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Joined: 13 Mar 2011
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 Posted: Tue Mar 15, 2011 3:50 pm Post subject: R. J. Knecht's |
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Despite its unfinished state, Catherine often visited the palace. She held banquets and festivities there and loved to walk in the gardens.[47] According to the French military leader Marshal Tavannes, it was in the Tuileries gardens that she planned the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre, in which thousands of Huguenots were butchered in Paris.[62] The gardens had been laid out before work on the palace halted. They included canals, fountains, and a grotto decorated with glazed animals by the potter Bernard Palissy.[63] In 1573, Catherine hosted the famous entertainment at the Tuileries that is depicted on the Valois tapestries. This was a grand ball for the Polish envoys who had come to offer the crown of Poland to her son, the duke of Anjou, later Henry III of France.[64] Henry IV later added to the Tuileries; but Louis XVI was to dismantle sections of the palace. The communards set fire to the remainder in 1871. Twelve years later, the ruins were demolished and then sold off.[65]
[edit] Saint-Maur
The palace of Saint-Maur-des-Fossés, south east of Paris, was another of Catherine's unfinished projects. She bought this building, on which Philibert de l'Orme had worked, from the heirs of Cardinal Jean du Bellay, after the latter's death in 1560.[66] She then commissioned de l'Orme to finish the work he had begun there. Drawings by Jacques Androuet du Cerceau in the British Museum may shed light on Catherine's intentions for Saint-Maur. They show a plan to enlarge each wing by doubling the size of the pavilions next to the main block of the house. The house was to stay as one storey, with a flat roof and rusticated pilasters. That meant the extensions would not unbalance the masses of the building as seen from the side.[52]
De l’Orme died in 1570; in 1575 an unknown architect took over at Saint-Maur.[67] The new man proposed to heighten the pavilions on the garden side and top them with pitched roofs. He also planned two more arches over de l’Orme’s terrace, which joined the pavilions on the garden side.[68] In historian R. J. Knecht's view, the scheme would have given this part of the house, a "colossal, even grotesque" pediment.[69] The work was only partly carried out, and the house was never fit for Catherine to live in.
[edit] Hôtel de la Reine
A 1650 engraving by Israël Silvestre of the Hôtel de la Reine in Paris: the central and right-hand sections are those built during Catherine’s lifetime. The Colonne de l'Horoscope can be seen in the background, to the right.
After de l'Orme's death, Jean Bullant replaced him as Catherine's chief architect. In 1572, Catherine commissioned Bullant to build a new home for her within the Paris city walls. She had outgrown her apartments at the Louvre and needed more room for her swelling household.[70] To make space for the new scheme and its gardens, she had an entire area of Paris demolished.[71]adidas klokker
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