Julien-David Le Roy

Julien-David Le Roy or Leroy (; 6 May 1724 in Paris – 28 January 1803 in Paris) was an 18th-century French architect and archaeologist, who engaged in a rivalry with Britons James Stuart and Nicholas Revett over who would publish the first professional description of the Acropolis of Athens since an early 1682 work by Antoine Desgodetz. Le Roy succeeded in printing his Ruins of the Most Beautiful Monuments of Greece four years ahead of Stuart and Revett. Plate of the Ionic order from Les Ruines des plus beaux monuments de la Grèce.

Athens study Stuart and Revett were researching Athens since 1748 but Le Roy had an advantage in accessing the ruins due to good relations between France and the Ottoman Empire. Le Roy's studies, supported by Comte de Caylus and his art circle, recruited the finest engravers and architects to produce illustrations, and became sort of a national project for the pre-revolutionary France. Le Roy spent only three months in Athens (compared to three years taken by Stuart and Revett); and discouraged their readers by filling it with lesser monuments instead of the expected Parthenon.

Le Roy responded with a counterargument that an insight in development of a culture is just as worthwhile as meticulous, surgical rendition of antique relics. His book ultimately had a greater impact on practical architecture than Stuart and Revett's,

Biography Julien-David Le Roy, the son of a court clockmaker Julien Le Roy, studied architecture under Jacques-François Blondel (le petit Blondel), and travelled to Rome on an Academy scholarship in 1751–1754. He had three brothers: Pierre (1717–1785) another clockmaker, Jean-Baptiste (1720-1800), a physicist and Encyclopédiste, and Charles (1726–1779), a physician as well as an Encyclopédiste.

Le Roy's ideas were materialized in the Church of Saint Genevieve, a project led by his friend Jacques-Germain Soufflot. Le Roy directly advised Soufflot on the philosophy and history of architecture and provided a classic single-sheet scheme of principal Christian church types, solving the problem of marrying the dome with cross-shaped floorplan. An important correspondence with him is conserved in Poitiers (France), published in 2020 in Le Journal des Savants, the oldest scientist review in Europe (17th century).