Reconstructing and Restoring an Eighteenth-Century Parisian Landmark

A presentation by Bénédicte de Montlaur and Cinzia Pasquali (World Monuments Fund)

Wednesday, November 5, 2025

38 West 86th Street, Lecture Hall

gallery@bgc.bard.edu

$15 General | $12 Seniors | Free for people associated with a college or university, people with museum ID, people with disabilities and caregivers, and BGC members

For over twenty years, World Monuments Fund undertook the remarkable task of restoring the historic Chancellerie d’Orléans. Built in Paris in the early eighteenth century, the Chancellerie displays a decorative program consisting of paintings, stucco, and wood carving by some of the leading artists of the time. In the early twentieth century, the interior was dismantled and put into storage. These treasures were forgotten for nearly a century, until World Monuments Fund began work to reconstruct and restore the spaces. In this presentation, World Monuments Fund president and CEO Bénédicte de Montlaur is joined by the project’s conservator, Cinzia Pasquali. Together, they will narrate the history of the Chancellerie and the conservation work that brought this important example of Rococo interiors back to public view.

Bard Graduate Center is grateful for the generous support of the Selz Foundation.

Bénédicte de Montlaur is the president and CEO of World Monuments Fund (WMF), leading its mission to safeguard irreplaceable heritage working with local communities worldwide. She is responsible for defining and implementing WMF’s strategic vision in more than thirty countries and leading an international team of seventy employees, as well as an additional four hundred cultural conservation professionals around the world. Under her tenure, WMF has developed the programs Crisis Response Fund and the Climate Heritage Initiative, has opened offices in France and China, and has expanded the International Council of World Monuments Fund, which currently boasts nine chapters globally. De Montlaur’s background mixes culture and the arts, politics, international diplomacy, and human rights. Prior to joining WMF, de Montlaur spent two decades as a senior diplomat with the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She served as Cultural Counselor at the French Embassy in the United States, where she led France’s largest international cultural advocacy network and its two partner foundations—Albertine and FACE—directing a team of ninety people in ten US offices. Previously, she was deputy assistant secretary in charge of North Africa at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Paris, United Nations Security Council negotiator on Africa and the Middle East in New York, and French Embassy first secretary in Damascus, Syria. De Montlaur studied sociology and Arabic at the École Normale Supérieure (Ulm) and public affairs at Sciences Po, Paris. She was a Marshall Memorial Fellow at the German Marshall Fund. She has served on the boards of several cultural and educational institutions and is currently a board member of the Maison Francaise at Columbia University. In 2011 she curated an original photographic exhibition entitled Islam and the City. Beyond her professional accomplishments, de Montlaur is a polyglot—speaking French, English, Arabic, and Spanish—and completed the New York City Marathon in 2011 and 2024.

Cinzia Pasquali is a conservator-restorer specializing in painting and sculpture, trained at the Istituto Centrale per il Restauro (ISCR) in Rome and holding a master’s degree in conservation-restoration from Université Paris III. She has led major restoration projects in Italy and France, including the Galerie d’Apollon at the Louvre, the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, and the Grande Singerie at Chantilly. Cinzia led the restoration of the interior decors of the Chancellerie d’Orléans. Collaborating with the Centre for Research and Restoration of the Museums of France (C2RMF), she has restored key masterpieces by Leonardo da Vinci, Bronzino, and Piero di Cosimo. Internationally recognized for her expertise in painting diagnostics, she frequently works with museums and contributes to academic conferences and publications. She also helped establish a conservation training program in the Maghreb and Middle East through the European TEMPUS project.

Image: Grand salon de la Chancellerie d’Orléans remonté à l’hôtel de Rohan, 2021. © Archives nationales de France / Nicolas Dion and Nicolas Cantin.