberini in Rome in which Divine Wisdom appears with the symbol of the sun on her breast.

The statue was moved to a location on the far side of the newly constructed Neptune Basin, the most northern point on the north-south axis of the Garden.

[9] In spite of Louis's public rejection of the equestrian statue, its form inspired future royal portraits of the King, including a marble creation by Antoine Coysevox depicting Louis XIV on horseback which sits in the Salon of War at Versailles, making corrections to facial characteristics created by Bernini which the French king interpreted as a slight against him, creating a more somber expression and raising the forehead to a more 'suitable' height.

The equestrian statue of Louis XIV was designed with his earlier work in Rome on The Vision of Constantine in mind, with both horses striking similar poses and neither riders holding reins or stirrups.