so keep in mind that French art historians don't really call French Baroque architecture by that name in fact each particular architectural style is named after whoever was in rule at the time so louis xiii louis xiv louis the fifteenth those are their stylistic designations recall those large-scale buildings that we saw towards the end of the Renaissance here this is the chateau de chambord and in this symmetrical Renaissance style remember that this was the little vacation spot of Francis the first and his guest was Leonardo and Leonardo had with him of course the Mona Lisa which is why the Mona Lisa is in France and not in Italy so a French architecture rejects the more elaborate style of Italian Baroque but it's still pretty fussy there is an emphasis on classicism to strengthen the concepts of the power of the monarchy but towards the end of the Baroque period when about 1655 when louis i am the state xiv reflects on his aesthetic style you know he becomes the longest ruling monarch in european history he starts renovating the Louvre a project that was started by his father and significantly Goldstar bang-bang-bang he moves the courts to Versailles and this is done for political reasons we'll talk about that in just a moment so let's take a look on the map at the Loire Valley here is the lawar River and there are probably over a thousand Chateau within this region this has been occupied since at least the 12 of 1500 s BCE it is invaded by different groups but finally it settles down to be the garden of France after about the third century this is a time when wineries are in the region and there's this tremendous buildings building boom and so we've got distinct architectural styles covering everything from early medieval to the Baroque usually the Chateau were built on the sites of former feudal strongholds that were centuries old by this point in time now today many of them are privately owned and placed they are places that you can visit Francoise monsaert is the best known French architect of the Baroque period he's working at the end of the reign of louis xiii and overlaps to louis xiv he is inspired by the structural and geometric skill that was developed under the French King Louis the fourth I'm reading Roman numerals and it makes me nuts he used a brick and stone extensively and he worked in creating this kind of a town house build out in Paris but in the lawar he's going for this symmetrical perfectionist style and he develops a rough style that bears his name this is called a mansard roof do you see how it is a tall peaked roof the Chateau Bois is an amazing building it was worked on over a span of hundreds and hundreds of years and so we've got three different styles going on this is man sart's contribution but we've also got parts of the building that were created in the Renaissance so this is the first part of the chateau and then they created a Gothic Revival and then finally the Baroque that you see here so this is a place that you can visit today we have lots of information about it and very interestingly in the summertime now they will do these light projection shows in order to draw visitors to the region so here is a close up of that mansard roof that we were talking about you can see that it has a very high pitch and then it pitches in again so we call that a double pitch roof here is an interior space and you can see all the classical references you see we've got a column reference here we've got this string course or in tablature we've got a lunette with a sculpture program and you've got to love these little pootie these little angels that bubble off the side of the the wall into our space remember that Palladio's Villa rotunda is the most influential piece of architecture from the Renaissance this is a place that he knew up man Sartre knew up he had read Palladio's book as had many other architects of the day so this is the Louvre in Paris and the Louvre has had an amazing long history as a fort a prison a chateau a palace and finally as a museum so the of course the prison aspect is is no longer visible it does look like a palace by its sheer size alone so the main build-out here during the Baroque period was 60 and 67 to 1670 the Louvre was at that point in time created on the city's western edge and it just got bigger and bigger as a city grew it grew around it there was a square plan here and then two long wings let's go to the plan view all right so we start back here and then it gets larger and larger and larger here's the river son and when you visit today this is how it looks we've got the mansard roof we've got three stories we have a colonnade which is a classical element and of course you have to notice the contemporary glass pyramid this is part of the entrance structure that was designed by the Chinese American architect I am pay this original design was extremely controversial as you can imagine especially because it was done by an American and not by someone who was French but the nice thing about it is that it clearly marks where to get into the building when I went to the Louvre I got so lost I couldn't find a main entrance and so I entered way back in antiquities and I walked for seven blocks trying to find the paintings so everybody starts here it throws light into the entrance complex which is below it and it is transparent so you can still see the building on either side so Fort prison Chateau palace and museum the others very significant French Baroque pick a piece of architecture is of course Versailles Versailles is about 20 minutes away today from Paris and it was designed as a hunting lodge now for those of you who've been there you know it is everything but a hunting lodge and it was developed specifically during this French Baroque period to be huge okay so ii louis xiv moved everybody from the court to versailles and he did that for a very specific reason so in 1660 we've got our first enlargement 1677 louis xiv moves the court and all administration to versailles versailles houses one hundred thousand people during the enlargement of the structure there was a workforce of thirty six thousand people and all of the Royal workshops were kept very busy because this huge building needed furniture and wood floors and tapestries and carpets and mirrors and porcelain and artwork not since the time of ancient Rome had such a building program on this grand scale been seen and grand scale describes what we see here this was originally a central court hunting lodge that looked out over the countryside and it just got bigger and bigger over time it has a full sized Church in it has an opera house and what's most important of all is that this building was designed so that the king could keep control of the court this is a time of excessive daily habits of the king where he's got 25 people that help him put his shoes on and 100 people that that make his food and if everyone is there helping the king they don't have time to plot against him the Hall of Mirrors of course is the best-known interior space in Versailles this was designed by Harden and mance art as far as the architecture went and then Lebrun did the ceiling panels this is a must have been a magical room because today you see those crystal chandeliers they would have had candles in them so imagine being dressed in French court attire of the 17th century and walking through this parquet floor with the mirrors on one side and then every one of these arches contains a set of double French doors and those French doors look out over the elaborate gardens they have torch ariz these light standards which also would have featured candlelight they bread they had live orange trees inside so it was really a magical place this was a a reception area a place where foreign dignitaries would come there would be dancing and and gambling and state assembly some of the furniture was solid silver which of course was stolen and melted down during the French Revolution Louise demand for his own life depicted in the ceiling fresco necessitated the French windows these floor-to-ceiling windows to let in enough light to see Louie as that godlike figure in sealing and so then let's spin around and look out the door so here is Versailles there is the hall of mirrors and here is this amazing symmetrical garden one of the things it's known for are all these water elements so we have formal gardens and then we have fountains and then we've got hidden gardens or grottoes so that this was a place where Louis employed tremendous hydraulic engineers they created a special water system in order to pump the massive quantities needed to get the water into where the fountains were and so what would happen is that the water system could not support all of the fountains at once so when the King decided he wanted to go for a walk there would be a series of courtiers who would be stationed along the path so as the King passed the fountain would be roaring and then they would have a system of whistling that would alert the pumping station and this is the painting of the pumping station it would alert the pumping station to turn off the fountain that the King just passed and turn on the fountain that he was going to see next and that afforded him with this amazing set of water elements these grottoes then here that the the bath of Apollo were little secret places to hide you know intrigued and trysts were a big part of French court life as the French Revolution is coming into play the court life at Versailles is so intense and so stressful that Louie builds a little house on the property of the big house a place to retreat the grand of treating all but it's not small enough for Marie Antoinette we'll talk about Marie in detail we talked about the French Revolution here shortly during the Rococo period but Marie was a German princess who had been kind of thrust into this elaborate court life and she got real fed up with it and so she created not just one small house but also a small country house and she would retreat to these small country houses with her children she would shoe fancy attire where simple country clothes let her children play with little pet animals that they had as a way to escape the stress of court life and of course that stress of court life is going to come to a head very shortly