louvre museum essay in french

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History of the building

New locations in the 21st century.

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• Official Site of the Louvre Museum
• LiveScience - The Louvre Museum: Facts, Paintings and Tickets
• Khan Academy - Museums and politics: the Louvre, Paris
• Louvre Museum - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)
• Table Of Contents

Louvre , national museum and art gallery of France , housed in part of a large palace in Paris that was built on the right-bank site of the 12th-century fortress of Philip Augustus . It is the world’s most-visited art museum, with a collection that spans work from ancient civilizations to the mid-19th century.

(Read Sister Wendy’s Britannica essay on art appreciation.)

In 1546 Francis I , who was a great art collector, had this old castle razed and began to build on its site another royal residence, the Louvre, which was added to by almost every subsequent French monarch. Under Francis I, only a small portion of the present Louvre was completed, under the architect Pierre Lescot . This original section is today the southwestern part of the Cour Carrée. In the 17th century, major additions were made to the building complex by Louis XIII and Louis XIV . Cardinal de Richelieu , the chief minister of Louis XIII, acquired great works of art for the king. Louis XIV and his minister, Cardinal Mazarin , acquired outstanding art collections, including that of Charles I of England. A committee consisting of the architects Claude Perrault and Louis Le Vau and the decorator and painter Charles Le Brun planned that part of the Louvre which is known as the Colonnade.

The Louvre ceased to be a royal residence when Louis XIV moved his court to Versailles in 1682. The idea of using the Louvre as a public museum originated in the 18th century. The comte d’Angiviller helped build and plan the Grande Galerie and continued to acquire major works of art. In 1793 the revolutionary government opened to the public the Musée Central des Arts in the Grande Galerie. Under Napoleon the Cour Carrée and a wing on the north along the rue de Rivoli were begun. In the 19th century two major wings, their galleries and pavilions extending west, were completed, and Napoleon III was responsible for the exhibition that opened them. The completed Louvre was a vast complex of buildings forming two main quadrilaterals and enclosing two large courtyards.

The Louvre building complex underwent a major remodeling in the 1980s and ’90s in order to make the old museum more accessible and accommodating to its visitors. To this end, a vast underground complex of offices, shops, exhibition spaces, storage areas, and parking areas, as well as an auditorium, a tourist bus depot, and a cafeteria, was constructed underneath the Louvre’s central courtyards of the Cour Napoléon and the Cour du Carrousel. The ground-level entrance to this complex was situated in the centre of the Cour Napoléon and was crowned by a controversial steel-and-glass pyramid designed by the American architect I.M. Pei . The underground complex of support facilities and public amenities was opened in 1989. In 1993, on the museum’s 200th anniversary, the rebuilt Richelieu wing, formerly occupied by France’s Ministry of Finance, was opened; for the first time, the entire Louvre was devoted to museum purposes. The new wing, also designed by Pei, had more than 230,000 square feet (21,368 square metres) of exhibition space, originally housing collections of European painting, decorative arts, and Islamic art. Three glass-roofed interior courtyards displayed French sculpture and ancient Assyrian artworks. The museum’s expanding collection of Islamic art later moved into its own wing (opened 2012), for which Italian architects Mario Bellini and Rudy Ricciotti enclosed another interior courtyard beneath an undulating gold-coloured roof made of glass and steel.

In 2012 a satellite location of the Louvre in the northern French town of Lens opened to the public. The museum, designed by the Japanese architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa , was intended to boost the economy of the region and to alleviate crowds at the Paris site. Five years later, after nearly a decade of delays, the Louvre Abu Dhabi opened in a building designed by French architect Jean Nouvel on Saadiyat Island , the emirate’s planned cultural hub. The new institution was the result of a controversial agreement between the governments of France and the United Arab Emirates , wherein the Louvre leased its name, parts of its collection, and its expertise to the nascent museum for a period of 30 years.

(Read Glenn Lowry’s Britannica essay on "Art Museums & Their Digital Future.")

The Louvre’s painting collection is one of the richest in the world, representing all periods of European art up to the Revolutions of 1848 . Works painted after that date that the Louvre once housed were transferred to the Musée d’Orsay upon its opening in 1986. The Louvre’s collection of French paintings from the 15th to the 19th century is unsurpassed in the world, and it also has many masterpieces by Italian Renaissance painters, including Leonardo da Vinci ’s Mona Lisa (c. 1503–19), and works by Flemish and Dutch painters of the Baroque period .

The department of decorative arts displays the treasures of the French kings—bronzes, miniatures, pottery, tapestries, jewelry, and furniture—while the department of Greek, Etruscan, and Roman antiquities features architecture, sculpture , mosaics , jewelry , and pottery . The department of Egyptian antiquities was established in 1826 to organize the collections acquired during Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign. The department of Near Eastern antiquities is most important for its collection of Mesopotamian art .

Louvre Museum: History and Most Important Masterpieces

Noppawat Charoensinphon / Getty Images 

• Art History
• Architecture

• B.S., Political Science, Boise State University

The Louvre Museum was originally constructed over 800 years ago as a fortress to protect the city of Paris from invaders. The fortress was eventually torn down and replaced with a palace that served as the royal residence of the French monarchy. By the 19th century, the Louvre had been transformed into a museum, open to the public. The Louvre Museum is now home to more than 35,000 of the world’s most famous works of art, including the “Mona Lisa,” the “Venus de Milo,” and the “Great Sphinx of Tanis.” 

Key Takeaways

• The Louvre Museum was constructed by King Philippe Augustus as a fortress in 1190 to protect the city of Paris from foreign invasion.
• When the protective walls could no longer contain the growing population of Paris, the walls were torn down, and a palace for the royal family was commissioned in its place.
• By 1793, the Louvre had been transformed into a museum, with the French Revolution facilitating the changing of hands from the monarchy to the national government.
• The iconic Louvre pyramid was added to the museum during a renovation project in the 1980s to promote a higher visitor volume.
• The Louvre Museum is currently home to some of the most famous works of art in the world, including the “Mona Lisa”, the “Venus de Milo”, and the “Great Sphinx of Tanis.” 

The origin of the name “Louvre” is unknown, though there are two theories held by most historians. According to the first, the word “Louvre” comes from the Latin lupara , meaning wolf, due to the presence of wolves in the area in previous centuries. The alternative theory is that it is a misunderstanding of the old French word lower , meaning tower, referring to the Louvre’s original purpose as a defensive structure. 

A Defensive Fortress

Around the year 1190, King Philippe Augustus ordered a wall and a defensive fortress, the Louvre, to be constructed to protect the city of Paris from English and Norman invasions.

During the 13th and 14th centuries, the city of Paris grew in wealth and influence, which led to a dramatic increase in population. When the original defensive city walls of the Louvre could no longer contain the growing population, the fortress was transformed into a royal residence.

The first French monarch to reside in the Louvre was Charles V, who commanded that the fortress be reconstructed into a palace, though the danger of the Hundred Years War sent subsequent monarchs to seek safety in the Loire Valley away from Paris. It was only after the Hundred Years War that the Louvre became the primary residence for French royalty.

Before it was converted into a royal residence, the Louvre fortress also served as a prison, an arsenal, and even a treasury. 

A Royal Residence

The Louvre fortress was originally constructed on the right side of the river Seine, the wealthy side of the city where merchants and tradesmen worked, making it an ideal location for a royal residence. While King Charles V ordered the transformation of the fortress into a palace during the 14th century, it wasn’t until King Francis I returned from captivity in Spain in the 16th century that the Louvre fortress was demolished and rebuilt as the Louvre palace. Armed with a desire to regain control over the city of Paris, King Francis I declared the Louvre as the official royal residence of the monarchy, and he used the palace to store his vast collection of artwork.

All successive French monarchs added to the palace and its collection of art until King Louis XIV, the Sun King, officially moved the royal residence from the Louvre to Versailles in 1682.

During the Age of Enlightenment , middle-class citizens of France began calling for the public display of the royal art collection, though it wasn’t until 1789 when the beginning of the French Revolution initiated the transformation of the Louvre from a palace to a museum. 

A National Museum

In response to the growing outcry of the French middle class for access to the royal art collection, the Louvre Museum was opened in 1793, though it was closed for renovations shortly afterwards. The museum’s collection grew rapidly as a result of the plundering of Napoleon’s armies during the Napoleonic Wars . Many of the pieces taken from Italy and Egypt were returned after Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo in 1815 , but the expansive Ancient Egyptian Collection that exists in the museum today is a result of this plundering.

Over the course of the 19th century, the Royal Academy was converted into the National Academy, turning over control of the museum to the democratically-elected government of France. It was during this century that two additional wings were added to the palace, giving it the physical structure it exhibits today. 

The Louvre Museum During World War II

In the summer of 1939, the Director of French National Museums, Jacques Jaujard, oversaw a clandestine evacuation of more than 4.000 works of art from the Louvre, including the “Mona Lisa.” The following year, Adolf Hitler successfully invaded Paris , and by June the city had surrendered to Nazi control. 

The evacuation took several years, and most of the artwork was first moved to the Château de Chambord in the Loire Valley and later transferred from estate to estate in order to keep the collections out of the hands of the Germans. Though some of the hiding places of the collections were revealed after the war, Jacques Jaujard remained silent about the operation until his death in 1967. 

The Louvre Pyramid and Renovation in the 1980s

In the early 1980s, former French President François Mitterrand proposed the Grand Louvre , an expansion and renovation project of the Louvre Museum to better accommodate increased visitation.

The job was tasked to Chinese-American architect Ieoh Ming Pei , who designed the iconic Louvre pyramid that serves as a main entrance to the museum. Pei wanted to create an entryway that reflected the sky and made the outside Louvre palace walls visible, even from underground. The final result, competed in 1989, is the 11,000-square-foot glass pyramid with two spiralling staircases that funnel visitors into a vast network of underground passages that lead to different wings of the former palace.

This renovation project also revealed the previously undiscovered original fortress walls, now displayed as part of the permanent exhibit in the museum’s basement. 

The Louvre-Lens and the Louvre Abu Dhabi

In 2012, the Louvre-Lens opened in northern France, featuring collections on loan from the Louvre Museum in Paris with the intention of making French art collections more accessible across the country.

The Louvre Abu Dhabi was inaugurated in November 2017, featuring rotating art collections from museums across the world. Though the Louvre in Paris and the Louvre Abu Dhabi are not directly in partnership, the latter is leasing the museum name from the former for 30 years and working with the French government to encourage visitation to the first museum of this kind in the Middle East. 

Collections at the Louvre Museum

As the Louvre Museum was the home of the French monarchy, many of the pieces currently on display were once part of the personal collections of the kings of France. The collection was augmented by Napoleon, Louis XVIII, and Charles X, though after the Second Republic the collection was supplied mainly by private donations. Below are the most famous pieces on permanent display in the Louvre Museum. 

Mona Lisa (1503, estimate)

One of the most famous works of art in the world, the Mona Lisa , painted by Leonardo da Vinci , has been on display at the Louvre since 1797. More than six million people visit the Louvre to see the Mona Lisa each year. This fame is almost entirely the result of a robbery that took place in 1911, when the Mona Lisa was taken from the Louvre by an Italian patriot who believed the painting should be in display in Italy rather than France. The thief was caught trying to sell the painting to the Uffizi Museum in Florence, and the Mona Lisa was returned to Paris in early 1914.

Winged Victory of Samothrace (190 BC)

Representing the Greek goddess of victory, Nike was found in hundreds of different pieces in 1863 on the Greek island of Samothrace before she was brought to the Louvre Museum. She was positioned as the sole figure on top of a staircase in the museum in 1863 where she has remained ever since. The athleticwear company of the same name used the goddess of victory as inspiration for the brand, and the Nike logo is taken from the shape of the top of her wings.

Venus de Milo (2nd Century BC)

Discovered in 1820 on the Greek island of Milo, the Venus de Milo was gifted to King Louis XVIII , who donated it to the Louvre collection. Because of her nudity, she is thought to represent the Greek goddess Aphrodite , though her identity has never been proven. She is positioned to appear as though she is looking across the other Roman depictions of Venus that appear in the same hall at the Louvre Museum.

Great Sphinx of Tanis (2500 BC)

As a result of Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt , the Sphinx was discovered by French Egyptologist Jean-Jacques Rifaud in 1825 in the “lost city” of Tanis and acquired the by Louvre the following year. It is positioned strategically as the sole, dominant figure at the entrance to the Egyptian collection of the Louvre Museum, just as it would have been positioned as a guardian at the entrance of an Egyptian pharaoh’s sanctuary.

The Coronation of Napoleon (1806)

This enormous painting, created by Napoleon’s official painter Jacques-Louis David, depicts the coronation of Napoleon Bonaparte as the Emperor of France in Notre Dame Cathedral in 1804. The imposing dimensions of the painting are intentional, designed to make observers feel present at the ceremony. It was moved from the Palace of Versailles to the Louvre in 1889.

Raft of the Medusa (1818-1819)

This oil painting by Théodore Gericault depicts the sinking of a French ship on route to colonize Senegal. The painting was widely considered to be controversial because it depicted tragedy in a realistic, graphic way, blaming the newly reinstated French monarchy for the sinking of the ship, and it featured an African man, a subtle protest against enslavement. It was acquired by the Louvre after Gericault’s death in 1824.

Liberty Leading the People (1830)

Painted by Eugène Delacroix, this work depicts a woman, a symbol of the French Revolution known as Marianne, holding the tricolor revolutionary French flag that would later become the official flag of France, while standing above the bodies of fallen men. Delacroix created the painting to commemorate the July Revolution, which toppled King Charles X of France. It was purchased by the French government in 1831 but returned to the artists after the June Revolution of 1832. In 1874, it was acquired by the Louvre Museum.

Michelangelo’s Slaves (1513-15)

These two marble sculptures, The Dying Slave and the Rebellious Slave, were part of a 40-piece collection commissioned to adorn the tomb of Pope Julius II . Michelangelo completed a sculpture of Moses, the only piece residing at the tomb of Pope Julius II, as well as two enslaved people – the Dying Slave and the Rebellious Slave, before being called away to work on the Sistine Chapel . Michelangelo never finished the project, and the completed sculptures were kept in private collection until they were acquired by the Louvre after the French Revolution.

• “Curatorial Departments.”  Musée Du Louvre , 2019.
• “Louvre Museum Opens.”  History.com , A&E Television Networks, 9 Feb. 2010.
• “Missions & Projects.”  Musée Du Louvre , 2019.
• Nagase, Hiroyuki, and Shoji Okamoto. “Obelisks in Tanis Ruins.”  Obelisks of the World , 2017.
• Taylor, Alan. “The Opening of the Louvre Abu Dhabi.”  The Atlantic , Atlantic Media Company, 8 Nov. 2017.
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French Audio Story #57: Le musée du Louvre – The Louvre Museum | for B1 and B2 French Learners 🇫🇷

French audio story #57: le musée du louvre – the louvre museum | for b1 and b2 french learners 🇫🇷.

French Audio Story #57: Le musée du Louvre – The Louvre Museum | for B1 and B2 French Learners 🇫🇷, and beginners/intermediates comes from my second YouTube channel French chit-chat with Dylane. You can find the story in English and French. Watch the video to work on your French listening skills, you can even turn on the subtitles in French or in English. Follow along with the French Audio Story: Le musée du Louvre – The Louvre Museum | for B1 and B2 French Learners 🇫🇷

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French Chit-Chat with Dylane Ep.57

Le musée du louvre.

Je pense qu’on connaît tous le musée du Louvre à Paris donc, parlons-en !  

Le musée du Louvre est l’un des plus grands musées du monde. Il est situé dans le centre de Paris et il contient de vastes collections d’œuvres d’art. Le Louvre est une destination incontournable pour les amateurs d’art, les historiens et les touristes du monde entier.

Le Louvre a été construit entre 1190 et 1202, par le roi Philippe Auguste qui a décidé de construire une forteresse pour protéger Paris contre les invasions ennemies.

Au fil des siècles, le bâtiment a été utilisé différemment, cela a été une résidence royale ou même le siège du gouvernement français. C’est en 1793, pendant la Révolution française, que le Louvre devient un musée. Il a ensuite évolué pour devenir le plus grand musée du monde.

Aujourd’hui, l’entrée du musée du Louvre se fait dans la cour Napoléon. On entre dans la pyramide pour aller au sous-sol où se trouve le musée. Il y a beaucoup à dire sur l’architecture du Louvre donc si vous voulez une vidéo juste sur l’architecture, dites-le-moi en commentaires. Beaucoup de gens qui visitent le musée pour la première fois, ne se rendent pas compte de sa superficie. Il fait plus de 60 000 m². Pour visiter le musée tout entier, il faudrait environ quatre jours en passant 10 secondes devant chaque œuvre d’art.

Maintenant, parlons un peu plus en détails de ses œuvres d’art, et bien sûr, de la Joconde.  

Le musée du Louvre, ce n’est pas que des tableaux. Il y a aussi des sculptures, des objets d’art, des céramiques, et bien plus. Il y a vraiment de tout.

35 000 objets et ouvres d’art sont exposés au Louvre, de la préhistoire au 21e siècle.

Mais est-ce que vous savez que seule une petite partie des œuvres est accessible au public ? Le musée compte 460 000 œuvres d’art. Les œuvres qu’on ne voit pas sont stockées dans des réserves, certaines au musée, d’autres loin du musée. Environ 250 000 œuvres sont conservées loin de Paris, dans un centre de conservation qui se trouve dans la commune de Liévin à 177 km de Paris. 

Chaque année, ce sont entre 9 et 10 millions de personnes qui visitent le musée, c ’ est à peu près 50 visiteurs par minute. 

Les trois œuvres emblématiques sont la Vénus de Milo, le sacre de Napoléon, et bien sûr, la Joconde.

Comme vous le savez sûrement, la Joconde est un peu la star du musée. Elle attire 20 000 visiteurs chaque jour. La Joconde est un tableau de Léonard de Vinci, qui a été réalisé entre 1503 et 1506. Il représenterait une femme nommée  Florentine   Lisa Gherardini , mais nous n ’ avons jamais été vraiment certain de son identité. La Joconde est un tableau plein de mystère.

Est-ce que vous savez que la Joconde a été volée le 21 août 1911 ? Alors qu’elle était exposée dans musée du Louvre, un Italien au nom de Vincenzo Peruggia a volé le tableau car il  voulait que l’œuvre retourne en Italie, pays où elle a été créée. C ’ est en 1913, soit deux ans plus tard, que le voleur a été démasqué après avoir essayé de vendre le tableau à un marchand d’art italien.  

Pendant cette période, le musée a attiré plus de visiteurs que d’habitude car tout le monde voulait voir l’emplacement vide de la Joconde.  

Aujourd ’ hui le Louvre n ’ est pas qu ’ un seul musée, mais trois. Il y a bien sûr le Louvre de Paris, mais également un autre à Lens dans le nord de la France et un dernier à Abu Dhabi aux Émirats Arabe Unis. Trois chances de découvrir les collections du Louvre de Paris.

Alors dites-moi, est-ce que vous êtes déjà allé au Louvre ? Si oui, est-ce que vous avez aimé votre visite ? Si non, est-ce que vous aimeriez y aller ?

Moi, je suis allée au Louvre il y a plus de 10 ans. J’ai vu la Joconde et la Vénus de Milo mais j’ai passé la plupart de mon temps à admirer l’art égyptien et l’art grec.

The Louvre Museum

I think we all know the Louvre Museum in Paris, so let’s talk about it!

The Louvre Museum is one of the largest museums in the world. It is located in the center of Paris and it contains vast collections of artworks. The Louvre is a must-visit destination for art lovers, historians, and tourists from all over the world.  

The Louvre was built between 1190 and 1202, by King Philippe Auguste who decided to build a fortress to protect Paris against enemy invasions.

Over the centuries, the building has been used differently, as a royal residence or even as the seat of the French government. It was in 1793, during the French Revolution, that the Louvre became a museum. It then evolved to become the largest museum in the world.

Today, the entrance to the Louvre Museum is through the Napoleon courtyard. You enter the pyramid to go to the basement where the museum is located. There is much to say about the architecture of the Louvre, so if you want a video just on the architecture, let me know in the comments. Many people who visit the museum for the first time do not realize its size. It covers over 60,000 square meters. To visit the entire museum, it would take about four days, spending 10 seconds in front of each artwork.

Now, let’s talk a little more in detail about its artworks, and of course, about the Mona Lisa.

The Louvre Museum is not just paintings. There are also sculptures, art objects, ceramics, and much more. There really is everything.

35,000 objects and artworks are exhibited at the Louvre, from prehistory to the 21st century. But did you know that only a small part of the artworks is accessible to the public? The museum has 460,000 artworks. The artworks that are not seen are stored in reserves, some in the museum, others far from the museum. Approximately 250,000 artworks are kept away from Paris, in a conservation center located in the town of Liévin, 177 km from Paris.  

Every year, between 9 and 10 million people visit the museum, that’s about 50 visitors per minute.

The three emblematic artworks are the Venus de Milo, the Coronation of Napoleon, and of course, the Mona Lisa.

As you probably know, the Mona Lisa is a bit of a star of the museum. It attracts 20,000 visitors every day. The Mona Lisa is a painting by Leonardo da Vinci, which was created between 1503 and 1506. It is said to represent a woman named Florentine Lisa Gherardini, but we have never been really sure of her identity. The Mona Lisa is a painting full of mystery.

Did you know that the Mona Lisa was stolen on August 21, 1911? While it was exhibited in the Louvre Museum, an Italian named Vincenzo Peruggia stole the painting because he wanted the artwork to return to Italy, the country where it was created. It was in 1913, two years later, that the thief was unmasked after trying to sell the painting to an Italian art dealer.

During this period, the museum attracted more visitors than usual because everyone wanted to see the empty space where the Mona Lisa was.  

Today the Louvre is not just one museum, but three. There is of course the Louvre in Paris, but also another one in Lens in northern France and a last one in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. Three chances to discover the collections of the Louvre in Paris.

So tell me, have you ever been to the Louvre? If so, did you enjoy your visit? If not, would you like to go?

As for me, I went to the Louvre over 10 years ago. I saw the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo, but I spent most of my time admiring Egyptian and Greek art.

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Louvre Museum

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The Louvre is the national museum and art gallery of France . It sits on land that originally housed a military fort built by Philip II in the 12th century. In 1546 Francis I had the fort torn down and replaced with a palace for the royal family. He named his new home the Louvre, a name that has stuck to the modern day. However, only a small part of the Louvre was built during the reign of Francis I. In fact, almost every later French king added a new part of the building.

The Louvre was no longer a royal residence after 1682, when Louis XIV moved his court to Versailles. In the 18th century it was proposed that the Louvre should become a public museum. One of the king’s aides, the comte d’Angiviller, oversaw preparations for the Louvre’s transition to a museum. These preparations included the buying of more artwork and the building of the Grande Galerie. The museum was not actually opened until 1793, when the revolutionary government opened the Musée Central des Arts in the Grande Galerie. Like the old kings, the new governments continued to expand the Louvre. Napoleon had a new hall and a northern wing added to the museum. In the 19th century two more wings were completed and formally opened by Napoleon III. By this time, the museum was a vast complex of buildings that formed two adjacent rectangles with courtyards in the middle.

The Louvre underwent massive renovations in the 1980s and ’90s to make the space more welcoming and accessible to visitors. A huge underground complex was built beneath the courtyards of the museum. Improvements included offices, shops, exhibition spaces, storage areas, and parking areas, as well as an auditorium, a tourist bus depot, and a cafeteria. The entrance to this level was placed in a courtyard and topped with a controversial steel-and-glass pyramid designed by U.S. architect I.M. Pei . In 1993 the rebuilt Richelieu wing, formerly occupied by France’s Ministry of Finance, was opened, making the entire space an art museum for the first time.

Many types of art are housed in the Louvre. The painting collection is one of the richest in the world, representing all periods of European art up to impressionism. The collection of French paintings from the 15th to the 19th century is unsurpassed in the world, and it also has many masterpieces by Italian Renaissance painters and Flemish and Dutch painters of the Baroque period. In addition, it contains a large number of Egyptian artifacts, ancient Greek and Roman art, a famous collection of Mesopotamian art, and many treasures of the French royalty.

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History of the Louvre: From Royal Château to Museum

• Post category: Facts and history
• Post author: Nassie Angadi

The history of the Louvre in Paris is a long and fascinating one. Today it is home to a wide range of art collections spanning thousands of years. Almost as interesting as the works it holds, is the history of the building itself. And how it ended collecting one of the finest collections of artworks in the world.

One of the most visited museums in Paris and the world, the Louvre started out as an ancient fortress. Transformed into a royal palace , it was then given a new lease on life as a museum, becoming a monument to French history that is much-loved by locals and visitors alike.

If you read Dan Brown’s Da Vinci code, you would think that there is a Mary Magdalene hidden grave somewhere in the Louvre, under a glass pyramid. No need for fiction however, the real history of this building is just as interesting. (You can see what is purported to be her tomb in Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume in Provence, instead.)

The Louvre is said to hold over 35,000 pieces of art , with less than 10% of its famous works on display. We explore this incredible cultural icon, just how it managed to amass such a collection, and the twists and turns of history that turned it from a royal home to a building for the people. Allons-y!

1. The Construction

The fortress that became the Château du Louvre was initially built in 1190 French King Louis Auguste.

Its location on the Right bank of the Seine river was across from the older part of Paris , which was formerly called Lutece (today Ile de la Cité and the Latin quarter in the 5th arrondissement ).

It is not the oldest palace in Paris, however, that honor belongs to the Palais de la Cité , better known as the Conciergerie on Ile de la Cité .

The new fortress of the Louvre on the Right bank of the Seine was intended to defend the wholesale food market Les Halles that was supplying the city against one of the traditional routes taken during invasions and raids since the time of the Vikings. 

In the center was a large tower, known as the Grosse Tour du Louvre , protected by a series of outer walls and towers. In addition, it was protected by a large moat 10m wide, that were filled with water from the Seine. It is entirely unclear where the name “Louvre” came from.

Subsequent kings during the Middle ages would expand the fortress, using the Louvre as a royal residence, a prison, a place for keeping the treasury, and even for a library.

You can still see a portion of these old walls in the Sully Wing of the Louvre Museum .

2. François I and Leonardo da Vinci

In 1528, French King François I brought down the Grosse Tour du Louvre in his push to bring the Louvre up to Renaissance standards. He made the Louvre his royal residence in Paris, although the Château de Fontainebleau outside of Paris remained his favorite abode.

He ordered a large scale renovation in the Italian renaissance style, with ceremonial rooms, ballrooms, royal apartments and more. He also started to acquire artworks from across the continent, and with it, famous artists .

He offers to host Leonardo da Vinci, giving him a stipend and lodging at Clos Luce near his childhood home in Amboise . Da Vinci moved to France at the age of 64, arriving with chests full of notes and sketchbooks, along with 3 of his most famous paintings, the Mona Lisa ,  Virgin and Child   with St. Anne , and  St. John the Baptist .

After Da Vinci died, many of his possessions became property of the royal family , which is how they ended up staying in France and on display at the Louvre Museum.

After François I’s son (Henri II) died, his wife Catherine de Medici became one of the most powerful women in France . She continued construction at the Louvre, as well as starting construction at a new palace right next to the Louvre, the Palais des Tuileries .

3. Henri IV (of Navarre) and the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre

At the time, tensions were high between Protestants and Catholics. The youngest daughter of Queen Catherine, Marguerite of Valois, is married off to Henri of Navarre , in an effort to heal the tensions. It would have the opposite effect.

Henri is protestant, and marrying Catholic Marguerite would lead to one of the most brutal massacres in French history, which takes place directly outside the Louvre Palace a couple of days their wedding.

With the bride and groom staying at the Palais du Louvre, both Protestants Huguenots and Catholics had descended on Paris to be present at the marriage.

Alarmed that Protestant Henri was now in line to the throne of France , they would turn on Huguenots gathered, encouraged by Catholic Catherine. By some historians’s estimates, the number of dead across France vary from 10,000 to 30,000 people.

Henri of Navarre would go on to convert to Catholicism to try to maintain the peace after becoming King Henri IV . His famous words were “Paris is well worth a mass.” He would continue to expand the Palais du Louvre and the Palais des Tuileries, with the intention of connecting the two.

4. Sun King Louis XIV’s Move to Versailles

When Sun King Louis XIV ascended to the throne, he was merely 4 years old. It was a tumultuous time known as  the Fronde , with nobles at the time contesting his mother Anne, who was Regent. At one point, the  12-year old Louis and his mother  were held prisoner at Palais Royal in Paris (the palace next to the Louvre ) until they conceded to the demands of the  frondeurs .

This made Louis detest and distrust Paris. But he nonetheless, moved into the Louvre Palace as an adult and started making more renovations. He built the Cour Carré , the smaller courtyard at the back of the Louvre today, as well as the Louvre Colonade , the eastern front of the Louvre.

He did however start looking for a new power base, and settled on the family’s old hunting lodge: Versailles which was a couple of hours away from Paris by horse.

Louis XIV set about on a grand construction project to build what we know today as the Palace of Versailles . By the 1670s, Louis XIV directed all his construction budget from the Louvre to the Château de Versailles.

5. The Louvre in decline

With Louis XIV and his descendants preferring to make Versailles their home, and the executive power located at the Palais des Tuileries, the Louvre was taken over by artists, craftsmen, royal academies, and various royal officers.

The Mona Lisa was not at the Louvre, but instead at the Palace of Fontainebleau (aka the Home of Kings). And when it was moved, Louis XIV, husband of Marie-Antoinette , moved it to the Palace of Versailles .

6. Becoming a museum

It would take a revolution for the Louvre Palace to find a new purpose. In 1789, the King, Marie-Antoinette and court were forced to return from Versailles and were in Tuileries Palace while many courtiers moved into the Louvre.

After the fall of the monarchy many artworks including the Mona Lisa became property of the French Republic and went on permanent display at the Louvre, while artists moved into the Louvre apartments that were newly vacated.

In May 1791, the Assemblée Nationale declared that the Louvre was officially a museum and “a place for bringing together monuments of all the sciences and arts”.  

It was known as the Muséum central des arts de la République , and was open to the public 3 days a week for free, displaying around 537 paintings and 184 objects of art. That relatively small collection would soon increase significantly.

7. Napoleon Bonaparte’s oeuvres d’art at the Louvre

When Napoleon Bonaparte took power and declared himself Emperor in 1804, he had the museum renamed  Musée Napoléon .

He himself did not live at the Louvre, preferring Château Malmaison , Fontainebleue , and later Palais de l’Elysée .

He did however set off pillaging various artworks across Europe, bringing them back to the Louvre. Acquisitions were made of Spanish, Austrian, Dutch, and Italian works, either as the result of war looting or formalized by treaties.

For example, one of his peace treaties compelled Italian cities to contribute pieces of art and heritage to Napoleon’s “parades of spoils”. These items were then placed the Louvre Museum.

As well as redecorating and renovating the interior, he also built the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel that stands in front of the Louvre to commemorate Napoleon’s military victories, as well as the “other” Arc de Triomphe on the Champs Elysées .

Napoleon also had a new wing built, between 1807 and 1815, which closed the courtyard of the Carrousel to the north, and which extended along rue de Rivoli.

8. Returning the artwork and rebuilding the collection

After Napoleon Bonaparte’s defeat at the Battle of Waterloo, many of the countries he had previously conquered asked for their artwork back.

For example, the Horses of Saint Mark , which had adorned the basilica of San Marco in Venice since the sack of Constantinople in 1204, had been brought to Paris where they were placed atop Napoleon’s Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel.

These were returned to Italy, after much consternation from the directors of the Louvre, and today there is a copy on top instead. Artworks were traded back and forth with much haggling between the parties.

One interesting example is the famed Venus de Milo, who dates back to the 1st century BC, Cyclades, Greece. It was acquired by the French ambassador in Constantinople through rather questionable bargaining, and offered to the restored Bourbon King Louis XVIII in 1821.

However in 1815, France had returned a similarly named  Venus de’ Medici  (also known as the Medici Venus) to the Italy, along with several other works.

In an effort to continue promoting the prestige of the Louvre, the French put forth that it was  Venus de Milo  that was more beautiful and a greater treasure, promoting her worldwide to the symbol of beauty what she is today.

9. Napoleon III’s reconstruction

With several wars with Prussia and England in the 19th century, the Louvre was not a priority.

When Napoleon III (nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte) lands on the French throne , he decides to renovate much of Paris , with his new Hausmannian buildings, as well as the Louvre.

The wings of the buildings around the Cours Napoleon where the glass pyramid entrance stands today, were actually substantially built and renovated in the 1850s by Emperor Napoleon III for his Minister of State.

Napoleon III himself, lived in the Tuileries Palace that used to be right next door. He had intended to fully connect to the two palaces into one, though that never happened.

After the fall of Napoleon III, much of the Louvre was reconverted back into a museum. But these state apartments including a grand dining hall, and salons with their crystal chandeliers, ornate gold, and velvet decorations remained.

It continued to house the Ministry of Finance, however, in the Napoleon III State apartments as recently as 1989. (In case you are wondering, the French Ministry of Finance is now in an ugly modern building on the Seine called Bercy in the 12th arrondissement.)

10. Burning down the attached Palais des Tuileries

Like his uncle Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor Napoleon III also was defeated and dethroned after a battle in 1870, this time against the Prussians (Germans). He was exiled to England, leaving France in turmoil.

His former home, the Tuileries Palace that was attached to the Louvre, was burnt down during the Paris Commune protests in 1871 . The emperor’s Louvre library (Bibliothèque du Louvre) and some of the adjoining halls, in what is now the Richelieu Wing, were separately destroyed.

The Tuileries were never rebuilt , but the Louvre museum was saved by the efforts of Paris firemen and museum employees led its curator Henry Barbet de Jouy.

11. Evacuating the Louvre during WWI and WWII

The Louvre was closed as a museum in 1914, during the outbreak of World War I, given the destruction of other major monuments like the historic Reims Cathedral that was subject to bombardments.

Many of its most important works were moved to Toulouse during the First World War. They would face a greater test in World War II.

With Paris under occupation by the Germans (which was not the case during WWI), and Hitler and his cronies confiscating artworks all over Europe, it was only the cleverness of its museum directors that the Louvre’s greatest treasures were saved.

Starting September 27, 1938, a few months before the war, convoys of art would leave the Louvre to be hidden in châteaux and houses across France.

Over 3,600 paintings were taken down and move to places like the Château de Chambord , Valençay, Louvigny, Pau, etc. Over 200 trips take place with 5,446 boxes are moved including the Winged Victory, Mona Lisa and many many more .

The disappointed Germans would find many of the walls of the Louvre empty, moving items like the Bayeux Tapestry to the Louvre instead.

12. Building the Glass Pyramids

In the 1980s, French president François Mitterrand decided that the French Ministry of Finance, which was still in the Louvre at the time, needed to move. The entire space was to become a museum.

In 1984, he selected I. M. Pei , a renowned architect to substantially renovate the space, including an underground entrance accessed through a glass pyramid in the Louvre’s central Cour Napoléon.

Parisians initially hated the idea of this modern pyramid in the middle of the ancient palace, but the work was completed anyway in 1993. In a few short years, however, the Louvre Museum would become the most visited museum in the world.

13. The Louvre Today

The Louvre museum is built right on the Seine, and along with other historic buildings like the Notre Dame de Paris , benefits from special precautions in case of flooding.

There is still controversy however, with foreign authorities like the Greek government asking for works like the Winged Victory to be returned, while French authorities insist the works would not have survived had they not been in the Louvre.

Whatever the case maybe, the Lourve continues to flourish, attracting millions of visitors every year, as a monument to art and culture.

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The Louvre Museum in Paris: A Complete Guide for Visitors

One of the Globe's Great Artistic Treasuries

 TripSavvy / Taylor McIntyre 

As museums go, the Louvre is quite simply a mammoth. The word "museum" may even be insufficient: the collections are so vast, diverse, and breathtaking that visitors may have the impression of navigating a maze of distinct artistic and cultural worlds.

Housed in the Palais du Louvre (Louvre Palace) , the former seat of French royalty, the Louvre emerged in the 12th century as a medieval fortress, slowly evolving toward its status as a public arts museum during the French Revolution in the late 18th century. Since then, it has become the globe's most-visited museum, and an enduring symbol of French excellence in the arts.

Spanning eight major thematic departments and 35,000 works of art  dating from Antiquity to the early modern period, the museum's permanent collection includes masterpieces by European masters such as Da Vinci, Delacroix, Vermeer, and Rubens, as well as unsurpassed Greco-Roman, Egyptian, and Islamic arts collections. Frequent temporary exhibits often highlight particular artists or movements, and are almost always worthwhile.

Read related: See early modern and impressionist masterpieces at the nearby Musée d'Orsay

Location and Contact Information:

General Access (individuals without tickets): Musée du Louvre, 1st arrondissement -- Porte des Lions, Galerie du Carrousel, or Pyramid entrances Metro: Palais Royal-Musée du Louvre (Line 1) Buses: Lines 21, 24, 27, 39, 48, 68, 69, 72, 81, 95, and the Paris Open Tour bus all stop in front of the glass pyramid (the main entrance to the museum.) Information on the Web: Visit the Louvre's official website

Sights and Attractions Nearby:

• Jardin des Tuileries
• Musée d'Orsay (Orsay Museum)
• Musee des Arts Decoratifs (Decorative Arts Museum)
• Designer Shopping in the Rue Saint-Honoré district

Opening Hours:

Open Thursday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, 9 a.m.-6 p.m.; Wednesday and Friday 9 a.m.-9:45 p.m. Admission is free for all on the first Saturday of each month from 6 p.m. to 9:45 p.m. 

The museum is closed Tuesdays and on the following dates:

For more detailed information on opening hours for current exhibits or events at the Louvre, consult this page.

Admission/Tickets:

For up-to-date details on admission fees to the Louvre Museum, consult this page at the official Musee du Louvre site . The Paris Museum Pass includes admission to the Louvre. (Buy Direct at Rail Europe)

Louvre Museum Tours:

Guided tours of the Louvre are available for individuals and groups and can make a visit to the museum degrees less overwhelming. Find out more about Louvre museum tours on this page .

Collections, Exhibits and Events at the Louvre:

The following guides will help you navigate the Louvre museum's collections and exhibits and make choices about what you'd like to see ahead of your next visit:

• Louvre Museum Permanent Collections Guide
• Information on temporary exhibits at the Louvre
• Special Events at the Louvre

Accessibility & Services for Visitors With Limited Mobility

The Louvre is generally recognized as being adequately accessible to visitors with physical disabilities. Visitors with wheelchairs have priority access to the museum's main entrance at the pyramid and do not have to wait in line. Wheelchairs may also be rented free of charge at the museum's information desk (an identification card will be required as a deposit.) Visitors with guide dogs, tip canes, and other aids have full access to the collections.

• Find more information on Louvre accessibility  (scroll to the bottom of the page)

Visitor Tips and Advice Ahead of Your Visit:

Read our guide on How NOT to visit the Louvre  to find out how to avoid burnout and make the most of your visit. It's so easy to do too much and feel overwhelmed. Read my expert advice on taking in the museum's collections at a comfortable and enjoyable pace, and absorbing more details. Less really can be more!

Pictures of the Louvre:

For an overview of some of the museum's most important works and details, or for some artistic inspiration, take a look at our Louvre Pictures Gallery .

Read More About the History of the Museum:

Consult this page for an in-depth look at the Louvre Museum's rich and tumultuous history.

Shopping and Dining:

The museum houses several restaurants and snack bars in addition to a cafeteria:

• Just below the Pyramid , the restaurant Le Grand Louvre offers gourmet specialties in a classic setting. Open from 12 a.m. to 3 p.m. and from 7 p.m. to 12 p.m. on Wednesdays and Fridays.
• On the lower ground floor , the Cafe Denon offers snacks and casual meals. Open from 9:30 am to 5:00 p.m. (7:00 p.m. during evening openings).
• On the second floor (European "first floor") , the Cafe Richelieu offers more casual dining possibilities: sandwiches, salads, cold and hot drinks, etc. Open from 10:15 am to 5:00 p.m. (7:00 p.m. during evening openings).
• For books and gifts, head to the Louvre bookshop in the "Hall Napoleon" under the Pyramid. The bookshop boasts France's largest selection of art history titles, in addition to a wide range of guidebooks in various languages, childrens' books, and engravings. Open from 9:30 am to 7:00 p.m. (closes at 9:45 p.m. on Wednesday and Friday).
• The Carrousel du Louvre is a popular shopping center housed within the Louvre palace and accessible via the Rue de Rivoli entrance. Open seven days a week, the Carrousel du Louvre offers designer fashion, home design shops, fine gifts, and other shops you'd expect to find in an upscale shopping center. An extensive upstairs food court is a notch more gourmet-- and also a notch more costly-- than standard mall counterparts.

Related Articles

More related articles.

The Louvre Museum: Facts, Paintings & Tickets

The Louvre is the world's largest museum and houses one of the most impressive art collections in history. The magnificent, baroque-style palace and museum — LeMusée du Louvre in French — sits along the banks of the Seine River in Paris. It is one of the city's biggest tourist attractions.

History of the Louvre

The Louvre was originally built as a fortress in 1190, but was reconstructed in the 16th century to serve as a royal palace. "Like many buildings, it was built and rebuilt over the years," said Tea Gudek Snajdar, an Amsterdam-based art historian, museum docent and a blogger at Culture Tourist . 

During its time as a royal residence, the Louvre saw tremendous growth. Nearly every monarch expanded it, according to History.com . Today, it covers a total area of 652,300 square feet (60,600 square meters). In 1682, Louis XIV moved the royal residence to Versailles, and the Louvre became home to various art academies, offering regular exhibitions of its members' works. 

During the French Revolution, Louis XVI and his wife, Marie Antoinette, were forcibly removed from Versailles and imprisoned in Tuilleries Palace, which was then adjacent to the Louvre, according to the Louvre’s official website . They were beheaded there in 1793. 

The National Assembly opened the Louvre as a museum in August 1793 with a collection of 537 paintings. The museum closed in 1796 because of structural problems with the building. Napoleon reopened the museum and expanded the collection in 1801, and the museum was renamed Musée Napoléon.

"It was Napoleon Bonaparte who created the foundation for the world famous museum the Louvre is today," said Gudek Snajdar. "He wanted to be in charge of creating a collection of art in Louvre. That's why he renamed it in 1802 to the 'Napoleon Museum.' He wanted to create a museum of France with a wonderful collection of art from all around the world. He enlarged its collection by bringing art from his military campaigns, private donations and commissions he made."

Napoleon's contributions included spoils from Belgium, Italy, Prussia and Austria, according to Napoleon.org . In 1815, when Napoleon abdicated with the Treaty of Fontainebleau, almost 5,000 artworks were returned to their countries of origin. France was allowed to keep only a few hundred works, and the Louvre reverted to its original name. Many artifacts from Napoleon's conquests in Egypt remained, according to History.com. 

After Napoleon, the Louvre continued to expand. The multi-building Louvre Complex was completed under the reign of Napoleon III in the mid-19 th century, according to napoleon.org .

Louvre paintings & other works

The Louvre's collection includes Egyptian antiques, ancient Greek and Roman sculptures, paintings by the Old Masters (notable European artists from before 1800), and crown jewels and other artifacts from French nobles. Its works span the sixth century B.C. to the 19th century A.D. More than 35,000 works are on display at any given time. The displays are divided into eight departments: Near Eastern Antiquities; Egyptian Antiquities; Greek, Etruscan and Roman Antiquities; Islamic Art; Sculptures; Decorative Arts; Paintings; and Prints and Drawings, according to the Louvre website.

Without question, the Louvre's most famous work is Leonardo da Vinci's " Mona Lisa ," who enchants hordes of visitors with her enigmatic smile. This small, iconic painting — it is only 21 by 30 inches (53 by 77 centimeters) is covered with bullet-proof glass and flanked by guards, according to the Louvre website. This protection is the result of it being stolen in 1911. (It was recovered in 1913.)

Crowds also flock to see the armless beauty of the "Venus de Milo," and "Winged Victory," the ancient Greek sculpture also known as "Nike of Samothrace." Other popular works include a stele inscribed with the Code of Hammurabi , da Vinci's tragic sculpture "The Dying Slave" and Antonio Canova's 18th-century sculpture "Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss." Eugene Delacroix's "Liberty Leading the People," which depicts the bare-breasted Liberty goddess leading a charge in the French Revolution, and is thought to have inspired Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables," and Jacques-Louis David's "The Coronation of Napoleon" was commissioned by Napoleon himself and is a good reminder of the Louvre's history.

Gudek Snajdar gave Live Science some unique Culture Tourist recommendations. Some of her favorites come from the collection of Near Eastern Art. She recommends the "Frieze of Archers" from the sixth century B.C. and "Winged Bull with a Human Head" from the eighth century B.C. 

She also suggests viewing another masterpiece by da Vinci, "The Virgin and Child With Saint Anne," which is very close to the "Mona Lisa."

"Instead of getting lost in a crowd in front of the 'Mona Lisa,' I would definitely take a look on that painting and enjoy the work of this Italian painter in a peace and quiet," she said. Also, "a few of Johannes Vermeer's paintings are definitely not to be missed (especially when you know there are only 34 of them in the world). It's a great opportunity to see some of them."

Architecture of the Louvre

"Although today its collection is the most interesting part of the museum, the building itself is an important exhibit, too," said Gudek Snajdar. The building is primarily of Renaissance and French Classical style, she said. The first medieval elements from the old fortress can still be seen underground, beneath the pyramid, around the lobby area. 

"Probably its most famous part is Claude Perrault's 'Colonnade' on the eastern façade of Louvre," said Gudek Snajdar. "It was built in the 17 th century and it's a wonderful example of a French Classicism. It's composed of paired Corinthian columns with pavilions at the corners of the facade." She said had influenced many buildings — the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., and the Metropolitan Museum in New York being just some of them.

The Louvre pyramid

In 1983, the Louvre underwent a renovation plan known as the Grand Louvre, according to History.com Part of the plan called for a new design for the main entrance. Architect I.M. Pei was awarded the project, and he designed an underground lobby and modern glass pyramid structure in the courtyard. Inaugurated in 1988, the pyramid would become a celebrated element of the landmark museum's design. "It is my personal favorite," said Gudek Snajdar. "Combining traditional style with modern architecture, it shows the Louvre's timeless beauty."

In 1993, the Inverted Pyramid, a skylight dipping into the underground lobby, was unveiled, according to the Louvre website.

Louvre tickets & hours

Because of its size and the scale of its collection, it is impossible to see the entirety of the Louvre in one visit. The museum reported about 8.1 million visitors in 2017 — so prepare for crowds, especially around the most popular works.

The museum offers a variety of tools to help visitors plan their days, including the " Masterpieces Visitor Trail,” timed at about 90 minutes and covering the 10 most famous works, maps of floor plans and advanced ticket options.

The Louvre is open every day but Tuesday and the following holidays: Christmas Day, New Year's Day, and International Workers' Day (May 1). The hours are: Monday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., and Wednesday and Friday from 9 a.m. to 9:45 p.m.

As of 2018, admission to the entire museum costs 15 euros (17 euros if ordered online). Admission is free for those under 18, as well as other individuals with proper documentation , such as art teachers, pass holders and people with disabilities. Admission is also free on certain special days, such as Bastille Day (July 14).

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Jessie Szalay is a contributing writer to FSR Magazine. Prior to writing for Live Science, she was an editor at Living Social. She holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from George Mason University and a bachelor's degree in sociology from Kenyon College. 

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In Love with the Louvre

What happens when we try to walk at night through museums we can no longer visit? A range of online virtual tours provides the possibility, but apart from physical problems of reproduction—the pixel resolution is inadequate, the movement glitchy and twitchy—the real difference is the loss of tactile and optical tension, the missing dialogue of aching feet and happy eyes. Online, we float, ghostlike, down corridors, making giddy hundred-and-eighty-degree spins, with no querulous photographer from Toledo with a selfie stick to bump into. Sit and know you’re sitting is the meditation master’s insistence, and Walk and look while knowing you’re walking and looking is the more complicated Zen of the museum experience: the physical and the painterly, the squinting to see and the moments of transporting vision, have to go in tandem. The work is there , actually there as a physical fact, which you could touch, if you were allowed to. A book may be an object, but the Kindle edition of “Hamlet” is as much Hamlet as the (no longer extant) manuscript. Raphael’s portrait of Baldassare Castiglione exists at one specific point on the planet, and nowhere else, having begun in one nameable place and followed a track through time, owner by owner and wall to wall. Reproductions reproduce, and they often do it well, but they can’t reproduce the sex appeal of museumgoing, the carnal intersection of one physical object with another, you and it. It’s a thing, there; you, a thing, here.

This truth is never so piercingly felt as when we think about revisiting in our minds the Louvre in Paris, since its essential experience is enormity and intimacy, constantly colliding, on a scale unequalled by any other gallery in the world. Closed for four months during the pandemic, the Louvre reopened recently, in a cautious, by-appointment-only manner; but, like most of the great galleries of Europe, it remains off limits to still-tainted Americans. As Mark Twain, the archetypal exhausted American tourist, noted when he visited in the eighteen-sixties, the museum contains “miles of paintings by the old masters,” but the experience of its Grande Galerie—a corridor, not a room—is necessarily closeup. Even the large and little rooms that spring off its sides hold out the possibility of an intimate encounter with the past. You look—well, you would look, if you could get within thirty feet of it, past the bulwark of tourists for whom it is the destination of a European visit—at the gallery’s most famous picture, Leonardo ’s “La Gioconda” (the one called, in English, the “Mona Lisa”), and you see paint, crackle, a smile, a non-smile, a mystery, a woman, a remembered page of prose (“She is older than the rocks among which she sits”), and, if you allow proximity to defeat familiarity, a genuinely weird, extraterrestrial portrait. Had Leonardo come from another planet, as he sometimes seems to have, this would be a picture of its geology, its flora, and its queen.

Ten million people visited the Louvre last year, before France’s lockdown in March, and no museum can become so crowded without cancelling its own purpose, or replacing it with another purpose—the purpose of a dutiful hajj, of having been there. There are too many people looking to allow anyone to see. Construction of the “Grand Louvre,” begun in the nineteen-eighties, with a new entrance hall crowned by the I. M. Pei pyramid, was meant to organize and order the overcrowding, but has only added to the exhaustion. The long lines that snake around the pyramid in the summer without a trace of shade are tiring to look at, let alone stand in. And, once inside, the physical act of buying a ticket and getting oriented is so extended that it makes the time between the urge to visit and the actual experience of a work of art punishingly long.

Nonetheless, the place is so big, so various, so filled with objects, and so beautifully disordered that there is still, especially off-season, a chance to infiltrate inside, instead of being regimented within it. A Saturday morning in one of the lesser wings—say, the Richelieu wing, opened in the nineteen-nineties—offers time alone with overlooked delights, like the sixteenth-century Flemish tapestries called “Les Chasses de Maximilien,” which include a bracing account of the Emperor out hunting with his dogs and horses and attendants and whippers-in on a winter morning, perfectly capturing the smoky, enveloping air of the Flemish woods while providing an extraordinary encyclopedia of canine types, some strange, some familiar.

Mysterious in effect, the Louvre is delightfully mysterious in history, too, as James Gardner shows in “ The Louvre: The Many Lives of the World’s Most Famous Museum ” (Atlantic Monthly Press). No one knows why the Louvre is called the Louvre. You would think that it has some relation to “Lutetia,” the Roman name for Paris, or the like, but not a bit; the origin of the name is as opaque as the French love of Johnny Hallyday. Even so, the name has stuck through the site’s transition from citadel to showplace. The continuity the Louvre represents is the continuity of the French state. Gardner relates the long story of the Louvre, starting around the thirteenth century, when it was simply a castle, through its elevation as a palace, and then, in the seventeenth century, its expansion into service as an office building for French royalty. In those centuries, the building intersects art history only occasionally. A kind of false spring occurred when François I seems to have bought pictures from Leonardo at Amboise, in the early sixteenth century—three paintings, including that smiling lady, which remain the nucleus of the collection. It was a cosmopolitan collection—the French King, like many of his successors, displayed his power by demonstrating his taste, with the model of collecting as a form of exotic shopping already in place.

Pictures were also commissioned and displayed there. Peter Paul Rubens ’s seventeenth-century series apotheosizing the life of the mediocre Marie de Médicis as the Queen of France migrated into the royal collection early on, and remains both the apogee and the burlesque of major art that is also pure toadying to power. In the late seventeenth century, Louis XIV bought a tremendous number of pictures, but, as Gardner rightly says, he bought as a contemporary New York billionaire would buy, acquiring blue-chip names—then mostly Italian—without much evidence of distinct sensibility. Still, one great picture after another did come into his personal collection for the benefit of France, including what is, for some people’s money, the single greatest picture in the Louvre, that Raphael portrait of the Italian diplomat and author Castiglione. Raphael, the most talented painter who has ever lived, somehow compressed in a single frame all of the easy painterliness and understated humanity of Titian, while fixing, in Castiglione’s mixture of wisdom, intensity, sobriety, and wry good humor, the permanent form for the ideal author photo.

Gardner’s muscular, impatiently expert prose recalls Robert Hughes in his city books, “ Barcelona ” and “ Rome .” He indulges in a few polemics along the way but has unusually firm, if retardataire , views on architecture and a shrewd, watchful, knowing eye—noting, for instance, that the greatest architectural achievement of the complex, the seventeenth-century Colonnade, with its bas-relief pediment, is now so hidden away, around the corner from the pyramid and the central court, that “not one visitor to the Louvre in a hundred, perhaps in a thousand, will ever see this masterpiece.”

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His account reminds us that we always make one era responsible for what belongs to the one before, and among the truths of French history is that we give the Revolution credit—or blame—for historical processes and institutions that were under way long before 1789. The great public-private spaces of modernity—the restaurants and cafés with their class- and caste-spanning crowd—were all nurtured during the Enlightenment, even if they blossomed after the Revolution. Although the Louvre formally opened as an art gallery in 1793—the beginning of the Terror—the idea to make it so had begun half a century before. The removal of the court to Versailles under Louis XIV, in 1682, had left an enormous volume of unused space, and even more was created by the expansion of the Tuileries Palace, west of the courtyard where the pyramid now stands. The urge to turn the princely palace into a picture palace led, in the eighteenth century, to a series of exhibitions in the former royal residence—the kind of French salons that would, by attraction and repulsion, dominate French taste right up to the First World War.

The direction and planning of the incipient Louvre luckily fell into the hands of two remarkable fonctionnaires who, more than anyone else, are responsible for its character. The first was the extravagantly named Charles-Claude Flahaut de la Billarderie, Comte d’Angiviller, who was appointed the keeper of the king’s estates by Louis XVI. As Gardner tells us, he was intent on establishing a museum in the Grande Galerie, and he went about the heroic work, through both architecture and acquisition, of turning a royal abode into an art gallery. D’Angiviller’s dream was made real by an accident of finance almost impossibly ironic to imagine, given that the Louvre has, for more than a century, been the special haunt of American tourists. The end of the American Revolution, we learn from Gardner’s history, helped finance the French museum. Once the War of Independence had been concluded, the French government could start to collect on its loans to the American colonies, putting thirteen million livres in d’Angiviller’s hands.

He started collecting good pictures, not greedily and haphazardly, as prestige prizes, but with a modern kind of eye, devoted to filling gaps in the collection. He sent his emissaries north, for instance, to buy one of the great Rembrandts that distinguish the collection—the humane and anti-idealizing artist not being at all an obvious choice to French aristocratic taste at the time. D’Angiviller also renovated the Grande Galerie itself, envisioning a huge iron-and-glass skylight that would illuminate the arriving pictures.

He lost his job when the Revolution happened—he fled, for fear of losing his head as well—but the position of what was, in effect, museum director fell to an equally aesthetic and public-spirited conservator, Jean-Marie Roland de la Platière, usually called Roland. A Girondin liberal, he built on d’Angiviller’s efforts, with their implicit appeal to ever-larger audiences, and dreamed for the first time of a true museum: a synoptic collection telling the story of art-making in all its genres, available to everyone. “It should be open to everyone and everyone should be able to place his easel in front of any painting or to draw, paint, or model as he chooses,” he declared. When the Louvre opened at last as a museum, in 1793, anyone could go in.

Roland, with his impeccable liberal credentials and democratic instincts, was one of the more pitiable victims of the countless pitiable victims of the Jacobin Reign of Terror. Only months before the museum’s opening, he took off, afraid of the radicals. Though he got out of Paris, his intellectual, spirited wife, an activist who belonged to the wrong families, biologically and politically, was arrested in the spring of 1793 by the Jacobins, and publicly beheaded in the fall. “From the moment when I learned that they had murdered my wife,” Roland wrote (in words Gardner doesn’t quote), “I would no longer remain in a world stained with enemies.” He committed suicide by sword thrust.

As the revolutionary chaos gave way to the military dictatorship of Napoleon, the Louvre was transformed in another direction. Napoleon set out to loot the world for the benefit of the museum. Of the assaults on Egypt and the Levant, Gardner writes that they “may be unique in the history of warfare in that their goals had almost as much to do with the acquisition of visual art as with the conquest of territory.” In the inevitable French manner, there was even a bureaucracy of the piracy: a comité d’instruction supervising agences d’évacuation and agences d’extraction , which, Gardner says, “essentially oversaw the removal of all portable economic and cultural assets from the conquered nations.”

What Napoleon did was turn his predecessors’ idea of a great picture gallery into one of the first instances of a truly encyclopedic museum—a horizontal treasury of the world’s wonders, hauled into a single city and placed under one roof. The French took the self-embracing Medici Venus from Palermo and the four horses from the façade of San Marco (which had previously been stolen by the Venetians from Constantinople during the horrible Fourth Crusade). Being French, they looted with terrific taste. Pretty much everything they took—from the “Laocoön,” in the Vatican, to the Egyptian antiquities—we would still regard as worth taking. It is de rigueur now to see this as the Enlightenment Armed, philosophes crashing in directly behind the armies on an imperial mission. But it was also the Enlightenment Awakened: for the first time in fifteen hundred years, Western Europe fully reclaimed Egyptian history as part of the inheritance of civilization, through Jean-François Champollion’s heroic deciphering of hieroglyphics, which Napoleon’s invasion made possible.

Much of the loot was sent back after the fall of Napoleon, but much remained, and the pattern of taking continued in subsequent regimes. Though many of the greatest pieces that arrived in the nineteenth century were purchased or donated, others were found in French archeological digs in poor or colonized countries and share in the common indictment of the exploitation of the economically weak by the economically strong. The Nike of Samothrace, the greatest mid-nineteenth-century acquisition, came to the museum because a French diplomat dug it out of the ground on the Aegean island of Samothrace and sent it to Paris. (The prow on which the statue originally sat was later retrieved and mounted on the museum’s steps.)

Does time turn loot into legacy? This is one of the great debates of our era, worth taking up. The point is foregrounded by the Greek government’s ever-hotter pursuit of the Parthenon Marbles in the British Museum, taken from Athens by Lord Elgin in the early nineteenth century, with what seemed to be official permission from the Ottoman administration. What is plunder and what is portable cultural material?

It is very hard to acquit any art museum of looting once one looks hard at the historical circumstances of acquisition. The great collections of European paintings in America were assembled, often by the dealer Joseph Duveen and the connoisseur Bernard Berenson, on something like the same unequal terms as the great archeological collections of Europe. Altarpieces were ripped out of Italian churches and palazzos with a disdain for their context equivalent to Lord Elgin’s—and at a time when Italy was as financially weak against American power as Greece had been militarily against English (and Turkish) power.

Indeed, the matchless American collection of Impressionist pictures in the Art Institute of Chicago would not be immune from the same reproach. We bought them, we protest, at a moment when the indigenous nation grossly undervalued them, which is exactly the same response that the British make against the Greeks. Yet the infirmities of the French state at the turn of the twentieth century, the argument might run, made the simple act of protecting the national patrimony politically impossible. Seurat’s perfect “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte,” which resides in Chicago, is an archetypally French painting, depicting a French scene, fully legible only in the context of French arguments about science, society, and Utopia. Send it back to Paris, the patrimonialists could demand, on the next plane after the one that brings the Elgin Marbles back to Athens!

In truth, it all depends on the transaction and the treasure. Bronze Age people, after all, passed art around the Aegean, in the path of trade and armies, quite as much as later people did. Some of the nineteenth-century takings obviously mark the kind of cultural circulation and hybridization that is not just essential to civilization but exactly what we mean by “civilization”; others really do trail the injuries of theft. The Parthenon Marbles are part of a still existent if damaged architectural whole, and the splendor of the Acropolis Museum is that it looks directly out on the original site. They ought to be returned. On the other hand, the Italian pictures at the Louvre represent the long-standing to-ings and fro-ings of art in European culture, a practice both loving and violently rapacious. Portable pictures are meant to move. Seurat in Chicago makes us all more Parisian. The Veroneses in the Louvre show us, in this sense, more historical truth than a Veronese in situ in Venice might. Portable pictures are inherently self-propelled, with the possibility of going elsewhere implicit in their making.

As the nineteenth century wore on, fewer great objects found a home in the Louvre. But the most extensive building projects in its history took place in the eighteen-fifties and sixties, under Louis-Napoléon and the Second Empire. That nineteenth-century Nouveau Louvre is most of what the tourist sees today, in the Cour Napoléon surrounding the pyramid. Designed by a changing roster of official architects, in what was seen as a noble, Grand Siècle style, it makes the gewgaw glories of the Second Empire everywhere evident. Though made of the same beige limestone as the seventeenth-century buildings, the sculptural decoration of the Cour Napoléon is florid and pompous in a way that recalls the Sunday-matinée façade of the Opéra more than the low-relief severities of the Cour Carrée. Every surface is decorated with statues, so that, as Gardner writes, visitors waiting in line to enter the pyramid “cannot fail to notice that they are being watched by eighty-six stone figures, each about ten feet tall, that man the terraces of the first floor like some overdressed swat team.” The one great accomplishment of the Nouveau Louvre was to link the older Louvre with the Tuileries Palace, which closed off the courtyard to the west. But the palace was burned nearly to the ground by the Communards in 1871, in an anti-Royalist gesture made as the Commune fell. The fires reached the gallery end of the Louvre as well, saved only by heroic Paris pompiers .

The iron-frame buildings of the Nouveau Louvre—instantly identifiable by its proliferation of dormers and mansard roofs—became the most frequently copied architectural style in mid-nineteenth-century America. Here was the basis of “the General Grant style of every other Midwestern county courthouse,” as the wonderful social historian J. C. Furnas once wrote, “and a principal reason for many Americans’ sense of anticlimax when seeing Paris for the first time—so much of it looks like the insane asylum and Public School Number Eight back home.” Philadelphia’s city hall is probably the most imposing remaining instance of the shared style. The ruins of the Tuileries, which were visible through most of the eighteen-seventies, were left oddly unpictured by the great generation of Impressionists coming of age as artists at that time. The avant-garde painters, mostly radical republicans like Manet, regarded the ruins as an encumbering image of exactly the kinds of deadly Paris feud and fronde they were trying to leave behind.

Ignoring the ruins, those artists haunted the museum. The curious thing is that, for all the Parisian drama going on around it, the Louvre as a museum has been a remarkably stable institution. Very few things have entered the collection that stand above, or even very much alongside, its nineteenth-century acquisitions; the works that had arrived by 1870 are still its treasures today.

Nothing is more imperious than the academic insistence on how our tastes in art and music are reshaped by class conflict and social upheaval. But, when one looks at cultural history without prejudice, what is astonishing is how constant taste is. Hamlet’s advice to the players in 1600 is, pretty much thought for thought, what you would say to an acting company now: the straight actors shouldn’t ham it up, the comedians shouldn’t gag it up, and the more lifelike and credible the human behavior, the better. In the same way, an aesthete asked in 1900 to single out the most important works in the Louvre would have named the Leonardos, the Delacroixs, the Greek statuary, the Egyptian antiquities, and, perhaps, the French neoclassical paintings. The aesthete might have liked the insipid side of Raphael, the chubby babies and pious peasant Madonnas, more than we do, but that peerless portrait of Castiglione is an unaltered affection. More than a century later, the list is not very different. All that has changed is the warning labels: the old-style aesthete might have been warned that these hallowed presences are protective against the corruptions of modernity; we are warned not to miss their absences, all the persecuted or subordinated peoples not shown. It is the same kind of talk about the risks of mere visual pleasure, attached to a different kind of moral strenuousness. The pieties change, but the pictures don’t.

The greatest single transformation in the building and its purposes since the Second Empire dates to our own era, with Mitterrand’s “Grand Louvre,” completed in the nineteen-nineties. Gardner is, on the whole, kind to the architectural features of the I. M. Pei project, which certainly achieved its desired effect of making the Louvre a little more rational, if a lot less beautiful. (In the pre-Pei era, you entered more or less directly onto the great staircase and the Nike of Samothrace, a thrilling preface.) What Gardner regrets is the scale of the new mass tourism that the post-Pei Louvre invited, overlooking, perhaps, its central lesson. Despite Walter Benjamin’s famous insistence otherwise, mechanical reproduction, far from diminishing the aura of the original, vastly reinforces it. The more people have seen of the Louvre, the more they want to see it, just as the more baseball games you show on television, the more people come to the park. It’s also true that in a secularized society, where culture fills a role once played by faith, there is a persistent place for pilgrimage—even attached to penance, waiting outside in the hot Parisian summer sun for hours.

“The Louvre stands as an implicit reproach, a programmatic rejection of the art and architecture that the West favors today, with its asymmetries, its puerile rebellions, its clamorous proclamation of its own insufficiency,” Gardner insists. Must it? Certainly French modernism is impossible to imagine without the Louvre: Picasso and Matisse’s Orientalism is unimaginable without Delacroix, as de Kooning and Francis Bacon would be unimaginable without Rubens—borrowing his stylized armor of life drawing, the extravagant hooks and curves he puts in place of real human form. Wayne Thiebaud pulls into the twenty-first century Chardin’s mission of bringing a halo to ordinary edibles. Even the wilder shores of avant-gardism that Gardner seems to make reference to are often Louvre-linked, inasmuch as it took the Louvre to give the “Mona Lisa” sufficient renown to make Duchamp’s drawing a mustache on her something more than just an insult. And the Master of the Morbid Manner, Jeff Koons, is in spirit very much self-consciously emulating the deliberately overblown pneumatic grandeur of the kind we find in Rubens’s Marie de Médicis series. The Louvre seems far from finished as a fishing ground of form.

Meanwhile, the best way to revisit the Louvre at night is to do what Henry James suggested: shut your eyes and see it in your dreams. Such pleasures are real, if hard-won, and prove that memory creates a more virtuous virtual reality than virtual reality can. Ain’t nothing like the real thing, baby. For all the museum’s vainglory and dubious universalist pretensions, an earth without the Louvre on it would be an infinitely poorer place—a truth that we feel as strongly when we can’t possibly be there as we did in the now distant-seeming days when we could. ♦

Museums and politics: the Louvre, Paris

The origin of the modern museum…is linked to the development of the guillotine. —Georges Bataille, October, 1986

This statement by the cultural critic Georges Bataille may seem extreme, but it is both literally true and symbolically revealing. The founding of the Louvre Museum in Paris is directly connected the French Revolution, whose supporters used the guillotine to execute their enemies. More broadly, museums are tightly intertwined with politics and the expression of power. The case of the Louvre reveals those connections across a span of over 200 years.

First, a fortress and palace

Before it was a museum, the Louvre was a palace and the seat of the French monarchy. It began as a fortress built soon after 1190, strategically located on the banks of the Seine River. The location offered a lookout and protection for the king, Philip Augustus. As the monarchy consolidated power in Paris, the Louvre was enlarged to accommodate a growing court. The massive structure we know today is the result of centuries of expansion. The name “Louvre” has not changed, though its origins—associated by some with loup (wolf)—have been lost.

Aerial view of the Louvre Museum (2010), photo: Matthias Kabel (CC BY-SA 3.0)

A dazzling frame for the royal collections

Although not intended as a museum, the Louvre has long been a container for art. Across the globe, monarchs use collecting and display to proclaim their wealth, power, and accomplishments, and the French were no different. Members of the court and esteemed guests might have the chance to see the king’s renowned collection of ancient statuary as well as his galleries of paintings, sculpture, decorative objects, and technological wonders. The greatest artists of the day decorated the interior of the palace, creating a dazzling frame for the royal collections. To observe the king surrounded by great art was to understand his might, not to mention his good taste and learning.

Louis Le Vau (architect), Gallery of Apollo ( Galerie d’Apollon ), Louvre, begun 1661 (photo: Steven Zucker,  CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Art and the state

In France, art production was often controlled by the state—that is, by the king and his cabinet— so the Louvre again played an important role. It was the seat of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture (established 1648), the agency that oversaw the training of artists, art criticism, art exhibitions and sales—and thus the very form of art itself. Members of the Academy met at the Louvre to debate what types of art were officially acceptable, and select members of the public were invited there to see state-sanctioned art. Although these gatherings, called “Salons,” are ancestors of today’s art exhibitions, their contents were carefully managed and visitation was limited to the elite. Thus, even as a display space the Louvre remained a fortress, overseen by the ruling class and largely inaccessible.

Heads of Kings from the façade of Notre Dame, Paris, today on display at the Cluny Museum, Paris (photo: Steven Zucker,  CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

The fortress breached

When revolution broke out in Paris in the 1789, the monarchy and clergy were the chief targets of popular anger. The most famous tool of the French Revolution, the guillotine, was used to chop off heads quickly, efficiently, and dramatically. A less bloody but similarly powerful tool was the control of art: famously, the heads of the biblical kings that ornamented the cathedral of Notre Dame, mistaken by many for French royals, were violently removed. In addition to these symbolic acts of destruction, the revolutionaries sought to control the display of art by looting collections and taking control of historic and sacred sites. Churches and palaces were nationalized and that famous former fortress—the Louvre—was remade as a public museum.

This transformation was highly visible and extremely significant. Once the home of the king and the house of his private treasures, the Louvre Museum was now open to all and those same treasures put on public view. The revolutionaries sought to underscore the symbolism of these changes. They inaugurated their museum on August 10, 1793, the first anniversary of the expulsion of Louis XVI, the last king, and placed an enormous plaque announcing their gesture over the door to the Gallery of Apollo, a royal reception hall originally dedicated to Louis XIV, the so-called Sun King (today it holds the crown jewels, sealed under glass). Any citizen with time and interest could visit and the message was powerful: the monarchy is dead, its fortress breached, and its material possessions are the property of the people.

Civilization, democracy, and education

This was not just a claim about wealth; it was also a statement about civilization, democracy, and education, a triumvirate we know as the Enlightenment . Visitors to the Louvre Museum were led through the development of art from ancient Egypt to Greece , Rome , and the Italian Renaissance . This chronology, laid out in the Louvre’s massive corridors, culminated in French academic painting, the manner promoted by the Royal Academy and its official Salons (exhibitions). A visitor who followed this path participated in what has been described as a “ritual of citizenship,” tracing a hierarchy in which France was represented as the rightful heir to these earlier traditions, the apex of aesthetic progress—and of civilization itself.

Heinrich Reinhold (after Benjamin Zix), The Marriage of the Emperor Napoleon I to the Archduchess Marie Louise of Austria in the Grand Gallery of the Louvre on April 1, 1810 , 1810-11, etching and engraving, hand-colored, 39.4 x 58.7 cm (Philadelphia Museum of Art)

Napoleon Bonaparte brought a similar attitude to his collecting activities and use of the Louvre Museum. A military leader who rose through the ranks to be crowned Emperor of France in 1804, Napoleon fully understood the potential of art as a sign of majesty and the place of the Louvre in that story. In addition to ornamenting its halls with his personal insignia and using it for his own glorification (including an elaborate wedding to his second wife, Marie Louise of Austria), he treated the Louvre as a trophy case, filling it with booty hauled back from his military campaigns. Statuary from the papal collections at the Vatican, an ancient quadriga of horses from the church of San Marco in Venice, and archaeological finds from expeditions to Egypt were literally paraded into Paris and put on pedestals in the Louvre Museum. Napoleon’s propaganda machine spread the news of his acquisitions, proclaiming France the “New Rome.” After his fall and exile in 1815 many, but not all, looted objects were returned to their previous owners.

What about the art of Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas?

A question that has challenged the Louvre Museum from an early date concerns the sort of art it should display. The traditional pillars of Western art (Egypt, Greece, Rome, Renaissance Italy) were long part of the collection and French art was an obvious inclusion. But other cultures were contested, most notably those not considered part of the Western canon such as art from the French colonies of the nineteenth century. African objects, for example, were rejected, ending up instead in places like the Trocadéro, an exhibition hall built for the World’s Fair of 1879. There, in an international context dedicated to industrial development, they were interpreted as “ primitive ” objects, in contrast with technological and aesthetic wonders attributed to Europe. Many ended up in the Musée de l’homme (Museum of Man), an ethnographic museum that treated them as instructive rather than inspirational.

By favoring some objects and excluding others, the Louvre Museum was doing much more than controlling what hung on its walls: it was deciding what was “art.” These judgments were in keeping with broader prejudices of the time, which considered cultural traditions outside Europe to be of lesser quality, value, and importance. And although these categorizations go back centuries, they continue to impact the museum world today, particularly as France and other Western nations wrestle with their colonial past.

Pavillon des Sessions, 2009 (photo: Jean-Pierre Dalbéra (CC BY 2.0)

In the 1980s, a serious push to include African art in the Louvre led to the opening of the Pavillon des Sessions (2000),  galleries in the Louvre devoted to the arts of Africa, Oceania, Asia, and the Americas. Though elegant and spacious, these galleries are so far off the museum’s beaten path that they are little visited and little known. In 2006, responding to critics who demanded political justice in the form of a museum dedicated to those neglected traditions, the French government opened the Musée du quai Branly on a prime piece of Parisian real estate near the Eiffel Tower. Despite its grandeur and centrality, many see the exile of certain cultures to the Musée du quai Branly as another form of marginalization, preserving colonial-era attitudes and prejudices.

View of the Cour Napoléon with the pyramid completed in 1989 by I. M. Pei, Musée du Louvre, Paris

Remaining questions

Today the Louvre is wildly popular, drawing millions of tourists every year and continuously trying to adjust to the onslaught of visitors. Architect I.M. Pei’s new entryway was a controversial first step, situating a gigantic glass pyramid at the center of a Renaissance courtyard to funnel in visitors more efficiently and give access to a modern, full-service atrium.

In 2017, hoards of visitors follow lightning tours (“Mona Lisa, Venus de Milo, Nike of Samothrace, and outta here”), wield selfie sticks (now banned) and fan out in the adjacent underground mall to eat, shop, and recharge phones. Some say the Louvre is being transformed from an art museum to a tourist attraction, from a place of education and quiet inspiration to an entertainment venue; others decry this attitude as a vestige of the elitism of the French monarchs.

The Salle Mollien, Louvre (with 19th century French academic painting) (photo: Steven Zucker,  CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

In fact, this debate over the root value of museums and their collections is playing out in museums all over the world. At its core are profound questions about power and authority. Those who control art—its form, placement, availability, and definition—control a significant part of the cultural narrative that defines who we are and our relationship with the past. Should this control rest primarily with curators and scholars, or should those professionals pay more attention to the voices of the crowd? Wherever you stand on this question, the case of the Louvre makes clear that the complex, uneasy relationship between art museums and politics is nearly as old as the palace itself.

Bibliography

Apollo Gallery at the Louvre (interactive)

History of the Louvre (from the Louvre Museum)

Carol Duncan, Carol, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (London and New York: Routledge, 1995).

Andrew McClellan, Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modern Museum  in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

Sally Price, Paris Primitive: Jacques Chirac’s Museum on the Quai Branly (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

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Monuments of Paris, French 8

Arc de triomphe, avenue des champs-elysees, the centre pompidou, conciergerie, eiffel tower, les invalides & musée de l'armée, musée d’orsay,, musée rodin, parc de la villette, place de la concorde, sacré-coeur, sainte-chapelle, images that are ok to use.

• Vocabulaire utile pour le projet du monument de Paris

• Arc de Triomphe It was exactly 180 years ago today that the Arc de Triomphe was inaugurated in Paris as a symbol of France’s military strength. Situated in the center of the Place Charles de Gaulle, at the western end of the Champs-Élysées, the Arc de Triomphe has become one of the most recognizable monuments in the world.

• CENTRE POMPIDOU Named after French president Georges Pompidou (1911–74), it was designed by then-unknowns Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers. The architects' claim to fame was putting the building's guts on the outside and color-coding them: water pipes are green, air ducts are blue, electrics are yellow, and things like elevators and escalators are red. Art from the 20th century to the present day is what you can find inside.
• Conciergerie La Conciergerie is a former royal palace and prison in Paris, France, located on the west of the Île de la Cité, near the Cathedral of Notre-Dame
• La Défense La Défense is the prime high-rise office district of Paris. Many of Paris's tallest buildings can be found here
• Eiffel Tower The Eiffel Tower is to Paris what the Statue of Liberty is to New York and what Big Ben is London: the ultimate civic emblem. French engineer Gustave Eiffel—already famous for building viaducts and bridges—spent two years working to erect this monument for the World Exhibition of 1889
• Eiffel Tower Eiffel Tower, French Tour Eiffel, Parisian landmark that is also a technological masterpiece in building-construction history.
• Les Invalides & Musée de l'Armée Topped by its gilded dome, the Hôtel des Invalides was (and in part still is) a hospital. Commissioned by Louis XIV for wounded soldiers, it once housed as many as 6,000 invalids.

• Map of the Louvre
• Gae Aulenti, Musée d’Orsay Architect, Dies at 84 Gae Aulenti, a provocative Italian architect and designer who most notably converted a Paris train station into the Musée d’Orsay, died on Wednesday at her home in Milan
• Works in focus: Paintings at the Musee d'Orsay Alphabetical by artist, this page lists paintings on display at the museum with links to find out more information on the work of art.
• MUSÉE RODIN Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) briefly made his home and studio in the Hôtel Biron, a grand 18th-century mansion that now houses a museum dedicated to his work.
• Parc de la Villette This former abattoir is now a 130-acre ultramodern park. With lawns and play areas, an excellent science museum, a music complex, and a cinema, it's also the perfect place to entertain sightseeing-weary kids. You could easily spend a whole day here
• Place de la Concorde The Place de la Concorde (French pronunciation: [plas də la kɔ̃kɔʁd], Harmony Square) is one of the major public squares in Paris, France. In fact, in terms of area, its 86,400 square metres make it the largest square in the French capital

• Sainte-Chapelle This was the royal chapel, this was a chapel attached to the Royal Palace for the use of the king and his household

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• Last Updated: Apr 25, 2023 9:59 AM
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The travels and travails of the Mona Lisa

Leonardo da Vinci, Mona Lisa, 1503-1506, Musée du Louvre. Image and original data provided by Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives/ART RESOURCE, N.Y.; artres.com

In 2012, 150,000 people signed a petition asking the Louvre to return Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa to its “home city” of Florence, Italy. Not surprisingly, the Louvre declined. The Mona Lisa has done its share of traveling in the past 500 years, and more often than not it has proven nerve racking.

Before we get to the travel stories, let’s look at Florence’s claim. Leonardo da Vinci did start painting the Mona Lisa in 1503 or 1504 in the Italian city, but in 1516 he was invited by King François I to work in France, and scholars believe he finished the painting there, and there it has remained. After Leonardo’s death, the king bought the Mona Lisa and exhibited it at the Palace of Fontainebleau, its home for more than 100 years, until Louis XIV took it to the Palace of Versailles.

John Vanderlyn, The Palace and Gardens of Versailles, 1818-19. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

After the French Revolution the Mona Lisa moved to its new home at the Louvre—after a slight detour: Napoleon borrowed the painting to decorate his bedroom in the Tuileries Palace for four years. In 1804, Mona Lisa finally was finally exhibited at the Louvre’s Grand Gallery. (Take a close look at the Samuel Morse painting below to see how the Mona Lisa looked installed in 1833.)

[CLICK FOR CLOSE-UP] Samuel Finley Breese Morse, Exhibition gallery of the Louvre, 1833. The Carnegie Arts of the United States Collection, data from University of Georgia Libraries.

Pierre Lescot, Palais du Louvre, Cour Carrée, façade, distant view, 1546-1578. Image and original data provided by Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives/ART RESOURCE, N.Y.; artres.com

Things were pretty calm for the next few decades until 1956, when not one but two people attacked the painting. A man threw acid at it during an exhibition at a museum in Montauban, France, and another lobbed a rock at it when it was back in the Louvre.

So it’s no surprise reaction was so strong six years later when First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy asked André Malraux, the French minister for cultural affairs, if the Mona Lisa could be exhibited in the United States.

As Aleksandr Gelfand writes in the Metropolitan Museum’s blog , a group of curators at the Louvre threatened to resign if the loan was approved, and the newspaper  Le Figaro  ran an editorial asking the American people to refuse the painting. But Malraux agreed to the First Lady’s request, and Mona Lisa headed to the National Gallery in Washington, DC.

Gelfand outlines the many security measures that were taken: the painting was shipped in a custom-made, temperature-controlled case within a fireproof and watertight container, and was kept under constant watch by security guards and museum officials. The ocean liner carrying the Mona Lisa was accompanied by the United States Coast Guard as it entered New York Harbor, where local, state, and federal security officials were waiting to greet it. The painting was transferred to an air-conditioned van and all traffic along the route to Washington was stopped; the procession drove through red traffic lights the entire way. Two marines were posted at its sides during its exhibition at the National Gallery, where the crowds were so great that, according to The New Yorker , viewers only got to see the Mona Lisa for four seconds each.

When the painting returned to New York to be exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum, it was kept in a safe in one of the museum’s Western European Arts storerooms, where it remained under continuous observation until its exhibition.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, exterior, during the exhibition, The Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci, February 7- March 4, 1963; view facing south showing crowds lined up on Fifth Avenue and on the front steps of the Museum. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

In a colorful memoir , former Metropolitan Museum Director Thomas Hoving, then a curator in the medieval department, claimed that while in storage, “one of the fire sprinklers in the ceiling broke its glass ampoule and the masterpiece… [was] rained upon.” But Hoving added that the thick glass covering over the painting protected it, and, “The rainstorm was never mentioned to the outside world”—except in his book, of course.

Be that as it may, the painting was exhibited behind bulletproof glass, flanked by two museum guards, and watched by detectives from behind. More than one million visitors saw the masterpiece. A week after the exhibition closed, the painting was safely back home in the Louvre.

The last time the Mona Lisa was on loan it travelled to the Tokyo National Museum and to Moscow’s Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, both in 1974. More than 1.5 million people saw the painting in Tokyo, to this day a record for a Japanese museum. The Japanese were the first to exhibit the painting protected by a triplex glass box. Good thing, too, because one of the many visitors tried to spray red paint on it.

While it’s true that staying at the Louvre doesn’t guarantee peace—in 2009 a woman threw a terracotta mug at the Mona Lisa that shattered against the glass enclosure—all things considered, there’s no place like home.

–   Giovanni Garcia-Fenech

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Museums & Institutions

Fondation cartier unveils plans for its new paris outpost.

The historic building near the Louvre has been renovated by French architect Jean Nouvel, who designed the foundation's current premises in 1994.

The Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain has revealed a first glimpse of its new location opposite the Louvre on Place du Palais-Royal in Paris, which will open to the public in 2025. The building’s interiors have been renovated by Jean Nouvel, the same architect who designed the foundation’s current premises on Boulevard Raspail in 1994.

Celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, the Fondation Cartier was established in the town of Jouy-en-Josas in 1984 before moving to Paris a decade later. In recent years, it has dedicated exhibitions to artists like Sarah Sze, Ron Mueck, Matthew Barney, Malick Sidibé, and Claudia Andujar . The foundation’s multi-decade history is being recounted in a new podcast series “Voir venir, Venir voir,” which launches today.

Compared to the strikingly modern building made of glass and steel that Fondation Cartier current inhabits, the new location is a classical Haussmannian building on Place du Palais-Royal. It originally opened as a five-star hotel in 1855 before becoming a department store in 1863. Since 1978, it has been known as the Louvre des Antiquaires and has housed hundreds of antique shops and galleries.

Rendering of interior by Jean Nouvel for Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris, opening in 2025. Image courtesy of Fondation Cartier.

On the facade’s first floor are bay windows that connect the street to an entirely reimagined interior that blends historic elements with modern innovations in a vast complex containing 91,493 square feet of public space, 69,965 square feet of exhibition space that can be further expanded using five mobile platforms to create custom layouts for different projects. The foundation’s original space is much smaller, at just 13,000 square feet.

“From its creation, the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain has based its activity around three major principles that still hold true today,” said its founding president Alain Dominique Perrin. “The first is the central position granted to artists and artistic production, including artists already known to the general public as well as emerging figures.”

The second is the focus on “transversality,” according to Perrin, meaning that the space is dedicated to all forms of creation, from painting to photography, architecture to film, design to fashion, and more. The third is the strict separation between the Fondation Cartier’s activities and the commercial development of Maison Cartier.

Chantier Palais Royal – Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain under construction in May.

Nouvel has worked on several major museums internationally, including the National Museum of Qatar in Doha, the Louvre Abu Dhabi , the 2005 expansion of the Reina Sofia in Madrid, and the Musée du quai Branly in Paris. The glass and steel building that he made for Fondation Cartier in 1994 is notable for its lack of partitioning interior walls, creating a dynamic, open-ended exhibition space that some artists directly responded to.

“Moving into such an impressive site, in terms of location and history, entails a form of invention,” he said in a press statement. “And what is invented is not automatically seen in the steel or stone.”

He hopes that the renovation will be a source of inspiration for artists who exhibit at the Fondation Cartier. “The space is marked by a different way of doing: a way of conceiving how artists can have maximum power of expression,” he said. “A site such as this one calls for boldness, courage that artists might not necessarily demonstrate in other institutional spaces.”

Jo Lawson-Tancred

European news reporter, the best of artnet news in your inbox., more trending stories.

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Museum rules - To ensure the safety of all visitors and artworks

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Museum rules To ensure the safety of all visitors and artworks Visit | Museum rules

We’re here to help.

During your visit, museum staff  are available to answer any questions you may have.

To ensure the safety of all visitors, the Louvre applies the preventative measures decided on by the French government for all public services. All visitors must undergo the security checks at the museum entrances. 

Suitcases and large bags are not allowed in the museum.

Maximum size of bag allowed

You cannot bring large bags or suitcases to the museum but lockers are available free of charge for smaller items. All umbrellas that do not fit into a bag must be left in self-service umbrella stands in the cloakroom.

Please note: Any items exceeding 55 x 35 x 20 cm will not be allowed in the museum (welcome area and exhibition rooms).

All items left in the lockers must be collected the same day. The museum shall not be held responsible for any items of value placed in the lockers. Please contact us for further information.

Photography

You can take photos and videos in the permanent collections if they are for personal use. However, you are not allowed to use selfie sticks, flash or lighting.

In the temporary exhibition galleries, it may be prohibited to take photos or videos of certain works.

Loan of equipment

Equipment on loan must not leave the premises.

Leaving the museum

In order to help us manage the number of visitors and queues, any exit is final.

Respect the artworks

To ensure the safety of the artworks and other visitors, in the exhibition rooms you are not allowed to:

• Make a lot of noise;
• Touch the artworks;

Prohibited items

• all categories of weapons and ammunition
• tools, in particular craft knives, screwdrivers, wrenches, hammers, pliers and clippers
• all blunt objects (self-defence batons, baseball bats)
• any excessively heavy, cumbersome, or foul-smelling item
• any explosive, flammable or volatile substance
• aerosol generators (dyes, paints and lacquers) containing substances likely to damage artworks, buildings and/or security equipment
• any item generating incapacitating or neutralising products, or electrical weapon used to neutralise individuals
• any artwork or antique
• excessive quantities of food or drink as determined by inspecting officers at the entrance to the reception areas
• all animals, with the exception of guide dogs or assistance dogs accompanying persons with motor or mental impairment

Right to speak publicly

Only those who have been authorised to do so are allowed to speak publicly in the exhibition rooms. This includes curators, teachers to their class, and professional tour guides with a permit from the French Ministry of Culture or Minister of Tourism.

See the visitor regulations

Visitor regulations 2019.

Download .pdf (343,1Ko)

Respect the gardens

To prevent damage to the ground, plants and sculptures, and for hygiene and safety reasons, you are not allowed to: 

• use mono- or bicycles in the gardens;
• walk or sit on the lawns;
• pick the plants;
• touch or climb the sculptures;
• walk your pet (pets are only allowed in the cafe terraces);
• feed the birds;
• remove the chairs from the premises.

Lire le règlement des jardins

Règlement des cours, jardins, passages et péristyles du domaine national du louvre et des tuileries du 9 juillet 2024.

Download .pdf (343,5Ko)