Lille : Vauban masterpiece, Street art way ahead of Banksy...

Hi there - two weeks done and time for Darranda to join up with me again, this time in Lille, northeast France. Perfect base to explore the northern most area of the WW1 British section which includes the Ypres salient and the various battles that took place over the four years. Focus today (Saturday 18th) will be on Passchedaele or Third Ypres however the tour covers the same areas as 1st and 2nd Ypres too.

Yesterday was a bit gloomy and drizzly - remarkably like England - so we headed for the Palais de Beaux Artes in Lille and indoor entertainment. Great looking building.

Inside is even more impressive with great exhibits on sculpture including works by Rodin and a temporary exhibition using drawings by the great masters (so Titian, Michael Angelo etc) as a backdrop for some highly original 'street art' by Ernest Pignon-Ernest. I'll post a link to show some of his work. He is like a 'classical' Bansky and I am pretty sure I'm right in saying he pre-dates Banksy by some way as he was doing this stuff back on the sixties. He takes classical pieces for inspiration, creates part of them as a drawing and then places them in some street scenes.

http://www.pignon-ernest.com/

The Musee also has some unique scale models of great Vauban fortresses accross France, Belgium and the Low Countries. The really are something - this is the one of Lille done in a scale of 1:600 and made in the late 1600's! Not sure what 1:600 is as this is before metres.

Lille in 1:600 looking across the town to the Citadel

 

 

Vauban was the foremost military engineer of this time and his radical redesign of fortifications to give better defense against artillery gave rise to some exceptional structures - such as this one in Lille. His work is characterstically geometric - lots of star shapes for example. There are extensive outworks called gabions and bastions which provide both protection for the main wall and also opportunities for counter-offensive fire against any besiegers. Typically there will be many ditches and water obstructions. All the walls are sloped and there would be an earth bank (glacis) in front of any walls to deflect shot up and over the walls themselves. He was very productive - see link below.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vauban

 

The Musee has, I think, 12 of these fortresses done in these scale models. Very impressive.

I will do another post on the Lille Citadel as it is very well preserved, absolutely huge and a perfect example of some of the techniques Vauban employed.

In the meantime here is a link to what Wiki has to say about it

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citadel_of_Lille