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Three days in Paris to enjoy the Summer after the COVID-19 lockdown period...
Location: Pont d'Arcole, Paris 4ème.
Coördinates: 48°85'55" N 2°35'05" E
Reason: Three days stay in Paris to enjoy the city and catching up with the space invaders. Fourty space invaders visited, flashed and captured in these two days.
Pont d'Arcole: The Pont d'Arcole is a bridge in Paris over the River Seine. It is served by the Metro station Hôtel de Ville. The need for a bridge communicating between place de Grève (now Place de l'Hôtel-de-Ville) and the île de la Cité had been felt for years. Called the passerelle de Grève or the pont de l'Hôtel-de-Ville for the first two years of its life, its present name - according to the most generally accepted hypothesis - comes from the Battle of the Bridge of Arcole, in which Napoleon personally led a charge waving the tricolour and defeated the Austrians in 1796.
It was only in 1828 that a suspension bridge for pedestrians with two 6m-wide carriageways, supported from a central pier in midstream, was built by Marc Seguin. In 1854, with increased traffic due to the prolongation of the rue de Rivoli, it was replaced by a more substantial metal structure that could also be used by vehicular traffic. The pont d'Arcole was built to the plans of Alphonse Oudry (1819–1869), retired Ingénieur des Ponts et Chaussées and his partner Nicolas Cadiat;[2] the structure was innovative in that it was the first unsupported bridge across the Seine to be made entirely in wrought iron rather than cast iron. The low arch, only lightly cambered, was also innovative, and on 16 February 1888 it suddenly sagged by 20 cm and had to be consolidated. It was only between 1994 and 1995 that the city council made overall repairs to the bridge's roadways, reviewing its waterproofing and paintwork at the same time.
Location on the Seine
The bridge is also historically notable in that it was over this bridge that the first tanks of Général Leclerc's 2nd Armored Division rolled on their way to the place de l'hôtel de ville during the Liberation of Paris in August 1944.
Facts & Figures:
Design: Alphonse Oudry / Nicolas Cadiat
Length: 80 meters
Width: 20 meters
Weather: Sunny, 30° C
To Listen ♫: Elias B - Polar Ice (Adam Nickey Remix) (Youtube)
Self-portrait technics: Camera on shoulder bag on sidewalk with selftimer on 10 seconds.
Pont d'Arcole 18/07/2020 07h48
Pont d'Arcole in the early Summer morning in July 2020. Seen from the Quai de Gesvres and at the other side Quai de la Corse. And above the buildings of Île-de-la-Cité, the construction crane for the repair work of Notre-Dame de Paris, which was partly destroyed by fire in April last year (2019).
Île-de-la-Cité
The Île de la Cité is one of two remaining natural islands in the Seine within the city of Paris (the other being the Île Saint-Louis). It is the centre of Paris and the location where the medieval city was refounded.
The western end has held a palace since Merovingian times, and its eastern end since the same period has been consecrated to religion, especially after the 10th century construction of a cathedral preceding today's Notre Dame. The land between the two was, until the 1850s, largely residential and commercial, but has since been filled by the city's Prefecture de Police, Palais de Justice, Hôtel-Dieu hospital and Tribunal de commerce. Only the westernmost and northeastern extremities of the island remain residential today, and the latter preserves some vestiges of its 16th-century canon's houses. The Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation, a memorial to the 200,000 people deported from Vichy France to the Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War, is located at the upriver end of the island.
Area: 0,225 km2
Geology: River Island
Arrondissements: 1 and 4
Population: 1 168 (2007), 891 (2016)
[ Source and much more information: Wikipedia - Île-de-la-Cité ]
Pont d'Arcole
The Pont d'Arcole is a bridge in Paris over the River Seine. It is served by the Metro station Hôtel de Ville. The need for a bridge communicating between place de Grève (now Place de l'Hôtel-de-Ville) and the île de la Cité had been felt for years. Called the passerelle de Grève or the pont de l'Hôtel-de-Ville for the first two years of its life, its present name - according to the most generally accepted hypothesis - comes from the Battle of the Bridge of Arcole, in which Napoleon personally led a charge waving the tricolour and defeated the Austrians in 1796.
It was only in 1828 that a suspension bridge for pedestrians with two 6m-wide carriageways, supported from a central pier in midstream, was built by Marc Seguin. In 1854, with increased traffic due to the prolongation of the rue de Rivoli, it was replaced by a more substantial metal structure that could also be used by vehicular traffic. The pont d'Arcole was built to the plans of Alphonse Oudry (1819–1869), retired Ingénieur des Ponts et Chaussées and his partner Nicolas Cadiat;[2] the structure was innovative in that it was the first unsupported bridge across the Seine to be made entirely in wrought iron rather than cast iron. The low arch, only lightly cambered, was also innovative, and on 16 February 1888 it suddenly sagged by 20 cm and had to be consolidated. It was only between 1994 and 1995 that the city council made overall repairs to the bridge's roadways, reviewing its waterproofing and paintwork at the same time.
Location on the Seine
The bridge is also historically notable in that it was over this bridge that the first tanks of Général Leclerc's 2nd Armored Division rolled on their way to the place de l'hôtel de ville during the Liberation of Paris in August 1944.
Opened: 1856
Design: Alphonse Oudry / Nicolas Cadiat
Length: 80 meters
Width: 20 meters
[ Source & more Info: Wikipedia - Pont d'Arcole ]
Charles Michel-Ange Challe
Paris - Paris 1778
About 1742-1749
Pen and ink, ink wash
Gift of Dr. Sean B. Murphy
Inventory 2012.83
Charles Michel-Ange Challe, born in Paris on February 13, 1718 and died January 8, 1778 is a painter, draftsman and French architect.
Having studied with Boucher and Le Moyne, he was one of the most appreciated painters of his time and enjoyed a huge success across Europe. His architectural drawings in the style of Piranesi contributed to his appointment in 1764 as Draftsman of the Chamber and the Cabinet of the King, charge for which he would produce many ephemeral architectures for parties and great royal funerals.
He played a pivotal role in the transition between rococo and classical styles and was one of the essential contributors to the creation of aesthetics known as the Louis XVI style .
Charles Michel-Ange Challe was born in Paris to a modest family from March 18, 1718. He first studied architecture with the Dominican monk Brother André before joining the workshop of François Lemoyne, then at the height of his glory. After the latter's suicide in 1731, he became a pupil of François Boucher, whose friend he became and whose technique would have a lasting influence on him.
In 1738, he first runs for the Prix de Rome and came second. He will be a candidate again in 1740 and 1741, the year he receives the Grand Prize for his Tobit Healing. Among the members of the jury are Nicolas de Largillière and Charles van Loo. His brother, Simon, won the second prize in sculpture the same year.
He arrived in Rome on November 3, 1742, as a resident at the French Academy in Rome. Under the direction of Jean-Francois de Troy, he made copies of Raphael Stanze in the Vatican to send them to the Gobelins as cartons for tapestries. Challe copied in particular The Encounter between Leo I the Great and Attila. He took advantage of his stay to travel in Italy, from which he brought back a number of architectural drawings and landscapes.
In Campania, he visits Herculaneum and ventured into the crater of Vesuvius, then active, which he will report in a scientific treatise.
As part of the Academy of Rome, he also plays a leading role in the development of festive decorations, or farandoles, in the context of the carnival of 1748 and is brought to collaborate with the architects Louis-Joseph Le Lorrain, Ennemond- Alexandre Petitot and Charles-Louis Clérisseau who will reinforce his neoclassical way. The success of these initiatives will play a significant role in his appointment as head of Menus Plaisirs a few years later.
He remains in Rome for seven years while the normal length of a stay was not supposed to exceed three years.
But it is especially by his drawings of monuments in the style of Piranesi that this period will mark the work of Challe. The influence of the great draftsman on the Académie de France, near the studio where his works were engraved, is well known. Throughout his career, Challe will produce a large number of high quality drawings in the style of Piranesi and will work on the French translation of his theoretical works.
He designs temples, triumphal arches, monumental sculptural groups, and bridges for which he uses a number of monumental motifs: columns, funerary urns, obelisks.
Back in Paris in 1749, he enjoys a huge success and becomes one of the most prominent painters. In 1752, he is an accredited member of the Royal Academy of Painting and becomes a member two years later. In 1758, he is appointed professor of perspective to replace Sébastien Leclerc. His reception piece at the Academy, The Union of Painting and Sculpture Arts by Drawing, ornates the ceiling of the meeting room.
A prolific painter, he produced many pieces, showing the influence of François Boucher and Nicolas de Troy (Les Charmes multipliés, The Crowned Shepard), which enjoyed considerable success in France but also in Prussia, in all German states, England and Russia. Many European courts invited him without success. The best of his works were engraved (Jupiter and Leda, engraved in 1761 by Jean-Baptiste Tillard).
He exhibited at the Salon of 1753 and will continue to participate in the following years, alongside Jean Siméon Chardin, Etienne Jeaurat, Jean-Marc Nattier, Jean Restout, Louis Tocque, Louis-Michel and Charles van Loo. He displayed religious paintings (Saint Sebastien, Last Judgment, Ascension), history paintings (Lucretia and Brutus, Death of Cleopatra) and portraits (Mignot, sculptor of the king.)
But his work for the Salon will earn him in 1763 violent criticism of Diderot after some praise on his Socrates on the Verge of Drinking Hemlock in 1761:
"It looks like being painted a hundred years ago; but it is much older for the way than for the color. It looks like it's a copy after some ancient bas-relief. There reigns a simplicity, a tranquility, especially in the main figure, which is hardly of our time."
His Sleeping Venus is very much appreciated especially at the court:
"It is about this painting that Louis XV asked a lady of his court, famous for her taste in the arts, what she thought of the Salon, she replied that she remembered only the Venus from Challe."
In 1765, he presented a monumental painting: Hector Entering the Palace of Pâris which earned him unanimous negative reviews and dissuaded him from exhibiting the following years.
Nevertheless, he continued to be very much in demand and became one of the most expensive painters of his time. He decorated many churches (Oratoire du Louvre, Convent of Feuillants, Saint-Hippolyte and Saint-Roch in Paris) and mansions (hotels of Palatine of Lithuania, of Soyecourt, of Malta, of Duke of Praslin, of Duke of Aiguillon.)
After the death of the sculptor and ornamanist René Michel Slodz in 1764, he was appointed, by a royal decree of 23 February 1765, Draftsman of the Chamber and Cabinet of the King, a position he obtained thanks to the support of the Duke d'Aumont in competition with other brilliant candidates (de Wailly, Bocquet, Géraud.) This charge is then important to the court:
"Machinist, composer of theater clothes and ballet costumes, organizer of funerals, artificer, scenery painter, in a word, man of common taste and easy elegance, such was the draftsman of the cabinet of His Majesty."
He will be particularly famous in the early years for the ephemeral architectures he creates for the great funerals at a time when the taste is in transition to neoclassicism "the greak way". Thus he conceives the monuments of the infant Philippe de Bourbon, Duke of Parma, of Louis-Ferdinand, Dauphin of France, of Stanislas Leszczynski, King of Poland, of Elisabeth Farnese, Queen of Spain, of the Dauphine Maria Josepha of Saxony, of the Queen of France, of Charles-Emmanuel III of Savoy and finally of King Louis XV himself. The label of the moment wants indeed that great funeral.
"Corroborate the elaboration of a rhetoric that attempts to compose a kind of figurative eulogy that also obeys a precise geography."
They constitute a graphic counterpart to the funeral oration. The king's draftsman also creates sets for other royal ceremonies: entrances, weddings, law courts, parties and entertainment. In 1770, he creates the ephemeral decoration of the marriage of the Dauphin, future Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette at Versailles and the Orangery with the assistance of Moreau the Younger who will succeed him:
"This palace of the Sun, raised at one end of the canal, whose waters reflected torrents of light will remembered for a long time. These groves and beds of fire, basins where the two elements seemed to be confused, the variety of amusements and shows distributed throughout the park to share the crowd."
He is the first to engrave his drawings, which allows us to rediscover today this less known part of French art of the seventeenth century, all the achievements of Menus Plaisirs having been dismantled after being used.
In November 1770, an aging Challe was named knight of the order of Saint Michel and ennobled. He is filled with honors and received at the Academy of Sciences and Fine Arts of Lyon.
In 1762 he married Madeline-Sophie Nattier, the youngest daughter of Jean-Marc Nattier with whom he had no children.
In the last years of his life, he worked on a project to expand the city of Marseille which was first approved by Turgot, Minister of the Navy, before being abandoned. His declining health didnot allow him to participate actively in the decor of the coronation of Louis XVI in Reims in June 1775, which will be directed by his assistant Moreau le Jeune . He died on January 8, 1778 from a violent fever, at the age of 59 years.
Beyond his painted and engraved work, he leaves many books, plays in verse, dramatic works, travel stories and translations of Piranesi, not to mention his scientific essay on Vesuvius but none has been published under his name and it is difficult to trace his aliases.