Roland Fréart, sieur de Chambray

Roland Fréart, sieur de Chambray (13 July 1606 – 11 December 1676) was a French writer, collector, and a theorist of architecture and the arts. Though not a practitioner himself, his two major publications, Parallèle de l'architecture antique avec la moderne (1650) and Idée de la perfection de la peinture (1662), appeared at a time when French architects were struggling to apply a new sense of discipline and order to the practice of building.

Roland Fréart was born in Le Mans, France. In 1630 he travelled to Italy, returning to France in 1635. While in Rome he studied architecture and met the collector Cassiano dal Pozzo and the painter Nicolas Poussin, as well as the artists Charles Errard and Jacques Stella.

Roland and his brother (Paul Fréart, sieur de Chantelou, or possibly Jean Fréart, sieur de Chantelou) were sent to Rome in 1639 and 1640, commissioned by their cousin François Sublet de Noyers, the superintendent of the Bâtiments du Roi, to secure the services of Poussin ("the best French artist in Rome") and to arrange for casts and copies to be made of the best antiquities in Roman collections, for the French royal palaces. Poussin arrived in Paris (with Chantelou) in December 1640. Casts of bas-reliefs sent back to Paris found use in the decor of the ceiling compartments in the Grande Galerie of the Palais du Louvre. There were also seventy casts from reliefs of sections of Trajan's Column.

Chantelou returned to Italy in 1643, with projects to cast the colossal horsemen of the Quirinal in bronze for the main entrance to the Louvre, but the death of Cardinal Richelieu, the disgrace of Sublet de Noyers and the death of the King (1642–43) brought these ambitious projects to naught.

...
Wikipedia