Escalier Daru

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Escalier Daru with the Winged Victory of Samothrace in the background

The Escalier Daru (Daru Staircase), also referred to as Escalier de la Victoire de Samothrace, is one of the largest and most iconic interior spaces of the Louvre Palace in Paris, and of the Louvre Museum within it. Named after Pierre, Count Daru, a minister of Napoleon, and initially designed in the 1850s by Hector-Martin Lefuel as part of Napoleon III's Louvre expansion,[1] it received its current Stripped Classical appearance in the early 1930s. Since 1883, its focal point has been the Winged Victory of Samothrace, one of the highlights of the Louvre's collections.[2]

The Escalier Daru is the last in a series of increasingly monumental staircases built to serve this area of the Louvre building. In 1722, as the old Queen Mother's apartment on the ground floor of the Petite Galerie was being prepared to be the residence of Mariana Victoria of Spain the betrothed of Louis XV,[3] a staircase was built to lead directly into the Salon Carré on the upper level, dubbed Escalier de l'Infante after Mariana Victoria. Following the ending of the engagement and her return to Spain after just three years, the Salon Carré became the venue for the yearly art show of the Académie des Beaux-Arts – thus the word Salon for such shows. Visitors would use the Escalier de l'Infante to access the Salon from the Cour de la Reine, later known as Cour du Sphinx and covered with a glass ceiling in 1934.[4]

Shortly before his death in 1780, the Louvre architect Jacques-Germain Soufflot designed a new staircase in the context of intensive planning for the creation of a public museum in the Louvre's Grande Galerie.[1]: 78  Soufflot's design was implemented from 1781 by his successor Maximilien Brébion [fr]. The new staircase or Escalier du Salon, which replaced the Escalier de l'Infante, opened on the ground floor on the Cour de la Reine that was intended to become the entrance of the museum, and led to what is now the Salle Duchâtel on the upper floor, immediately to the north of the Salon Carré in Le Vau's wing doubling the Petite Galerie to the west.[5]

Following the first opening of the Louvre Museum in 1793 and its reorganization under Napoleon in the early 1800s, the museum's main entrance was established further north, through the Rotonde de Mars on what is now the southeastern corner of the Cour Napoléon. To suitably lead visitors from there to the highlights of the museum's collection in the Grande Galerie, Napoleon's architects Charles Percier and Pierre Fontaine designed a monumental staircase, soon dubbed the Escalier Percier et Fontaine, that started next to the Rotonde de Mars and led straight to the Salon Carré. The structural work was completed in 1807,[1]: 84  but the lavish decoration designed by Percier and Fontaine took many more years and was only completed under their supervision during the Bourbon Restoration.

Lefuel's creation

Later developments

Notes

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