1. Palais du Louvre, eastern colonnade.

(Photo by Claudio Allais)

52
Fast-IP Excellence Award
Lucia Allais Ordering the Orders:
Claude Perrault’s Ordonnance and the
Eastern Colonnade of the Louvre

Gian Lorenzo Bernini made his exit from Paris in October 1665.
He left behind three unbuilt schemes for the eastern façade
of the Louvre, a disappointed King and court, and little hope
that the strained relationship between the French monarchy and
the Italian papacy could be repaired. Bernini’s trip to France
had been orchestrated in the name of political and architectural
expediency; to the double problem of a palace without a proper
façade and a diplomacy without real amicability, Bernini’s
talents potentially offered a single solution. One of his schemes,
despite his departure, was still in the works. As it turned out,
Louis XIV’s ambivalence about Bernini’s proposals was eventu-
ally matched by Colbert’s distaste for his grandiloquence—and
the extensive demolition required by the Italian’s designs came
to be seen by both as an affront to French sovereign power.1
Colbert’s response to this vexing sequence of events was, ulti-
mately, to relieve Bernini and resume the search for a French
solution that had, since January 1664, yielded several propos-
als. In the spring of 1667 he appointed a committee that brought
together the premier architecte Francois Le Vau, the premier
peintre Charles Le Brun, and the physician Claude Perrault to
propose new designs. By all accounts, this petit conseil execut-
ed its mandate swiftly and without much difficulty. Within three
months, the scheme for a colonnade with coupled columns
had been proposed, authorized, and finalized (Figure 1).
In light of the controversy that had surrounded the commis-
sion, and of the debates that the façade’s coupled columns
would continue to provoke long after its completion, the deci-
sions of the petit conseil appear in the historical record as a rare
moment of conceptual clarity in an otherwise endlessly contort-
ed and highly politicized process. When poet Nicolas Boileau
gave Le Vau sole credit for the façade in 1694—disputing the
rumor that it was Perrault alone who deserved it—he triggered
a centuries-long debate over the design’s credits and merits.2
By the end of the eighteenth century, Perrault had been canon-
ized as both the most vocal defender of the façade and the most
eager contender for its authorship, causing the façade’s origins
and originality to emerge as inextricably linked.3 Still today,
the debate over attribution continues to animate art historical
scholarship—most notably that of Robert W. Berger, who
Future Anterior
Volume 2, Number 2 recently launched a new search to determine, with absolute
Winter 2005 certainty, whose hand was responsible for the design for the
53
eastern façade of the Louvre—as if a controversy that had
begun with Bernini’s fall into disfavor needed to culminate in
the naming of an alternative, yet equally singular, individual.4
Although this search has unearthed a considerable amount of
archival material, no definitive authorship has been estab-
lished, and today Perrault remains a ghost figure, the not-
Bernini of the Louvre.
If the attribution of the unorthodox façade to Perrault
seems attractive to us moderns, it is because Perrault elaborat-
ed an equally unorthodox theory of architecture. Most analyses
of Perrault identify an affinity between his theory of architecture
and the design of the Louvre colonnade by attesting to the
ostensible modernity that characterizes both. Alberto Perez-
Gomez puts it this way: “on the basis of Perrault’s theory … the
idea for the east façade of the Louvre almost certainly seems to
have originated in his radically modern and original understand-
ing of architecture.”5 This assertion of the “radically modern”
goes on to legitimate an account that detects in Perrault’s
Ordonnance des cinq éspèces de colonnes selon la méthode
des anciens (1683) clear evidence of the incursion of “modern
science” into architecture, and irrefutable proof that this incur-
sion amounted to a kind of original sin from which architecture
has had to redeem itself ever since.6 In particular, whereas
Antoine Picon has noted that Perrault’s interest in architecture
was marked by the “curiosity of a classical savant,” Perez-
Gomez equates this curiosity with an opportunistic attempt to
scientize the art of building by creating a rigorous discipline in
which “creative tasks” occur as the literal application of a “theo-
retical position.”7 In other words, for Perez-Gomez it is Perrault’s
desire for creative agency that forever deprived architecture of
the ability to create new meanings—and the attribution of the
Louvre colonnade to Perrault is indispensable in this interpreta-
tion. Ironically, the reverse argument, according to which
Perrault should be robbed of authorship for the façade, seems
to stem from a similar logic; namely, that a mere physician-with-
a-theory is unfit to fill the void left behind by Bernini and that
this position is more adequately filled by an architect-without-
a-theory like Le Vau.8
Yet the fact remains that the Louvre colonnade precedes
Perrault’s theory of architecture by a decade, appearing repeat-
edly in Perrault’s writings: it is the frontispiece to his 1674 trans-
lation of Vitruvius, which also features the machines he invent-
ed for its construction; it serves as a concluding example in his
1683 Ordonnance; it even appears in his treatise on mechanics.9
If it is difficult to dissociate Perrault from the Louvre colonnade,
then, it is because his theories seem to be structured around
it, not vice-versa. Nor can the colonnade’s ubiquitous presence
in the theoretical oeuvre be explained away as a strategic place-
54
2. Frontispiece in Claude Perrault, ment in a list of canonical examples. These engravings alter-
Les dix livres d’architecture de Vitruve
(Paris: J.B. Coignard, 1673). Engraving nately depict the colonnade as partially hidden, as incomplete,
by Sébastien Leclerc. (Photo by author) or under construction (Figure 2). Never a static object, the
façade is repeatedly deployed as a backdrop—starting from the
left, then disappearing behind objects in the foreground,
as if to suggest that its doubled rhythm could extend beyond
the frame ad infinitum. It is not the fact of its objecthood (the
doubled order as a symbol for architecture) but rather the
process of constructing a system (the doubling of orders as
generative of architecture) that becomes an allegory for archi-
tectural creation. In fact, by 1700 the building of the Louvre
colonnade had become the analogy par excellence for architec-
tural invention itself—not just in Perrault’s writings, but also
in academic debates.10 Whether or not he was solely responsible
for its design, Perrault was the first in a long line of thinkers
to deploy the Louvre façade as a generative trope in architec-
tural discourse.
This essay revisits both Perrault’s theory of architecture
and the eastern façade of the Louvre as devices for ordering the
orders, which offered late baroque France a new model for
thinking about authorship and authority in architecture. The
doubling of columns in the Louvre façade is here discussed in
the context of the proliferation of parallelisms and symmetries
that pervaded French architectural culture as Perrault encoun-
tered it, and in particular as he represented it in his conceptual-
ization of the orders. This conceptualization, it will be argued,
is evident less in Perrault’s oft-cited polemical preface to the
55
Ordonnance than in the semantic subtleties of his translations
and the tabular system he devised to compute the proportions
of the orders.

Parallels
If the Louvre colonnade stands as an allegory for architec-
tural invention, it is only fitting that its authorship should have
come into question. It was, after all, designed by a committee
of three, which was convened at a time when the very nature of
authorship in the arts was under debate. By the late seven-
teenth century, successive translations and disseminations of
Vitruvius had established that modern artistic creation should
stem from the imitation of ancient precedents. But the historical
rationale for this debt to the past remained unclear. Was classi-
cal antiquity an unattainable ideal whose elusive perfection the
moderns were striving towards? Or was it an originary state,
now surpassed, whose primitive works served as the basis upon
which to build and improve? In other words, did the ancients
stand at the beginning or at the end of creation?
Ancients and moderns alike argued their position in a
plethora of texts entitled Parallel of the Ancients and the
Moderns; one of which was written by Claude Perrault’s brother
Charles. Influential royal advisor, founding member of the
French Academy, and writer of fables, Charles was also an unre-
lenting spokesman for the virtues of his brother. It was Charles
who recommended that Claude be elected to the Academy of
Sciences and commissioned to translate Vitruvius. It was also
Charles who obtained for him a position in the petit conseil.
And, perhaps most importantly, it was Charles who initiated the
rumor that Claude alone had designed the Louvre colonnade.
The Perrault brothers stood firmly on the side of the moderns,
their solidarity evident even in Charles’s Parallel, which intro-
duced the art of architecture by making an analogy between the
two brothers’ domains:

Just as figures of rhetoric are available to all, and just

as they offer an equal advantage to those who desire
to speak, so it is that the five orders of architecture are
equally in the hands of all architects. The merit of an
architect therefore is not to use columns, but to place
them with judgment and to compose beautiful build-
ings with them.11

Architecture, like language, was for Charles composed of ele-

ments whose meaning was modified by their placement in a
general scheme. Echoing his involvement in language reform,
Charles proclaimed architecture to be progressive—and the
exemplary product of such progress was the new façade of the
Louvre:
56
 I maintain that, in the Louvre façade alone, there is
more architectural beauty than in any of the buildings
of the ancients. When the design for this façade was
presented, … its majestic porticos … surprised even the
eyes that had been most accustomed to beautiful
things. But it was thought that its execution would be
impossible, and that this design would be more
properly painted in a picture, because it was only in
painting that one had ever seen anything like it, rather
than in the front of a real palace.12

From the parallel with language to the analogy with paint-

ing, Charles demonstrated that the progressive codification of
the arts had extracted beauty from “the buildings of the
ancients” and turned it into a comparative value which could
pass not only from ancient to modern times, but also from
“painted picture” to “real palace.” The radicality of this claim
for beauty’s translatability is perhaps best evidenced by the
fervor with which a competing Parallel, published in 1650 by
3. The Corinthian Order of Vignola and Roland Fréart de Chambray, attempted to leave beauty where
Alberti Compared, in Roland Fréart de
Chambray, A Parallel of the Ancient
it was: buried deep inside the “mystery” of its classical manifes-
Architecture with the Moderne (London: tations.13
J. Walthoe, 1733). Engraving. (Photo by
Fréart, too, was one in a pair of brothers; this pair, however,
author)
stood unequivocally on the side of the ancients.14 On the rela-
tionship between architecture and language, Fréart was clear:
“the art of architecture does not consist in words.” Still, he
opened his Parallèle de l’architecture antique avec la moderne
by quoting Vitruvius’s definition of the architectural order,
as if to demonstrate unconditional deference to the authority of
the ancients. It was only after attempting a remarkably awkward
translation (“an apt, and regular disposition of the members of a
work separately; and a composition of the universal proportion
to the symmetry”) that a puzzled Fréart then professed that
words mattered little:

Another peradventure, more subtle and penetrant than

I am, might find out the mystery of these words, which
I confess I comprehend not; and therefore it is, that
I have thus translated them purely from the Latin text
word for word, so that I may the more naturally pro-
pose them to those who shall desire profit by them.15

Far from an admission of incompetence, the ambition

to translate Vitruvius “word for word” constitutes an homage to
the tradition that had always recorded classical proportions
literally from ancient monuments. Paradoxically, the reason for
deferring to the “mystery” of Vitruvian words was precisely that
their legacy was so stubbornly mysterious. Instead of dwelling
on the word “order,” Fréart proposed a careful inventory of its

57
4. Claude Perrault, Les dix livres d’archi- “ocular manifestations” gathered from treatises since the
tecture de Vitruve (Paris: J.B. Coignard,
1673). Double-page spread. (Photo by Renaissance. In plate after plate, Fréart displayed innumerable
permission of the Rotch Library, M.I.T.) pairs of columns drawn in parallel across an imaginary central
axis—only to render their discrepancies even more obvious
(Figure 3). What Fréart offered was not simply a parallel
between the ancients and the moderns but rather an endless
series of parallels, a sequential permutation of unmatched pairs
which seems to illustrate not that the ancients were mysterious
but that all interpretations of the ancients had been mysterious-
ly contradictory. The predicament of the architect in search
of ancient authority is exemplified by Fréart’s dilemma: by his
attempt to steer away from language and his compulsion
to return to Vitruvius’s words; by his desire to let ancient archi-
tecture speak for itself and his vexed search for even one
matching pair of proportions.
Nearly thirty years after Fréart cited Vitruvius in his intro-
duction, Claude Perrault was commissioned to produce a new
“modern” translation of the classical text. This commission
prompted the quip that architecture must be very ill, if it needed
a medical opinion; yet ironically it was precisely Perrault’s
training as a physician that made him familiar enough with
Greek and Latin to make an authoritative translation.16 In accor-
dance with his erudition, Perrault appended his translation with
footnotes so copious that most of the pages are divided into
two halves: translated ancient text at the top, and modern
explanatory footnotes at the bottom (Figure 4). This format
allowed Perrault to present two theories of architecture, literally
58
 juxtaposed one to the other, and in this sense this translation
of Vitruvius constitutes Perrault’s own version of a Parallel.
Perrault saw doublings everywhere in Vitruvius’s text, often
emphasizing dichotomies that previous editions had tried to
overcome. Even the canonical figure of the Vitruvian man—
whose problem of fitting the human body into a square and a
circle simultaneously had famously occupied the minds and
hands of architects since the Renaissance—was presented by
Perrault as two separate drawings (Figure 5). Armed with a
doubling lens, Perrault read Vitruvius in stereometric vision,
as a conflated field of textual dualities that needed to be
disassociated and pulled apart.
Perhaps most importantly, Perrault made use of this
doubling lens to shed light on the Vitruvian definition of the
architectural order that had so perplexed Fréart de Chambray.
That sentence alone is appended with five footnotes, which pro-
vide terminological clarifications on three quarters of a page.
Before even translating the word “order,” Perrault establishes
that the Latin words for proportion, symmetry, and relation all
appear to denote the same idea. What results is a remarkable
linguistic twist whereby symmetry becomes proportion:
5. The proportions of the human body
in Claude Perrault’s Les dix livres Although the word proportion exists in French,
d’architecture de Vitruve (Paris: J.B. I was not able to use it to translate the word proportio,
Coignard, 1673), Book III Plate VII.
(Photo by permission of the Rotch because, since Vitruvius uses the words symmetria
Library, M.I.T.) and proportio that mean the same thing in Latin, I had
to find two words that also mean the same thing in
French, which symmetry and proportion cannot do,
since they mean something different... This is why I
thought I could translate symmetria as proportion, and
proportio as rapport.17

This effort to dissociate ancient words from their modern

homonyms reveals an impulse to distinguish real meaning from
mere resemblance. For example, Perrault erases the word “sym-
metry” entirely from his translation in order to avoid confusion
between its ancient meaning and its modern one. There are two
kinds of symmetries, Perrault explains: the ancient operation,
which projects the proportions of one element onto a larger
one; and the modern, specifically French, operation, which
reflects an element in its exact dimensions across an axis.
Throughout his footnotes, Perrault repeatedly returns to the
latter definition, emphasizing that in modern France one can
only call symmetrical those elements which are in a relationship
of “parity and equality.”18 In the cultural context that consistent-
ly represented ancients and moderns as facing each other
contentiously across an axis, Perrault’s compulsive emphasis on
symmetry must be understood less as a compositional prefer-
ence and more as a new conceptual category. If ancients and
59
moderns are truly in a state of parallelism, Perrault seems to
imply, then an axis can simply be drawn between them and they
can be declared to be symmetrical, and hence “equal.”

Orders
In his preface to the Ordonnance, Perrault makes this
parallelism polemically explicit, famously proposing that archi-
tectural beauty consists of two separate—but, one might
say, symmetrical—parts: “positive” beauty and “customary”
beauty. Whereas positive beauty is a timeless value that corre-
sponds to a viewer’s natural instincts, customary beauty, by
contrast, changes over time and corresponds to the caprices of
fashion. This doubling of beauty has often been read as the
critical index of Perrault’s modernity—as a symptom of the
characteristically modern propensity to make categories that
artificially divide a previously homogenous order of meaning.19
Yet one should avoid the equation of doubling with bifurcation,
division with discord, and distinction with contradiction.
Doubling, division, and distinction are just as easily equated
with symmetry—thereby becoming conciliatory values as
opposed to contentious ones. Perrault’s own title, “The
Ordering of the Five Kinds of Columns According to the Method
of the Ancients,” shows that he nested his analytical categories
in a unifying scheme where modern agency and ancient
authority might converge. Nowhere is this desire for conver-
gence more evident than in the first page of the Ordonnance
where, even under the seemingly innocent guise of explicating
Vitruvius, Perrault transforms a paralyzing confrontation into
a productive device, doubling the architectural order so as
to reinforce it.
Perrault opens his treatise, like so many before him, by
translating Vitruvius’s definition of the architectural order: “the
Ordonnance, according to Vitruvius, is what determines the size
of each of the parts of a building according to its use.”20 Having
thus distilled from Vitruvius’s definition two elements (a build-
ing and its parts) and two attributes (size and use), Perrault
then reveals that what had puzzled Fréart de Chambray was the
lack of relationship between the respective pairings of element
and attribute that Vitruvius mandates: size and parts (this rela-
tionship is regulated, as Vitruvius later explains, by “propor-
tion”); and building and use (this link is regulated by “shape”).
In other words, Perrault’s first page exposes the mystery of the
ancients: namely, that Vitruvius’s definition is composed of two
unrelated requirements—one concerning “proportion,” the
other concerning “shape”—which are conjoined by nothing
more than his simultaneous enunciation of them as constitutive
of “ordering.” To clarify the Vitruvian approach, Perrault doubles
this definition into two separate operations: on the one hand,
60
6. The new architectural order in Claude
Perrault, Ordonnance des cinq espèces
de colonnes selon la méthode des
anciens (Paris: J.B. Coignard, 1683).
(Photo by author)

proportion determines the parts of a column; on the other,

shape determines its use. Real architectural “order,” Perrault
contends, will only arise when a single relationship emerges out
of these two operations, accounting somehow both for the
“shape of use” (such as Ionic or Doric) and the “proportions of
parts” (such as architrave or capital). The single relationship
reconciling “shape of use” and “proportion of parts” is signaled
by nothing more than a rhetorically well-placed “nevertheless.”
Perrault writes that although “shape might be more fitting to
determining use … nevertheless … the most essential difference
between the orders … according to Vitruvius … is that of propor-
tions.”21 It is here that Perrault’s invention occurs: by locating
the “order” in an enigmatic “nevertheless,” Perrault escapes
the impasse of a bifurcated world. Proportion, ultimately, must
guarantee the unity of the architectural order. “Hence,” Perrault
concludes, “the architectural order is what is regulated by the
ordonnance when it prescribes the proportions for entire
columns and determines the shape of certain parts in accor-
dance with their different proportions.”22 This definition would
amount to a tautology (order is that which is ordered, propor-
tion is that which is proportioned) were it not for Perrault’s
simultaneous use of active and passive voices: order is that
which regulates, all the while being regulated. From Vitruvius’s
statement of a single order, Perrault extracts the requirement
of a doubled structure, and it is the singularity of doubling as a
process that becomes the bearer of architecture’s unitary
authority.
61
 What Perrault retains of Vitruvius’s definition of the order
is its organizational structure—its ability to order the orders.
Placed at the beginning of the Ordonnance, the doubling device
that Perrault had developed in his translation of Vitruvius’s Ten
Books becomes the conceptual basis not only for his inventory
of the classical orders but also for his invention of a modern way
of ordering. Having prefaced the Ordonnance with the startling
claim that “the differences between the orders … are the only
well-established matters in architecture,” Perrault proceeds to
organize these “differences” into the paired categories he
extracts from Vitruvius’s text.23 What emerges from all this is a
two-dimensional structure that surfaces repeatedly: as a way to
organize the Ordonnance into two parts; as a visual device for
describing the orders; and as the basis for tabulating propor-
tions by means of a grid.
Consider, for a start, the two-part organization of the
Ordonnance: “Part I: Qualities that are common to all the
orders,” and “Part II: Qualities that differ in each order.”
Perrault structures his architectural treatise as a system of dif-
ferences, a matrix that accounts for sameness as well as for dis-
tinction. Hence the division of columns into parts, which is
“common to all the orders,” is as integral to architecture as the
elaboration of a column’s shape, which “differs in each order.”
Consider also the missing illustration of the orders from
Vitruvius’s Ten Books, which had been re-imagined since the
Renaissance as a single plate of five juxtaposed columns. Here
again Perrault’s two taxonomic variables—“shape” and “pro-
portion”—can be detected in the visual structure of his illustra-
tion, which relies on two axes to dictate kind (Tuscan, Doric,
Ionic, Corinthian, Composite) and part (capital, shaft, base)
(Figure 6). Perrault’s rendition of this plate is remarkably grid-
like: a compact square whose dotted vertical lines provide visu-
al continuity between column shafts. The integrity of the
columns as objects has been sacrificed; they are fractured in
two, made to fit under a single horizontal hang-line that com-
presses the profiles traditionally rising along a diagonal.
Perrault’s orders are not, as they had been for so many before
him, labeled objects standing autonomously on the same
ground. Rather, they are dimensions drawn together into a sin-
gle matrix. Accordingly, this depiction of the architectural
order—which for centuries had been perpetuated by a predomi-
nantly mimetic tradition—is nothing other than a taxonomic
grid classifying architecture into a system of differences: on the
one hand, difference in kind; on the other hand, difference in
part. Perrault explains the architectural order as a two-variable
system—but where his translation of Vitruvius had merely har-
nessed the descriptive power of symmetry, his Ordonnance acti-
vates the productive power of a grid. It is this same grid that
62
7. Table des Entablemens in Claude Perrault later deploys in his tabulations in order to average out
Perrault, Ordonnance des cinq espèces
de colonnes selon la méthode des new proportions.
anciens (Paris: J.B. Coignard, 1683). It is with this recurring structure in mind that we must
(Photo by author)
approach Perrault’s proposal for new “probable” proportions
and the accusations it earned its author for over four centuries.
The narrative according to which Perrault destroyed archi-
tectural creation insists that he was forced by his own analytical
mindset to cast architectural beauty as arbitrary, yet compelled
by the weight of tradition to concede that beauty might be
natural. This dichotomy is mapped onto Perrault’s double voca-
tion as an architect and a scientist; hence his infamous “averag-
ing” operation was (and continues to be) understood by his
detractors as a surreptitious attempt to supplant the “natural”
with the “scientific”; science trumps nature when the average
of all arbitrary proportions, despite being “arbitrary,” are
understood as somehow “natural.” The potential flaw in this
narrative lies in its basic assumption that positive and custom-
ary beauty are necessarily contradictory, that one is “natural”
and the other “scientific,” and that Perrault was caught
between the two, uncertain as to his allegiance.24 What I want
to suggest instead is that Perrault relied on this and other
dualities to resolve conflict rather than produce it, and that,
therefore, he saw the two notions of beauty as symmetrical,
equally implicated in the production of an architectural order
that emerges as a third element—scientific perhaps, but no
less natural nor more arbitrary for it. We moderns have project-
ed onto Perrault our contemporary understanding of science
63
8. De livres et des chapitres contenus
dans la quatrième partie de ce livre in
François Blondel, Cours d’architecture
enseigné dans l’Académie royale d’ar-
chitecture. (Paris: Chez l’auteur, 1698).
(Photo by author)

by assuming that he imported a ready-made “scientific” tool into

an otherwise “natural” practice—despite the fact that Perrault
extracted both his categories from architecture’s own tradition.
Far from imposing a theory of discord onto a previously
harmonious order of architecture, Perrault performed an analy-
sisof architecture’s discordant Vitruvian legacy in order to derive
a two-dimensional grid calibrated to encompass both to the
authority of the ancients and the ambition of the moderns.
Consider again Perrault’s two most polemical claims: firstly, that
“the differences between the orders … are the only well-estab-
lished matters in architecture”25; and secondly, that “in architec-
ture there is positive beauty and beauty that is only arbitrary.”26
Neither of these two claims was particularly new in late seven-
teenth-century France. Where the first is concerned, inventories
like Fréart’s Parallel had amply illustrated the differences
between the proportions offered in previous treatises. The prac-
tice of measuring the orders had, further, extended beyond
treatises to include ancient buildings, in successive missions
whose findings had only extended the list of discrepancies to be
accounted for.27 There were, indeed, only differences in the archi-
64
 tecture of the ancients. As for the two kinds of beauty, it was a
common trope of the literary Parallels and had begun
to transcend its literary origins to inform a theory of aesthetics,
notably in the work of Port Royal logician Pierre Nicole. In
his 1659 True Beauty and its Phantom, Nicole distinguished
between “real” and “false” beauty, the first “eternal,” the latter
“contingent,” in order to propose a unifying aesthetics in which
beauty was equally well-suited to “nature” and to “convention,”
equally attuned to the “true description of things” and to “the
secret penchants of human nature.”28
What Perrault aimed to describe with his infamous claims
was not his own theory of architecture, but rather the predica-
ment of architecture in his time. If the architectural orders were
about differences, and beauty was always two-fold, then
9. Plate II: The Doric Order in Claude Perrault’s contribution was simply to require that these assess-
Perrault, Ordonnance des cinq espèces
de colonnes selon la méthode des ments intersect. He fulfilled that requirement by producing a
anciens (Paris: J.B. Coignard, 1683). grid in which architectural differences could be inventoried and
(Photo by author)
averaged. In this grid, the horizontal axis (the axis of what
Perrault called “positive beauty”) traces all the differences that
have remained constant in history, whereas the vertical axis (the
axis of “customary beauty”) gathers the differences that have
changed over time. What Perrault placed into this grid were the
orders collected in Fréart’s Parallel and the buildings measured
by Desgodets in Rome.29 For example, the “Table of Entabla-
tures” pulls together all the relevant measurements made or
proposed since antiquity (Figure 7). This table is modeled close-
ly on the plate of orders he devised to illustrate Vitruvius, with
one significant departure; whereas the horizontal axis expect-
edly organizes columns by kind, the vertical axis—instead of
marking the difference between base, column and capital—now
distinguishes between Serlio, Palladio, Vitruvius, the Temple of
Peace, the Colosseum, etc. Theorists, architects, and buildings:
all are placed into the same matrix In one fell swoop, Perrault
transforms each iconic figure and building into an abstract
numerical quantity, arbitrarily different from its predecessors
and successors regardless of the relative weight of its historical
authority. Chronology is discarded, supplanted by a sliding
scale from “less” to “more.” What Perrault proposed was not
a new inventory but a new structure for an existing inventory,
as a comparison of his tabulations with the table of contents of
François Blondel’s 1675 Cours d’architecture enseigné dans
l’académie royale d’architecture makes clear (Figure 8). Blondel
was a staunch defender of the ancients, dedicating an entire
chapter to a denouncement of Perrault’s heretical theory.
Yet a discerning eye might examine his index of chapters and
see Perrault’s matrix emerging from the maniacal repetition of
names, orders, and parts. It was this kind of repetition of
sources that Perrault placed into his grid, and it is not difficult
65
10. Detail of the eastern colonnade,
Palais du Louvre. (Photo by author)

to imagine the effect of this ordering on the authority of the

ancients.
From an undifferentiated collection of discordant sources,
Perrault extracted an improbably elegant numerical progres-
sion. Where centuries of measuring had yielded only complexity
and difficulty, Perrault’s plate of the orders explained every pro-
portional relationship with the paradoxical simplicity of ten
roman numerals (Figure 6). In order to arrive at this simplicity,
Perrault not only created a new module that transformed messy
fractional entities into neat integers, but he also famously
fudged his calculations.30 As a mathematician, Blondel deferred
to the inscrutability of his sources, crowding his plates with
numbers in the hopes that every mathematical entity might hold
a meaningful key to the mystery of the ancients. Perrault’s num-
bers, by contrast, are nothing but the means to an end. Without
a scale and almost devoid of numbers, Perrault’s diagram of the
orders is a pithy formula computed in Part I of the Ordonnance
and reprinted five times in Part II (once for each order). If
Perrault eventually proposes new proportions, it is only to con-
clude with an assurance that he will defer to anybody who pro-
66
poses a better method of calculation. “Method” is the operative
term here: the authority that emerges out of the conflict
between ancients and moderns is the process of ordering itself.
It is not Perrault’s theory that is crippled by “complexities and
contradictions” (to use Perez-Gomez’s phrase).31 Rather, it is the
Vitruvian tradition, unproblematically gathered in Perrault’s
plates for each order, which lays bare all of its accumulated
discrepancies by means of a new ordering device that mirrors
ancients and moderns around an axis and folds them into one
(Figure 9).

Columns
What does all this have to do with the Louvre colonnade?
What is the connection between the authority of method and
a façade without an author? In strictly proportional terms, the
architectural order used at the Louvre is not the same as the
Corinthian order proposed in the Ordonnance. Yet Perrault’s
numerical elegance tolerates inaccuracy. Far more important is
the question posed by the doubling of columns: what are we to
make of the coincidence that, in an age of endless parallels,
such a visible royal commission should feature paired columns
rather than single ones? To be sure, there is a technical explana-
tion: an added column helps to support the weight and with-
stand the thrust of an architrave spanning unprecedented
lengths. But structural necessities are only part of the answer.
I would like to suggest that the doubling of columns at the
Louvre projects architecture onto Paris in the same way as the
Ordonnance projects a method of ordering onto the Vitruvian
tradition. My point is not that Perrault’s method has literally
been embodied by a colonnade, but rather that both function as
devices for ordering. They both posit a conciliatory politics—
for interpreting the orders, for giving an architectural face to the
monarchy—that acknowledges the authority of the ancients all
the while breaking the spell of their mystery.
Symmetry is the key to understanding the colonnade’s
role—it is, after all, an operation that turns a single column into
a pair by means of a vertical axis. Take the plate from Fréart’s
Parallel comparing Alberti’s and Vignola’s Corinthian order;
it is the disrupted expectation of symmetry—of seeing a single
column and then realizing that two different halves have been
conjoined—that creates the uncanny effect of seeing double
(Figure 3). Just as a vertical axis is endlessly repeated in the
plates of Fréart’s text, so a vertical line can be drawn between
each pair of columns at the Louvre. Mapped onto the whole
colonnade, this proliferation of axes of symmetry helps to
explain the relentlessness of the façade and Perrault’s insis-
tence on representing it as a potentially self-perpetuating sys-
tem of construction. By the same token, imagining these axes
67
11. Plan d’un entre-colonne des
arrière-corps du péristyle du Louvre
in Pierre Patte, Mémoire sur les objets
les plus importans de l’architecture
(Paris: Rozet, 1769). Engraving.
(Photo by author)

serves to shift our attention away from the columns qua

columns and towards the space between them. This emphasis
on intercolumniation, on the space in-between, leads us back
to Perrault’s translation of Vitruvius’s Ten Books. It is in his
explanatory footnote to the section on intercolumniation that
the Louvre colonnade first appears as an exception to ancient
rules.32 To legitimize what he calls (without claiming authorship)
“the invention made at the Louvre,” Perrault makes reference
to Hermogenes—the only ancient architect who, in order to
accommodate an entrance, had dared break the regularity of
intercolumniation by slightly modifying the interval between the
columns of his temples. In his footnote, Perrault draws two
plans of four columns each, in a sequence that makes evident
the process of ordering a colonnade (Figure 4). Hence the dou-
bling of columns at the Louvre is not the result of an addition of
elements, but rather of a modulation of distances: it is not that
a column is added, as the diagram in his footnote makes clear,
but that every other column is displaced. Rather than pairing
identical columns, the Louvre façade appears to pair non-identi-
cal intervals; for every short interval between paired columns,
68
there is a long interval between pairs of columns. In other
words, if the Louvre façade is to be understood as a system, it
must be understood as a system of differences. Just as in
Perrault’s Ordonnance, what matters is not the numerical meas-
urement of the orders (the dimension of columns), but rather
the accumulated differences between them (the space between
columns). In both instances, discerning the significance of
the orders amounts to asking what the difference between two
kinds (espèces) of differences might be.
Perrault’s footnote on Hermogenes concludes with the
decidedly modern assertion that, whereas the Ancients pre-
ferred their peristyles to have narrowly-spaced columns, the
French favor more generous intervals, which Perrault calls
dégagement. This evolution of taste, Perrault argues, occurred
because of usage, a concept that also appears in his brother’s
Parallel in reference to the Louvre colonnade. Whereas in
ancient times, Charles Perrault explains, ladies had to stop
holding hands when entering temples because entrance spaces
were too narrow for two bodies, modern peristyles improve
on their predecessors by making accommodations for usage.33
Hence narrow and wide intervals appear to be literal references
to ancient and modern usage, respectively. And the Louvre
colonnade can be understood as a serial juxtaposition of two
kinds of usages: the ancient short interval, so narrow that it
barely allows for the width of a single body; and the modern
dégagement, made wide as possible through modern structural
technology. The ancient interval, while remaining a reference
point, only serves to underscore the amplitude of the modern
dégagement, and the sociability it implies.
What, then, is the usage of dégagement at the Louvre? In
Perrault’s frontispiece to Vitruvius, we find another doubling of
columns, to the left of the Louvre, in the Arc de Triomphe du
Faubourg Saint Antoine that Perrault designed in 1667 to com-
memorate the royal entrance into Paris of 1660 (Figure 2). Here
the pairs of columns flank an archway intended for the passage
of the King, and the resulting intervals are clearly differentiated
by usage; short intervals between paired columns are merely
appended to the wall, whereas the wider ones between pairs
allows for triumphal processions. Hence the Arc stands as the
result of a properly French ordering of columns, whereby a
modern dégagement befits the authority of the modern King
and the ancient precedent is presumably displayed for its sym-
bolic value. At the Louvre, by contrast, the entire colonnade
stands apart from the wall, and never allows for passage of any
kind. From the inside of the Louvre, one can only step into the
peristyle and look through it, and it is from within this space
that the scene in Perrault’s frontispiece to Vitruvius appears to
have been composed. Here a picture of sociable architecture
69
emerges. The allegorical figures conversing in the foreground
are seated behind short and wide intervals; they are situated as
if in the Louvre colonnade yet they also paradoxically face it,
looking out onto a cityscape taken over by a plethora of coupled
columns (Figure 10).
If the “invention” of the Louvre is to have detached its
colonnade completely from the façade to form a peristyle, then
the usage of this peristyle corresponds to another kind of
dégagement: a pulling apart of one surface from another, a
process that leaves traces on the wall in the form of coupled
pilasters. As Pierre Patte’s 1769 detailed plan shows, the space
of the colonnade results from a doubling of coupled columns
into coupled pilasters, a gesture that seems to echo Perrault’s
doubling of the canonical Vitruvian figure into circle and square
(Figure 11). As a result of this gesture, every interval between
pairs of columns is matched by a perpendicular interval
between wall and colonnade, and the two directions of this
dégagement are clearly marked by the circle-in-a-square ceiling
scheme that hovers above it and projects geometrical order
from the coffers down.
Clearly the peristyle of the Louvre is an ordered space
intended to be occupied by bodies, rather than simply a com-
posed facade intended to be perceived from a distance. What is
more, it is not a given that the body behind the colonnade is the
body of the King—as a comparison with another royal residence
makes clear. A similar process of dégagement characterizes
Jules Hardouin-Mansart’s Galerie des Glaces, which was
appended to the western façade of Versailles in 1678. Here, too,
the interior wall bears traces of a perforated surface that has
been detached from it; the same arcuated rhythm is found on
the garden façade and on the wall of mirrors that is parallel to it.
Yet whereas the mirrors at Versailles serve to bring its gardens
inside the palace, the wall behind the Louvre colonnade remains
impermeable. Whereas the Galerie des Glaces looks both
inward and outward to reflect the supremely ordered world of
Le Nôtre’s gardens, the Louvre colonnade is an ordered space
that mirrors itself indefinitely, projecting outward onto the
chaos of a then-still-medieval Paris. And whereas the mirrors of
Versailles reflect the King as he deambulates down his hall,
rendering his body into a ubiquitous presence, the peristyle of
the Louvre is marked by Louis XIV’s absence.
Remember that the construction of the colonnade stands
in the historical record as the marker of the King’s departure
from Paris— and his transfer of the entire court to Versailles.
If, in Louis Marin’s words, “the King at Versailles is at once
everywhere and nowhere,” at the Louvre, in contrast, the King is
elsewhere—the King is at Versailles.34 By the time the colonnade
was completed, all that remained of the royal entourage in
70
Paris were the scientists, the artists, the architects—in short,
the academicians. To be sure, the Louvre continued to denote
the absolutist authority that had created it. But the task
of representing this authority was being delegated to the
Academies—bearers of France’s newly institutionalized
scientific and artistic ambitions. Imagine therefore the Louvre,
teeming with so many artists and savants who, entrusted with
their academic mandates, are charged with developing an
intrinsically French view of the world. In this scheme of things,
the image of the colonnade as a projective ordering device
takes on added dimension. No longer an order to be contem-
plated from the outside, the colonnade is a space for looking
out onto Paris through the eyes of an academician—a space for
seeing, through the intervals of the columns (both narrow and
wide, both Ancient and Modern), an entire world that has yet
to be ordered. The Louvre colonnade offers not an order to be
looked at, but rather an ordering device to be looked through,
and what this device imposes onto Paris is the numerical
elegance of taxonomy, of classification, of order.
The passage from a contemplated single order to a sociable
ordering device is also found in Charles Perrault’s Parallel, an
allegorical tale of the eclipse of the authority of the ancients.
The Parallel is a satirical fable that follows three characters—
le Président, le Chevalier and l’Abbé—as they travel to
Versailles to discuss the merits of modern inventions and
ancient accomplishments. Arriving at the question of architec-
ture, they refer not to the château in front of their eyes, but
to the royal complex in Paris. Here, the Abbé contends, a single
column contains architecture’s perfect order, embodied in
a single, ideal proportion:

Abbé: It is said that, among the columns at the Palais

des Tuileries, there is one column which has the
desired proportion. People go admire it, as if it were
the only one where the architect had reached the
imperceptible point of perfection. It is even said that,
not long ago, an old architect had himself brought
there every day, and spent two whole hours sitting in
his chair, contemplating this masterpiece.

Chevalier: I am not surprised; this way he got his rest,

and in a very pleasant place. By the same token he
acquired a great reputation at a small price, since, the
less one saw what could possibly be so charming in
this column, the more one supposed that he had a pro-
found understanding of the mystery of architecture.

Abbé: If those strong proportions had had natural

71
 beauty, no study would have been required to judge
them.35

“An old architect” immobilized by the sight of a single col-

umn, all the while “getting his rest”: with what might be taken
as a reference to Bernini’s recent Parisian visit (he was sixty-
seven years old at the time), Charles offers a cautionary tale
about the mystery of the ancients. What he goes on to argue is
that “in the Louvre façade alone there is more architectural
beauty than in any of the buildings of the ancients.”36 What this
means, I want to suggest, is that the Louvre colonnade makes it
impossible to contemplate a single column—a single order—
since this order is, quite literally, no longer single. By ordering
the orders, in other words, the Louvre colonnade breaks the
mystery of the ancients just as it allows space for the consolida-
tion of modern authority. The truly modern architect must stand
behind the colonnade and watch it project ancient authority and
modern invention together onto the world, in a perpetually self-
replicating system. It is this self-replication that ensures the
emergence of a properly French order, as architecturally coher-
ent as it is politically absolute.

Author biography
Lucia Allais is the winner of the 2005 FAST-IP Excellence Award. “Ordering the
Orders” originally appeared in the Winter 2005 issue of thresholds, the journal of
architecture, art and media culture produced by the Department of Architecture of
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This version has been abridged from the
original. Allais is a doctoral candidate in the History, Theory and Criticism of
Architecture and Art at MIT.

Endnotes
This paper was originally written in the context of a seminar entitled Imagining the
Baroque, taught by Erika Naginski at MIT in Fall 2003. I am grateful to Professor
Naginski for her patient input, both during the seminar and long after it had ended. I
am also grateful to Professor Antoine Picon for his pithy but invaluable comments
during the research phase of this project.
1
Our confused understanding of Bernini’s stay in Paris stems from three conflicting
first-hand accounts: Charles Perrault’s Mémoires de ma vie (1669; Paris: Renouard,
1909); Paul Fréart de Chantelou’s Journal du voyage du Cavalier Bernin en France
(Paris: L. Lalane, 1885); and the transcript of a conversation between Claude Perrault
and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz reprinted in Journal général de l’instruction
publique et des cultes XXVI/32 (22 Apr. 1857): 235-236.
2
Nicolas Boileau, “Réflexions critiques sur quelques passages du rhéteur Longin,” in
Oeuvres Complètes, ed. by Françoise Escal (Paris: Gallimard,1966), 495, was trying
to discredit Claude Perrault as an architect: “it is the design of the famous Monsieur
Le Vau that was followed in the façade of the Louvre, and … it is not true that this
great work of architecture, nor the observatory, nor the triumphal arch, are the work
of a physician from the Faculty;” this and all subsequent translations from French are
mine, unless otherwise noted.
3
For a historical account of Perrault’s claim to authorship, see Wolfgang Herrmann’s
“The Sequel,” in his The Theory of Claude Perrault (London: Zwemmer, 1973), 130-
179.
4
In its most recent iteration, this debate took place in the pages of Burlington
Magazine, in a series of book reviews. See, for example, Christopher Tadgell,
“Claude Perrault, Francois le Vau and the Louvre Colonnade,” Burlington Magazine
CXXII/926 (May 1980), 26-35; Robert W. Berger, “The Louvre Colonnade,” in
Burlington Magazine CXXIII/934 (Jan. 1981), 33-35; Robin Middleton, “The Palace of
the Sun: The Louvre of Louis XIV: Book Review,” in Burlington Magazine CXXXV/1087

72
(Oct. 1993), 70-702; and Hilary Ballon, “A Royal Passion: Louis XIV as Patron of
Architecture: Book Review,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 54
(Dec. 1995) 499-500.
5
Alberto Perez-Gomez, “Introduction” to Claude Perrault, Ordonnance for the Five
Kinds of Columns after the Method of the Ancients, trans. by Indra Kagiz McEwen
(Santa Monica: Getty Center, 1993), 5.
6
Alberto Perez-Gomez, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1983), offers an argument that is modeled closely on Edmund Husserl’s
Crisis of the European Sciences (1939; Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
1970), with Perrault substituting for Galileo in the historical role of a critical hinge
between the pre-modern “real world given through perception” and the modern
“mathematically structured world of idealities.”
7
See Antoine Picon, Claude Perrault, 1613-1688, ou la curiosité d’un classique, (Paris:
Picard, 1988).
8
Robert W. Berger, A Royal Passion: Louis XIV as Patron of Architecture (Cambridge
University Press, 1994) 34-35, argues in favor of Le Vau, for example, by observing
that the final scheme is “strikingly similar to Francois Le Vau’s façade design of 1662-
1664, strongly suggesting that the younger Le Vau’s drawing, available to his brother,
was used as the basic model.” This argument is accompanied by a skeptical descrip-
tion of Perrault as a “scientist, physician and fledgling architect” whose involvement
in architecture remains inexplicable apart from his “theoretical” predicament as an
erudite: “we do not fully understand why Colbert appointed Claude to so important
a group; perhaps Claude’s interest in the writings of Vitruvius … may have suggested
to Colbert that he possessed ancient theoretical knowledge that could be useful.”.
See also his The Palace of the Sun: The Louvre of Louis XIV (University Park: Penn
State University Press, 1993) and A Royal Passion: Louis XIV as Patron of Architecture
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
9
See the engravings from Claude and Charles Perrault, Œuvres de physique et de
méchanique (Amsterdam: Chez Jean Frederic Bernard, 1727).
10
For more on the role played by Perrault at the Académie d’Architecture, see Hilary
Ballon, “Constructions of the Bourbon State: Classical Architecture in Seventeenth-
Century France,” in Cultural Differentiation and Cultural Identity in the Visual Arts.
Studies in the History of Art 27, ed. by Susan J. Barnes and Walter S. Melion
(Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1989), 135-148.
11
Charles Perrault, Parallèle des anciens et des modernes en ce qui regarde les arts et
les sciences (Paris: 1688), 128-129.
12
Ibid., 176.
13
In his Ordonnance, 57, Claude Perrault also used this phrase, repeatedly express-
ing his disbelief at “the extent to which architects make a religion of venerating … the
mystery of proportions.”
14
Fréart’s brother, Paul de Fréart, Sieur de Chantelou, was later enlisted to escort
Bernini in France, and wrote an account of his journey contradicting Charles
Perrault’s Mémoires (see note 1).
15
Roland Fréart de Chambray, A Parallel of Architecture both Ancient and Moderne,
trans. by John Evelyn (London: 1663), 7.
16
Picon, 137.
17
Claude Perrault, Les dix livres d’architectures de Vitruve, (1673, rev. 1683;
Bruxelles: Mardaga, 1979), 56, n. 3. Perrault ends by acknowledging how “unfortu-
nate” it is not to be able to translate the latin proportio as the French proportion and,
noting that Cicero had found himself in a similar predicament when translating
Plato’s Timaeus from Greek, cites him as precedent for the need to be “daring
through reinvention.”
18
Ibid., 56 n. 2: “Since our symmetry, properly speaking, is the equality and the parity
that one encounters between two opposing parts, such that if, for example….
columns are more tight on the right than on the left…we say that this is a default of
symmetry.” For more on the French definition of symmetry, see Werner Szambien,
Symétrie, goût, caractère: théorie et terminologie de l’architecture à l’age classique
(Paris: Picard, 1986), 61-79; and Robin Middleton, “Symmetry: A French Obsession,”
Daidalos 15 (15 Mar. 1985), 71-81.
19
Perez-Gomez’s notion of Crisis is the basis for the argument about the loss of mean-
ing. On the complexity of semantic homogeneity, see Manfredo Tafuri, “Architettura
Artificialis: Claude Perrault, Sir Christopher Wren e il dibattito sul linguaggio
architettonico,” in Barocco europeo, barocco italiano, barocco salentino. Congresso
internazionale sul Barocco, ed. by Pier Fausto Palumbo (Lecce: Centro di studi salen-
tini, 1970), 375-398.
20
Ordonnance, 66.
21
Ibid.
22
Ibid.
23
Ibid., 47.

73
24
Much attention has been paid to discerning whether Perrault privileges one kind of
beauty over the other. As Picon,145, has shown, Perrault argues first that arbitrary
beauty (which is understood only by an informed elite) is superior to positive beauty
(which can be perceived by any uneducated eye), but later grants that the authority
accorded to positive beauty is usually superior to the one granted to arbitrary beau-
ty.
25
Ordonnance, 47.
26
Ibid., 53.
27
Antoine Desgodets was sent to Rome by Colbert in the late 1670s, publishing his,
Les édifices antiques de Rome, dessinés et mesurés très exactement (Paris: Simon,)
in 1682.
28
Pierre Nicole, La vraie beauté et son fantôme , ed. Béatrice Guion, (1659; Paris:
Champion, 1996), 71, 103, articulates an axis of convenance between “things” and
“people” in progressively abstract terms: from words ( “Mais ce n’est pas assez que
les mots conviennent aux choses, s’ils ne conviennent également à la nature
humaine”) to thought (“Il est assez facile de saisir comment les pensées doivent
s’accorder aux choses. Mais il est en revanche beacucoup plus difficile de percevoir
comment elles doivent s’accorder aux personnes”). By means of this abstraction, he
arrives at a notion of “beauty” that is essentially detached from the particulars of
any art form and corresponds to what Louis Marin, La critique du discours: sur la
“Logique de port-royal” et les “Pensées” de Pascal (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1975),
79-105, calls a “theory of the sign.”
29
Ordonnance, 63, refers to Desgodets and his “discovery” of different proportions.
30
For a start, Perrault’s so-called “average” proportions are not the mathematical
average of a given numerical set, but rather the means between the two extreme val-
ues in the set. More to the point, Herrmann, 106-107, notes that the many typograph-
ical and mathematical mistakes that appear in Perrault’s calculations demonstrate
his “complete disregard for arithmetic,” and “prove that these tables were made
after the fact.”
31
Perez-Gomez, in Ordonnance, 37
32
“Par L’aspreté des Entrecolonnemens,” Dix Livres, 78-79, n. 16.
33
Ch. Perrault, Parallèle, 135.
34
Louis Marin, “Classical, Baroque: Versailles, or the Architecture of the Prince,” Yale
French Studies 80. Baroque Topographies (1991), 180.
35
Ch. Perrault, Parallèle, 140.
36
Ibid., 176.

74