Gallery › Versailles
Map of Versailles
A palace in the middle, a geometric garden on one side and a town laid out to match on the other. Versailles is a whole landscape drawn with a ruler, and in lines it can be read in full.
What you see on the map
The Grand Canal. A cross of water more than a kilometre and a half long, on the axis of the palace. It is the first thing you see on the map, in the middle of the green of the park.
The gardens. André Le Nôtre laid them out for Louis XIV: straight avenues, roundabouts, parterres and groves that form a pattern of diamonds and stars around the canal.
The Trianons. North of the arm of the canal, the Grand and Petit Trianon with their own gardens. To the south, the Pièce d'eau des Suisses, a rectangle of water next to the town.
The town. East of the palace, three great avenues converge on the Place d'Armes, and on each side the Notre-Dame and Saint-Louis quarters are set out in a grid.
Which scale and paper suit it
1:20,000 on a 30 cm square, as in the picture, covers more than 5 km: the whole canal, the gardens, the palace and the town.
1:6,000 on A3 moves in on the gardens, with every parterre and every fountain.
In the original colours, as here, the green of the park sets off the blue cross; in black ink, it reads like a seventeenth-century engraving.
Make it yours
Open the example and move the frame: Marly, to the north, or the park of Sceaux, also by Le Nôtre, have a pattern of their own.
Change all the colours at once with a theme (black ink, sepia, coral, night, blueprint) and download it as PNG. With a free account, also element by element, at 600 dpi, as vector PDF and as SVG.
