Volume 33, Number 8 · May 8, 1986
Right Man, Wrong Job
By Robert M. Adams
Diary of the Cavaliere Bernini's Visit to France
by Paul Fréart de Chantelou, edited with an introduction by Anthony Blunt, annotated by George C. Bauer, translated by Margery Corbett
Princeton University Press, 366 pp., $49.00
Bernini in France: An Episode in Seventeenth-Century History
by Cecil Gould
Princeton University Press, 158 pp., $29.00
The old castle-fortress of the Louvre was originally built by a restless, truculent monarch, Philip II Augustus, starting in 1204; it stood outside the walls of Paris as a military redoubt while the French kings occupied that structure on the Ile de la Cité known today as the Palais de Justice. As a fortress, the Louvre was steadily enlarged by a succession of monarchs until in the sixteenth century François I resolved to tear down the medieval castle and raise in its place a château in the then new 'Italian' style. But converting a fort to a royal residence was a tremendous project, progress was slow because of wars both foreign and domestic, and from monarch to monarch the plans kept changing. After successive revisions and additions by Henri II, his widow Catherine de Médicis, Henri IV, and Louis XIII, the still expanding structure was left in a considerable muddle.
Review, 4091 words
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