#The central courtyard
of the Louvre was only cleared of townhouses in the mid 19th century
the glass pyramids came later, in 1989
THE LARGEST PAINTING
on display at the Louvre is The Wedding
Feast at Cana, painted by Paolo Veronese in 1563. It covers a whole wall of the
Salle des Etats, and in any other room it would be the focus of attention. On
the wall immediately facing it however is a modest sized portrait in smoky
colours of a woman smiling enigmatically. Thanks to the Mona Lisa, known in
France as La Joconde, the figures in Veronese’s masterpiece spend most of their
time looking out onto a throng of people with their backs turned.
The world’s most visited museum has plenty of similar
treasures hiding in plain sight, beginning wit hthe earliest work on display –
a 9,000-year old human figure in ghostly white plaster from Ain Ghazal in
Jordan. Tutankhamun of Egypt lived closer in time to us than to the people who
made this statue-a whisper from a nameless past. Now on loan to the Louvre, its
present home (Room D, Near Eastern Anitquities) is generally a place of
serenity.
‘We almost don’t want to say which rooms are less visited
than they should be – we would like to keep them quiet!’ says Daniel Soulie,
who has written several books on the Louvre.
‘The whole Richelieu wing and the second floor, the galleries of French
sculpture and objects d’art, the paintings of the Northern European schools –
these are fabulous collections which don’t get so many visitors.’
The Louvre gets its
particular character because it evolved into a museum rather than being
designed as one. It began around 1200 as fortress built to protect the western
walls of Paris, its chilly foundations still visible in the basement of the
museum. Soon enveloped by an expanding city, the fortress lost its defensive
function, and in its place came a royal palace. Several changes later, this is
the building that’s stands on the eastern side of the great glass pyramid.
IM Pei’s bold, geometric addition to the Louvre attracted some criticism when it was
built in 1989 to give the museum the single, grand entrance it had never had.
But it is only the latest stage in eight centuries of reinvention, in which the
opening of a public museum in 1793 was just one milestone. To the west of where
the pyramid is today was another royal palace, the Tuileries, and it was a
long-term ambition of the later French kings to link up both residences with
two parallel wings, creating a great central courtyard. In the end, it was an
emperor, Napoleon III, nephew of the more famous Napoleon, who completed the
project in the 1850s. in 1871, he was overthrown and the Tuileries burnt down.
The grand central courtyard remains open its western side.
‘What Napoleon III had in mind when he built most of the
buildings that you see around the pyramid was to gather together at the Louvre
and the Tuileries all the major organs of the state-imperial residence,
government ministries, a library and a museum,’ says Daniel. Before it was home
to the Mona Lisa, the Salle des Etats was the venue for state openings of
parliament.
Older royal reminders are also threaded through the museum.
In room 26 of the Egyptian galleries, a headless statue of the Egyptian
galleries, a headless statue of the boy-king tutankhamun is watched over by
portraits of Louis XIII and his queen, Anne of Austria-their
great-great-great-grandson Louis XVI and his own queen would come to a similar
end in real life. And in the Grande Galerie, built between 1595 and 1610 to
link the old Louvre to the Tuileries, French kings carried on the practice of
‘healing’ suffers of the skin condition scrofula with a royal touch of the
hand, as proof of their divinely ordained powers. Yet despite the parade of
kings and emperors who have passed through its corridors, the Louvre has never looked as splendid as it does
now.
The museum offers a variety of themed,
self-guided trails, including palace history, horse-riding. The Da Vinci Code
and artworks depicting love through the
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