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The western wing of the Louvre was designed to accommodate court entertainments. On the ground floor Lescot built a ballroom featuring a musicians' tribune ("for hautboys and players of instruments") supported by four marble caryatids by Jean Goujon in a classicising style. The figures may have been inspired by Vitruvius's description of the caryatids of the Erechtheum, the Ionic temple built on the Acropolis in Athens between 421 and 406 B.C.E. Goujon's figures, their bodies animated by a subtle twist, wear sheer chitons that clearly reveal the bodily forms beneath, they combine a rigorously classical approach to line with sensuous modeling that is essentially Mannerist in spirit.
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