Louvre

1. What is the Louvre, and why does it matter?

The Louvre is the largest art museum in the world and the most visited, receiving around nine million people a year. Its permanent collection contains approximately 500,000 objects, of which some 35,000 are displayed across eight departments spanning more than 60,000 square metres of gallery space. It holds three of the most recognised works of art on earth: the Mona Lisa, the Venus de Milo, and the Winged Victory of Samothrace. But the Louvre is more than a museum. It is a building that has accumulated eight centuries of French history within its walls, moving through roles as a medieval fortress, a royal palace, an imperial trophy house, and finally a public institution. The decision to open it as a museum in 1793 — turning a private royal collection into common property — became a model for cultural institutions across the world, establishing the principle that a great collection belongs to the people rather than to the crown.

2. How did the Louvre begin, and what was its original purpose?

The history of the Louvre begins in 1190, when King Philip II — Philip Augustus — ordered the construction of a fortress at the western edge of Paris as part of a new defensive wall he was building around the city before departing on crusade. The original structure was roughly square in plan, surrounded by a moat fed from the Seine, and anchored by a massive central keep known as the Grosse Tour. Its purpose was purely military: to anchor the new city wall and to protect Paris from English attack from the west. It was not a residence and was not intended to be beautiful. The remains of this medieval fortress — the foundations of the keep and the moat — are still visible today in the basement of the Sully Wing, a reminder that beneath the gilded halls of one of the world’s great museums lies a twelfth-century defensive structure built for war.

3. How did the Louvre become a royal palace?

The transformation from fortress to palace happened in stages across two centuries. In the fourteenth century, King Charles V began the first significant conversion, commissioning the architect Raymond du Temple to add turrets, decorated windows, spiral staircases, and living quarters, and installing within the building his famous library of nearly a thousand manuscripts. The Louvre under Charles V was genuinely palatial, but it fell out of royal favour in the following century as other residences were preferred. The decisive transformation came in the sixteenth century under Francis I, who in 1528 ordered the great medieval keep demolished and commissioned the architect Pierre Lescot to replace the old fortress with a Renaissance palace built around a grand courtyard. Lescot’s wing, still standing today, introduced to France the vocabulary of classical antiquity and Italian Renaissance architecture. Francis I was also the king who brought the Mona Lisa to France, acquiring it from Leonardo da Vinci, and the royal art collection he began assembling at the Louvre laid the foundation for the museum that would eventually open to the public more than two centuries later.

4. How did the Louvre evolve from Francis I to Louis XIV?

Each successive French monarch added to the Louvre, and the building grew in stages from Lescot’s original wing into the vast U-shaped complex that frames the Cour Carrée today. Henry II continued Lescot’s work. Henry IV added the Grand Gallery along the Seine, a structure almost half a kilometre long connecting the Louvre to the Tuileries Palace that lay to the west. Louis XIII continued the expansion of the Cour Carrée. Under Louis XIV the complex underwent its most dramatic seventeenth-century enlargement, with the construction of the great east colonnade designed by Claude Perrault, one of the finest examples of French classical architecture. Then, in 1682, Louis XIV moved the royal court permanently to Versailles, and the Louvre ceased to be the principal royal residence. It was used to display certain works from the royal collection and to house various academies, but it drifted without a clear central purpose for the following century, vast, underused, and increasingly discussed by Enlightenment thinkers as a natural home for a public museum of art.

5. How did the French Revolution turn the Louvre into a public museum?

The political upheaval of the Revolution transformed the Louvre overnight from a symbol of royal power into a symbol of civic ownership. When the monarchy fell, the royal collections — assembled over two centuries by the kings of France — became national property. The National Assembly decreed that a public museum should be established in the Louvre, and on 10 August 1793, exactly one year after Louis XVI had been removed from the throne, the Muséum central des Arts opened its doors with an initial display of 537 paintings drawn from the royal collection and from works confiscated from the church and émigré nobility. Entry was free. The choice of date was deliberate: the museum opened on the anniversary of the monarchy’s overthrow, declaring in the clearest possible terms that art which had belonged to kings now belonged to the people. It was a revolutionary act as significant in its way as the storming of the Bastille.

6. What did Napoleon do to the Louvre, and what happened to the collection he assembled?

Napoleon understood the Louvre’s potential as an instrument of imperial prestige and used it systematically. As his armies swept across Europe, Italy, Egypt, and Syria, he ordered the seizure of works of art from the collections of defeated rulers, churches, and institutions. These were transported to Paris and installed in the Louvre, which was renamed the Musée Napoléon in 1803 and became briefly the richest museum in the world, its galleries packed with masterpieces taken from Rome, Venice, the Vatican, and beyond. The director Napoleon appointed, Vivant Denon, personally organised much of this systematic looting across Italy and Germany. When Napoleon abdicated in 1815, the victorious powers demanded restitution: approximately 5,000 works were returned to their countries of origin. Some pieces were judged too large or fragile to move and remained in Paris. The Egyptian collection Napoleon’s campaigns had generated stayed in the Louvre, and it remains there today as one of the great collections of ancient Egyptian art outside Egypt itself.

7. Who were the three great masterpieces of the Louvre, and how did they arrive?

The three works that draw the largest crowds to the Louvre arrived by very different routes. The Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait of Lisa Gherardini painted in oil on poplar panel between approximately 1503 and 1519, came to France because Leonardo himself came to France: Francis I invited the ageing artist to his court, and the painting entered the French royal collection around 1518. The Venus de Milo, an ancient Greek marble statue of Aphrodite carved around 150 to 100 BC, was discovered on the Aegean island of Milos in 1820 and acquired by the French ambassador, who presented it to Louis XVIII, who donated it to the Louvre the same year. The Winged Victory of Samothrace, a second-century BC marble figure of the goddess Nike set on the prow of a stone ship, was discovered by a French diplomat on the island of Samothrace in 1863 and brought to Paris, where it has stood at the head of the Daru staircase ever since, arguably the most dramatically displayed object in any museum on earth.

8. How did the theft of the Mona Lisa make it the most famous painting in the world?

Before 1911, the Mona Lisa was an admired work in the Louvre’s collection, recognised by art historians and serious visitors but by no means the cultural phenomenon it has since become. On 21 August 1911, an Italian handyman named Vincenzo Peruggia, who had previously worked at the Louvre helping to fit protective cases to paintings, concealed himself in the building overnight, lifted the Mona Lisa from the wall the following morning, tucked it under his coat, and walked out. The theft caused a sensation. The borders of France were sealed, the Louvre closed for a week, and the empty space on the wall where the painting had hung drew more visitors than the picture itself had ever attracted. The global press coverage made the Mona Lisa a household name across the world for the first time. It was recovered in Florence in December 1913 when Peruggia tried to sell it to a dealer, and when it was returned to the Louvre enormous crowds came to see it. The theft had made it, irreversibly, the most famous painting on earth.

9. How did I.M. Pei’s pyramid transform the Louvre in the twentieth century?

By the 1980s, the Louvre faced a practical crisis. Visitor numbers had grown to a scale the building could not comfortably absorb: the three wings opened onto separate courtyards with no shared entrance, queues were unmanageable, and the logistics of moving millions of people through a medieval complex defeated every conventional solution. President François Mitterrand commissioned the Chinese-American architect Ieoh Ming Pei to redesign the museum’s entrance as part of a wider programme of grands travaux reshaping Paris. Pei’s solution was radical: a glass and steel pyramid rising 21.6 metres from the centre of the Cour Napoléon, built from 673 glass panes, beneath which a spacious underground lobby connected all three wings. The pyramid opened in 1989 and was immediately controversial, denounced by critics as an act of architectural vandalism against one of France’s great historical buildings. It is now regarded as one of the most successful works of twentieth-century architecture: a structure that creates a genuine dialogue between the ancient and the modern without apologising for either.

10. What is the Louvre today, and what is its legacy?

The Louvre today is both a museum of extraordinary depth and a building that carries more accumulated history than almost any other structure in Europe. Its collection spans eight thousand years of human civilisation, from the prehistoric to the mid-nineteenth century, organised across eight departments. The Richelieu Wing, which had been occupied by the French Ministry of Finance until 1989, was finally converted to gallery space and opened to the public in 1993, completing the museum as it exists today. Around nine million people visit each year, making the Louvre the most visited museum in the world, though the pressure of those numbers means that many visitors experience little beyond the crowd around the Mona Lisa. Its deeper legacy is the idea it helped establish in 1793: that a nation’s art belongs to its citizens, that the collections of kings are the inheritance of the people, and that a great museum is not a private pleasure but a public institution with obligations to the present and the future. Every major public museum in the world descends, in some sense, from that decision made in Paris in the year of the Revolution.