Fragment from Apollo Gallery carpet no. 1

This recently discovered fragment comes from a once-enormous carpet (30 x 25 feet) intended for the Louvre’s Apollo Gallery, the space adjacent to the Grande Galerie whose decoration celebrates Louis XIV in the guise of the Roman sun god. Confined to storage for most of the eighteenth century, the carpet came into the possession of King Louis Philippe’s foreign minister, Maréchal Sébastiani, whose house on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré it furnished until 1851. A large section previously in a chapel at Notre Dame is now lost. Two more fragments are known to survive. When and how the individual pieces were cut up remains a mystery.