BeauxArts, 1992, stiff glossy pictorial covers, illustrated, 65 pages, 22 cms x 28.4 cms, condition: as new.i
The Luxembourg Palace of Paris, France.was originally built (16151645) to the designs of the French architect Salomon de Brosse to be the royal residence of the regent Marie de' Medici, mother of King Louis XIII. After the Revolution it was refashioned (17991805) by Jean Chalgrin into a legislative building and subsequently greatly enlarged and remodeled (18351856) by Alphonse de Gisors. The palace has been the seat of the upper houses of the various French national legislatures (excepting only the unicameral National Assembly of the Second Republic) since the establishment of the Sénat conservateur during the Consulate; as such, it has been home to the Senate of the Fifth Republic since its establishment in 1958.
Immediately west of the palace on the Rue de Vaugirard is the Petit Luxembourg, now the residence of the Senate President; and slightly further west, the Musée du Luxembourg, in the former orangery. On the south side of the palace, the formal Luxembourg Garden presents a 25-hectare (62-acre) green parterre of gravel and lawn populated with statues and large basins of water where children sail model boats.
Marie de' Medici, the widow of Henry IV, desired to make a building similar to her native Florence's Palazzo Pitti; to this effect she had the architect Métezeau (either Louis Métezeau or his brother, Clément Métezeau) sent to Florence to make detailed drawings of the building'. She bought the Hôtel de Luxembourg and its fairly extensive domain in 1612 and commissioned the new building, which she referred to as her Palais Médicis, in 1615. Its construction and furnishing formed her major artistic project, though nothing remains today of the interiors as they were created for her, save some architectural fragments reassembled in the Salle du Livre d'Or. The suites of paintings she commissioned, in the subjects of which she expressed her requirements through her agents and advisers, are scattered among museums.
