Jean Péru
Jean Péru (- 1723), is a famous architect and sculptor inhabitant of Avignon of the 17th century.
One owes him of many architectural achievements in Avignon:
- the frontage of the Saint-Marthe Hospital. This sumptuous 175 meters length frontage was built between 1667 and 1830. Jean Péru, who works there between 1689 and 1693 impose the drawing of it: narrow and tightened spans, on two levels of windows, capped with a picturesque attic window.
- the Hotel of Massilian (of the surname which occupied it at the XVIIIe century)
- the old high altar which trônait with the XVII° century in current Concise Musée. It was about a plaster gantry of gigantic proportions, which did not comprise less than ten columns, sixteen pilasters, an attic, and made all the turn of the apse. It also worked out the fascinating plaster glory places at the base of the vault absidal. All this disappeared today.
- repairs of the higher port of the Rhone after the floods of 1674. The original inscription dedicating the bridge to the virgin had been destroyed. J. Peru was charged to restore it and repair the statue of Notre-Dame who decorated this part.
- the northern replanning of the wings of the Saint-Louis Old people's home and the large staircase in 1712, then of the southern wing. It also began the wing is (which gives on the street of the Gate-Boquier) but it died before the end of work in 1723.
But also of the sculptures, like:
- the Virgin with the child decorating the Saint-Pierre Church of Avignon (on the pier separating the doors)
- the first of the various copies of famous the Venus of Arles in its initial state before its departure for Versailles.