Marie de' Medici, regent for her son Louis XIII, commissioned the palace as a residence she called her Palais Médicis. Salomon de Brosse designed it, and it was built from 1615 to 1645. She wanted it to resemble the Palazzo Pitti in Florence. The article calls the style Louis XIII, mapped here to Baroque.
Jean-François Chalgrin transformed the interior from 1799 to 1805. He demolished the grand central staircase, destroyed Marie's chapel and enclosed the flanking terraces for a library. He added a Neoclassical staircase with an Ionic colonnade and a coffered barrel vault. Alphonse de Gisors enlarged it from 1835 to 1856, copying the garden facade so closely that old and new are hard to tell apart.
The palace has been the seat of the French Senate since 1958. Delacroix painted the library from 1845 to 1847. The garden to the south covers 62 acres (25 hectares).
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