Bernini's Louvre

In the mid-17th century, the Louvre in Paris was the subject of several plans by various architects - Bernini, Cortona etc. However, the designs were rejected as "too Italian" and the winner of the design competition was a doctor from Lorraine - Charles Perrault (also the author of Cinderella) - with his stark neo-classical colonnade.

But say one of Bernini's designs had been accepted? Bernini already influenced Mansart in his design for the Chapelle des Bourbons at St. Denis (never built and the design reused for the church of the Invalides), and French art and architecture set the tone for the rest of Europe until the Revolution. What would more than a passing lip-service to the Italian Baroque do to Paris?
 
I just thought of a way (sort of) to keep the Louvre as a royal residence. Colbert was originally dead-set against the move of the court to Versailles permanently. LXIV disliked Paris due to the Fronde(s). So have Colbert be able to have a more convincing argument about why the king should live at the Louvre/Les Tuileries than OTL. That way, Bernini's design is for a royal residence, not just for a palace that barely gets used.

That said, bump.
 

Vitruvius

Donor
Well I think its a complicated situation. Part of the reason Bernini was rejected, aside from court politics, was that France was already coming into its own at the time. French artists and architects were already emerging of the same caliber as their Italian colleagues so it won't be necessary to continue to import Romans anymore and thus Rome will no longer be the center of art and architecture for Western Europe. So I think its too late to stave off the divergence of French Baroque from Roman Baroque. If anything Bernini's plan, if executed, might be like the last gasp of Roman influence in Paris. Of course it would still have its influences its just that the French had already absorbed about all they were ever going to from the Rome, which is frankly quite a lot. Consider Mansart's own plan for the Louvre or Le Vau's College des Quatres Nations in this respect. It's also hard to pin Perrault's design as purely Neoclassical. For one the term is anachronistic in this context for another the spacing and rhythm of the columns and the massing of the blocks is baroque and the giant order is clearly taken from Rome. For a stark neoclassical palace take a look at Boullee's plans for Versailles. By contrast to Bernini's first plan it represents a more severe classicism but it has strong strains of the Baroque. And besides even in defeat Bernini had some wider influence. Nicodemus Tessin's plan for the Royal Palace in Stockholm was strongly influenced by Bernini's revised oval-less plan for the Louvre which he studied while he was visiting Paris.

So if Bernini's first plan was accepted and built I'm not sure what the effects would be. As you mentioned the court moved to Versailles so that Chateau rather than the Palais du Louvre served as the model for foreign royal residences so that's an added obstacle. If its like OTL Louvre where its basically a big useless building then I don't know, maybe more knock on affects down the road that affect the Neoclassical reaction to the Rococo. Certainly it wouldn't provide the same reference to Servandoni's Saint Sulpice facade which OTL heralded the beginning of the Neoclassical period. Maybe we could see a more flamboyant, less severely classical French Baroque. The closest thing I could think of is 17th-18th century Sicily but I doubt you'd see Paris go quite as far as Catania or even Torino for that matter (though something like the Palazzo Carignano might be possible). Again I think the particular classicism of French Baroque was already set by Bernini's time. And with the French Academy having such an important role and the Academy being so tightly controlled by the state the official style and thus popular style will probably continue to take its queues from the King so unless Louis really likes Bernini's Louvre I'm not sure you'd see profound shifts in French architecture. Though it could have effects on English architecture.
 
Bernini's plan for the Louvre they actually started building, it was discontinued after the laying of the foundation stone, however, since, as one detractor pointed out: the design contained enough errors, that were the errors stones, they could build a new Louvre.

OTOH hand, Bernini when he was going to rebuild the palace, came up with a design that was not only for the Louvre, but for the palais des Tuileries as well, linking the two - nearly two centuries ahead of Napoléon III and Visconti, and 50 years after Henri IV built the Grande Galerie.

It might've been interesting to see the two palaces connected as Henri IV had originally planned too - although Jacques Androut Cerceau was to do that in the Henrician scheme.
 
I have a sort of rough idea for how to get Bernini's plan away from the drawing board:

Sometime near the middle of the 1650s, Mazarin (an Italian living in France who had a large influence on LXIV) gets Bernini to Paris by means fair or foul (maybe alongside Urbanus VII's Barberini nephews). Bernini is commissioned to design the Louvre Palace as OTL. First design Mazarin and the king reject as too Italian for Paris, second design goes over a little better, but Mazarin suggests that Bernini get a French assistant to help him (IDK if Mansart was active in the '50s or no). Either way, project 3 gets approved and they start building. When Mazarin dies they're about 55-65% done, and Bernini's gone back to Rome. The work slowly grinds to a halt due to LXIV's dislike of Paris and the channelling away of funds to Versailles. The palace is finished on a much less grand scale than Berniniplanned but rather to French mid Baroque tastes than that of the Roman high baroque. As a way of demonstrating his own dislike for the palace, Louis turns it over to the Academie, while it's generally referred to as the "Italian eyesore" by the Parisians.

*I'm basing much of this on the fate of Bernini's equestrian statue of Louis. The king disliked it, but rather than destroy it, he simply had a few details on it changed by an obliging French sculptor and banished it to a distant part of the gardens of Versailles.

Do you guys think this is plausible or no?
 
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