Louis XVI style, also called Louis Seize, is a style of architecture, furniture, decoration and art which developed in France during the 18-year reign of Louis XVI (1774–1792), just before the French Revolution. It saw the final phase of the Baroque style as well as the birth of French Neoclassicism. The style was a reaction against the elaborate ornament of the preceding Baroque period. It was inspired in part by the discoveries of Ancient Roman paintings, sculpture and architecture in Herculaneum and Pompeii. Its features included the straight column, the simplicity of the post-and-lintel, the architrave of the Greek temple. It also expressed the Rousseau-inspired values of returning to nature and the view of nature as an idealized and wild but still orderly and inherently worthy model for the arts to follow. Notable architects of the period included Victor Louis (1731–1811), who completed the Grand Théâtre de Bordeaux (1780). The Odeon Theatre in Paris (1779–1782) was built by Marie-Joseph Peyre (1730–1785) and Charles de Wailly (1729–1798). François-Joseph Bélanger completed the Chateau de Bagatelle in just sixty-three days to win a bet for its builder, the King's brother. Another period landmark was the belvedere of the Petit Trianon, built by Richard Mique. The most characteristic building of the late Louis XVI residential style is the Hôtel de Salm in Paris (now the Palais de la Légion d'Honneur), built by Pierre Rousseau in 1751–1783. Superbly crafted desks and cabinets were created for the Palace of Versailles and other royal residences by cabinetmakers Jean-Henri Riesener and David Roentgen, using inlays of fine woods (particularly mahogany) and decorated with gilded bronze and mother of pearl. Equally fine sets of chairs and tables were made by Jean-Henri Riesener and Georges Jacob. The royal tapestry works of Gobelins, Aubusson and Beauvais continued to make large tapestries, but an increasing part of their business was the manufacture of upholstery for the new sets of chairs, sofas and other furnishings for the royal residences and nobility. Wallpaper also became an important part of interior design, thanks to new processes developed by Reveillon. In Hungary, it is known as Copf Style.
Origins and influences The Louis XVI style was a reaction to and transition the French Baroque style, which had dominated French architecture, decoration and art since the mid-17th century, and partly from a desire to establish a new Beau idéal, or ideal of beauty, based on the purity and grandeur of the art of the Ancient Romans and Greeks. In 1754 The French engraver, painter and art critic Charles-Nicolas Cochin denounced the curves and undulations of the predominant rocaille style: "Don't torture without reason those things which could be straight, and come back to the good sense which is the beginning of good taste." Louis XVI himself showed little enthusiasm for art or architecture. He left the management of these to Charles-Claude Flahaut de la Billaderie, the Count of Angiviller, who was made Director General of the Bâtiments du Roi. Angeviller, for financial reasons, postponed a grand enlargement of the Palace of Versailles, but completed the new Château de Compiègne (1751–1783), begun by Louis XV, and decorated it from 1782 to 1786. The King's principal architectural addition to Versailles was the new library on the first floor (begun 1774). He was much more generous to Queen Marie Antoinette; she redecorated the Grand Apartments of the Queen at Versailles in 1785, and carried out important works on her apartments at the Palace of Fontainebleau and Compiègne, as well as new apartments in the Tuileries Palace. The King also gave the Queen the Petit Trianon at Versailles, and in 1785 bought a new château for her at St. Cloud. Classicism, based Roman and Greek models had been used in French architecture since the time of Louis XIV; he rejected a plan by Gian Lorenzo Bernini for a baroque façade of the Louvre Palace, and chose instead a classical façade with a colonnade and pediment. The architects of Louis XIV, Jules Hardouin-Mansart and Jacques Lemercier, turned away from the gothic and renaissance style and used a baroque version of the Roman dome on the new churches at Val-de-Grace and Les Invalides. Louis XV and his chief architects, Jacques Ange Gabriel and Jacques-Germain Soufflot continued the style of architecture based upon symmetry and the straight line. Gabriel created the ensemble of classical buildings around the Place de la Concorde while Soufflot designed the Panthéon (1758–1790) on the Roman model. An influential building from the late Louis XV period was the Petit Trianon at Versailles (1762–1764), by Jacques Ange Gabriel, built for the mistress of the King, Madame de Pompadour. Its cubic form, symmetric facade and Corinthian peristyle, similar to the villas of Palladio, made it model for the following Louis XVI style. Another notable influence on the style was the architecture of the Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio, which influenced the building of country houses in England, as well as the French architect Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (1736–1806). Palladio's ideas were the inspiration for the Château de Louveciennes, and its neoclassical music pavilion (1770–1771) built by Claude Nicolas Ledoux for the mistress of Louis XV, Madame du Barry. The pavilion is cubic in form, with a facade of four pilasters supporting the architrave and the pilaster of the terrace. It became the model for similar houses under Louis XVI.
Motifs and ornaments The decorative motifs of Louis XVI style were inspired by antiquity, the Louis XIV style, and nature. Characteristic elements of the style: a torch crossed with a sheath with arrows, imbricated disks, guilloché, double bow-knots, smoking braziers, linear repetitions of small motifs (rosettes, beads, oves), trophy or floral medallions hanging from a knotted ribbon, acanthus leaves, gadrooning, interlace, meanders, cornucopias, mascarons, Ancient urns, tripods, perfume burners, dolphins, ram and lion heads, chimeras, and gryphons. Greco-Roman architectural motifs are also very used: flutings, pilasters (fluted and unfluted), fluted balusters (twisted and straight), columns (engaged and unengaged, sometimes replaced by caryatids), volute corbels, triglyphs with guttae (in relief and trompe-l'œil).
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