Claude Perrault (1613-1688), French scientist, architect, and engineer, designed the east front of the Louvre in Paris, the finest example of the classicistic phase of the French baroque style.

Claude Perrault was born on Sept. 25, 1613, in Paris. He was trained as a doctor and was a respected member of the Académie des Sciences. He was also a serious student of architecture and archeology, and the influential position of his younger brother Charles, intermediary of Louis XIV's prime minister, Jean Baptiste Colbert, in the newly founded academies of science, architecture, sculpture, and painting gave Claude access to the inner circle of artists and architects.

The celebrated Italian architect Gian Lorenzo Bernini had been invited to Paris by Louis XIV in 1665 to furnish designs for the east front of the Louvre, but his excessively Italian baroque designs were inappropriate for the essentially French medieval and French-adapted Renaissance palace...