In Le Village Royal, a boutique-lined passageway in Paris, is an awe-inspiring installation of colorful umbrellas by Sextafeira Produções. The passageway is always popular with shoppers and window shoppers, but now this high-end alleyway is attracting foot traffic from all walks of life, thanks to the art installation.
Featuring 800 polychromed parapluies (umbrellas) floating overhead, the Umbrella Sky Project takes public art to new heights. Entering Le Village Royal, one is dazzled by a magical, multicolored canopy of open umbrellas. As sunlight illuminates the shades, the passageway is transformed into a colorful space.
This is not the first time the Umbrella Sky Project has saturated city streets in color. From a Portuguese town to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, over 25 locations all over the world have gotten the Umbrella Sky Project’s Technicolor treatment. Intended to “bring color and joy and promote places and their surroundings,” these installations are hugely successful.
If there is a more beautifully constructed space on earth than Sainte-Chapelle, then I have yet to find it! Glass and color and stone have never been more masterfully combined than in this place. It’s alchemy.
Feast your eyes!
The Sainte-Chapelle, an architectural gem set within the Palais de la Cité, was founded by King Louis IX (later to become Saint Louis) in the mid-13th century to house the relics of the Passion.
Originally at the service of the monarchy, the building is composed of the lower chapel, used by the Palace staff, and the upper chapel, reserved to the King and his entourage, where the relics were kept. The stained glass windows, set in the Flamboyant Gothic architecture, are one of a kind.
Sainte-Chapelle (Holy Chapel) – Upper Chapel, Paris, France
First, I take you on a guided tour starting at the facade and going into the upper and lower chapels, ending with a video of the exterior work that is going on now. For you history buffs, my usual spiel is at the end. :-)
The Sainte-Chapelle (holy chapel) is the royal chapel in the Gothic style, within the medieval Palais de la Cité, the residence of the Kings of France until the 14th century, on the Île de la Cité in the River Seine in Paris.
Construction began after 1238; the chapel was consecrated on 26 April 1248. The Sainte-Chapelle is considered among the highest achievements of the Rayonnant period of Gothic architecture. It was commissioned by King Louis IX of France to house his collection of Passion relics, including Christ’s Crown of Thorns – one of the most important relics in medieval Christendom, later hosted in the nearby Notre-Dame Cathedral until the 2019 fire, which it survived.
Along with the Conciergerie, the Sainte-Chapelle is one of the earliest surviving buildings of the Capetian royal palace on the Île de la Cité. Although damaged during the French Revolution, and restored in the 19th century, it has one of the most extensive 13th-century stained glass collections anywhere in the world.
The royal chapel is a prime example of the phase of Gothic architectural style called “Rayonnant,” marked by the feeling of weightlessness and strong vertical emphasis. It stands squarely upon a lower chapel, which served as parish church for all the inhabitants of the palace, which was the seat of government. The King Louis IX was later recognized as a saint by the Catholic Church. His title became Saint Louis.
The Sainte-Chapelle, in the courtyard of the royal palace on the Île de la Cité (now part of a later administrative complex known as La Conciergerie), was specifically built to house Louis IX’s collection of relics of Christ, which included the Crown of Thorns, the Image of Edessa and some thirty other items.
Louis purchased his Passion relics from Baldwin II, the Latin emperor at Constantinople, for the sum of 135,000 livres, though this money was actually paid to the Venetians, to whom the relics had been pawned. The relics arrived in Paris in August 1239, carried from Venice by two Dominican friars.
Upon arrival, King Louis hosted a week-long celebratory reception for the relics. For the final stage of their journey they were carried by the King himself, barefoot and dressed as a penitent, a scene depicted in the Relics of the Passion window on the south side of the chapel.
The relics were stored in a large and elaborate silver chest, the Grand-Chasse, on which Louis spent a further 100,000 livres.
The entire chapel, by contrast, cost 40,000 livres to build. In 1246, fragments of the True Cross and the Holy Lance were added to Louis’ collection, along with other relics. The chapel was consecrated on 26 April 1248 and Louis’ relics were moved to their new home with great ceremony.
As well as serving as a place of worship, the Sainte-Chapelle played an important role in the political and cultural ambitions of King Louis and his successors. With the imperial throne at Constantinople occupied by a mere Count of Flanders, and with the Holy Roman Empire in uneasy disarray, Louis’ artistic and architectural patronage helped to position him as the central monarch of western Christendom. In this way, the Sainte-Chapelle fit into a long tradition of prestigious palace chapels.
Just as the Emperor could pass privately from his palace into the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, so now Louis could pass directly from his palace into the Sainte-Chapelle.
More importantly, the two-story palace chapel had obvious similarities to Charlemagne’s palatine chapel at Aachen (built 792–805)—a parallel that Louis was keen to exploit in presenting himself as a worthy successor to the first Holy Roman Emperor.
The contemporary visitor entering the courtyard of the Royal Palace would have been met by the sight of a grand ceremonial staircase (Grands Degres) to their right and the north flank and eastern apse of the Sainte-Chapelle to their left.
The chapel exterior shows many of the typical characteristics of Rayonnant architecture—deep buttresses surmounted by pinnacles, crocketted gables around the roof-line and vast windows subdivided by bar tracery.
The internal division into upper and lower chapels is clearly marked on the outside by a string-course, the lower walls pierced by smaller windows with a distinctive spherical triangle shape. Despite its decoration, the exterior is relatively simple and austere, devoid of flying buttresses or major sculpture and giving little hint of the richness within.
No designer-builder is named in the archives concerned with the construction. In the 19th century it was assumed (as with so many buildings of medieval Paris) to be the work of the master mason Pierre de Montreuil, who worked on the remodelling of the Royal Abbey of Saint-Denis and completed the south transept façade of Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris. Modern scholarship rejects this attribution in favor of Jean de Chelles or Thomas de Cormont, and the hand of an unidentified master mason from Amiens.
The Sainte-Chapelle’s most obvious architectural precursors include the apsidal chapels of Amiens Cathedral, which it resembles in its general form, and the Bishop’s Chapel (c. 1180s) of Noyon Cathedral, from which it borrowed the two-story design. As has often been argued, however, the major influence on its overall design seems to have come from contemporary metalwork, particularly the precious shrines and reliquaries made by Mosan goldsmiths.
The Parisian palatine chapel, built to house a reliquary, was itself like a precious reliquary turned inside out (with the richest decoration on the inside). Although the interior is dominated by the stained glass, every inch of the remaining wall surface and the vault was also richly colored and decorated. Analysis of remaining paint fragments reveals that the original colours were much brighter than those favoured by the 19th-century restorers and would have been close to the colors of the stained glass. The quatrefoils of the dado arcade were painted with scenes of saints and martyrs and inset with painted and gilded glass, emulating Limoges enamels, while simulated rich textiles hangings added to the richness of the interior.
Above the dado level, mounted on the clustered shafts that separate the great windows, are 12 larger-than-life-sized sculpted stone figures representing the 12 Apostles (six of these are replicas—the damaged originals are now in the Musée du Moyen Age). Each carries a disk marked with the consecration crosses that were traditionally marked on the pillars of a church at its consecration. Niches on the north and south sides of the chapel are the private oratories of the king and of his mother, Blanche of Castile.
The most famous features of the chapel, among the finest of their type in the world, are the great stained-glass windows, for whose benefit the stone wall surface is reduced to little more than a delicate framework. Fifteen huge mid-13th-century windows fill the nave and apse, while a large rose window with Flamboyant tracery (added to the upper chapel c. 1490) dominates the western wall.
Arranged across 15 windows, each 15 metres high, the stained glass panes depict 1,113 scenes from the Old and New Testaments recounting the history of the world until the arrival of the relics in Paris.
Despite some damage, the windows display a clear iconographical program. The three windows of the eastern apse illustrate the New Testament, featuring scenes of The Passion (center) with the Infancy of Christ (left) and the Life of John the Evangelist (right). By contrast, the windows of the nave are dominated by Old Testament exemplars of ideal kingship/queenship in an obvious nod to their royal patrons. The cycle starts at the western bay of the north wall with scenes from the Book of Genesis (heavily restored).
The next ten windows of the nave follow clockwise with scenes from Exodus, Joseph, Numbers/Leviticus, Joshua/Deuteronomy, Judges, (moving to the south wall) Jeremiah/Tobias, Judith/Job, Esther, David and the Book of Kings.
The final window, occupying the westernmost bay of the south wall brings this narrative of sacral kingship right up to date with a series of scenes showing the rediscovery of Christ’s relics, the miracles they performed, and their relocation to Paris in the hands of King Louis himself.
Above, the Sainte-Chapelle rises above the rooflines of the royal palace. Miniature by the Limbourg brothers, c. 1400
Much of the chapel as it appears today is a re-creation, although nearly two-thirds of the windows are authentic. The chapel suffered its most grievous destruction in the late eighteenth century during the French Revolution, when the steeple and baldachin were removed, the relics dispersed (although some survive as the “relics of Sainte-Chapelle” in the treasury of Notre Dame de Paris), and various reliquaries, including the grande châsse, were melted down.
The Sainte-Chapelle was requisitioned as an archival depository in 1803. Two metres’ worth of glass was removed to facilitate working light and destroyed or put on the market. Its well-documented restoration, completed under the direction of Félix Duban in 1855, was regarded as exemplary by contemporaries and is faithful to the original drawings and descriptions of the chapel that survive.
The Sainte-Chapelle has had various stages of restoration from the 1970s onwards. Air pollution, the elements, and the large number of visitors all cause damage to the stained glass windows. Also, in 1945 a layer of external varnish had been applied to protect the glass from the dust and scratches of wartime bombing. This had gradually darkened, making the already fading images even harder to see.
In 2008, a more comprehensive seven-year programme of restoration was begun, costing some €10 million to clean and preserve all the stained glass, clean the facade stonework and conserve and repair some of the sculptures. Half of the funding was provided by private donors, the other half coming from the Villum Foundation.
Included in the restoration was an innovative thermoformed glass layer applied outside the stained glass windows for added protection. The project was completed in 2015 in time for the 800th anniversary of the birth of St. Louis, who had ordered the construction of the chapel.
A bronze replica of the south door of the Baptistery by Andrea Pisano was unveiled today on the feast day of Florence’s patron saint John the Baptist. The copy of Andrea Pisano’s masterpiece was made using 700-year-old techniques.
Earlier this month I had the good fortune to visit Paris and the Fondation Louis Vuitton in the Bois de Boulogne. While there, I had the best kind of close encounter: Soto’s kinetic creation, Pénétrable BBL Bleu.
Soto’s striking installation was on an open level of the Frank Gehry building, which suited it perfectly.
In case you didn’t know, Jesús Rafael Soto was a Venezuelan artist who was best known for his kinetic sculptures and large scale optical installations. Born in 1923 in Ciudad Bolivar, Soto remained in Venezuela for his formative years, before moving to Paris in 1950 where he would remain for the rest of his life, while keeping a workshop in Caracas from 1975 onwards.
Very early on, he attached himself to post-war avant-garde modernism and became part of the abstract art circles. His participation in the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles in 1951, followed by his involvement in the celebrated exhibition Le Mouvement at the Galerie Denise René in Paris in 1955 alongside Marcel Duchamp, Alexander Calder, and Victor Vasarely, bears witness to this commitment.
By the late 1960s, Soto was known as a leader in kinetic art, with works that were remarkable for their illusions of sensory vibrations.
Soto’s Pénétrable BBL Bleu is what I saw and experienced in Paris.
La Basilique Royale de Saint-Denis is not only the first true example of the Gothic style of architecture, but also the burial place for French royalty. It would be an understatement to state that it is a major church in Christendom.
The Basilica of Saint-Denis (French: La Basilique royale de Saint-Denis, or simply Basilique Saint-Denis) is a large medieval abbey church in the city of Saint-Denis, now a northern suburb of Paris. The building is of singular importance historically and architecturally as its choir, completed in 1144, shows the first use of all of the elements of Gothic architecture. Watch this brief Khan Academy video to get up to speed on Gothic.
Saint Denis was the patron saint of France and became the first bishop of Paris. He was decapitated on the hill of Montmartre in the mid-third century with two of his followers, and is said to have subsequently carried his head to the site of this current church, indicating where he wanted to be buried. A martyrium was erected on the site of his grave, which became a famous place of pilgrimage during the fifth and sixth centuries.
The site originated as a Gallo-Roman cemetery in late Roman times. The archeological remains still lie beneath the cathedral; the people buried there seem to have had a faith that was a mix of Christian and pre-Christian beliefs and practices.
Around 475 St. Genevieve purchased some land and built Saint-Denys de la Chapelle. In 636 on the orders of Dagobert I the relics of Saint Denis, the patron saint of France, were reinterred in the basilica.
The basilica became a place of pilgrimage and the burial place of the French kings and queens, with nearly every king from the 10th to the 18th centuries buried there. Moreover, there were many royal tombs from previous centuries.
St. Denis was not used for the coronations of kings, that function being reserved for the Cathedral of Reims; however, French Queens were commonly crowned there. “Saint-Denis” soon became the abbey church of a growing monastic complex.
All but three of the monarchs of France from the 10th century until 1789 have their remains here. Some monarchs, like Clovis I (465–511), were not originally buried at this site. The remains of Clovis I were exhumed from the despoiled Abbey of St Genevieve which he founded.
In the 12th century, the Abbot Suger rebuilt portions of the abbey church using innovative structural and decorative features. In doing so, he is said to have created the first truly Gothic building. The basilica’s 13th-century nave is the prototype for the Rayonnant Gothic style, and provided an architectural model for many medieval cathedrals and abbeys of northern France, Germany, England and many other countries.
Above: the Rayonnant Gothic choir of St Denis.
Dagobert, the king of the Franks, reigned from 628 to 637, and he refounded the church as the Abbey of Saint Denis, a Benedictine monastery. Dagobert commissioned a new shrine to house the Saint Denis’s remains, which was created by his chief councillor, Eligius, a goldsmith by training.
King Dagobert’s own tomb in St. Denis below:
Above and below: the tomb of King Dagobert
When Abbot Suger was modifying the church, the façade was also redesigned and included tall, thin statues of Old Testament prophets and kings attached to columns (known as “jamb figures”) flanking the portals.
These jamb statues were an attractive addition to the Gothic façade, and were subsequently used at the cathedrals of Paris and Chartres, constructed a few years later, and became a feature of almost every Gothic portal thereafter.
Above the doorways, the central tympanum was carved with Christ in Majesty, displaying his wounds while the dead emerge from their tombs below. Scenes from the martyrdom of St. Denis were carved above the south (right hand) portal, while above the north portal was a mosaic (now lost), even though this was already retardataire, or, as Suger put it: “contrary to the modern custom.”
The French Revolution, havoc wreaked:
Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People.
Because of the church’s connections to the French monarchy and proximity to Paris, the abbey of Saint-Denis was a prime target of revolutionary vandalism. All of the medieval monastic buildings were demolished in 1792 and, unfortunately, the facade of the church suffered much mutilation at the hands of the revolutionaries. They mistakenly believed that the jamb statues depicted the kings of France. In this mistake, they battered the Gothic statuary, leaving little of the exterior’s decorative program intact.
Fortunately, especially for the study of the history of art, we have a record of how the jamb sculptures appeared in Montfaucon’s drawings.
The portal tympana sculpture was also defaced.
The tombs and effigies were obviously at risk during this chaotic time and so they were wisely relocated, by calmer minds than those of the pesky revolutionaries, to the Musée des Monuments Français by Alexandre Lenoir in 1798.
For a relatively brief period, the relics of St-Denis were transferred to the parish church of the town in 1795; they were returned to the abbey in 1819.
Of the original sculpture, very little remains, most of what is now visible being the result of rather clumsy restoration work in 1839. Some fragments of the original sculptures survive in the collection of the Musée de Cluny in Paris.
Although the revolutionaries left the church itself standing, it was deconsecrated, its treasury confiscated and its reliquaries and liturgical furniture melted down for their metallic value (although some objects, including a chalice and aquamanile donated to the abbey in Suger’s time, were successfully hidden and survive to this day) and the remaining royal tombs desecrated.
The church was reconsecrated (reopened) by Napoléon in 1806 and the tomb sculptures returned to Saint-Denis when Lenoir’s Musée des Monuments Français was closed after the restoration of the monarchy.
The royal remains, however, were left in the mass graves to which they had been placed in 1798.
Below is the Bourbon crypt, or the Memorial to King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette, sculptures (1830) by Edme Gaulle and Pierre Petitot
Under the direction of architect Viollet-le-Duc, famous for his work on Notre-Dame de Paris, church monuments that had been taken to the Museum of French Monuments were returned to the church. The corpse of King Louis VII, who had been buried at Barbeau Abbey and whose tomb had not been touched by the revolutionaries, was brought to Saint-Denis and buried in the crypt. In 2004, the mummified heart of the Dauphin, the boy who would have been Louis XVII, was sealed into the wall of the crypt.
The abbey church contains some fine examples of cadaver tombs. The effigies of many of the kings and queens are on their tombs, but their bodies were removed during the French Revolution. The ancient monarchs were removed in August 1793 to celebrate the revolutionary Festival of Reunion, then the Bourbon and Valois monarchs were removed to celebrate the execution of Marie Antoinette in October 1793. The bodies were dumped into three trenches and covered with lime to destroy them.
Archaeologist Alexandre Lenoir saved many of the monuments by claiming them as artworks for his Museum of French Monuments. The bodies of several Plantagenet monarchs of England were likewise removed from Fontevraud Abbey during the French Revolution.
At top are Effigies on the tomb of Henry II and Catherine de’ Medici, carved by Germain Pilon.
The bodies of the beheaded King Louis XVI, his wife Marie Antoinette of Austria, and his sister Madame Élisabeth were not initially buried in Saint-Denis, but rather in the churchyard of the Madeleine, where they were covered with quicklime.
The body of the Dauphin, who died of illness and neglect at the hands of his revolutionary captors, was buried in an unmarked grave in a Parisian churchyard near the Temple.
In 1817, the restored Bourbons ordered the mass graves to be opened, but only portions of three bodies remained intact. The remaining bones from 158 bodies were collected into an ossuary in the crypt of the church, behind marble plates bearing their names.
During the restoration the Bourbons ordered search for the corpses of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, but only a few bones were found that were presumably the king’s and a clump of greyish matter containing a lady’s garter, were found on 21 January 1815. They were brought to Saint-Denis and buried in the new Bourbon crypt.
King Louis XVIII, upon his death in 1824, was buried in the center of the crypt, near the graves of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. The coffins of royal family members who died between 1815 and 1830 were also placed in the vaults.
The church, including the architectural sculpture and stained glass windows (of which very little medieval glass survives) was heavily restored in the mid-nineteenth century by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, the same architect responsible for the restoration of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame. Under Viollet-le-Duc’s direction, church monuments that had been taken to the Museum of French Monuments were returned to the church.
The present location of the tomb effigies does not correspond to their medieval locations.
The corpse of King Louis VII, who had been buried at Barbeau Abbey and whose tomb had not been touched by the revolutionaries, was brought to Saint-Denis and buried in the crypt. In 2004, the mummified heart of the Dauphin, the boy who would have been Louis XVII, was sealed into the wall of the crypt.
I was so fortunate when I visited the Fondation Louis Vuitton recently that an excellent exhibition from London was on view. I couldn’t help myself: it was so refreshing to see “modern art” in Paris after non stop Renaissance art in Florence all of the time. Ha! Never thought I’d live to say those words!
Oops! I fell way behind on posting my Paris adventures! Let me start again now!
The Louis Vuitton Foundation, in French: La Fondation Louis Vuitton, has its home in a spectacular building in the 16th arrondissement, Paris, France. This building serves as an art museum and cultural center, sponsored by the group LVMH and its subsidiaries. It is run as a legally separate, nonprofit entity as part of LVMH’s promotion of art and culture. And isn’t the world lucky for all of that!
In 2001, Bernard Arnault, the Chairman of LVMH, met world-renowned architect, Frank Gehry, and told him of plans for a new building for the Louis Vuitton Foundation for Creation on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne. Suzanne Pagé, then director of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, was named the foundation’s artistic director in charge of developing the museum’s program.
Not everything went according to plan.
The city of Paris, which owns the park, granted a building permit in 2007. In 2011, an association for the safeguard of the Bois de Boulogne won a court battle, as the judge ruled the centre had been built too close to a tiny asphalt road deemed a public right of way.
Opponents to the site had also complained that a new building would disrupt the verdant peace of the historic park.
The city appealed the court decision and eventually a special law was passed by the Assemblée Nationale that the Fondation was in the national interest and “a major work of art for the whole world,” which allowed it to proceed.
I believe I was very fortunate to visit La Fondation on a clear, sunny day (because, believe me…some of the days were cold and cloudy during my visit), and because I was able to see the exhibit from London’s Courtauld Institute. I’ll post about the exhibit itself another day. My focus today is on the incredible building itself.
The Fondation Louis Vuitton is located on prime property in Paris, next to the Jardin d’Acclimatation in the Bois de Boulogne, the famous park on the west side of the Capitol city. Napoleon III and the Empress Eugénie opened the Jardin d’Acclimatation in October 1860. They thus provided the Paris they were intent on rebuilding with a landscaped park designed in accordance with the model of English gardens that they so admired.
The building soars!
And it frames the sky and the park and city beyond it:
The following paragraphs are taken from the Fondation’s website:
“From an initial sketch drawn on a blank page in a notebook, to the transparent cloud sitting at the edge of the Jardin d’Acclimatation in the Bois de Boulogne, Frank Gehry constantly sought to “design, in Paris, a magnificent vessel symbolising the cultural calling of France.”
:A creator of dreams, he has designed a unique, emblematic and bold building.
Respectful of a history rooted in French culture of the 19th century, Frank Gehry dared to use technological achievements of the 21st century, opening the way for pioneering innovation.”
“Frank Gehry retained from the 19th century the transparent lightness of glass walls and the taste for walks punctuated by surprises.
“His architecture combines a traditional “art de vivre”, visionary daring and the innovation offered by modern technology.
“From the invention of glass curved to the nearest millimetre for the 3,600 panels that form the Fondation’s twelve sails to the 19,000 panels of Ductal (fibre-reinforced concrete), each one unique, that give the iceberg its immaculate whiteness, and not forgetting a totally new design process, each stage of construction pushed back the boundaries of conventional architecture to create a unique building that is the realisation of a dream.”
“This great architectural exploit has already taken its place among the iconic works of 21st-century architecture. Frank Gehry’s building, which reveals forms never previously imagined until today, is the reflection of the unique, creative and innovative project that is the Fondation Louis Vuitton.
“To produce his first sketches, Frank Gehry took his inspiration from the lightness of late 19th-century glass and garden architecture. The architect then produced numerous models in wood, plastic and aluminium, playing with the lines and shapes, investing his future building with a certain sense of movement. The choice of materials became self-evident: an envelope of glass would cover the body of the building, an assembly of blocks referred to as the “iceberg”, and would give it its volume and its vitality.
“Placed in a basin specially created for the purpose, the building fits easily into the natural environment, between woods and garden, while at the same time playing with light and mirror effects. The final model was then scanned to provide the digital model for the project.”
One of the many delights of Paris is the Fondation Louis-Vuitton pour la création with its exhibition spaces and fountain. I’ll be posting soon about the building itself, by Frank Gehry. But for now, I want to focus only on the water.
The water is also inside the building, sort of. The sound of the water from inside the building reminds me of Frank Lloyd Wright’s house in Pennsylvania: Falling Water.
Sainte-Chapelle (Holy Chapel) – Upper Chapel, Paris, France
get back, lauretta! 
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