the Louvre

[Danielle Gorree]

Musée du Louvre
 
Established 1793
Location Palais Royal, Musée du Louvre,
75001 Paris, France
Visitor figures 8,300,000 (2006)[1]
Director Henri Loyrette
Curator Marie-Laure de Rochebrune
Website www.louvre.fr

[Danielle Gorree]

The Louvre Museum (French: Musée du Louvre) in Paris, France, is the most visited and one of the oldest, largest, and most famous art galleries and museums in the world.

The Louvre has a long history of artistic and historic conservation,[citation needed] inaugurated in the Capetian dynasty and continuind to this day. The building was previously a royal palace and holds some of the world's most famous works of art, such as Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, The Virgin and Child with St. Anne, Madonna of the Rocks, Jacques Louis David's Oath of the Horatii, Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People and Alexandros of Antioch's Venus de Milo. Located in the centre of the city of Paris, between the Rive Droite of the Seine and the rue de Rivoli in the Ier arrondissement, it is accessed by the Palais Royal — Musée du Louvre Metro station. The equestrian statue of Louis XIV constitutes the starting point of the "axe historique", but the palace is not aligned on this axis.

With 8.3 million visitors in 2006, the Louvre is the most visited art museum in the world.

[Danielle Gorree]

View of Musée du Louvre from Jardin des Tuileries

[Danielle Gorree]

Musée du Louvre, Pavillon Richelieu

[Danielle Gorree]

Palais du Louvre



The cour d'honneur looking west

[Danielle Gorree]

The palais du Louvre in Paris, on the Right Bank of the Seine is a former royal palace, situated between the Tuileries Gardens and the church of Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois. Its origins date back almost a thousand years and its present structure has evolved in stages since the sixteenth century.

The Louvre, which gets its name from a Frankish word leovar or leower, signifying a fortified place, according to the French historian Henri Sauval (1623-1676), was the actual seat of power in France until Louis XIV moved to Versailles in 1682, bringing the government perforce with him; the Louvre remained the formal seat of government to the end of the Ancien Régime.

Model of the first royal "Castle of the Louvre"

[Danielle Gorree]

Medieval Louvre

The first royal "Castle of the Louvre"—it was first mentioned under this name in a charter of 1198—was founded on the edge of medieval Paris by King Philip Augustus as a fortified royal palace to defend the western flank of the city on the Rive Droite (right bank). The structure consisted of a rectangular enclosure wall with towers at the corners and the middle of the sides, as well as two strong gates. In the centre of the courtyard of the castle was a tall keep, isolated by its own moat. Charles V remodelled the structure to provide some suitably splendid apartments. Later kings such as François I and Henri II systematically demolished the original castle to build a Renaissance palace. The remains of both the curtains and the keep can be seen in the Medieval Louvre gallery.

The earliest above ground part of the Palais du Louvre was begun in 1535. The architect Pierre Lescot introduced to Paris the new design vocabulary of the Renaissance, which had been developed in the châteaux of the Loire Valley. His new wing for the old castle defined its status, as the first among the royal palaces. Jacques Androuet du Cerceau also worked on the Louvre.

During his reign (1589-1610), Henri IV added the Grande Galerie. More than a quarter of a mile long and one hundred feet wide, this huge addition was built along the bank of the Seine; at the time of its completion it was the longest edifice of its kind in the world. Henri IV, a promoter of the arts, invited hundreds of artists and craftsmen to live and work on the building's lower floors. This tradition continued for another 200 yeLouis XIII (1610-1643) completed the wing now called the Denon Wing, which had been started by Catherine de' Medici in 1560. Today it has been renovated, as a part of the Grand Louvre Renovation Programme.

The Richelieu Wing was also built by Louis XIII, the building first being opened to the public as a museum on November 8, 1793 during the French Revolution.

Napoleon I built the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel in 1805 to commemorate his victories and the Jardin du Carrousel. In those times this garden was the entrance to the Palais des Tuileries.

The Louvre was still being added to by Napoleon III. The new wing of 1852–1857, by architects Visconti and Hector Lefuel, represents the Second Empire's version of Neo-baroque, full of detail and laden with sculpture. Work continued until 1876.

[Danielle Gorree]

Remains of the medieval foundations can still be seen underneath the museum.

[Danielle Gorree]

The Richelieu Wing of the Louvre at night

[Danielle Gorree]

Panoramic view of the Louvre in 1908





Panoramic view of the Louvre in 2006

[Danielle Gorree]

The large glass pyramid of le musée du Louvre

[Danielle Gorree]

View of the outside from inside the Louvre Pyramid

[Danielle Gorree]

The Louvre Pyramid is a large metal and glass pyramid which serves as the main entrance to the Musée du Louvre and has become a landmark for the city of Paris.

Commissioned by the French president François Mitterrand, it was built in 1989 by the architect I. M. Pei from New York, who was responsible for the design of the Miho Museum in Japan among others. The structure, which was constructed entirely with glass segments, reaches a height of 20.6 meters (about 70 feet); its square base has sides of 35 meters (115 feet). It consists of 603 rhombus-shaped and 70 triangular glass segments.

The pyramid and the underground lobby underneath it were created because of a series of problems with the Louvre's original main entrance, which could no longer handle an enormous number of visitors on an everyday basis. Visitors entering through the pyramid descend into the spacious lobby then re-ascend into the main Louvre buildings. Several other museums have duplicated this concept, most notably the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.

It is not well known that a baroque pyramid was proposed for the centennial celebrations of the 1789 French Revolution. It is possible that the architect, I.M. Pei, was aware of these designs when he chose a pyramid form, for the bicentennial celebrations of 1989.

[Danielle Gorree]

The construction of the pyramid triggered considerable controversy because many people feel that this futuristic edifice looks quite out of place in front of the Louvre Museum with its classical architecture. Certain detractors ascribed a "Pharaonic complex" to Mitterrand. Others came to appreciate the juxtaposing of contrasting architectural styles as a successful merger of the old and the new, the classical and the ultra-modern.

The main pyramid is actually only the largest of several glass pyramids that were constructed near the museum, including the downward-pointing La Pyramide Inversée that functions as a skylight in an underground mall in front of the museum.

During the design phase, there was a proposal that the design include a spire on the pyramid to simplify window washing. This proposal was eliminated because of objections from I. M. Pei.

[Danielle Gorree]

666 panes: an urban legend

It has been claimed by some that the glass panes in the Louvre Pyramid number exactly 666, "the number of the beast", often associated with Satan. Various conspiracy theorists have ascribed some deeper, sinister meaning to this supposed fact. For instance, Dominique Stezepfandt's book François Mitterrand, Grand Architecte de l'Univers declares that "the pyramid is dedicated to a power described as the Beast in the Book of Revelation (...) The entire structure is based on the number 6."

The story of the "666 panes" originated in the 1980s, when the official brochure published during construction did indeed cite this number (even twice, though a few pages earlier the total number of panes was given as 672 instead). The number 666 was also mentioned in various newspapers. The Louvre museum however states that the finished pyramid contains 673 glass panes (603 rhombi and 70 triangles). A higher figure was obtained by David A. Shugarts, who reports that the pyramid contains 689 pieces of glass (Secrets of the Code, edited by Dan Burstein, p. 259). Various attempts to actually count the panes in the pyramid have produced slightly discrepant results, but there are definitely more than 666.

The myth resurfaced in 2003, when Dan Brown incorporated it in his best-selling novel The Da Vinci Code. Here the protagonist reflects that "this pyramid, at President Mitterrand's explicit demand, had been constructed of exactly 666 panes of glass - a bizarre request that had always been a hot topic among conspiracy buffs who claimed 666 was the number of Satan" (p. 21). However, David A. Shugarts reports that according to a spokeswoman of the offices of I.M. Pei, the French President never specified the number of panes to be used in the pyramid. Noting how the 666 rumor circulated in some French newspapers in the mid-1980s, she commented: "If you only found those old articles and didn't do any deeper fact checking, and were extremely credulous, you might believe the 666 story" (Secrets of the Code, p. 259).