Tuileries
After the death of Henry II, Catherine abandoned the palace of the Tournelles, where Henry had lain after a lance fatally pierced his eye and brain in a joust. To replace the Tournelles, she decided in 1563 to build herself a new Paris residence on the site of some old tile kilns or tuileries. The site was close to the congested Louvre, where she kept her household. The grounds extended along the banks of the Seine and afforded a view of the countryside to the south and west. The Tuileries was the first palace that Catherine had planned from the ground up. It was to grow into the largest royal building project of the last quarter of the sixteenth century in western Europe. Her massive building schemes would have transformed western Paris, as seen from the river, into a monumental complex.
To design the new palace, Catherine brought back Philibert de l'Orme from disgrace. This arrogant genius had been sacked as superintendent of royal buildings at the end of Henry II's reign, after making too many enemies. De l'Orme mentioned the project in his treatises on architecture, but his ideas are not fully known. It appears from the small amount of work carried out that his plans for the Tuileries departed from his known principles. De l'Orme is said to have "taught France the classical style—lucid, rational and regular". He notes, however, that in this case he added rich materials and ornaments to please the queen. The plans therefore include a decorative element that looks forward to Bullant's later work and to a less classical style of architecture.
For the pilasters of Catherine's palace, de l'Orme chose the Ionic order, which he considered a feminine form:
I will not go on to other matters without pointing out to you that I chose the present Ionic order, from amongst all others, in order to ornament and to give lustre to the palace, which Her Majesty the Queen, mother of the most Christian King Charles IX, today is having built at Paris . . .The other reason why I wanted to use and to show the Ionic order properly, on the palace of Her Majesty the Queen, is because it is feminine and was devised according to the proportions and beauties of women and goddesses, as was the Doric to those of men, which is what the ancients have told me: for, when they decided to build a temple to a god, they used the Doric, and to a goddess, the Ionic. Yet all architects have not followed that, shown in Vitruvius's text . . . accordingly I have made use, at the palace of Her Majesty the Queen, of the Ionic order, on the view that it is delicate and of greater beauty than the Doric, and more ornamented and enriched with distinctive features.
Catherine de' Medici was closely involved in planning and supervising the building. De l'Orme records, for example, that she told him to take down some Ionic columns that struck her as too plain. She also insisted on large panels between the dormers to make room for inscriptions. Only a part of de l'Orme's scheme was ever built: the lower section of a central pavilion, containing an oval staircase, and a wing on either side. Though work on de l'Orme's design was abandoned in 1572, two years after his death, it is nonetheless held in high regard. According to Thomson, "The surviving portions of the palace scattered between the Tuileries gardens, the courtyards of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the Château de la Punta in Corsica show that the columns, pilasters, dormers and tabernacles of the Tuileries were the outstanding masterpieces of non-figurative French Renaissance architectural sculpture".
De l'Orme's original plans have not survived. Jacques Androuet du Cerceau, however, has left us a set of plans for the Tuileries. One engraving shows a grandiose palace, with three courts and two oval halls. This design is atypical of de l'Orme's style and so is likely to have been du Cerceau's own proposal or his son Baptiste's. It recalls the houses with tall pavilions and multiple courtyards that du Cerceau often drew in the 1560s and 1570s. Architectural historian David Thomson suggests that the oval halls within du Cerceau's courtyards were Catherine de' Medici's idea. She may have planned to use them for her famously lavish balls and entertainments. Du Cerceau's drawings reveal that, before he published them in 1576, Catherine decided to join the Louvre to the Tuileries by a gallery running west along the north bank of the Seine. Only the ground floor of the first section, the Petite Galerie, was completed in her lifetime. It was left to Henry IV, who ruled from 1589 to 1610, to add the second floor and the Grande Galerie that finally linked the two palaces.
After de l'Orme died in 1570, Catherine abandoned his design for a freestanding house with courtyards. To his unfinished wing she added a pavilion that extended the building towards the river. This was built in a less experimental style by Jean Bullant. Bullant attached columns to his pavilion, as advocated in his 1564 book on the classical orders, to mark proportion. Some commentators have interpreted his different approach as a criticism of de l'Orme's departures from the style of Roman monuments.
Despite its unfinished state, Catherine often visited the palace. She held banquets and festivities there and loved to walk in the gardens. According to the French military leader Marshal Tavannes, it was in the Tuileries gardens that she planned the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre, in which thousands of Huguenots were butchered in Paris. The gardens had been laid out before work on the palace halted. They included canals, fountains, and a grotto decorated with glazed animals by the potter Bernard Palissy. In 1573, Catherine hosted the famous entertainment at the Tuileries that is depicted on the Valois tapestries. This was a grand ball for the Polish envoys who had come to offer the crown of Poland to her son, the duke of Anjou, later Henry III of France. Henry IV later added to the Tuileries; but Louis XVI was to dismantle sections of the palace. The communards set fire to the remainder in 1871. Twelve years later, the ruins were demolished and then sold off.
Read more about this topic: Catherine De' Medici's Building Projects