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Tracing the transformation of Louis XIII's modest hunting lodge into the spectacular showplace of the French monarchy, photographs of the architecture, interiors, and gardens include research on the architecturally innovative and influential palace.
A fascinating, lavishly illustrated history of the art and architecture of Paris has been expanded to encompass more than eight hundred illustrations and detailed descriptions to capture the diverse beauty of Notre Dame's Gothic splendor, the French Impressionist paintings housed at the Musée d'Orsay, the Louvre, new architectural landmarks, and designs for works in progress.
The French chateau Vaux-le-Vicomte was built in just five years from 1657 to 1661 by Louis XIV's Minister of Finance Nicolas Foucquet, halfway between the royal summer houses of Vincennes and Fontainebleau. Designed by Louis Le Vau, decorated by Charles Le Brun and with gardens laid out by Andre Le Notre, the house was still partially unfinished on the 17th August 1661 when Foucquet invited the King to the celebrated reception that was followed almost immediatley by Foucquet's arrest. Within weeks, the house was under judicial seal, the team of craftsmen disbanded or removed to Versailles and Foucquet was in prison. Despite its politically unstable history and the threat of demolition during the French Revolution, Vaux has survived remarkably unaltered and intact.
Chateaux of the Loire Valley presents the Loire Valley s achitectural heritage in brilliant photographs. Descriptions of castles and monuments are complemented by maps, timetables, genealogys of the kings of France, glossaries and bibliographies."
An innovative analysis of the representational strategies that constructed Catherine de’ Medici and sought to explain her behaviour and motivations.
Leading French painters in the late medieval period executed miniatures for lavishly illuminated books of hours. In the mid-fifteenth century, Simon de Varie commissioned such a book. Completed in 1455, it included five priceless works by the most eminent French painter of the time, Jean Fouquet, as well as other striking paintings by two of his contemporaries. In the seventeenth century, Simon de Varie's book was divided into three sections and sold as separate volumes. Two of these volumes are today in the Royal Library in The Hague. The third volume--thought lost until 1984, when it surfaced in a private collection and was subsequently acquired by the Getty Museum--contains the first mini...
This volume explores the various strategies by which appropriate pasts were construed in scholarship, literature, art, and architecture in order to create “national”, regional, or local identities in late medieval and early modern Europe. Because authority was based on lineage, political and territorial claims were underpinned by historical arguments, either true or otherwise. Literature, scholarship, art, and architecture were pivotal media that were used to give evidence of the impressive old lineage of states, regions, or families. These claims were related not only to classical antiquity but also to other periods that were regarded as antiquities, such as the Middle Ages, especially ...
The world-famous chateaux of the Loire attract hundreds of thousands of visitors every year. In this book, the photographer Robert Polidori has captured more than seventy of them in unique pictures. He depicts the Chateau of Blois in its imposing beauty, the original fortifications in Chinon and Angers, and the Magnificent Azay-le-Rideau. It goes without saying that the splendid Chambord is here as well, a place redolent of legend and history like almost no other.