The Escalier Daru (Daru Staircase), also referred to as Escalier de la Victoire de Samothrace , is one of the largest and most iconic interior spaces of the Louvre Palace in Paris , and of the Louvre Museum within it. Named after Pierre, Count Daru , a minister of Napoleon , and initially designed in the 1850s by Hector-Martin Lefuel as part of Napoleon III's Louvre expansion , it received its current Stripped Classicism appearance in the early 1930s. Since 1883, its focal point has been the Winged Victory of Samothrace , one of the highlights of the Louvre's collections.
21-640: The Escalier Daru is the last in a series of increasingly monumental staircases built to serve this area of the Louvre building. In 1722, as the old Queen Mother's apartment on the ground floor of the Petite Galerie was being prepared to be the residence of Mariana Victoria of Spain the betrothed of Louis XV , a staircase was built to lead directly into the Salon Carré on the upper level, dubbed Escalier de l'Infante after Mariana Victoria. Following
42-504: A new staircase in the context of intensive planning for the creation of a public museum in the Louvre's Grande Galerie . Soufflot's design was implemented from 1781 by his successor Maximilien Brébion [ fr ] . The new staircase or Escalier du Salon , which replaced the Escalier de l'Infante , opened on the ground floor on the Cour de la Reine that was intended to become
63-406: A plan for a single floor, one room wide, that coincides closely with what was actually built. According to Henri Sauval , writing around 1650 but not published until 1724, the wing was one-storey high surmounted by a terrace. He credited the design to an architect named Chambiche (thought to be the stonemason Pierre II Chambiges (1545–1616) ). Pierre Lescot , the architect of the Louvre at the time,
84-474: Is generally credited with the initial design, but construction stopped around 1568, as the Wars of Religion gathered momentum, when the walls may not have risen as high as the tops of the windows. In the late 16th century, during the reign of Henry IV , a second storey was added ( piano nobile ) consisting of a large full-length room decorated as a gallery celebrating former kings and queens of France, known as
105-709: Is now the southeastern corner of the Cour Napoléon. To suitably lead visitors from there to the highlights of the museum's collection in the Grande Galerie , Napoleon's architects Charles Percier and Pierre Fontaine designed a monumental staircase, soon dubbed the Escalier Percier et Fontaine , that started next to the Rotonde de Mars and led straight to the Salon Carré. The structural work
126-768: The Salle Percier et Fontaine . The Escalier Daru was still unfinished at the end of the Second Empire . Its current focal point, the Winged Victory of Samothrace , was only placed at its center after Lefuel's death in 1880. The sculpture had been found in Samothrace in 1863, and shipped to Paris in 1879. It was installed in the Daru Staircase in 1883. In 1882, Lefuel's successor Edmond Guillaume [ fr ] started making plans for
147-790: The Louvre Palace , which connects the buildings surrounding the Cour Carrée with the Grande Galerie bordering the River Seine . Begun in 1566, its current structures date mainly from the 17th and 19th centuries. Most of its main floor is now the Galerie d'Apollon , one of the Louvre's most iconic spaces. The foundation of the Petite Galerie was begun in 1566 under Charles IX . Jacques Androuet du Cerceau 's Les plus excellents bastiments de France , published in 1576, shows
168-563: The Salle des Peintures or Galerie des Rois . A portrait of Marie de' Medici by Frans Pourbus the Younger , still in the Louvre , is a rare remnant of this series. In the second half of the 1650s, the ground floor was lavishly decorated for Anne of Austria as her summer apartment ( appartement d'été ), whose ornate ceilings partly survive to this day. These rooms had previously been
189-528: The article wizard to submit a draft for review, or request a new article . Search for " Edmond Guillaume " in existing articles. Look for pages within Misplaced Pages that link to this title . Other reasons this message may be displayed: If a page was recently created here, it may not be visible yet because of a delay in updating the database; wait a few minutes or try the purge function . Titles on Misplaced Pages are case sensitive except for
210-547: The Louvre's extensive complex of mid-19th-century horse stables. In the early 2010s, as the Winged Victory was temporarily removed for restoration, the option of uncovering the late-19th-century mosaics was considered. But it was eventually rejected by the Louvre's curators, and the staircase was kept in its mid-1930s state. Petite Galerie of the Louvre The Petite Galerie is a wing of
231-459: The completion of the staircase. A team of Italian specialists created colorful mosaics for the vaulted ceilings, representing Victories holding palms and portraits of illustrious figures, on a design by painter Jules-Eugène Lenepveu . The final completion was designed by Louvre architect Camille Lefèvre [ fr ] and his successor from 1930 Albert Ferran, in the Art Deco style of
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#1732765065119252-647: The context of Napoleon III's Louvre expansion . The exteriors of the Petite Galerie facing the Seine (south) and the Jardin de l'Infante (east) have been kept in their state as restored by Duban. Inside, the ground floor is now part of the Louvre's department of classical antiquities, and the first floor is the Galerie d'Apollon. In playful reference to the Grande Galerie (whose name is much more widely known to
273-642: The ending of the engagement and her return to Spain after just three years, the Salon Carré became the venue for the yearly art show of the Académie des Beaux-Arts - thus the word Salon for such shows. Visitors would use the Escalier de l'Infante to access the Salon from the Cour de la Reine , later known as Cour du Sphinx and covered with a glass ceiling in 1934. Shortly before his death in 1780, Louvre architect Jacques-Germain Soufflot designed
294-591: The entrance of the museum, and led to what is now the Salle Duchâtel on the upper floor, immediately to the north of the Salon Carré in Le Vau's wing doubling the Petite Galerie to the west. Following the first opening of the Louvre Museum in 1793 and its reorganization under Napoleon in the early 1800s, the museum's main entrance was established further north, through the Rotonde de Mars on what
315-400: The exterior façades of the Petite Galerie, simultaneously with those of the eastern half of the Grande Galerie facing the Seine. He reversed the changes made by Le Vau and aimed at carefully restoring the designs of the time of Henry IV, based on 17-century engravings by Jean Marot . On the western side, Le Vau's façade became the eastern side of the enclosed Cour du Sphinx in the 1850s in
336-463: The new composition. Lefuel had presented eight successive projects to preserve Percier and Fontaine's ensemble, but eventually gave up and dismantled most of it in 1865 to give way to the new one. Even so, he was able to preserve some of the ceilings and columns of Percier and Fontaine's upper level, in the first-floor rooms that are now between the Escalier Daru and the Salon Carré, now known as
357-521: The times, and executed in 1932-1934 as part of a broader museum modernization effort led by Louvre Director Henri Verne . Ferran covered the mosaics with stone-patterned wallpaper, broadened the stairs, and brought forward the Winged Victory to make it more prominent. In 1997, in the third phase of the Grand Louvre project, the Escalier Daru was extended downwards to serve the newly opened gallery of Archaic Greece , in what had formerly been part of
378-501: The venue for the King's Council. A major fire on 6 February 1661 destroyed most of the Galerie des Rois, though not the ground floor. The gallery's exterior was rebuilt in the 1660s with a new design by Louis Le Vau , who added a parallel wing doubling the Petite Galerie to the West. Inside, the upper floor was rebuilt as the Galerie d'Apollon . In 1849, architect Félix Duban renovated
399-1356: The visiting public than that of the Petite Galerie), the Louvre museum in 2015 renamed an temporary exhibition space of its Richelieu Wing as the "petite galerie", signaling its dedication to displays aimed at younger visitors. 48°51′35″N 2°20′13″E / 48.85977°N 2.33683°E / 48.85977; 2.33683 Edmond Guillaume Look for Edmond Guillaume on one of Misplaced Pages's sister projects : [REDACTED] Wiktionary (dictionary) [REDACTED] Wikibooks (textbooks) [REDACTED] Wikiquote (quotations) [REDACTED] Wikisource (library) [REDACTED] Wikiversity (learning resources) [REDACTED] Commons (media) [REDACTED] Wikivoyage (travel guide) [REDACTED] Wikinews (news source) [REDACTED] Wikidata (linked database) [REDACTED] Wikispecies (species directory) Misplaced Pages does not have an article with this exact name. Please search for Edmond Guillaume in Misplaced Pages to check for alternative titles or spellings. You need to log in or create an account and be autoconfirmed to create new articles. Alternatively, you can use
420-423: The western end, that was a new staircase named, like the gallery that led to it and the pavilion in which it stood, after Nicolas François, Count Mollien , another of Napoleon's ministers. At the eastern end, Lefuel initially wanted to keep Percier & Fontaine's staircase for its aesthetic value, but was overruled by Napoleon III or by his State Minister Achille Fould , who insisted on a new staircase aligned with
441-592: Was completed in 1807, but the lavish decoration designed by Percier and Fontaine took many more years and was only completed under their supervision during the Bourbon Restoration . In the context of Napoleon III's Louvre expansion , Lefuel created a new entrance for the museum, west of the earlier one, on the ground floor of the Pavillon Denon . From there, two monumental galleries led west and east and were to end with monumental staircases. At
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