[PARIS] Plan général du jardin du Palais du Luxembourg

General map of the Palais du Luxembourg, hand drawn in ink and watercolor on paper folded up and restored, with the handwritten words "He was up and Cotté in 1768". It is annotated action units yards and characteristics feet of the old regime.
Restorations ...
This plan reflects the original plots of royal gardeners seventeenth century, Jacques Boyceau (1560-1635) and André Le Nôtre (1613 to 1700). Plans were kept until changes Chalgrin companies in the revolutionary era and completed in 1804, to make the building comply with the institution of the Senate. A document similar plot dating from the late seventeenth century is kept in the National Archives (under the symbol O / 11687 / B room 732). However, if one can note a certain continuity of the original plans during the interim contemporary until the end of the eighteenth century, however, noted some differences in the design of flower beds, here quite accurately reported.
On the death of Henry IV Marie de Medici contemplated leaving the Louvre Palace that she does not like. In 1612, the Regent Hotel acquired the Duke of Piney-Luxembourg, surrounded by a garden of eight hectares. This originally extended for 300 meters just before the building because of the Carthusian convent obstructing the southern perspective. It will be annexed as a result of the nationalization of the property of the clergy during the Revolution. The gardens will be expanded during the nineteenth century to their current scope. From East to West, they originally had more than one kilometer from the current Saint-Michel Boulevard to the existing boulevard Raspail.
During the years 1612 and 1613, Jacques Boyceau, Intendant of the King's Gardens, undertook a set of symmetry in the layout of the parterres around a central fountain. The plantations were completed in 1630 before being taken in 1635 by André Le Nôtre. The Florentine engineer Thomas Francine was commissioned to design the Italian terrace double ambulatory. Having at heart to bring this momentum into Italian taste at the court of France, Marie de Medici entrusted the renovation of the building at Salomon de Brosse who was inspired by the rustic order of the Pitti Palace. Hotel Duke Piney-Luxembourg then became the "Petit Luxembourg".
This rare handwritten enhanced color, revealing the conservation area in the seventeenth state throughout the Ancien Regime, shows, countdown, the first fruits of French gardens. Jacques Boyceau was indeed the first to conceptualize the French style of gardening in his treatise by reasons of nature and art published in 1638. Divided into three books, the gardener architect presents theories and ideas for design, implementation and maintenance of large aristocratic gardens. The Luxembourg Gardens in designing Boyceau and Le Nôtre, so does the state of excellence of a French garden art that flourished under the early Bourbons.
On the death of the queen in 1642, the palace and gardens lost their royal function and changed owner repeatedly until they return to the hands of the Bourbons in 1778, when the Count of Provence, brother of Louis XVI and future Louis XVIII, inherited the estate.
Probably used as a working document to gardeners architects of the eighteenth century for the maintenance of flowerbeds, the plan of this Parisian garden to the history of the most prestigious is one of the last vestiges of its original state, characteristic of the birth of the genre French before his great transformations.