page_title: Jacques Lemercier
section_title: Life and career
hierarchical_section_title: Jacques Lemercier / Life and career
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Galerie des Proues, Palais-Royal, Paris 1er.
context_page_description: Jacques Lemercier was a French architect and engineer, one of the influential trio that included Louis Le Vau and François Mansart who formed the classicizing French Baroque manner, drawing from French traditions of the previous century and current Roman practice the fresh, essentially French synthesis associated with Cardinal Richelieu and Louis XIII.
context_section_description: Lemercier was born in Pontoise. He was the son of a master mason, probably Nicolas Lemercier, one of a large interrelated tribe of professionals. Profiting by a voyage to Italy with a long stay in Rome, presumably from about 1607 to 1610, Lemercier developed the simplified classicizing manner established by Salomon de Brosse, who died in 1636, and whose Palais du Luxembourg for Marie de Medici Lemercier would see to completion.
  On his return to France, after several years working as an engineer building bridges, his first major commission, however, was to complete the Parisian Church of the Oratorians, (1616), which had been begun by Clément Métezeau; its success made his reputation. As early as 1618 he appears as architecte du roy, with a salary of 1200 livres, out of which he had to reimburse his atelier. In 1625 Richelieu put him in charge of the main royal project, the galleries being added to the Louvre, where Lemercier was working to the design established by Pierre Lescot a generation before; for the sake of regularity, Lescot's ranges in the Cour Carré were multiplied round further courtyards, quadrupling the building area, each of the four sides having a pavilion at its center. In this manner Lemercier built the northern half of the west side and the famous Pavillon de l'Horloge at the center of the west wing. Its high squared dome breaks the wing's roofline and three arched openings provide access to the enclosed court. Two superposed orders of columns and rich sculptural decor in pediments and niches, on piers and panels are kept under control by strong horizontal cornice lines.
  During 1638 and 1639, Lemercier was appointed premier architecte charged with supervision of all the royal building enterprises, in which capacity he fell into a disagreeable dispute with the cultivated Nicolas Poussin about the decorations in the Louvre.
  The Hôtel de Liancourt (1623) stands out among Lemercier's Paris hôtels particuliers for aristocratic patrons.
  Lemercier built (from 1627 on) Richelieu's Paris residence, the Palais-Cardinal, today's Palais Royal. "Richelieu's palace was destroyed by fire in 1763. Only one remnant survives: a wall fragment with a relief of ship anchors and prows, signs of the Cardinal's role as Superintendent of the Navy, which appeared throughout the palace." This remnant is located in the Galerie des Proues, on the east side of the second court (on the garden side), the so-called Cour d'Honneur. A more expansive town-planning project, one of the most ambitious non-military French projects of the century, was the palatial residence, the grand parish church and the entire new town of Richelieu, in Poitou (Indre-et-Loire). The lost Château de Richelieu itself was an improvisation on the theme set by Brosse's Luxembourg. Also for the Cardinal Lemercier rebuilt the Château de Rueil, not so far from Paris, also demolished. The Château of Thouars, with its majestic long façade, is his also, and survives.
  Less known, because gardens are less permanent, are parterre gardens laid out to Lemercier's designs, at Montjeu, at Richelieu and at Rueil (Mignot; Gady).
  [[Image:Sorbonne DSC09369.jpg|thumb|left|The chapel at the Sorbonne, 1635: prototype for Mansart's at Les Invalides.
  At the Sorbonne, the college has been rebuilt, but its domed church (1635) is the acknowledged surviving masterpiece of Lemercier. The hemispherical dome on a tall octagonal drum, first of its type in France, has four small cupolas in the angles of the Greek cross above the two Corinthian orders on the façade, of full columns below, flat pilasters above. The interior was intended to be frescoed. The square intersection is surrounded by cylindrical vaults and a semicircular choir apse. The north side consists of a portico. In the church Richelieu was interred in 1642.
  At the royal abbey church of Val-de-Grâce Lemercier succeeded the elder Mansart who completed the structure to the cornice line, and refused to agree to a change in the building's design. Lemercier completed it with a dome.
  Lemercier was engaged by Louis XIII in initial plann
caption: Relief of ship anchors and prows, a surviving remnant of Lemercier's Palais-Cardinal
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