Louis Le Vau
Louis Le Vau designed Vaux-le-Vicomte and then began building Versailles for Louis XIV. Together with the painter Le Brun and the garden designer Le Nôtre he created the French Baroque whole of building, interior and park.
Louis Le Vau was born in 1612 in Paris, the son of a master builder, and learned the trade in his father’s business. He never travelled to Italy, which was unusual for a French architect at the time, but studied Italian architecture through books and engravings. In the 1630s and 1640s he built town houses, hôtels, in Paris, among them on the Île Saint-Louis, where he lived himself. The Hôtel Lambert with its staircase and its gallery showed his talent for scenographic spaces.
His breakthrough came with Vaux-le-Vicomte, which he built for the finance minister Fouquet in 1658–1661 with Le Brun and Le Nôtre. After Fouquet’s fall Louis XIV took on the whole team. Le Vau became the king’s First Architect in 1654 and worked at the Louvre and the Tuileries. From 1661 he rebuilt the king’s hunting lodge at Versailles, and in 1668 he began wrapping the old château in a new building, the enveloppe, facing the garden. He also designed the Collège des Quatre-Nations, today the Institut de France, opposite the Louvre, with a domed church and curved wings.
Le Vau died in 1670, and his work at Versailles was continued by François d’Orbay and later Jules Hardouin-Mansart. He had laid the foundations for French classicism under Louis XIV, in which architecture, painting, sculpture and garden design worked together to display the king’s power. That model spread across Europe. In Sweden Tessin the Elder and Tessin the Younger drew on French palace architecture, and Drottningholm with its French garden shows the legacy of Vaux-le-Vicomte and Versailles.