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![<p><a href="https://www.flickr.com/people/133876835@N08/">Michael.Kemper</a> posted a photo:</p>
<p><a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/133876835@N08/55382714141/" title="Paris / Palais-Royal - Louvre"><img src="https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/55382714141_5fe8ec84a9_m.jpg" width="240" height="160" alt="Paris / Palais-Royal - Louvre" /></a></p>
<p>Escalier Mollien<br />
<br />
The Louvre, or the Louvre Museum (French: Musée du Louvre [myze dy luvʁ]), is a national art museum in Paris, France.<br />
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The Louvre, a former royal palace, is known for its collection of celebrated paintings collected by the French kings, including the Mona Lisa of Leonardo Da Vinci. The museum received 9 million visitors in FY-2025 and is regularly ranked as the most visited art museum not only in France, but in the world. Twenty-seven percent of the visitors in 2012 were French, while 73 percent were from other countries.<br />
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It is located on the Right Bank of the Seine in the city's 1st arrondissement (district) and home to some of the most canonical works of Western art, including the Mona Lisa, Venus de Milo, and Winged Victory. The museum is housed in the Louvre Palace, originally built in the late 12th to 13th century under Philip II. Remnants of the Medieval Louvre fortress are visible in the basement of the museum. Due to urban expansion, the fortress eventually lost its defensive function, and in 1546 Francis I converted it into the primary residence of the French kings.<br />
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The building was redesigned and extended many times to form the present Louvre Palace. In 1682, Louis XIV chose the Palace of Versailles for his household, leaving the Louvre primarily as a place to display the royal collection, including, from 1692, a collection of ancient Greek and Roman sculptures. In 1692, the building was occupied by the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres and the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, which in 1699 held the first of a series of salons. The Académie remained at the Louvre for 100 years. During the French Revolution, the National Assembly decreed that the Louvre should be used as a museum to display the nation's masterpieces. The palace and exhibition space was expanded in the 19th century and again in the 20th.<br />
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The museum opened on 10 August 1793 with an exhibition of 537 paintings, the majority of the works being royal and confiscated church property. Because of structural problems with the building, the museum was closed from 1796 until 1801. The collection was increased under Napoleon, after the Napoleonic looting of art in Europe, Egypt, and Syria, and the museum was renamed Musée Napoléon, but after Napoleon's abdication, many works seized by his armies were returned to their original owners. The collection was further increased during the reigns of Louis XVIII and Charles X, and during the Second French Empire the museum gained 20,000 pieces. Holdings have grown steadily through donations and bequests since the Third Republic. The collection is divided into eight departments: Egyptian Antiquities; Near Eastern Antiquities; Greek, Etruscan, and Roman Antiquities; Islamic Art; Sculpture; Decorative Arts; Paintings; Prints and Drawings.<br />
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The Musée du Louvre contains approximately 500,000 objects[ and displays 35,000 works of art in eight curatorial departments with more than 60,600 m2 (652,000 sq ft) dedicated to the permanent collection. The Louvre exhibits sculptures, objets d'art, paintings, drawings, and archaeological finds. At any given point in time, approximately 38,000 objects from prehistory to the 21st century are being exhibited over an area of 72,735 m2 (782,910 sq ft), making it the largest museum in the world. It received 9.0 million visitors in 2025. It is ranked as the most-visited art museum, and most-visited museum of any category.<br />
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Location and visiting<br />
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The Louvre Museum is located inside the Louvre Palace, in the centre of Paris, adjacent to the Tuileries Gardens. The two nearest Métro stations are Louvre–Rivoli and Palais Royal–Musée du Louvre, the latter having a direct underground access to the Carrousel du Louvre commercial mall.<br />
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Before the Grand Louvre overhaul of the late 1980s and 1990s, the Louvre had several street-level entrances, most of which are now permanently closed. Since 1993, the museum's main entrance has been the underground space under the Louvre Pyramid, or Hall Napoléon, which can be accessed from the Pyramid itself, from the underground Carrousel du Louvre, or (for authorised visitors) from the passage Richelieu connecting to the nearby rue de Rivoli. A secondary entrance at the Porte des Lions, near the western end of the Denon Wing, was created in 1999 but is not permanently open.<br />
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The museum's entrance conditions have varied over time. Prior to the 1850s, artists and foreign visitors had privileged access. At the time of initial opening in 1793, the French Republican calendar had imposed ten-day "weeks" (French: décades), the first six days of which were reserved for visits by artists and foreigners and the last three for visits by the general public. In the early 1800s, after the seven-day week had been reinstated, the general public had only four hours of museum access per week, between 2pm and 4pm on Saturdays and Sundays. In 1824, a new regulation allowed public access only on Sundays and holidays; the other days the museum was open only to artists and foreigners, except for closure on Mondays. That changed in 1855 when the museum became open to the public all days except Mondays. It was free until 1922, when an entrance fee was introduced except on Sundays. Since its post-World War II reopening in 1946, the Louvre has been closed on Tuesdays, and habitually open to the public the rest of the week except for some holidays.<br />
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The use of cameras and video recorders is permitted inside, but flash photography is forbidden.<br />
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Beginning in 2012, Nintendo 3DS portable video game systems were used as the official museum audio guides. The following year, the museum contracted Nintendo to create a 3DS-based audiovisual visitor guide. Entitled Nintendo 3DS Guide: Louvre, it contains over 30 hours of audio and over 1,000 photographs of artwork and the museum itself, including 3D views, and also provides navigation thanks to differential GPS transmitters installed within the museum.<br />
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The upgraded 2013 Louvre guide was also announced in a special Nintendo Direct featuring Satoru Iwata and Shigeru Miyamoto demonstrating it at the museum, and 3DS XLs pre-loaded with the guide are available to rent at the museum. The 3DS Louvre guide was scheduled to be retired in September 2025 and will be replaced by a different guide system.<br />
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History<br />
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Before the museum<br />
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The Louvre Palace, which houses the museum, was begun by King Philip II in the late 12th century to protect the city from the attack from the west, as the Kingdom of England still held Normandy at the time. Remnants of the Medieval Louvre are still visible in the crypt. Whether this was the first building on that spot is not known, and it is possible that Philip modified an existing tower.<br />
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The origins of the name "Louvre" are somewhat disputed. According to the authoritative Grand Larousse encyclopédique, the name derives from an association with a wolf hunting den (via Latin: lupus, lower Empire: lupara). In the 7th century, Burgundofara (also known as Saint Fare), abbess in Meaux, is said to have given part of her "Villa called Luvra situated in the region of Paris" to a monastery, even though it is doubtful that this land corresponded exactly to the present site of the Louvre. However, linguistically it would be sounder to derive the word from the French verb louer (to let, rent), with the Old French noun-building suffix -re appended (like in oeuvre, genre, ogre, bougre etc.), signifying something which is let or rented. According to DuCange's medieval Latin glossary, louvagium in medieval France was a kind of fee or rent paid for the use of something.<br />
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The Louvre Palace has been subject to numerous renovations since its construction. In the 14th century, Charles V converted the building from its military role into a residence. In 1546, Francis I started its rebuilding in French Renaissance style. After Louis XIV chose Versailles as his residence in 1682, construction works slowed to a halt. The royal move away from Paris resulted in the Louvre being used as a residence for artists, under Royal patronage. For example, four generations of craftsmen-artists from the Boulle family were granted Royal patronage and resided in the Louvre.<br />
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Meanwhile, the collections of the Louvre originated in the acquisitions of paintings and other artworks by the monarchs of the House of France. At the Palace of Fontainebleau, Francis collected art that would later be part of the Louvre's art collections, including Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa.<br />
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The Cabinet du Roi consisted of seven rooms west of the Galerie d'Apollon on the upper floor of the remodelled Petite Galerie. Many of the king's paintings were placed in these rooms in 1673, when it became an art gallery, accessible to certain art lovers as a kind of museum. In 1681, after the court moved to Versailles, 26 of the paintings were transferred there, somewhat diminishing the collection, but it is mentioned in Paris guide books from 1684 on, and was shown to ambassadors from Siam in 1686.<br />
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By the mid-18th century there were proposals to create a public gallery in the Louvre. Art critic Étienne La Font de Saint-Yenne in 1747 published a call for a display of the royal collection. On 14 October 1750, Louis XV decided on a display of 96 pieces from the royal collection, mounted in the Galerie royale de peinture of the Luxembourg Palace. A hall was opened by Le Normant de Tournehem and the Marquis de Marigny for public viewing of the "king's paintings" (Tableaux du Roy) on Wednesdays and Saturdays. The Luxembourg gallery included Andrea del Sarto's Charity and works by Raphael; Titian; Veronese; Rembrandt; Poussin or Van Dyck. It closed in 1780 as a result of the royal gift of the Luxembourg palace to the Count of Provence (the future king, Louis XVIII) by the king in 1778. Under Louis XVI, the idea of a royal museum in the Louvre came closer to fruition. The comte d'Angiviller broadened the collection and in 1776 proposed to convert the Grande Galerie of the Louvre – which at that time contained the plans-reliefs or 3D models of key fortified sites in and around France – into the "French Museum". Many design proposals were offered for the Louvre's renovation into a museum, without a final decision being made on them. Hence the museum remained incomplete until the French Revolution.<br />
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Revolutionary opening<br />
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The Louvre finally became a public museum during the French Revolution. In May 1791, the National Constituent Assembly declared that the Louvre would be "a place for bringing together monuments of all the sciences and arts". On 10 August 1792, Louis XVI was imprisoned and the royal collection in the Louvre became national property. Because of fear of vandalism or theft, on 19 August, the National Assembly pronounced the museum's preparation urgent. In October, a committee to "preserve the national memory" began assembling the collection for display.<br />
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The museum opened on 10 August 1793, the first anniversary of the monarchy's demise, as Muséum central des Arts de la République. The public was given free access on three days per week, which was "perceived as a major accomplishment and was generally appreciated". The collection showcased 537 paintings and 184 objects of art. Three-quarters were derived from the royal collections, the remainder from confiscated émigrés and Church property (biens nationaux). To expand and organise the collection, the Republic dedicated 100,000 livres per year. In 1794, France's revolutionary armies began bringing pieces from Northern Europe, augmented after the Treaty of Tolentino (1797) by works from the Vatican, such as the Laocoön and Apollo Belvedere, to establish the Louvre as a museum and as a "sign of popular sovereignty".<br />
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Bertrand Clauzel then chief of staff to Emmanuel de Grouchy, serving in the Army of Italy, negotiated the abdication of the King of Sardinia in December 1798 from his mainland territories. To secure the agreement Clauzel returned with the Woman with Dropsy, a painting by the Dutch master Gerard Dou. Clauzel would donate it to the Louvre, making it the first donation in the museum's history.<br />
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The early days were hectic. Privileged artists continued to live in residence, and the unlabelled paintings hung "frame to frame from floor to ceiling". The museum closed in May 1796 due to structural deficiencies. It reopened on 14 July 1801, arranged chronologically and with new lighting and columns. On 15 August 1797, the Galerie d'Apollon was opened with an exhibition of drawings. Meanwhile, the Louvre's Gallery of Antiquity sculpture (musée des Antiques), with artefacts brought from Florence and the Vatican, had opened in November 1800 in Anne of Austria's former summer apartment, located on the ground floor just below the Galerie d'Apollon.<br />
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Napoleonic era<br />
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On 19 November 1802, Napoleon appointed Vivant Denon, a scholar and polymath who had participated in the Egyptian campaign of 1798–1801, as the museum's first director, in preference to alternative contenders such as antiquarian Ennio Quirino Visconti, painter Jacques-Louis David, sculptor Antonio Canova and architects Léon Dufourny or Pierre Fontaine. On Denon's suggestion in July 1803, the museum itself was renamed Musée Napoléon.[<br />
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The collection grew through successful military campaigns. Acquisitions were made of Spanish, Austrian, Dutch, and Italian works, either as the result of war looting or formalised by treaties such as the Treaty of Tolentino. At the end of Napoleon's First Italian Campaign in 1797, the Treaty of Campo Formio was signed with Count Philipp von Cobenzl of the Austrian Monarchy. This treaty marked the completion of Napoleon's conquest of Italy and the end of the first phase of the French Revolutionary Wars. It compelled Italian cities to contribute pieces of art and heritage to Napoleon's "parades of spoils" through Paris before being put into the Louvre Museum. The Horses of Saint Mark, which had adorned the basilica of San Marco in Venice after the sack of Constantinople in 1204, were brought to Paris where they were placed atop Napoleon's Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel in 1797. Under the Treaty of Tolentino, the two statues of the Nile and Tiber were taken to Paris from the Vatican in 1797, and were both kept in the Louvre until 1815. (The Nile was later returned to Rome, whereas the Tiber has remained in the Louvre to this day.) The despoilment of Italian churches and palaces outraged the Italians and their artistic and cultural sensibilities.<br />
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After the French defeat at Waterloo, the looted works' former owners sought their return. The Louvre's administrator, Denon, was loath to comply in absence of a treaty of restitution. In response, foreign states sent emissaries to London to seek help, and many pieces were returned, though far from all. In 1815 Louis XVIII finally concluded agreements with the Austrian government for the keeping of works such as Veronese's Wedding at Cana which was exchanged for a large Le Brun or the repurchase of the Albani collection.<br />
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From 1815 to 1852<br />
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For most of the 19th century, from Napoleon's time to the Second Empire, the Louvre and other national museums were managed under the monarch's civil list and thus depended much on the ruler's personal involvement. Whereas the most iconic collection remained that of paintings in the Grande Galerie, a number of other initiatives mushroomed in the vast building, named as if they were separate museums even though they were generally managed under the same administrative umbrella. Correspondingly, the museum complex was often referred to in the plural ("les musées du Louvre") rather than singular.<br />
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During the Bourbon Restoration (1814–1830), Louis XVIII and Charles X added to the collections. The Greek and Roman sculpture gallery on the ground floor of the southwestern side of the Cour Carrée was completed on designs by Percier and Fontaine. In 1819 an exhibition of manufactured products was opened in the first floor of the Cour Carrée's southern wing and would stay there until the mid-1820s. Charles X in 1826 created the Musée Égyptien and in 1827 included it in his broader Musée Charles X, a new section of the museum complex located in a suite of lavishly decorated rooms on the first floor of the South Wing of the Cour Carrée. The Egyptian collection, initially curated by Jean-François Champollion, formed the basis for what is now the Louvre's Department of Egyptian Antiquities. It was formed from the purchased collections of Edmé-Antoine Durand, Henry Salt and the second collection of Bernardino Drovetti (the first one having been purchased by Victor Emmanuel I of Sardinia to form the core of the present Museo Egizio in Turin). The Restoration period also saw the opening in 1824 of the Galerie d'Angoulême, a section of largely French sculptures on the ground floor of the Northwestern side of the Cour Carrée, many of whose artifacts came from the Palace of Versailles and from Alexandre Lenoir's Musée des Monuments Français following its closure in 1816. Meanwhile, the French Navy created an exhibition of ship models in the Louvre in December 1827, initially named musée dauphin in honour of Dauphin Louis Antoine, building on an 18th-century initiative of Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau. This collection, renamed musée naval in 1833 and later to develop into the Musée national de la Marine, was initially located on the first floor of the Cour Carrée's North Wing, and in 1838 moved up one level to the 2nd-floor attic, where it remained for more than a century.<br />
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Following the July Revolution, King Louis Philippe focused his interest on the repurposing of the Palace of Versailles into a Museum of French History conceived as a project of national reconciliation, and the Louvre was kept in comparative neglect. Louis-Philippe did, however, sponsor the creation of the musée assyrien to host the monumental Assyrian sculpture works brought to Paris by Paul-Émile Botta, in the ground-floor gallery north of the eastern entrance of the Cour Carrée. The Assyrian Museum opened on 1 May 1847. Separately, Louis-Philippe had his Spanish gallery displayed in the Louvre from 7 January 1838, in five rooms on the first floor of the Cour Carrée's East (Colonnade) Wing, but the collection remained his personal property. As a consequence, the works were removed after Louis-Philippe was deposed in 1848, and were eventually auctioned away in 1853.<br />
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The short-lived Second Republic had more ambitions for the Louvre. It initiated repair work, the completion of the Galerie d'Apollon and of the salle des sept-cheminées, and the overhaul of the Salon Carré (former site of the iconic yearly Salon) and of the Grande Galerie. In 1848, the Naval Museum in the Cour Carrée's attic was brought under the common Louvre Museum management, a change which was again reversed in 1920. In 1850 under the leadership of curator Adrien de Longpérier, the musée mexicain opened within the Louvre as the first European museum dedicated to pre-Columbian art.<br />
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Second Empire<br />
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The rule of Napoleon III was transformational for the Louvre, both the building and the museum. In 1852, he created the Musée des Souverains in the Colonnade Wing, an ideological project aimed at buttressing his personal legitimacy. In 1861, he bought 11,835 artworks including 641 paintings, Greek gold and other antiquities of the Campana collection. For its display, he created another new section within the Louvre named Musée Napoléon III, occupying a number of rooms in various parts of the building. Between 1852 and 1870, the museum added 20,000 new artefacts to its collections.<br />
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The main change of that period was to the building itself. In the 1850s architects Louis Visconti and Hector Lefuel created massive new spaces around what is now called the Cour Napoléon, some of which (in the South Wing, now Aile Denon) went to the museum. In the 1860s, Lefuel also led the creation of the pavillon des Sessions with a new Salle des Etats closer to Napoleon III's residence in the Tuileries Palace, with the effect of shortening the Grande Galerie by about a third of its previous length. A smaller but significant Second Empire project was the decoration of the salle des Empereurs below the Salon carré.<br />
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From 1870 to 1981<br />
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The Louvre narrowly escaped serious damage during the suppression of the Paris Commune. On 23 May 1871, as the French Army advanced into Paris, a force of Communards led by Jules Bergeret set fire to the adjoining Tuileries Palace. The fire burned for forty-eight hours, entirely destroying the interior of the Tuileries and spreading to the north west wing of the museum next to it. The emperor's Louvre library (Bibliothèque du Louvre) and some of the adjoining halls, in what is now the Richelieu Wing, were separately destroyed. But the museum was saved by the efforts of Paris firemen and museum employees led by curator Henry Barbet de Jouy.<br />
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Following the end of the monarchy, several spaces in the Louvre's South Wing went to the museum. The Salle du Manège was transferred to the museum in 1879, and in 1928 became its main entrance lobby. The large Salle des Etats that had been created by Lefuel between the Grande Galerie and Pavillon Denon was redecorated in 1886 by Edmond Guillaume, Lefuel's successor as architect of the Louvre, and opened as a spacious exhibition room. Edomond Guillaume also decorated the first-floor room at the northwest corner of the Cour Carrée, on the ceiling of which he placed in 1890 a monumental painting by Carolus-Duran, The Triumph of Marie de' Medici originally created in 1879 for the Luxembourg Palace.<br />
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Meanwhile, during the Third Republic (1870–1940) the Louvre acquired new artefacts mainly via donations, gifts, and sharing arrangements on excavations abroad. The 583-item Collection La Caze, donated in 1869 by Louis La Caze, included works by Chardin; Fragonard, Rembrandt and Watteau. In 1883, the Winged Victory of Samothrace, which had been found in the Aegean Sea in 1863, was prominently displayed as the focal point of the Escalier Daru. Major artefacts excavated at Susa in Iran, including the massive Apadana capital and glazed brick decoration from the Palace of Darius there, accrued to the Oriental (Near Eastern) Antiquities Department in the 1880s. The Société des amis du Louvre was established in 1897 and donated prominent works, such as the Pietà of Villeneuve-lès-Avignon. The expansion of the museum and its collections slowed after World War I, however, despite some prominent acquisitions such as Georges de La Tour's Saint Thomas and Baron Edmond de Rothschild's 1935 donation of 4,000 prints, 3,000 drawings, and 500 illustrated books.<br />
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From the late 19th century, the Louvre gradually veered away from its mid-century ambition of universality to become a more focused museum of French, Western and Near Eastern art, covering a space ranging from Iran to the Atlantic. The collections of the Louvre's musée mexicain were transferred to the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro in 1887. As the Musée de Marine was increasingly constrained to display its core naval-themed collections in the limited space it had in the second-floor attic of the northern half of the Cour Carrée, many of its significant holdings of non-Western artefacts were transferred in 1905 to the Trocadéro ethnography museum, the National Antiquities Museum in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, and the Chinese Museum in the Palace of Fontainebleau. The Musée de Marine itself was relocated to the Palais de Chaillot in 1943. The Louvre's extensive collections of Asian art were moved to the Guimet Museum in 1945. Nevertheless, the Louvre's first gallery of Islamic art opened in 1893.<br />
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In the late 1920s, Louvre Director Henri Verne devised a master plan for the rationalisation of the museum's exhibitions, which was partly implemented in the following decade. In 1932–1934, Louvre architects Camille Lefèvre and Albert Ferran redesigned the Escalier Daru to its current appearance. The Cour du Sphinx in the South Wing was covered by a glass roof in 1934. Decorative arts exhibits were expanded in the first floor of the North Wing of the Cour Carrée, including some of France's first period room displays. In the late 1930s, The La Caze donation was moved to a remodelled Salle La Caze above the salle des Caryatides, with reduced height to create more rooms on the second floor and a sober interior design by Albert Ferran.<br />
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During World War II, the Louvre conducted an elaborate plan of evacuation of its art collection. When Germany occupied the Sudetenland, many important artworks such as the Mona Lisa were temporarily moved to the Château de Chambord. When war was formally declared a year later, most of the museum's paintings were sent there as well. Select sculptures such as Winged Victory of Samothrace and the Venus de Milo were sent to the Château de Valençay. On 27 August 1939, after two days of packing, truck convoys began to leave Paris. By 28 December, the museum was cleared of most works, except those that were too heavy and "unimportant paintings [that] were left in the basement". In early 1945, after the liberation of France, art began returning to the Louvre.<br />
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New arrangements after the war revealed the further evolution of taste away from the lavish decorative practices of the late 19th century. In 1947, Edmond Guillaume's ceiling ornaments were removed from the Salle des Etats, where the Mona Lisa was first displayed in 1966. Around 1950, Louvre architect Jean-Jacques Haffner streamlined the interior decoration of the Grande Galerie. In 1953, a new ceiling by Georges Braque was inaugurated in the Salle Henri II, next to the Salle La Caze. In the late 1960s, seats designed by Pierre Paulin were installed in the Grande Galerie. In 1972, the Salon Carré's museography was remade with lighting from a hung tubular case, designed by Louvre architect Marc Saltet with assistance from designers André Monpoix, Joseph-André Motte and Paulin.<br />
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In 1961, the Finance Ministry accepted to leave the Pavillon de Flore at the southwestern end of the Louvre building, as Verne had recommended in his 1920s plan. New exhibition spaces of sculptures (ground floor) and paintings (first floor) opened there later in the 1960s, on a design by government architect Olivier Lahalle.<br />
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Grand Louvre<br />
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In 1981, French President François Mitterrand proposed, as one of his Grands Projets, the Grand Louvre plan to relocate the Finance Ministry, until then housed in the North Wing of the Louvre, and thus devote almost the entire Louvre building (except its northwestern tip, which houses the separate Musée des Arts Décoratifs) to the museum which would be correspondingly restructured. In 1984 I. M. Pei, the architect personally selected by Mitterrand, proposed a master plan including an underground entrance space accessed through a glass pyramid in the Louvre's central Cour Napoléon.<br />
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The open spaces surrounding the pyramid were inaugurated on 15 October 1988, and its underground lobby was opened on 30 March 1989. New galleries of early modern French paintings on the 2nd floor of the Cour Carrée, for which the planning had started before the Grand Louvre, also opened in 1989. Further rooms in the same sequence, designed by Italo Rota, opened on 15 December 1992.<br />
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On 18 November 1993, Mitterrand inaugurated the next major phase of the Grand Louvre plan: the renovated North (Richelieu) Wing in the former Finance Ministry site, the museum's largest single expansion in its entire history, designed by Pei, his French associate Michel Macary, and Jean-Michel Wilmotte. Further underground spaces known as the Carrousel du Louvre, centred on the Inverted Pyramid and designed by Pei and Macary, had opened in October 1993. Other refurbished galleries, of Italian sculptures and Egyptian antiquities, opened in 1994. The third and last main phase of the plan unfolded mainly in 1997, with new renovated rooms in the Sully and Denon wings. A new entrance at the porte des Lions opened in 1998, leading on the first floor to new rooms of Spanish paintings.<br />
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As of 2002, the Louvre's visitor count had doubled from its pre-Grand-Louvre levels.<br />
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21st century<br />
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President Jacques Chirac, who had succeeded Mitterrand in 1995, insisted on the return of non-Western art to the Louvre, upon a recommendation from his friend the art collector and dealer Jacques Kerchache. On his initiative, a selection of highlights from the collections of what would become the Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac was installed on the ground floor of the Pavillon des Sessions and opened in 2000, six years ahead of the Musée du Quai Branly itself.<br />
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The main other initiative in the aftermath of the Grand Louvre project was Chirac's decision to create a new department of Islamic Art, by executive order of 1 August 2003, and to move the corresponding collections from their prior underground location in the Richelieu Wing to a more prominent site in the Denon Wing. That new section opened on 22 September 2012, together with collections from the Roman-era Eastern Mediterranean, with financial support from the Al Waleed bin Talal Foundation and on a design by Mario Bellini and Rudy Ricciotti.<br />
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In 2007, German painter Anselm Kiefer was invited to create a work for the North stairs of the Perrault Colonnade, Athanor. This decision announces the museum's reengagement with contemporary art under the direction of Henri Loyrette, fifty years after the institution's last order to a contemporary artists, George Braque.<br />
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In 2010, American painter Cy Twombly completed a new ceiling for the Salle des Bronzes (the former Salle La Caze), a counterpoint to that of Braque installed in 1953 in the adjacent Salle Henri II. The room's floor and walls were redesigned in 2021 by Louvre architect Michel Goutal to revert the changes made by his predecessor Albert Ferran in the late 1930s, triggering protests from the Cy Twombly Foundation on grounds that the then-deceased painter's work had been created to fit with the room's prior decoration.<br />
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That same year, the Louvre commissioned French artist François Morellet to create a work for the Lefuel stairs, on the first floor. For L'esprit d'escalier Morellet redesigned the stairscase's windows, echoing their original structures but distorting them to create a disturbing optical effect.<br />
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On 6 June 2014, the Decorative Arts section on the first floor of the Cour Carrée's northern wing opened after comprehensive refurbishment.<br />
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In January 2020, under the direction of Jean-Luc Martinez, the museum inaugurated a new contemporary art commission, L'Onde du Midi by Venezuelan kinetic artist Elias Crespin. The sculpture hovers under the Escalier du Midi, the staircase on the South of the Perrault Colonnade.<br />
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The Louvre, like many other museums and galleries, felt the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the arts and cultural heritage. The museum closed after the end of the day on 29 February 2020, and it did not reopen until 6 July. The museum operated with limited capacity until 29 October, when it was ordered closed again due to an increase in COVID cases in France, and reopened on 19 May 2021. As a result, the museum recorded only 2.7 million visitors in 2020, down from 9.6 million in 2019 and a record 10.2 million in 2018.<br />
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In preparation for the 2024 Olympics, the Louvre staged an exhibit about the Games' history that links their ancient beginnings to the modern era.<br />
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Attendance rose to 8.9 million in 2023, 14 percent above 2022, but still short of the record of 10.2 million in 2018.<br />
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In January 2025, French President Emmanuel Macron announced plans for a renovation and expansion of the Louvre, including a room solely for the Mona Lisa. The planned renovation and expansion was a result of the increasing number of visitors each year to the Louvre. The renovation is set to begin in September 2026.<br />
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On 16 June 2025, the museum's employees went on strike in protest against chronic issues such as overcrowding, understaffing and "untenable" working conditions.<br />
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On 19 October 2025, the Louvre was subjected to a robbery through a forced window in the Galerie d'Apollon. The museum reported that jewellery had been stolen, and the perpetrators fled by motorbike. They used a construction platform left by the building to enter a window and leave with their score. The museum was closed for the day. French interior minister Laurent Nuñez said the robbery involved intruders entering the museum via a basket lift using a platform mounted on a lorry and then cut into the window using what appeared to be angle grinders. Nine major pieces of jewellery from the crowns of France were taken in a few minutes. Eight pieces were stolen, including an emerald necklace that belonged to Empress Marie-Louise and three jewels that belonged to queens Marie-Amelie and Hortense. The ninth item, the Crown of Empress Eugénie, was recovered the same day in a street close to the Louvre but in a damaged condition<br />
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On 25 October, two of the suspected thieves were arrested, one was trying to fly to Algeria from Charles de Gaulle Airport. On 29 October, the prosecutor in charge said that they had "partially admitted" to their involvement in the heist. She added that the jewels were yet to be recovered. On the same day, five additional suspects were arrested, but only one of them was allegedly part of the four-man heist team.<br />
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On 30 October, police arrested five more suspects, but there was still no sign of the stolen jewels.<br />
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In late November, a water line burst, and damaged between 300 and 400 books and journals, mostly from the 19th and early 20th centuries.<br />
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(Wikipedia)<br />
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Das Museum Louvre (französisch Musée du Louvre [myze dy luvʁ]), kurz der Louvre [ˈluːvrə], ist ein Kunstmuseum im 1. Arrondissement von Paris, der Hauptstadt Frankreichs. Er befindet sich im historischen Schloss Louvre, der ehemaligen Residenz der französischen Könige, am rechten Ufer der Seine. Infolge der Französischen Revolution wurde die frühere Kunstsammlung der Könige am 27. Juli 1793 zum ersten Mal der Öffentlichkeit zugänglich gemacht, am 10. August 1793 dann als Zentrales Kunstmuseum der Republik mit einer Ausstellung von 537 Gemälden eröffnet, wobei der Großteil der Werke aus königlichem Besitz und konfisziertem Kirchenbesitz stammte. Nach Napoleon Bonapartes siegreichem Italienfeldzug (1796/97) wurden Kunstwerke in Italien von den Franzosen requiriert. Die so vergrößerte Sammlung wurde in Musée Napoléon umbenannt. Nach dem Ende des Napoleonischen Kaiserreichs (1815) wurde die Kunstsammlung wieder als Louvre bezeichnet. Die in den Napoleonischen Kriegen erbeuteten Kunstwerke wurden an ihre vorhergehenden Besitzer zurückgeführt. Das nationale Element in der nun wieder als Louvre bezeichneten Kunstsammlung trat so wieder in den Vordergrund. Bis heute ist die Kunstsammlung auf mehr als 380.000 Objekte gewachsen, von denen etwa 35.000 ausgestellt sind. Mit 72.735 Quadratmetern Fläche und 9,6 Millionen Besuchern im Jahr 2019 ist der Louvre das größte und meistbesuchte Kunstmuseum der Welt.<br />
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Geschichte<br />
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Anfänge<br />
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Der Ursprung der Sammlung geht auf das 14. Jahrhundert zurück. Der Herzog Jean de Berry (1340–1415), ein Bruder Karls V., legte eine Sammlung von Gemälden, Tapisserien und Buchmalereien an, von denen einige noch in der heutigen Ausstellung zu sehen sind.<br />
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Der eigentliche Begründer der Sammlung ist aber König Franz I. (1515–1547), der als der erste große Sammler und Mäzen auf Frankreichs Thron gilt. Er richtete dem greisen Leonardo da Vinci im Schloss Le Clos Lucé ein Domizil an der Loire ein. Nach Leonardos Tod 1519 gelangten dessen Bilder – darunter wahrscheinlich auch die Mona Lisa – in die Sammlung des Königs, die zu dieser Zeit noch im Schloss Fontainebleau aufbewahrt wurde.<br />
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Kardinal Richelieu, der 1624 Minister unter Ludwig XIII. wurde, baute auf Staatskosten eine große Privatsammlung auf, die 1636 zum Großteil in den Besitz der Krone überging. 1660 zog die Sammlung in den Louvre um. Unter Ludwig XIV. wurden weitere kostbare Werke erworben, unter anderem von Tizian und Raffael.<br />
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Öffnung für das Publikum<br />
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Unter Ludwig XV. wurden kaum noch neue Bilder der Sammlung hinzugefügt. Dass die Sammlung der Öffentlichkeit nicht zugänglich war, führte zu allgemeiner Kritik, worauf 1750 im Palais du Luxembourg die erste Gemäldegalerie Frankreichs eröffnet wurde. Bereits 1779 wurde sie jedoch wieder geschlossen, da das Palais als Wohnung des späteren Ludwig XVIII. dienen sollte. Die Bilder wurden zurück ins Depot des Louvre gebracht. Der Politiker Charles Claude Flahaut de La Billarderie plante die Schaffung eines französischen Nationalmuseums.<br />
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Im Zuge der Französischen Revolution (1789) wurde die Kunstsammlung im Louvre mit Dekret der Nationalversammlung vom 27. Juli 1793 der Öffentlichkeit zum ersten Mal zugänglich gemacht. Am 10. August 1793 – auf den Tag genau ein Jahr nach Abschaffung der Monarchie – wurde der Louvre als Zentrales Kunstmuseum der Republik mit einer Ausstellung von 537 Gemälden eröffnet, wobei der Großteil der Werke aus königlichem und konfisziertem Kirchenbesitz stammte. Wegen baulicher Probleme war das Museum von 1796 bis 1801 geschlossen.<br />
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Weiterer Ausbau der Kunstsammlung<br />
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Napoleon Bonaparte erteilte nach seinem siegreichen Italienfeldzug (1796/97) den ausdrücklichen Befehl, berühmte Kunstwerke im Ausland für Frankreich zu requirieren. Die so vergrößerte Sammlung wurde in Musée Napoléon umbenannt. Bald schon konnte das Museum die Kunstwerke aus Rom, Venedig, Berlin, Wien und vielen anderen europäischen Städten nicht mehr fassen. Unter Napoleon Bonaparte entstanden im Rahmen eines groß angelegten, bahnbrechenden nationalen Kulturprogramms 15 Zweigstellen des Musée Napoléon in ganz Frankreich, in denen Kunstwerke der Sammlung zum ersten Mal einer breiten Öffentlichkeit zugänglich gemacht wurden. Nach dem Ende des Napoleonischen Kaiserreichs im Ergebnis der Schlacht bei Waterloo (18. Juni 1815) wurde der zukunftsweisende volkspädagogische Ansatz Napoleon Bonapartes nicht mehr weiterverfolgt; die Beutekunst wurde von den alliierten Siegermächten wieder an ihre vorhergehenden Besitzer zurückgegeben, wodurch das nationale Element in der nun wieder als Louvre bezeichnete Kunstsammlung in den Vordergrund trat.<br />
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1821 wurde mit dem Ankauf der Venus von Milo der Aufbau der Antikensammlung fortgesetzt. Seit 1808 war bereits die Antikensammlung der Borghese Teil der Sammlung. 1826 folgten die ägyptische und 1847 die assyrische Abteilung. Ab 1851 wurde die Ausstellungsfläche des Louvre unter Alfred Émilien de Nieuwerkerke erweitert. Nach dem Sturz des zweiten Kaiserreichs 1870 wurde die Sammlung endgültig von der Krone getrennt und verstaatlicht.<br />
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Der Sammlung kam zugute, dass seit 1972 die Erbschaftsteuer auch in Form von Kunstwerken entrichtet werden kann.<br />
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Grand-Louvre und heutiger Zustand<br />
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Staatspräsident François Mitterrand initiierte 1981 das Projekt „Grand-Louvre“, mit dem der gesamte Gebäudekomplex einer musealen Nutzung unterworfen wurde; 1999 wurde es abgeschlossen. Das Finanzministerium zog um;[2] in diesem Rahmen wurde unter anderem die Galerie d’Apollon restauriert und die Glaspyramide im Innenhof des Louvre geschaffen. Die Glaspyramide wurde von Ieoh Ming Pei entworfen und 1989 eröffnet. Sie dient heute als Haupteingang zum Musée du Louvre. Anfangs als „Gewächshaus“ und „Käseglocke“ verspottet, ist die Pyramide heute zu einem bekannten Wahrzeichen von Paris geworden.<br />
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Außerdem wurde 1993 das Carrousel du Louvre eröffnet, eine unterirdisch direkt an den Louvre angeschlossene Einkaufsmeile mit Restaurants und der invertierten Glaspyramide. 2009 gab es eine Kontroverse um den Einzug einer McDonald’s-Filiale im neugestalteten Restaurantbereich.<br />
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Ein Teil der mittelalterlichen Burg aus dem 16. Jahrhundert errichtet unter Karl V. ist heute im Louvre und Carrousel du Louvre zu sehen. Es handelt sich dabei um Teile der Ringmauern und Wassergräben, die im Zuge der Ausgrabungen für die Erweiterung des Louvre und den Bau des Carrousel du Louvre freigelegt wurden.<br />
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Seit 1986 werden viele vorher im Louvre gelagerte Kunstwerke der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts im Musée d’Orsay ausgestellt.<br />
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Im September 2012 eröffnete der Louvre eine neue Abteilung für islamische Kunst, die sich in einem Erweiterungsbau nach einem Entwurf der Architekten Mario Bellini und Rudy Ricciotti befindet. Ausgestellt werden rund 2500 Exponate, die teilweise aus dem Musée des Arts Decoratifs stammen. Für 2027 ist eine weitere neue permanente Ausstellung für Byzantinische Kunst geplant (Département des Arts de Byzance et des chrétientés en Orient).<br />
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Frankreichs Präsident Emmanuel Macron plant eine „neuen Renaissance“ des Louvre. Es sollen weitere Ausstellungsräume sowie ein zusätzlicher Eingang an der Ostfassade zur Seine entstehen.<br />
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Seit 2016 wurde das 180 km entfernte Liévin im nördlichen Département Pas-de-Calais zum Standort des wichtigsten Depots des Museums, das Centre de conservation du Louvre.<br />
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Einbruchdiebstahl am 19. Oktober 2025<br />
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Am Morgen des 19. Oktober 2025 drangen mehrere Täter in das Museum ein, vermutlich über eine Baustelle an der Seine-Fassade, wo derzeit Arbeiten stattfinden. Laut französischer Medien, darunter der Le Parisien, gelangten die Täter über einen Lastenaufzug direkt in einen Raum in der Galerie d’Apollon und hatten es gezielt auf die Schmucksammlung Napoleons III. und seiner Frau Eugénie abgesehen.<br />
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Als Reaktion auf die durch den Kronjuweleneinbruch aufgedeckten Mängel und die Notwendigkeit, die Infrastruktur zu modernisieren, hat das Louvre-Museum die Eintrittspreise für Nicht-Europäer ab 2026 auf 32 Euro Eintritt erhöht.<br />
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Rückforderungen<br />
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2009 forderte die türkische Stadt Izmir zwei antike Marmorstatuen der griechischen Götter Zeus und Apollon zurück, die Ende des 17. Jahrhunderts in der Nähe der Stadt, dem antiken Smyrna, gefunden wurden. Die beiden über zwei Meter großen Kunstwerke wurden Ende des 17. Jahrhunderts als Geschenk an König Ludwig XIV. nach Frankreich gebracht und werden derzeit in der Antikenabteilung des Louvre gezeigt. Sie sollen im geplanten Museum zur Zivilisation an der Ägäis in Izmir ausgestellt werden.<br />
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Im Louvre befinden sich 60 osmanische Keramikfliesen aus dem 17. Jahrhundert, die 1895 vom französischen Restaurator Albert Sorlin-Dorigny aus der Türbe Selim II. in Istanbul entwendet wurden. Sorlin-Dorigny arbeitete zwischen 1895 und 1899 an der Restaurierung der Hagia Sophia und brachte in dieser Zeit zahlreiche Kunstschätze nach Frankreich. Die Fliesen ersetzte er durch in der Fayence-Manufaktur von Choisy-le-Roi hergestellte Repliken. Der türkische Kulturminister bestätigte 2011 die Rückgabeforderung für die Fliesen.<br />
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Sammlung<br />
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Die Sammlung umfasst ungefähr 380.000 Werke, von denen etwa 35.000 Exponate auf einer Fläche von über 60.000 m² präsentiert werden. Damit ist das Museum, flächenmäßig betrachtet, das drittgrößte Museum der Welt. Besonders hervorzuheben ist die Qualität der griechischen und römischen Antikensammlungen, der Abteilungen der italienischen Renaissancemalerei und der flämischen Malerei des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts sowie der französischen Malerei des 15. bis 19. Jahrhunderts. Die französischen Kronjuwelen befinden sich in der Galerie Apollon.<br />
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Der Louvre in der Popkultur<br />
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Der von dem französischen Autoren Maurice Leblanc geschaffene Meisterdieb Arsène Lupin entwendet in einem Roman das im Louvre hängende Gemälde Mona Lisa. In der Netflix-Serie Lupin schleust sich Serienhauptfigur Assane Diop in den Louvre ein und stiehlt dort ein Diamantcollier. Auch der Roman Sakrileg von Dan Brown sowie die dazugehörige Verfilmung The Da Vinci Code – Sakrileg mit Tom Hanks in der Hauptrolle spielen im Louvre.<br />
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(Wikipedia)</p>](https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/55382714141_5fe8ec84a9_s.jpg)
