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Sara Galletti penetrates the restrictive and often-secretive building reports. Here, Galletti traces the Le palais du Luxembourg de Marie social life of the court, to show us how alterations made to the building as the de Médicis 1611–1631 many rooms there were, how they were property changed hands, from Maria’s Trans. Julien Noblet; Paris: Éditions Picard, used, and who was admitted to them. The death in 1642 through the mid-eighteenth 2012, 294 pp., 6 color and 165 b/w illus. second advance in our understanding of the century. As few of the original plans survive, €53.00, ISBN 9782708409354 building is contained in the final chapter, historians have often relied on later draw- which undertakes a careful architectural ings and depictions, made for different The Luxembourg Palace is one of those and iconographic reading of the palace. purposes. Some of these, as Galletti shows, rare early modern buildings that remains Inspired very self-consciously by the Pitti are more reliable than others. Casual read- central to the day-to-day life of a capital city. Palace in Florence, the Luxembourg reveals ers may find this chapter hard going. The This national landmark today houses the much about the perception and reception discussion is largely descriptive and, to Sénat, the upper chamber of the French of Italian architecture in France, during a the extent that it leaves behind the figure parliament, while from the garden, it is crucial period in the evolution of French of Maria, detaches itself somewhat from familiar to countless Parisians and tourists. classicism. the argument of the book as a whole. Its origins as a royal palace, however, lie in The first three chapters are concerned It is, however, admirably comprehensive. a radically different context. The palace to fix the chronology of the building. They Researchers interested in the later occu- was begun in 1615 for Maria de’Medici, cover the conception of the project, the pants of the palace will find this chapter a widow of Henri IV and regent to the young available visual sources, and the campaigns crucial resource. Louis XIII. Despite substantial changes in of construction. Some of this material has Chapter 3 returns to take up the thread both appearance and function, the palace been known for many years. Arthur Hustin, of the story, focusing on the fifteen-year still reflects something of the queen’s polit- in a fundamental study of 1910–11, pub- period from 1615 to 1631, during which ical position at that time, particularly as a lished much of the early documentation, the palace and its dependencies were foreigner and a female regent. This exem- in particular the contracts for the acquisi- largely completed. The subsections follow plary monograph by Sara Galletti recon- tion of the neighboring properties. Rosalys the principal actors involved in the work structs the early history of the building, Coope’s book on Salomon de Brosse treated at different stages. Here, too, several pre- offering new details and arguments to sev- the architecture in depth, and Alexandre viously unpublished sources serve to drive eral historiographical problems in which Gady’s more recent study on Jacques Le the discussion. A building survey under- the palace plays a leading role. Among the Mercier has done the same for the service taken in 1623 (Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal book’s many contributions, two stand out. and garden buildings.1 Galletti, however, 5995) provides a detailed description of The first is a new proposal for the sequence has cast a wider net for sources, and her the state of construction after eight years of rooms in the royal apartment. The ques- approach is more methodical than previ- of building work. Drawn up as part of tion has received considerable attention ous authors. She is not the first historian, Cardinal Richelieu’s litigation against from historians, due to the fame of Peter for example, to look for references to de Brosse, it relates to the architect’s early Paul Rubens’s large-scale series, the Life of Maria’s art patronage in the Medici diplo- and still-unexplained departure from Maria de’Medici, conceived expressly for matic correspondence in the Archivio di the project. As Galletti shows, the osten- the long gallery in the western wing. Galletti Stato in Florence, but she has exploited sible reason for the cardinal’s antipathy— this archive for references to the building de Brosse’s alleged mismanagement or Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 73, no. 2 to an unmatched extent. The result is an misdealing—is complicated by the fact that (June 2014), 277–297. ISSN 0037-9808, electronic ISSN 2150-5926. © 2014 by the Society of Architectural Histori- exhaustive, up-to-date, and eye-opening the architect left the site only to receive ans. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for study on a building we thought we knew. a commission for Richelieu’s château at permission to photocopy or reproduce article content Chapter 2 showcases the author’s sys- Limours. Whatever the explanation, Marin through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/ tematic method, meticulously correlating de la Vallée would take over as principal reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/jsah.2014.73.2.277. all the known visual evidence with written mason and contractor from 1624, entrusted

277 to complete the palace according to de containing each linked by the terrace that literature on the palace. Galletti redirects Brosse’s original designs. The chapter also runs across the entry pavilion. our attention instead to French prece- accounts for the palace’s interior decoration, The other distinguishing features of dents of the sixteenth century, particularly as well as its dependencies. A long section the Luxembourg were the large, salient to the architecture of Jacques Androuet on Marie’s agents Claude Maugis and pavilions that originally flanked the corps du Cerceau. In the hierarchical composi- Claude-Nicolas Fabri de Pieresc illustrates de logis, two on each of its extremities. The tion of volumes, the central pavilion hous- their responsibility for liaising with artists, resultant layout is anomalous and for ing a grand staircase, and the articulation Rubens in particular. There are new details historians of interior planning creates a of the entry pavilion, the Luxembourg about the famous garden—Galletti redates problem of interpretation, for the paired draws on several models presented in Tommaso Francini’s project to 1625—and pavilions seem to provide routes to two sepa- Du Cerceau’s Les plus excellents bastiments about the orangery, the aviary, and kitchens, rate apartments, each branching off from de France (1576–79), a source that relates which bordered the lower courts on either a common antechamber at the end of the more closely to de Brosse’s background side of the palace. The picture that emerges corps de logis. Was one apartment ceremonial (Du Cerceau was his grandfather) and from this chapter is that of a competent and the other private? Were they differen- to royal traditions of architectural repre- team of intermediaries who were able to tiated as winter and summer apartments? sentation. Where the Luxembourg does bring this complicated project to fruition, Scholars have offered several alternative clearly refer to the Pitti Palace are the despite frequent political and financial explanations for this state of affairs, and elevations, namely, the expressive use of setbacks. One paradoxical effect of their Galletti usefully reviews each, before put- the Tuscan order and its associated rusti- activity, however, is to shield our view of ting forward her own hypothesis. The pre- cation. Both of these elements might be the queen herself. Indeed, Maria’s absence cedent lies in Maria’s alterations in 1613 understood as emblems of the Florentine from the discussion is conspicuous. Galletti to her new apartment on the ground floor grand dukes, but Galletti is careful to point gives her credit for a sophisticated taste of the Louvre, which created two indepen- out the personal way that de Brosse has and an advanced policy of art patronage, dent spatial sequences within the same treated them. The articulation is subtler but her level of input in particular design wing, both following the antechamber. and the masonry more smoothly dressed. or budgetary choices remains obscure. One led, per tradition, to the bedchamber, The use of pilasters as opposed to half- The heart of the book is concerned whereas the other bypassed the bedchamber columns further deemphasizes the tectonic with the layout of the royal apartment, to offer a more intimate access to the queen expression of order in favor of a conti- and here Maria figures prominently.2 Like via a grand and petit cabinet. Rather than nuous ornamental skin. At the same time, the Tuileries palace and the château at multiplying rooms in the same sequence, the façades are littered with knowing Charleval, the Luxembourg was intended Maria appears to have distinguished the two references to royal palaces and châteaus, to house twin apartments: the king’s in the sets of rooms for different uses, allowing most notably Pierre Lescot’s wing at the eastern wing and the queen’s in the western. courtiers left behind in the antechamber to Louvre: the coupled orders, a frontispiece From the beginning, however, Henri’s apart- feel that they remained close to the royal crowned with a segmental arch, the narrow ment was intended to remain empty, both person. At the Luxembourg, this courtly windows set within an arcade. The Luxem- as a monument to the man and a constant practice is no longer cramped within the bourg, Galletti argues, adapts the archi- reminder of Maria’s claim to rule. Galletti’s confines of a single wing but rather given tecture of the Pitti to a new French context. overarching argument is that, as a political monumental expression in the form of the In this reading, the palace is less a state- statement, the palace actually reveals the two great pavilions on either side of the ment about Maria’s origins as a Medici queen’s relative weakness. Maria was, after main block. Galletti supports the picture princess than of what she had become: a all, the head of a mistrusted foreign con- painted here with anecdotes drawn from queen of France. tingent at court, queen in a country ruled contemporary mémoires and Florentine anthony gerbino by Salic law, and regent who would one day diplomatic correspondence. The sheer University of Manchester have to hand over power to her son. As a assiduousness of the research is impressive patron, her response to this predicament when we consider that it required a pursuit, was to stock the palace with reminders of often incidental to the reported events, for her connection with Henri. The building’s those isolated and curt references to the Notes rigorous left-right symmetry, which puts rooms in which they occurred. 1. Arthur Hustin, Le Luxembourg: Son histoire both members of the royal couple on equal In two autograph letters of 1611, Maria domaniale, architecturale, décorative et anecdotique, footing, is only the most obvious of such had singled out the Pitti Palace in Florence 2 vols. (Paris: du Sénat, 1910–11); Rosalys references. Galletti also highlights the ele- as the model for the building she wanted. Coope, Salomon de Brosse and the Development of ments of Rubens’s cycle that served the She even sent one of the king’s architects the Classical Style in French Architecture from 1565 same purpose. As she points out, the Life to measure and draw it in detail. Scholars to 1630 (London: A. Zwemmer, 1972); Alexandre of Maria de’Medici was intended to parallel of the Luxembourg have made much of this Gady, Jacques Lemercier: Architecte et ingénieur du a second, never-completed series cele- affiliation, and the final chapter attempts Roi (Paris: Maison des sciences de l’homme, brating the life of Henri IV, the galleries to redress the resulting imbalance in the 2005).

278 JSAH / 73: 2 , J UNE 2014 2. On the planning of royal palaces, see Monique which slender filleted piers run smoothly properties of the architectural frame and Chatenet, La cour de France au XVIe siècle: Vie into arches and ribs, is contrasted with the a sign of decadence and decline. Vasari’s sociale et architecture (Paris: Picard, 2002). The “jungle of overlapping shafts” (11) in the critique of Gothic is much in this spirit. research network Palatium: Court Residences as church at Brou, built some seventy-five Kavaler, on the other hand, argues that Places of Exchange in Late Medieval and Early Modern years later for Margaret of Austria. Simi- “geometrical ornament might function Europe 1400–1700 (www.courtresidences.eu) and larly juxtaposed, we see an austere geo- as a kind of metalanguage … considered the Centre de Recherche du Château de Versailles metric window (ca. 1300) from the nave of an approximation of divine thought” (50). have also been active in this field (www.chateau the minster at Freiburg im Breisgau with Kavaler says further, in the spirit of Roland versailles-recherche.fr). a window from the sixteenth-century choir Barthes’s Le plaisir du texte, that “it could where “designs have become fully emanci- provide an erotically tinged response that pated from the mundane task of supporting provided a motor for continued viewing. Ethan Matt Kavaler the glass” (12). The coexistence of elements Indeed, these structures offered a jouissance, Renaissance Gothic: Architecture of Gothic and Italianate architectural idiom a pleasure of reading surfaces” (51). Medieval and the Arts in Northern Europe, creates a new dispensation in which neither witnesses were aware of the extraordinary 1470–1540 could claim exclusive right to express a virtuosity of many of the decorative forms New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, unified worldview. The notion of “Renais- of the period but not necessarily in a posi- 2012, 344 pp., 80 color and 210 b/w illus. sance Gothic” is invoked as a means of tive sense. The 1439 contract for the vault $75, ISBN 9780300167924 representing the Gothic of these decades of the Oxford Divinity Schools specified (ca. 1470–ca. 1540) as qualitatively different (in vain) that the proposed job should be Ethan Matt Kavaler’s beautifully produced from “High Gothic” and “Rayonnant.” “free of all curiosities … [such as] taber- new book makes an extraordinary contri- Almost fifty years ago Jan Bialostocki nacles, carved figures, casements, and fillets bution to the growing discourse on “Late opened the possibility of looking at the and … all other curious frivolities that have Gothic” artistic production in the last phenomenon as an independent entity nothing to do with the work but occasion decades of the fifteenth and first decades and not a “late” manifestation, with all expenses of luxuries” (52). of the sixteenth century. The very title the associated negative connotations. The Kavaler begins his analysis of Late chosen by the author—a “provocative oxy- problem is compounded because of the Gothic ornament with the well-founded moron” (22)—complicates old notions of tendency to look at architecture in synec- premise that behind the mind-boggling Gothic as a style that “develops” continu- dochic relationship with society and to complexity of doubled-curved patterns ously over three centuries, entering into see the fifteenth century as an “autumnal” may lie a simple geometric matrix, able to a period of “decline” before being swept age, as Johan Huizinga characterized it in convey a subliminal sense of organization aside by the Renaissance. 1919. Kavaler then proceeds to look at the and purpose to forms that seem randomly The unruly and provocative material capacity of Renaissance Gothic to express composed. We are offered what Kavaler Kavaler deals with in this book is hard essential qualities of Englishness or German- labels “pictures of geometry” and their to cram into a traditional structure of ness; finally, despite his own aversion to transformative power. Interestingly, the chapter headings, and it has to be said that “developmental” stories, he explores the patterns of some German Late Gothic the introduction is disturbingly multifarious prototypes to be found in English Deco- vaults, which may seem random or impos- in its content. Yet the author’s argument rated and French Rayonnant architecture. sible to grasp when seen obliquely, may is, for the most part, well served by the At this point Kavaler comes to the resolve themselves into the simplest geo- thematic organization into five chapters— heart of his material: the astonishing spatial metry when seen from directly underneath “Ornament and Aesthetics,” “Flamboyant unity conveyed by the German hall church or in ground plan. As Kavaler writes, Forms,” “Microarchitecture,” “Natural with three vessels of the same height “Amazement and wonder were amongst Forms,” and, finally, “Deconstruction and divided by slender supports that lead the the goals of this aesthetic” (80). Hybridity”—a sequence that conveniently eye upward to the vault canopy, an area to Ornamental vocabularies were simulta- allows the author to reserve his most origi- which master masons devoted an enor- neously wide ranging, linking, for example, nal thinking for the later parts of the book. mous amount of creative activity. We are the Brabant and Spain, and Islam and the The introduction provides an overview introduced to the dynamic patterning of North, while at the same time capable of of problems of taste and historiography: the vaults at St. Annen, Annaberg (1495– expressing regional or personal identities. older historians of Gothic often professed 1525), and to the extraordinary work of Ornamental articulation encourages a nar- a real dislike for this mode, which they con- Benedikt Ried in the Vladislav Hall in rative reading that may impose a sense of sidered to be “overcharged” with ornament Prague (1493–1503). order while the similarities between the of a kind that had broken loose from its In chapter 1, “Ornament and Aesthetics,” complexities of Late Gothic architectural old role of expressing architectural behav- Kavaler introduces the difficulty many com- ornament and the look of goldwork may ior. A few carefully chosen juxtaposi- mentators have experienced with “orna- induce thoughts of celestial architecture. tions make the point: the “rational” forms ment,” which a Stoic or puritan mentality Chapter 2, “Flamboyant Forms,” allows of Saint-Maclou of Rouen (ca. 1440), in might see as extraneous to the essential the author to show us some of the building

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