Pierre Puget sculptor, illustrator, painter and architect of French seventeenth century, was born in Marseilles in 1620 and died there in 1694. At fourteen, he learned his trade from the wood sculptor Jean Roman. It creates in the workshop many decorative pieces for ships. Later he worked with Pietro da Cortona to Florence (1638-1643), with Bernini in Rome (1661-1662) and then in Genoa until 1668.
He returned to Marseilles in 1643 and received several commissions, including the cathedral of Marseilles. After his stay Genoese, he became director of construction of the arsenal of Toulon.
In the seventeenth century on land belonging to him near the cathedral of la Major, north side of the Butte des Moulins, Marseille decided to build the Old Charity to accommodate the beggars.
The project stalled and it was only in 1670 that the Provencal Pierre Puget, the French Michelangelo, architect of King and neighborhood child, begins one of his greatest achievements. Building pink and white stone in the career of the Crown (small town north of Marseilles), all of the Old Charity.
It assembles four wings of the building closed to the outside and opens on a rectangular courtyard with galleries on three levels, elegantly punctuate life. At the center of his composition, he draws an oval domed chapel of baroque style. The vanguard of the time. Today it radiates sunlight.
For a century, the charity receives the beggars of the city. Then, after the revolution and until the end of the nineteenth century, the Charity is a hospice dedicated to children and elderly. In 1905, the building is occupied by the army that his Senegalese infantry barracks. Later there legalizes squateurs people in social, in unhealthy cells.
In the early ’40s, Le Corbusier building remark and denounced his state of abandonment. In 1961 the City of Marseille decided to restore this jewel of the Architectural Heritage. The work will be completed in 1986.
Today, the Centre de la Vieille Charite houses a cultural center that hosts exciting exhibitions.
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