Jacques Sarrazin

Jacques Sarazin or Sarrazin (; baptised 8 June 1592 in Noyon – died 3 December 1660 in Paris) was a French sculptor in the classical tradition of Baroque art. He was instrumental in the development of the Style Louis XIV through his own work as well as through his many pupils. Nearly all his work as a painter was destroyed and is only known through engravings.

Life

Sarazin was born in Noyon, France, and went to Paris with his brother, where he trained in the workshop of Nicolas Guillain. He went to Rome in 1610 and remained there until 1628. While in Rome, he produced garden sculpture for Cardinal Aldobrandini's Villa Aldobrandini in Frascati (c. 1620). From 1622 to 1627, he carried out stucco work to accompany the paintings of Domenichino on the high altar of Sant'Andrea della Valle and in San Lorenzo in Miranda.

In 1628 he returned to Paris, where, in 1631, he married a niece of the painter Simon Vouet, whom he had met in Rome and for whom he had created some angels in stucco to frame his altarpiece in Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs, Paris.

Appointed ''Sculpteur et peintre ordinaire du roi'' in 1631, Sarazin made a number of works for Louis XIII and his wife Anne of Austria, particularly portraits and tomb sculpture, most of which were later destroyed.

Other royal works include the Caryatides of the Pavillon de l'Horloge, in the center of the west wing of the Cour Carrée (Square Court) of the Palais du Louvre. The history of the Caryatides illustrates well the collaborative system of royal sculpture during the period in which Sarazin worked. The facade had been designed by the royal architect, Jacques Lemercier, as an extension of the earlier facade across the courtyard made by Pierre Lescot. The Caryatides were inspired by six figures of the Caryatid Porch of the Erechtheion on the Acropolis at Athens. They had been drawn frequently by artists, and one had been brought to London. En 1550, Jean Goujon, the architect and sculptor at the Louvre under Henry II of France, had made a group of caryatides inside the Louvre, supporting the platform for musicians in the Hall of the Swiss Guards. Goujon, like Sarazin, never saw the originals in Greece; he worked only from drawings. Sarazin made his first drawings for the Louvre exterior figures in 1636, based on drawings of the originals and on the Goujon works, and then made terra cotta miniatures. The actual statues were then carried out in 1639-1640 by his assistants Gilles Guérin, Philippe de Buyster

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