Petite Galerie of the Louvre

[1] Jacques Androuet du Cerceau's Les plus excellents bastiments de France, published in 1576, shows a plan for a single floor, one room wide, that coincides closely with what was actually built.

Pierre Lescot, the architect of the Louvre at the time, is generally credited with the initial design,[4] but construction stopped around 1568, as the Wars of Religion gathered momentum, when the walls may not have risen as high as the tops of the windows.

[6]: 32 In the second half of the 1650s, the ground floor was lavishly decorated for Anne of Austria as her summer apartment (appartement d'été), whose ornate ceilings partly survive to this day.

The gallery's exterior was rebuilt in the 1660s with a new design by Louis Le Vau, who added a parallel wing doubling the Petite Galerie to the West.

He reversed the changes made by Le Vau and aimed at carefully restoring the designs of the time of Henry IV, based on 17-century engravings by Jean Marot.