Louis XIV's Savonnerie Carpets: The World's Largest Jigsaw Puzzle

This lecture explores Louis XIV’s Savonnerie carpets—woven for the Galerie d’Apollon and Grande Galerie of the Louvre—one of the most ambitious and enigmatic masterpieces of the Baroque era. Commissioned on a grand scale, The King’s Carpet (le tapis du roi) consisted of 92 individual pieces designed to cover the entire span of the Louvre’s Grande Galerie—six times the length of the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. Despite the monumental effort and cost, Louis XIV appears never to have used them.

Over time, the idea of a single unified carpet was forgotten. Individual pieces were given away as diplomatic gifts or used in royal and later presidential residences, sometimes stitched together as wall-to-wall carpeting. After the French Revolution, many carpets were stripped of their royal emblems or sold, eventually finding homes with prominent collectors such as the Rothschilds, Vanderbilts, and Wrightsmans. These scattered works have since become an enormous jigsaw puzzle that Emmanuelle Federspiel and Antonin Macé de Lepinay of the Mobilier national in Paris, together with Wolf Burchard of The Met, are reconstructing carpet by carpet for a forthcoming monograph.

To showcase their full splendor, the Grand Palais in Paris will present Le trésor retrouvé du Roi-Soleil from February 1–8, 2026, featuring 30 Grande Galerie carpets displayed as originally intended for the first time in more than 350 years.

Image caption: Wolf Burchard, Antonin Macé de Lépinay, and Elizabeth Cleland examine the Tapis Grande Galerie du Louvre, preserved by the Mobilier national in Paris, in 2023