Paris architecture in the era of absolutism

Invited Italian architects began to turn the medieval castles of French kings and court nobles into elegant palace residences with representative facades and richly decorated halls.

At the same time, classicism reigned supreme in the architecture of the city throughout the eighteenth century (its sign was Église Sainte-Geneviève, and the most grandiose urban ensemble was the Place Louis XV at the tip of the Tuileries Garden).

The architecture of the interiors of the absolutism era was most clearly expressed in the royal palaces of Paris (the Louvre, the Tuileries, the Palais-Royal and Luxembourg), as well as in the suburban residences of the Kings: Versailles, Grand and Small Trianon, Marly, Saint Germain, Saint-Cloud, Meudon, Boulogne, Muette, Vincennes, Choisy-le-Roi, Rambouillet and Fontainebleau.

In the architecture of Paris of the era of absolutism, one can trace the evolution of urban compositions (palace and park ensembles and squares) from the early Renaissance to the heyday of classicism (with elements of an emerging Empire style) and Baroque.

During the unsuccessful for France Italian Wars, the French aristocracy became closely acquainted with Italy, where at that time a new worldview and Renaissance art were rapidly developing.

The increased wealth and desire to emphasize the greatness of the royal court prompted the monarchs to begin large-scale palace construction on the basis of principles borrowed from the architecture of the Italian Renaissance.

National trends in architecture found their expression in the rejection of the project of the eastern facade of the Louvre, proposed by Bernini, the greatest representative of the Italian Baroque.

As part of these tasks, the architect Claude Perrault translated into French and published in Paris a treatise by his Roman colleague of the 1st century BC Vitruvius "Ten Books on Architecture".

[8] On the eve of Great French Revolution philosophical views of Voltaire, Jean le Rond d'Alembert and Denis Diderot defined classicism as the most an acceptable architectural system, as opposed to the Baroque and Rococo styles of the outgoing era.

[citation needed] In 1808, the famous book "Description of Paris and its buildings" was published, in which Charles Paul Landon and Jacques-Guillaume Legrand assessed the architecture of the capital of the era of absolutism.