Galerie d'Apollon

The Galerie d'Apollon is a grand gallery on the first floor of the Louvre Palace's Petite Galerie wing in Paris. Its present decorative scheme dates to the 1660s, when Louis XIV commissioned a rebuilding after a fire had damaged the Petite Galerie in 1661: Louis Le Vau directed the structural work while Charles Le Brun designed the ceiling and wall decoration, built around the sun's journey across the sky with Apollo as its central emblem, a program meant to celebrate Louis XIV as the self-styled Sun King. The gallery went unfinished for much of the eighteenth century until architect Felix Duban completed a thorough restoration in 1851, and it has been part of the Louvre's collection since the 1790s. Since 1887 it has displayed the surviving French Crown Jewels, including the 140-carat Regent Diamond, and the room itself is recognized as part of the Louvre's UNESCO World Heritage listing. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/