The Grand Palais des Champs-Élysées, commonly known as the Grand Palais, is a historic site, exhibition hall and museum complex located in the 8th arrondissement of Paris between the Champs-Élysées and the Seine, France. Construction of the Grand Palais began in 1897 following the demolition of the Palais de l'Industrie (Palace of Industry) to prepare for the Universal Exposition of 1900. That exposition also produced the adjacent Petit Palais and Pont Alexandre III.
The building was designed to be a large-scale venue for official artistic events. A pediment on the building refers to this function with an inscription that reads, "a monument dedicated by the Republic to the glory of French art." Designed according to Beaux-Arts tastes, the building features ornate stone facades, glass vaults and period innovations that included iron and light steel framing and reinforced concrete.
It is listed as a historic monument (monument historique) by the Ministry of Culture.
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The Petit Palais is an art museum in the 8th arrondissement of Paris, France.
Built for the 1900 Exposition Universelle ("universal exhibition"), it now houses the City of Paris Museum of Fine Arts (Musée des beaux-arts de la ville de Paris). The Petit Palais is located across from the Grand Palais on the former Avenue Nicolas II, today Avenue Winston-Churchill. The other façades of the building face the Seine and Avenue des Champs-Élysées.
The Petit Palais is one of fourteen museums of the City of Paris that have been incorporated since 1 January 2013 in the public corporation Paris Musées. It has been listed since 1975 as a monument historique by the Ministry of Culture.
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The Winged Victory of Samothrace, or the Niké of Samothrace, is a votive monument originally discovered on the island of Samothrace, north of the Aegean Sea. It is a masterpiece of Greek sculpture from the Hellenistic era, dating from the beginning of the 2nd century BC (190 BC). It is composed of a statue representing the goddess Niké (Victory), whose head and arms are missing and its base is in the shape of a ship's bow.
The total height of the monument is 5.57 metres including the socle; the statue alone measures 2.75 metres. The sculpture is one of a small number of major Hellenistic statues surviving in the original, rather than Roman copies.
Winged Victory has been exhibited at the Louvre in Paris, at the top of the main staircase, since 1884. Greece is seeking the return of the sculpture.
In 1863, Charles Champoiseau (1830–1909), acting chief of the Consulate of France in Adrianopolis (now Edirne in Turkey), undertook from March 6 to May 7 the exploration of the ruins of the sanctuary of the Great Gods on the island of Samothrace. On April 13, 1863, he discovered part of the bust and the body of a large female statue in white marble accompanied by numerous fragments of drapery and feathers. He recognised this as the goddess Niké, Victory, traditionally represented in Greek antiquity as a winged woman. In the same place was a jumble of about fifteen large grey marble blocks whose form or function was unclear: he concluded it was a funerary monument. He decided to send the statue and fragments to the Louvre Museum, and to leave the large blocks of grey marble on site. Departing Samothrace at the beginning of May 1863, the statue arrived in Toulon at the end of August and in Paris on May 11, 1864.
A first restoration was undertaken by Adrien Prévost de Longpérier, then curator of Antiquities at the Louvre, between 1864 and 1866. The main part of the body is erected on a stone base, and largely completed by fragments of drapery, including the fold of himation that flares behind the legs on the Nike. The remaining fragments – the right part of the bust and a large part of the left wing – too incomplete to be placed on the statue, are stored. Given the exceptional quality of the sculpture, Longpérier decided to present the body alone, exhibited until 1880 among the Roman statues first in the Caryatid Room, then briefly in the Tiber Room.
From 1875, Austrian archaeologists who, under the direction of Alexander Conze, had been excavating the buildings of the Samothrace sanctuary since 1870, studied the location where Champoiseau had found the Victory. Architect Aloïs Hauser drew the grey marble blocks left on-site and apprehended that, once properly assembled, they form the tapered bow of a warship, and that, placed on a base of slabs, they served as the basis for the statue. Tetradrachmas of Demetrios Poliorcetes struck between 301 and 292 BC. representing a Victory on the bow of a ship, wings outstretched, give a good idea of this type of monument. For his part, the specialist in ancient sculpture Otto Benndorf is responsible for studying the body of the statue and the fragments kept in reserve at the Louvre, and restored the statue blowing into a trumpet that she raises with her right arm, as on the coin. The two men thus managed to make a model of the Samothrace monument as a whole.
Champoiseau, informed of this research, undertook a second mission to Samothrace from August 15 to 29, 1879, for the sole purpose of sending the blocks of the base and the slabs of the Victory base to the Louvre. He abandoned on the island the largest block of the base, unsculpted. Two months later, the blocks reached the Louvre Museum, where in December an assembly test was carried out in a courtyard.
The curator of the Department of Antiquities, Félix Ravaisson-Mollien, then decided to reconstruct the monument, in accordance with the model of Austrian archaeologists. On the body of the statue, between 1880 and 1883 he restored the belt area in plaster, placed the right part of the marble bust, recreated the left part in plaster, attached the left marble wing with a metal frame, and replaced the entire right wing with a plaster model. But he did not reconstruct the head, arms or feet. The ship-shaped base is rebuilt and completed, except for the broken bow of the keel, and there is still a large void at the top aft. The statue was placed directly on the base. The entire monument was then placed from the front, on the upper landing of the Daru staircase, the main staircase of the museum.
Champoiseau returned to Samothrace a third time in 1891 to try to obtain the Victory's head, but without success. He did however bring back debris from the drapery and base, a small fragment with an inscription and fragments of coloured plaster.
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The Eiffel Tower is a wrought-iron lattice tower on the Champ de Mars in Paris, France. It is named after the engineer Gustave Eiffel, whose company designed and built the tower from 1887 to 1889.
Locally nicknamed "La dame de fer", it was constructed as the centerpiece of the 1889 World's Fair, and to crown the centennial anniversary of the French Revolution. Although initially criticised by some of France's leading artists and intellectuals for its design, it has since become a global cultural icon of France and one of the most recognisable structures in the world. The tower received 5,889,000 visitors in 2022. The Eiffel Tower is the most visited monument with an entrance fee in the world: 6.91 million people ascended it in 2015. It was designated a monument historique in 1964, and was named part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1991.
The tower is 330 metres tall, about the same height as an 81-storey building, and the tallest structure in Paris. Its base is square, measuring 125 metres on each side. During its construction, the Eiffel Tower surpassed the Washington Monument to become the tallest human-made structure in the world, a title it held for 41 years until the Chrysler Building in New York City was finished in 1930. It was the first structure in the world to surpass both the 200-metre and 300-metre mark in height. Due to the addition of a broadcasting aerial at the top of the tower in 1957, it is now taller than the Chrysler Building by 5.2 metres. Excluding transmitters, the Eiffel Tower is the second tallest free-standing structure in France after the Millau Viaduct.
The tower has three levels for visitors, with restaurants on the first and second levels. The top level's upper platform is 276 m above the ground—the highest observation deck accessible to the public in the European Union. Tickets can be purchased to ascend by stairs or lift to the first and second levels. The climb from ground level to the first level is over 300 steps, as is the climb from the first level to the second, making the entire ascent a 600 step climb. Although there is a staircase to the top level, it is usually accessible only by lift. On this top, third level is a private apartment built for Gustave Eiffel's personal use. He decorated it with furniture by Jean Lachaise and invited friends such as Thomas Edison.
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Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione is a c. 1514–1515 oil painting attributed to the Italian High Renaissance painter Raphael. Considered one of the great portraits of the Renaissance, it has an enduring influence. It depicts Raphael's friend, the diplomat and humanist Baldassare Castiglione, who is considered a quintessential example of the High Renaissance gentleman.
The portrait was produced as a result of Raphael's friendship with Castiglione, whose ascent in courtly circles paralleled that of the artist. They were close friends by 1504, when Castiglione made his second visit to Urbino, as Raphael was gaining recognition as an artist in the humanist circle of the city's ducal court. Raphael was commissioned by Guidobaldo da Montefeltro in 1505 to paint a picture for Henry VII; Castiglione traveled to England to present the finished painting to the king. It is possible that Castiglione later served as a "scholarly advisor" for Raphael's The School of Athens, and that the depiction of Zoroaster in that fresco may be a portrait of the courtier.
Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione may have had a practical and intimate purpose. Castiglione left his family behind when he went to Rome, and he wrote a poem in which he imagined his wife and son consoling themselves with the picture during his absence.
The composition is pyramidal. It's one of only two Raphael's paintings on canvas. Copies produced in the 17th century show Castiglione's hands in full, suggesting that the picture was subsequently cut by several inches at the bottom (at a later date researchers determined it has not been cut). Castiglione is seated against an earth-toned background and wears a dark doublet with a trim of squirrel fur and black ribbon; on his head is a turban topped by a notched beret. The attire indicates that this was painted during the winter, likely that of 1514–1515, when Castiglione was in Rome by appointment of Guidobaldo da Montefeltro to Pope Leo X. The lightest areas are the subject's face seen nearly head-on, a billow of white shirt front at his chest, and his folded hands, which are mostly cropped at the bottom edge of the canvas. Castiglione is seen as vulnerable, possessing a humane sensitivity characteristic of Raphael's later portraits. The soft contours of his clothing and rounded beard express the subtlety of the subject's personality. In his The Book of the Courtier Castiglione argued on behalf of the cultivation of fine manners and dress. He popularized the term sprezzatura, which translates roughly to "nonchalant mastery", an ideal of effortless grace befitting a man of culture. The concept eventually found its way into English literature, in the plays of Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare.
The picture's elegance of execution is consistent with the attitude of the subject. Art historian Lawrence Gowing noted the counter-intuitive handling of gray velvet (actually a fur) as contrary to an academic modeling of form, with the broad surfaces banked in rich darkness and the fabric shining most brightly as it turns away from the light. For Gowing, "The picture has the subtlety of baroque observation but the stillness and noble contour of classic painting at its peak." The portrait's composition and atmospheric quality suggest an homage to the Mona Lisa, which Raphael would have seen in Rome. Yet the Castiglione portrait transcends questions of influence; art historian James Beck wrote that "The Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione stands as a final solution for single male portraiture within the Renaissance style...."
Notwithstanding shifts in the critical appraisal of Raphael's work, the painting has enjoyed consistent admiration from other artists. Titian was strongly influenced by this portrait, and may have first viewed it in Castiglione's home in Mantua. The Venetian master's Portrait of a Man is generally seen as owing a strong compositional debt to Raphael's painting, and also reflects Castiglione's influential advice regarding the restrained elegance of attire recommended for courtiers. In 1639 Rembrandt drew a sketch of the painting while it was being auctioned in Amsterdam, and subsequently referenced the composition in several self-portraits. A copy of the painting, now in the Courtauld Institute of Art, was painted by Peter Paul Rubens. Both Rembrandt's and Rubens's versions display Baroque flourish, quite different from the original painting's sober restraint. In the 19th century Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres chose a frame for his Portrait of Monsieur Bertin much like that which adorned Raphael's painting, perhaps indicating Ingres's ambitions, while also underscoring the paintings' similarities of coloration and extraordinary illusionism. At the turn of the 20th century Henri Matisse copied the painting, and Paul Cézanne exclaimed of Raphael's portrait: "How well rounded the forehead is, with all the distinct planes. How well balanced the patches in the unity of the whole...."
Now in the Louvre, the painting was acquired by Louis XIV in 1661 from the heirs of Cardinal Mazarin.
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