Even before the Colonne Vendôme was finished in 1810, a smaller and somewhat less typical monument, but equally Roman and also the first of a considerable line, had been completed by Percier and Fontaine. The Arc du Carrousel of 1806-8—once a gate to the Tuileries from the Place du Carrousel, now unhappily floating in unconfined space—has much of the daintiness and, in the use of coloured marbles, the polychromy of its architects’ contemporary palace interiors. Indeed, the richness of the detailing is far less characteristic of Empire taste in architecture than are their façades near by in the Rue de Rivoli (Plate 6B); the Arc du Carrousel must have provided a rather fussy pedestal for the superb Grecian horses stolen from St Mark’s in Venice that were originally mounted upon it. Far more satisfactorily symbolic of imperial aspiration is the enormous Arc de Triomphe de l’Étoile, which looks down the entire length of the Champs Élysées today to overwhelm its brother arch even at that great distance (Plate 7). J.-A. Raymond (1742-1811), a pupil of Leroy, first received the commission; but with him was associated J.-F.-T. Chalgrin (1739-1811), the master of the younger Gisors, who soon took over and imposed his own astylar design. Chalgrin, like Gondoin, was an architect already well established under the _ancien régime_. His major innovation had been the reintroduction of the basilican plan[30] at Saint-Philippe-du-Roule in Paris in the 1760s, henceforth one of the favourite models for Romantic Classical churches in France and elsewhere on the Continent. Like many of the monuments of that earlier period by Chalgrin’s contemporaries, his Arc de l’Étoile reverts less to Roman antiquity than to certain aspects of the architecture of Louis XIV. Even its megalomaniac grandeur can be matched, relatively at least, in the Porte St Denis in Paris built in the 1680s by François Blondel, and it follows almost line for line the square proportions of that masterpiece. The arch was slowly brought to completion after Chalgrin’s death, first by his pupil L. Goust from 1811 to 1813 and from 1823 to 1830; then by Goust’s assistant, J.-N. Huyot (1780-1840), advised by a commission that included François Debret (1777-1850), Fontaine, and the younger Gisors; and finally from 1832 to 1837 by G.-A. Blouet (1795-1853). It owes its unmistakably nineteenth-century character partly to the crisp, hard quality of its imposts and entablatures and partly to the great Romantic figural reliefs executed in 1833 by Rude, Etex, and Cortot. These take the place on the piers of the more conventional trophy-hung obelisks on Blondel’s seventeenth-century arch. A certain post-Empire quality derives from the plastic complexity of Blouet’s attic; but on the whole the Arc de l’Étoile, if less original and less influential than Saint-Philippe-du-Roule, is Chalgrin’s masterpiece and Napoleon’s finest memorial.