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Author: Admin | 2025-04-28
Made of bronze, marble or lead, the 386 works of art in Versailles (including 221 decorating the gardens) make it the biggest open-air sculpture museum in the world. The vast space in garden at the foot of the Palace and the vast wooded area of the park allowed Le Nôtre to develop the principles he had applied at Vaux-le-Vicomte on a greater scale. Much more than just a gardener, André Le Nôtre – Landscape Architect and Controller General of Buildings – also mastered the rules of perspective and painting which he had learned from Simon Vouet in his youth, in a dynamic studio where he befriended the sculptor Louis Lerambert and notably also Charles Le Brun. The latter was a great artist who came into the public eye thanks to Fouquet with Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte and was quickly promoted to the position First Painter to the King. He established himself as head designer for decoration and celebrations and, alongside Le Nôtre, went on to work on the majority of the royal houses. It was therefore a tried and tested team which Louis XIV commissioned in 1662 with carrying out a very ambitious programme for the embellishment and expansion of the estate inherited from his father. From the outset, Louis XIV made clear his desire to make the estate a dramatic statement of his power in addition to the notion of enjoyment inherent to any garden. The use of water, a costly resource, required the construction of the famous pump known
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