 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
|
|
|
|||||
|
 |
 |
Biography of Gabriel Germain BoffrandName: Gabriel Germain BoffrandBirth Date: 1667 Death Date: 1754 Place of Birth: France Nationality: French Gender: Male Occupations: architect, interior decorator Gabriel Germain Boffrand Gabriel Germain Boffrand (1667-1754) was a French architect and interior decorator whose mastery of the new Louis XV or rococo style widely influenced 18th-century architecture in France and abroad.Gabriel Germain Boffrand codified and disseminated the supple rococo style which borrowed, in miniature scale, more from the Italian baroque of Francesco Borromini and Guarino Guarini than from the stringent academic classicism favored in France since the Renaissance. Boffrand's book Livre d'architecture (1745) indicates that he was aware of his role as mediator of the golden mean between reason and fantasy.Through loss of documentation and the demolition of most of the palaces and town houses Boffrand built in Paris and in the province of Lorraine, relatively little evidence of his talents subsists. He is said to have begun his artistic training under the sculptor François Girardon, but there is proof that Boffrand worked for the first architect of the king, …showed first 150 words…
…showed last 150 words…Balthasar Neumann, architect to the prince-bishop of Würzburg, brought his plans for the new Residenz to Paris for editing by De Cotte and Boffrand; the latter visited the site at Würzburg the next year. In 1736 Boffrand undertook the interior design of the Hôtel Soubise in Paris, his last and most notable work. The oval salon is the outstanding creation of the rococo style.Boffrand was a master of integrating convex and concave spatial solids and rectilinear and curvilinear planes. His signal credit as an architect was in having concretized the evolution of the sometimes overly mannered and occasionally chaotic style called the rococo. Further Reading Fiske Kimball, The Creation of the Rococo (1943), weaves Boffrand into the fabric of the 50-year evolution of the rococo style but underrates his importance as an original contributor. A valuable background study is Germain Bazin, Baroque and Rococo (trans. 1964). |