Palais du Louvre

The Louvre Palace (french: link=no, Palais du Louvre, ), often referred to simply as the Louvre, is an iconic French palace located on the Right Bank of the Seine in Paris, occupying a vast expanse of land between the Tuileries Gardens and the church of Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois. Originally a military facility, it has served numerous government-related functions in the past, including intermittently as a royal residence between the 14th and 18th centuries. It is now mostly used by the Louvre Museum, which first opened there in 1793.

Whereas the area had been inhabited for thousands of years, the Louvre's history starts around 1190 with its first construction as a castle defending the western front of the Wall of Philip II Augustus. The Louvre's oldest section still standing above ground, its Lescot Wing, dates from the late 1540s, when Francis I started the replacement of the medieval castle with a new design inspired by classical antiquity and Italian Renaissance architecture. Most parts of the current building were constructed in the 17th and 19th centuries.

For more than three centuries, the history of the Louvre has been closely intertwined with that of the Tuileries Palace, created to the west of the Louvre by Catherine de' Medici in 1564 and finally demolished in 1883. The Tuileries was the main seat of French executive power during the last third of that period, from the return of Louis XVI and his court from Versailles in October 1789 until the palace was set on fire during the Paris Commune of 1871. The Pavillon de Flore and Pavillon de Marsan, which used to respectively mark the southern and northern ends of the Tuileries, are now considered part of the Louvre Palace. The Carrousel Garden, first created in the late 19th century in what used to be the great courtyard of the Tuileries (or Cour du Carrousel), is now considered part of the Tuileries Garden. A less high-profile but historically significant dependency of the Louvre was to its immediate east, the Hôtel du Petit-Bourbon, appropriated by the monarchy following the betrayal of the Constable of Bourbon in 1523 and mostly demolished in October 1660 to give way to the Louvre's expansion. The last remains of the Petit-Bourbon were cleared in the 1760s.

General description

This sections provides a summary description of the present-day complex and its main constituent parts.

Location and layout

The Louvre Palace is situated on the right bank of the Seine, between the Quai François Mitterrand to its south, the to its west (thus named since 1957; formerly and , converted into an underpass in 1987–1989), the Rue de Rivoli to its north, and the Place du Louvre to its east. The complex occupies about 40 hectares with buildings distributed around two main open spaces: the eastern Cour Carrée (square courtyard), which is closed by four wings that form the square of its name, and the central Cour Napoléon, which is open on its western side, beyond the thoroughfare known as Place du Carrousel, towards the Carrousel Garden and the rest of the Tuileries Garden.

The Louvre is slightly askew of the Historic Axis (''Axe historique''), a roughly eight-kilometre (five-mile) architectural line bisecting the city. The axis begins with the Louvre courtyard, at a point now symbolically marked by a lead copy of Bernini's equestrian statue of Louis XIV, and runs west along the Champs-Élysées to La Défense and slightly beyond.

Since 1988, the Louvre Pyramid in the middle of the Cour Napoléon has marked the center of the Louvre complex. At the same time, the Louvre Museum has adopted a toponymy developed by the Carbone Smolan Agency to refer to the three clusters of buildings that surround that central focus point:
* To the east, the "Sully Wing" is the square-shaped set of buildings that surrounds the Cour Carrée, named after Maximilien de Béthune, Duke of Sully. It includes the 16th-century Lescot Wing and the footprint of the Medieval Louvre whose remains are displayed underground;
* To the south, the "Denon Wing" is the array of buildings between the Cour Napoléon and the Seine, named after the Louvre's first director Vivant Denon. the Louvre's southwestern wing is the Aile de Flore. The long Grande Galerie runs on the first floor for much of the length of this building, on the Seine-facing side.
* To the north, the "Richelieu Wing" is the almost-symmetrical array of buildings between the Cour Napoléon and the rue de Rivoli, named after Cardinal Richelieu. Its western extension alongside rue de Rivoli is the , itself continued by the Aile de Marsan.

The Louvre Museum occupies most of the palace's space, but not all of it. The main other users are at the building's two western tips: in the southwestern Aile de Flore, the École du Louvre and Center for Research and Restoration of Museums of France (C2RMF); and in the northwestern Aile de Marsan, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. In total, some 51,615 square meters (555,000 square feet) in the palace complex are devoted to public exhibition floor space.

Many sections of the Louvre are referred to as "wings" () and "pavilions" () – typically, the pavilions are the blocks at either the end or the center of a wing. In the Louvre's context, the word "wing" does not denote a peripheral location: the Lescot Wing, in particular, was built as the Louvre's main corps de logis. Given the Louvre wings' length and the fact that they typically abutted parts of the city with streets and private buildings, several of them have passageways on the ground floor which in the Louvre's specific context are called .

Toponymy

The origin of the name Louvre is unclear. French historian Henri Sauval, probably writing in the 1660s, stated that he had seen "in an old Latin-Saxon glossary, Leouar is translated castle" and thus took Leouar to be the origin of Louvre. According to Keith Briggs, Sauval's theory is often repeated, even in recent books, but this glossary has never been seen again, and Sauval's idea is viewed as obsolete. Briggs suggests that H. J. Wolf's proposal in 1969 that Louvre derives instead from Latin ''Rubras'', meaning "red soil", is more plausible. David Hanser suggests instead that the word may come from French , a "place where dogs were trained to chase wolves".

Beyond the name of the palace itself, the toponymy of the Louvre can be treacherous. Partly because of the building's long history and links to changing politics, different names have applied at different times to the same structures or rooms. For example, what used to be known in the 17th and 18th centuries the or is now generally referred to as Pavillon de l'Horloge, or (especially when considered from the west), or also after the architect Jacques Lemercier who first designed it in 1624. In some cases, the same name has designated different parts of the building at different times. For example, in the 19th century, the referred to what was later called the (still later, ), on the south side of the Grande Galerie facing the Seine, before becoming the name for the main pavilion of the Richelieu Wing On the rue de Rivoli, its exact symmetrical point from the Louvre Pyramid. The main room on the first floor of the Lescot Wing has been the , , , , in the 16th and 17th centuries. It was fragmented into apartments during the 18th century, then recreated in the early 19th and called successively , or (the latter also being the name of two other ceremonial rooms, created in the 1850s and 1860s respectively); then as part of the museum, , after 1871 in honor of donor Louis La Caze, , and since 2021 . The room immediately below, now known as , has also been called , , , , (from 1692 to 1793), and in the past, among other names.

Sully Wing

The Sully Wing forms a square of approximately side length. The protruding sections at the corners and center of each side are known as . Clockwise from the northwest corner, they are named as follows: (after a now-disappeared street), (after the nearby ), (also ), (also ), (also ), , , and , the latter also known as . The section between the Pavillon du Roi and the Pavillon Sully, known as the Lescot Wing () as it was designed by architect Pierre Lescot, is the oldest standing part of the entire Louvre Palace. The section between the Pavillon Sully and the Pavillon de Beauvais, which was modeled after the Lescot Wing by architect Jacques Lemercier, is similarly known as the Lemercier Wing (). The eastern wing is the , named after its iconic eastern façade, the Louvre Colonnade initially designed by Charles Perrault.

Denon and Flore Wings

On the southern side of the Cour Napoléon, the Denon Wing's three main pavilions are named respectively, from east to west, after Napoleon-era officials Pierre Daru, Vivant Denon and Nicolas François Mollien. Between these and the wing facing the seine are three courtyards, from east to west the (covered as a glass atrium since 1934), (ground floor covered since 2012), and . On the side of the Seine, this wing starts with the north–south bordering a side garden known as the , and continues westwards along the Quai François Mitterrand with the Salon Carré, Grande Galerie, and Pavillon de Flore. In the middle of the Grande Galerie are the , a composition of three monumental arches flanked by two narrow pavilions named respectively after the Duke of Lesdiguières and Henri de La Trémoille ( and ). Further west are the , a protruding structure on the northern side, the , a passageway to the quay, the on the north side, now the main entrance to the École du Louvre, and finally the Pavillon de Flore.

Richelieu and Marsan Wings

Similarly, on the northern side of the Cour Napoléon are, from east to west, the pavilions named after Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Cardinal Richelieu, and Anne Robert Jacques Turgot. Between these and the rue de Rivoli are three courtyards, from east to west the (formerly ), (formerly or ), and (formerly or ). On the side facing the rue de Rivoli, the main salient feature is the , which connects to the through the ground-floor (formerly ) between the and . Further west are the and the , built in the early 19th century and named after the nearby , then the and the Pavillon de Marsan, both rebuilt by Hector Lefuel in the 1870s.

Pyramid and underground spaces

The Louvre Pyramid, built in the 1980s on a design by I. M. Pei, is now the centerpiece of the entire Louvre complex. It leads to the underground which in turn serves a vast complex of underground spaces, including the Carrousel du Louvre commercial mall around an inverted pyramid further west.

Architectural style

The present-day Louvre Palace is a vast complex of wings and pavilions which, although superficially homogeneous in scale and architecture, is the result of many phases of building, modification, destruction and reconstruction. Its apparent stylistic consistency is largely due to conscious efforts of architects over several centuries to echo each other's work and preserve a strong sense of historical continuity, mirroring that of the French monarchy and state; American essayist Adam Gopnik has written that "The continuity the Louvre represents is the continuity of the French state." For example, from the 1620s to the 1650s Jacques Lemercier thoroughly replicated the Lescot Wing's patterns for his design of the northern half of the western wing of the Cour Carrée. In the 1660s Louis Le Vau echoed Lemercier's Pavillon de l'Horloge for his redesign of the central pavillon of the Tuileries Palace further west (burnt in 1871 and demolished in 1883), and mostly continued Lescot's and Lemercier's pattern for the completion of the Cour Carrée. A separate design a few years later, that associated with Claude Perrault for the Louvre Colonnade, included window shapes on the ground level based on Lescot's for the Pavillon du Roi a century earlier, ensuring visual continuity even though the dramatic colonnade on the upper level was different from anything that had been done at the Louvre so far. In the 1810s, Percier and Fontaine copied the giant order of the western section of the Grande Galerie, built in the early 17th century and attributed to Jacques II Androuet du Cerceau, for their design of the northern wing to connect the Tuileries with the Louvre along the rue de Rivoli. In the 1850s during Napoleon III's Louvre expansion, architects Louis Visconti then Hector Lefuel built the Denon and Richelieu pavilions as echoes of Lemercier's Pavillon de l'Horloge. In the 1860s and 1870s, Lefuel used designs inspired by the Lescot Wing even as he replaced the prior giant-order patterns created by Androuet du Cerceau and replicated by Percier and Fontaine. Finally, in the 1980s, I. M. Pei made explicit reference to André Le Nôtre, the designer of the Tuileries Garden, for his design of the Louvre Pyramid.

Building history

This section focuses on matters of design, construction and decoration, leaving aside the fitting or remodeling of exhibition spaces within the museum, which are described in the article Louvre. No fewer than twenty building campaigns have been identified in the history of the Louvre Palace. The architect of the largest such campaign, Hector Lefuel, crisply summarized the identity of the complex by noting: "" (translatable as "The Louvre is a building that has gone through a lot"). In the early 1920s Henri Verne, who would soon become the Louvre's Director, noted that "it has become, through the very slow pace of its development, the most representative monument of our national life."

Late 12th and 13th centuries

In 1190 King Philip II of France, who was about to leave for the Third Crusade, ordered the construction of a defensive wall all around Paris. To protect the city, he opted to build the Louvre as a fortress just outside the wall's junction with the Seine on its right bank, on the road to the Duchy of Normandy that was still controlled by his English rivals. Completed in 1202, the new fortress was situated in what is now the southwest quadrant of the Cour Carrée, and some of its remains, excavated between late 1983 and late 1985, are conserved underground.

The original Louvre was nearly square in plan, at seventy-eight by seventy-two meters, and enclosed by a 2.6-metre thick crenellated and machicolated curtain wall. The entire structure was surrounded by a water-filled moat. On the outside of the walls were ten round defensive towers: one at each corner and at the center of the northern and western sides, and two pairs respectively flanking the narrow gates on the southern and eastern sides.

In the courtyard, slightly offset to the northeast, was the cylindrical keep or donjon, known as the (Great Tower of the Louvre), thirty meters high and fifteen meters wide with 4-meter-thick external walls. The keep was encircled by a deep, dry ditch with stone counterscarps to help prevent the scaling of its walls with ladders. Accommodations in the fortress were supplied by the vaulted chambers of the keep as well as two wings built against the insides of the curtain walls of the western and southern sides. The circular plans of the towers and the keep avoided the dead angles created by square or rectangular designs which allowed attackers to approach out of firing range. Cylindrical keeps were typical of French castles at the time, but few were as large as the Louvre's .

Louis IX added constructions in the 1230s, included the medieval Louvre's main ceremonial room or in which several historical events took place, and the castle's first chapel. The partly preserved basement part of that program was rediscovered during heating installations at the Louvre in 1882–1883, and has since then been known successively as the and, after renovation in the 1980s, as the .

14th century

In the late 1350s, the growth of the city and the insecurity brought by the Hundred Years' War led Etienne Marcel, provost of the merchants (i.e. municipal leader) of Paris, to initiate the construction of a new protective wall beyond that of Philip II. King Charles V continued the project in the 1360s, and it was later known as the Wall of Charles V. From its westernmost point at the Tour du Bois, the new wall extended east along the north bank of the Seine to the old wall, enclosing the Louvre and greatly reducing its military value.Ballon 1991, p. 15. Remains of that wall have been uncovered and reconstructed in the present-day Louvre's Carrousel du Louvre.

Shortly after becoming king in 1364 Charles V abandoned the Palais de la Cité, which he associated with the insurgency led by Etienne Marcel, and made the Louvre into a royal residence for the first time, with the transformation designed by his architect . This was a political statement as well as a utility project – one scholar wrote that Charles V "made the Louvre his political manifesto in stone" and referred to it as "a remarkably discursive monument-a form of architectural rhetoric that proclaimed the revitalization of France after years of internal strife and external menace." The curtain wall was pierced with windows, new wings added to the courtyard, and elaborate chimneys, turrets, and pinnacles to the top. Known as the ("pretty Louvre"), Charles V's palace was memorably pictured in the illustration ''The Month of October'' of the ''Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry''.

15th century

In the late 14th and early 15th centuries, the preferred royal residence in Paris was the Hôtel Saint-Pol in what became the Marais, until the Armagnac–Burgundian Civil War resulted in the monarchy leaving Paris altogether; in the 1420s and 1430s Charles VII resided largely at or near Bourges, whereas his rival English claimant Henry VI's representative, the Duke of Bedford, generally resided in his base of Rouen, and while in Paris in his Hôtel des Tournelles. Even after Charles VII's ceremonial entry into Paris in 1437 and after the effective end of the Hundred Years' War in 1453, French monarchs preferred residing in the Châteaux of the Loire Valley, the Palace of Fontainebleau or, when in Paris, at the Château de Vincennes or the Hôtel des Tournelles. Meanwhile, the Louvre Castle was left in a state of increasing disrepair, even as it remained used as an arsenal and prison.

File:Fouilles exécutées dans la cour du Louvre - Mise à jour des fondations de l'ancienne tour de Philippe Auguste.jpg, First excavation of the medieval Louvre by Adolphe Berty in 1866
File:Louvre medieval foundations flickr.jpg, Remains of the Louvre's basement level, restored and opened to the public in the 1980s
File:Salle Saint-Louis (Louvre).jpg, The following its remodeling in the 1980s
File:Louvre - Les Très Riches Heures.jpg, The Louvre pictured in the ''Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry'', 1410s
File:Tour de Nesle and Louvre castle on the Crucifixion of the Parlement of Paris.jpg, The Louvre pictured in the ', mid-15th century
File:Pieta de Saint-Germain-des-Près - Old Louvre castle.jpg, The Louvre seen from the south, pictured in the ''Pietà of Saint-Germain-des-Prés'', late 15th century

16th century

In 1528, after returning from his captivity in Spain following his defeat at Pavia, Francis I ordered the demolition of the Louvre's old keep. In 1546 he formally commissioned the architect Pierre Lescot and sculptor Jean Goujon to modernize the Louvre into a Renaissance style palace, but the project appears to have actually started in 1545 since Lescot ordered stone deliveries in December of that year. The death of Francis I in 1547 interrupted the work, but it restarted under Francis's successor Henry II who on 10 July 1549 ordered changes in the building's design.

Lescot tore down the western wing of the old Louvre Castle and rebuilt it as what has become known as the Lescot Wing, ending on the southern side with the Pavillon du Roi. In the latter, he designed in 1556 the ceiling for Henry II's bedroom, still largely preserved after relocation in 1829 to the Louvre's Colonnade Wing, for which he departed from the French tradition of beamed ceilings. On the ground floor, Lescot installed monumental stone caryatids based on classical precedents in the , now known as the . On the northern end of the new wing, Lescot created a monumental staircase in the 1550s, long known as the (now , with sculpted ceilings attributed to Jean Goujon.

During the early 1560s, Lescot demolished the southern wing of the old Louvre and started to replace it with a duplication of the Lescot Wing. His plan may have been to create a square complex of a similar size as the old Louvre, not dissimilar to the Château d'Écouen that had been recently completed on Jean Bullant's design, with an identical third wing to the north and a lower, entrance wing on the eastern side. A contested hypothesis attributes to Lescot the first intent to extend the Louvre's courtyard to its current size by doubling the lengths of the wings, even though no implementation was made of such plans until the 1620s.

Lescot also credited with the design of the Petite Galerie, which ran from the southwest corner of the Louvre to the Seine. All work stopped in the late 1560s, however, as the Wars of Religion gathered momentum.

In the meantime, beginning in 1564, Catherine de' Medici directed the building of a new residence to the west, outside the wall of Charles V. It became known as the Tuileries Palace because it was built on the site of old tile factories (). Architect Philibert de l'Orme started the project, and was replaced after his death in 1570 by Jean Bullant. A letter of March 1565 indicates that Catherine de' Medici already considered a building to connect the Tuileries with the older Louvre building.

File:Bastiments v1 (Gregg 1972 p20) - Louvre west wing court facade.jpg, Court facade of the Lescot Wing, engraved by Jacques Androuet du Cerceau, 1576
File:Bastiments v1 (Gregg 1972 p21) - Louvre Pavillon du Roi river facade.jpg, Pavillon du Roi, south facade, du Cerceau, 1576
File:Manuscrit Français 9152 - Palais du Louvre.jpg, The Louvre in an engraving, 1580s
File:Plan of the Louvre with the modifications by Lescot - Berty 1868 after p168 – Gallica 2013 (adjusted).jpg, Ground-floor plan of the Renaissance Louvre with the Lescot Wing at the top and the south wing on the left
File:West facade of the Lescot wing by H Legrand - Berty 1885 v2 after p56 - Gallica 2013 (adjusted).jpg, West facade of the Lescot Wing c. 1560, elevation drawing by architect Henri Legrand (1868) based on historical documents
File:Israël Silvestre 049-10 Veüe et Perspective de la partie du Louure ou sont les apartemens du Roy et de la Reyne du coste du Jardin.jpg, South facade with the Pavillon du Roi on the left and the southeast tower of the old Louvre on the right (engraved by Israël Silvestre, c. 1650)
File:Israël Silvestre 049-09 Veüe et Perspectiue de la Galerie du Louure, dans laquelle sont les Portraus des Roys des Reynes et des plus Illustres du Royaume.jpg, View of the Petite Galerie with the south wing on the right (engraved by Silvestre before 1654)

Henry IV, France's new king from 1589 (the first from the House of Bourbon) and master of Paris from 1594, is associated with the further articulation of what became known as the ("Grand Design") of uniting the Louvre and the Tuileries in a single building, together with the extension of the eastern courtyard to the current dimensions of the Cour Carrée. From early 1595 he directed the construction of the Grande Galerie, designed by his competing architects Louis Métezeau and Jacques II Androuet du Cerceau, who are respectively credited with the eastern and western sections of the building by a long tradition of scholarship. This major addition, about 460 meters long, was built along the bank of the Seine. On the ground floor at the eastern end of the new wing, Métezeau created a lavishly decorated room that was known as the or , later called and now . At the time, the room on the first floor above, later Salon Carré, was known as or . Henry IV also had the first floor of the Petite Galerie built up and decorated as the , with portraits of the former kings and queens of France. A portrait of Marie de' Medici by Frans Pourbus the Younger, still in the Louvre, is a rare remnant of this series.

17th century

In 1624, Louis XIII initiated the construction on a new building echoing the Pavillon du Roi on the northern end of the Lescot Wing, now known as the Pavillon de l'Horloge, and of a wing further north that would start the quadrupling of the Louvre's courtyard. Architect Jacques Lemercier won the design competition against Jean Androuet du Cerceau, Clément II Métezeau, and the son of Salomon de Brosse. The works were stopped in 1628 at a time of hardship for the kingdom and state finances, and only progressed very slowly if at all until 1639. In 1639 Lemercier started a new building campaign during which the Pavillon de l'Horloge was completed. Its second staircase, mirroring Lescot's to the north, was still unfinished when the Fronde again interrupted the works in the 1640s, and its decoration has never been completed since then. At that time, much of the construction (though not the decoration) of the new wing had been completed, but the northern pavilion, or , designed by Lemercier similarly as Lescot's Pavillon du Roi, had barely been started.

File:Tour du bois, porte Neuve, le Louvre et la Seine.jpg, The unfinished Grande Galerie and the (end tower of the Wall of Charles V) in the early 1600s
File:Le chateau du Louvre sur un plan de 1615.jpg, The Pavillon du Roi and Lescot Wing with the rest of the medieval castle still standing, Merian map of Paris (1615)
File:Israël Silvestre, Vues de Paris 129 Veuë du Louvre, et de la Porte de Nesle, du costé du Fauxbourg St. Germain.jpg, View of the Louvre from the Left Bank, with the Pavillon du Roi and Pavillon de l'Horloge (left) and the medieval Louvre's towers still standing (right), by Israël Silvestre
File:Zeeman 1656 Louvre south facade – Gallica btv1b103031628 2013 (adjusted).jpg, Similar view in 1656, by Reinier Nooms
File:Reinier Nooms, View of the Louvre and the Tuileries, from Views of Paris and Neighborhoods, plate 1.jpg, The (now Pont Royal), Pavillon de Flore and western section of the Grande Galerie with the still standing in the mid-17th century, by Reinier Nooms
File:Israël Silvestre 049-11 Veue du Louure et de la grande Galerie du costé des Offices.jpg, West facade of the Louvre with Jacques Lemercier's northward extension and the ground-floor walls of in the foreground; engraving c.1644 by Israël Silvestre
File:Israël Silvestre 049-08 Veue et Perspectiue du dedans du Louure, faict du Regne de Louis XIII.jpg, Lemercier's wing pictured at a later date with the Pavillon de Beauvais completed and the start of the north wing heading east, engraving by Israël Silvestre
File:Israël Silvestre 051-08 Veuë du Louure par dedans le Bastiment neuf.jpg, Demolition of the north wing of the old Louvre Castle with the northeast tower still intact, engraving by Israël Silvestre
File:Israël Silvestre, La façade occidentale du Louvre et les nouveaux batîments de Levau (Cabinet des dessins du Louvre) – Hautecoeur 1927 planche 20.jpg , The Louvre's western façade facing the Tuileries, after Le Vau's 1660s reconstruction of the , by Israël Silvestre
File:L'Architecture française (Marot) – Façade sur le quai de l'extrémité de la Galerie d'Apollon – Mauban 1944 Fig 16.jpg, View of the Salon Carré and the southern end of the Petite Galerie from the south, engraving c.1670 by Jean Marot

On the southern side, Lemercier commissioned Nicolas Poussin to decorate the ceiling of the Grande Galerie. Poussin arrived from Rome in early 1641, but returned to Italy in November 1642 leaving the work unfinished. During Louis XIV's minority and the Fronde, from 1643 to 1652 the Louvre was left empty as the royal family stayed at the Palais-Royal or outside of Paris; the Grande Galerie served as a wheat warehouse and deteriorated.

On 21 October 1652, the king and the court ceremonially re-entered the Louvre and made it their residence again, initiating a new burst of construction that would last to the late 1670s.

Meanwhile Anne of Austria, like Marie de' Medici as queen mother before her, inhabited the ground-floor apartment in the Cour Carrée's southern wing. She extended it to the ground floor of the Petite Galerie, which had previously been the venue for the King's Council That "summer apartment" was fitted by architect Louis Le Vau, who had succeeded Lemercier upon the latter's death in 1654. The ceilings, decorated in 1655–1658 by Giovanni Francesco Romanelli who had been recommended by Cardinal Mazarin, are still extant in the suite of rooms now known as the .

In 1659, Louis XIV instigated a new phase of construction under Le Vau and painter Charles Le Brun. Le Vau oversaw the remodeling and completion of the Tuileries Palace, and at the Louvre, the completion of the walls of the north wing and of the eastern half of the south wing. By 1660 the and the western half of the northern wing had been completed; in October of that year, most of the Hôtel du Petit-Bourbon was demolished to make way for the completion of the Cour Carrée. On the courtyard's southern side the was completed in 1663, with a design by Le Vau that echoed that of the Pavillon de l'Horloge. Most of the northern wing was completed in the mid-1660s, though without a salient central pavilion as had been built on the west and south (Pavillon de l'Horloge, Pavillon des Arts) or on the southwestern and northwestern corners (Pavillon du Roi, Pavillon de Beauvais).

On 6 February 1661, a fire destroyed the attic of the and much of the in the Petite Galerie (though not Anne of Austria's ground-floor apartment). Le Vau was tasked by Louis XIV to lead the reconstruction. He rebuilt the as the more ornate Galerie d'Apollon, created a new suite of rooms flanking it to the west (the , later ) with a new façade on what became known as the (later , , and now ), and expanded the former on the northern side as well as making it double-height, creating the Salon Carré in its current dimensions. From 1668 to 1678 the Grande Galerie was also decorated with wood panelling, even though that work was left unfinished. The Salon Carré, however, was still undecorated when the court left for Versailles in the late 1670s. Meanwhile, landscape architect André Le Nôtre redesigned the Tuileries, first created in 1564 in the Italian style, as a French formal garden.Edwards 1893, p. 198.

The other major project of the 1660s was to create the Louvre's façade towards the city and thus complete the Cour Carrée on its eastern side. It involved a convoluted process, with the king's minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert first sidelining Le Vau and then summoning Gian Lorenzo Bernini from Italy. Bernini stayed in Paris from May 1665 to 1666 but none of his four striking designs gained approval, even though some building works started on their basis. Eventually a committee comprising Le Vau, Charles Le Brun and Claude Perrault produced a symmetrical and classical design featuring a giant Corinthian order colonnade with paired columns. Works started in 1667 and the exterior structures were largely completed by 1674, but would not be fully decorated and roofed until the early 19th century under Napoleon. To harmonize the Louvre's exterior, the decision was made in 1668 to create a new façade in front of Le Vau's for the southern wing, designed by the same architectural committee, albeit not on the northern side whose earlier design by Le Vau was just being completed.

The works at the louvre, however, stopped in the late 1670s as the king redirected all construction budgets at the Palace of Versailles, despite his minister Colbert's insistence on completing the Louvre. Louis XIV had already left the Louvre from the beginning of 1666, immediately after the death of his mother Anne of Austria in her ground-floor apartment, and would never reside there again, preferring Versailles, Vincennes, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, or if he had to be in Paris, the Tuileries. From the 1680s a new era started for the Louvre, with comparatively little external construction and fragmentation of its interior spaces across a variety of different uses.

File:Louvre - Élévation de la façade du côté de la rue St Honoré - Architecture françoise Tome4 Livre6 Pl16.jpg, Le Vau's design for the North façade, 1660s, engraved by Jacques-François Blondel in 1756
File:Louvre - Ancienne façade du côté de la rivière exécutée sur le dessein de Le Veau - Architecture françoise Tome4 Livre6 Pl13.jpg, Le Vau's design for the South façade, c.1660, engraved by Jacques-François Blondel in 1756
File:South facade of the Louvre by Le Vau about 1665, detail from a painting by Van der Meulen.jpg, From 1660 to 1663, Louis Le Vau extended the south wing by duplicating Lescot's austere terminal pavilion and wing but providing an original central pavilion with a colossal order of engaged Corinthian columns rising from the ground (detail from an engraving by Jan van Huchtenburg after Adam Frans van der Meulen