Roland Fréart, sieur de Chambray was a French writer, collector, and a theorist of architecture and the arts. Though not a practitioner himself, his two major publications, Parallèle de l'architecture antique avec la moderne (1650) and Idée de la perfection de la peinture (1662), appeared at a time when French architects were struggling to apply a new sense of discipline and order to the practice of building.