BOOKS ON ARCHITECTURE

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French

     Coming from a family of artists and artisans (his father Adrien was a joiner active between 1614 and 1634), Antoine Le Pautre, the brother of sculptor Jean Le Pautre, was an architect in Paris who designed the hôtel de Fontenay, the chapel at the Port-Royal Convent, and his masterpiece, the hôtel de Beauvais. There he brilliantly resolved the problems linked to the narrowness and the irregularity of the parcel (starting in 1654). Appointed Architect to the King's Buildings in 1648, then house architect to Gaston d'Orléans, the king's brother, in 1660, he created plans for Saint-Cloud. The celebrated cascade is attributed to him. He was among the first members of the Royal Academy of Architecture created in 1671.
Le Pautre's plans for residences fall naturally within the French tradition of his times: one finds allusions to the Luxembourg of Salomon de Brosse and to the château of Vaux-le-Vicomte by Louis le Vau. Some plans show features of an Italianism which distinguish them peculiarly from “architecturally correct” French classicism. One of the “pleasure palaces” clearly brings to mind Palladio's Villa Rotonda in Vicenza and Scamozzi's Rocca Pisana, even if their plans are not as perfectly symmetrical as those of their famous models. And one “country house” has a combination of curvilinear façades emphasized by giant pilasters and a circular central crowning which evoke Bernini's plans for the Louvre. Le Pautre, who however never went to Italy, communicates a certain fascination here for the architecture which was not yet called “baroque”.

Yves Pauwels (Centre d’études supérieures de la Renaissance, Tours) – 2013

Critical bibliography

R. W. Berger, Antoine Le Pautre. A French Architect of the Era of Louis XIV, New York University Press, College Art Association of America, 1969.

M. Préaud, Inventaire du fonds français, Graveurs du XVII^e siècle, Antoine Lepautre, Jacques Lepautre et Jean Lepautre, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, 1993, XI, 1.