Design for the Arc de Triomphe at Place du Trône (today’s Place de la Nation), which was never completed, by Claude Perrault, who beat out Charles Le Brun in a competition overseen by Jean-Baptiste Colbert, ca. 1670.
Featured on PDR in the essay Marvellous Moderns: The Brothers Perrault
Charles Perrault is celebrated as the collector of some of the world’s best-known fairy tales. But his brothers were just as remarkable: Claude, an architect of the Louvre, and Pierre, who discovered the hydrological cycle. As Hugh Aldersey-Williams explores, all three were able to use positions within the orbit of the Sun King to advance their modern ideas about the world.