Veue du chasteau de Versailles (View of Versailles, garden facade)
Adam Perelle
An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art
The classical monumentality of the elongated facade of Versailles, built in stages between 1670 and 1689, is beautifully rendered in this print by Adam Perelle (1640–1695). The gardens situated beneath the impressive facade are designed to complement and set off its architectural form. Evolving over a period of forty years, the immense estate of Versailles was built by a team of artists and architects: Charles Le Brun was general director, Louis Le Vau and Jules Hardouin Mansart the architects, André Le Nôtre the garden designer, François Girardon and Jean-Baptiste Tuby among the more than seventy sculptors involved with garden ornament. Based on a network of east-west avenues and cross avenues, Le Nôtre created a strictly symmetrical composition surrounding a central axis with a total length of close to ten kilometers, providing sweeping prospects over the entire park. A system of terraces leads down from the Grand Galerie at the center of the palace facade to the Grand Canal, moving by way of the Basin of Latona down the Tapis Vert or Allée Royale to the Basin of Apollo. Each level contained a series of garden-rooms, richly filled with colorful parterres and sculpture. Although augmented and replanted over the centuries, in essence the framework of the Versailles garden remains as Le Nôtre designed it.
Drawings and Prints
An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.