The 18th century gilded lead artwork has been restored and returned to its place in the domain after restoration work began in December 2022.
The Palace of Versailles has regained its famous Apollo fountain on Thursday, February 15th. The statue-fountain, a tribute to the sun god dear to Louis XIV, is located in the main axis of the royal palace and is set to host the equestrian events of the Paris Olympic and Paralympic Games.
The gilded lead artwork by Jean-Baptiste Tuby, created in the 18th century based on a drawing by Charles Le Brun, depicts Apollo in his chariot with four horses, surrounded by another god, Phaeton, and by tritons and dolphins.
The sculpture has regained all its brilliance and its central place in the domain after restoration work began in December 2022, the last time it was restored being over a hundred years ago, according to Laurent Salomé, director of the National Museum of the Châteaux de Versailles and Trianon.
“This Apollo fountain is crucial for Versailles in the literal sense, as it is at the crossroads of two major axes in the mythical perspective of the castle. It embodies the symbol to which Louis XIV was most attached: the sun, the sun god, so it really is the image of Versailles as one conceives it throughout the world,” emphasized Laurent Salomé.
“This fountain, like all the others, was suffering. It was collapsing. The lead sculpture, it’s magnificent, it was a wonderful find, but it’s fragile. The reinforcements were rusting, causing the shapes to explode, and it was urgent to restore it. The Olympic year was the ideal year, we needed a magnificent fountain for the occasion,” he added.
This restoration of the gilded sculptures “with gold leaf” as well as the fountain with its water jets brings the whole closer to its “rather bronzed historical state, which made the great originality of the gardens of the castle,” said this official.
It allowed to “rediscover the work and redo everything that had been altered in 400 years: the structures, the reinforcements, the gilding,” detailed Jacques Moulin, chief architect of historic buildings in charge of Versailles.
According to this specialist, this work represented “a challenge of attention and a technical challenge with the discovery of certain lead diseases and handling requiring the installation of a real peripheral structure around the whole.”
