The Louvre: Palace as Palimpsest

What was once Paris’s fortified guardian is now its treasure-filled heart. 

THE LOUVRE By James Gardner Atlantic Monthly, 394 pages, $30

 

image from 

Book Review by Edward Rothstein, The Wall Street Journal, Sept. 25, 2020 6:20 pm ET; original article contains an additional illustration,"The Pavillon de l’Horloge as seen through I.M. Pei’s pyramidal entrance to the Louvre."

Great museums have many functions: They can encyclopedically survey the world, provide compelling accounts of history, celebrate varied forms of beauty and project political power. They can also have an almost mythic presence. If myths recount a society’s origins in the natural world, a great museum can do something similar, demonstrating how the world is given shape and order. It is a place where people gather, time and again, united in something akin to ritual, searching for illumination, perhaps even seeking a sense of belonging. Museums are temples of a people or a nation. 

But I hadn’t realized just how mythically resonant a museum could be until I read James Gardner’s eloquent encomium to the Louvre, which traces its “many lives” from France’s prehistory into the present. “Before the Louvre was a museum,” his introduction begins, “it was a palace, and before that a fortress, and before that a plot of earth, much like any other.” Its life as a museum is venerable—over 200 years—but its life as a place of significance extends 600 years before that. And in the 1980s, excavations to create the museum’s underground bus depot unearthed the skeletal remains of a man who lived in the Bronze Age, over 4,000 years ago. Such is the microcosmic story of the largest museum in the world, with more than 782,000 square feet of exhibition space and a collection of more than 35,000 objects viewed by more than nine million annual visitors. 

And though, as Mr. Gardner says, the Louvre now “occupies a position of radical centrality” in the heart of Paris, it once lay at its outskirts, a military outpost west of the newly built city walls. In 1190, its first and only function was to serve as a defense in case the English (who then controlled the western third of what today is France) decided to use the river to reach Paris. The history of the Louvre, we begin to see, is inseparable from the history of Paris and the emergence of modern France. Is there any other museum with so intimate a relationship to its nation’s history? 

Yet, as Mr. Gardner argues, there is much about the Louvre that is mysterious, including its name. One suggestion has been that it came from a purportedly Saxon word, “loevar,” which apparently meant “castle.” Another is that it evolved from the French word “louve,” for “she-wolf,” alluding to the untamed world beyond the city walls. Nobody knows. And as Mr. Gardner leads us through the building’s history, complications accumulate. “Not a stone of the original structure survives above ground,” he notes, but “the ghost of the medieval building can be summoned” from the pillars and oculi of the museum’s Cour Carrée, as the original square courtyard is called. In Mr. Gardner’s account, it is as if architectural DNA were expressing itself in varied layers of rebuilding. In this case, the connection has become explicit: In 1989 the base of the medieval fortress was unveiled as a subterranean exhibit in the Louvre itself. 

One difficulty is that there have been “no fewer than twenty distinct building campaigns” at the Louvre over eight centuries. After it was turned into a palace by Charles V in the 14th century, the transformations become almost Baroque in their complexities. Every king’s reign involved expansion or demolition, modification or neglect, turning the building into an elaborate palimpsest of styles and functions. 

The Grande Galerie, for example, which now displays the extraordinary Italian paintings in the museum’s collection, was built by Henri IV and mostly completed by his death in 1610. It is almost half a kilometer long and 13 meters wide and was originally conceived as just a link between the Louvre and the Palais des Tuileries—a palace that eventually became the monarchy’s main Parisian residence but was destroyed by a blaze set by Communard rebels in 1871. That destruction actually ended up benefiting today’s Louvre by opening a vista extending westward from I.M. Pei’s pyramidal entrance to the Louvre directly to the Arc de Triomphe. 

Feasance and malfeasance combined haphazardly over the centuries. Yet the Louvre, like a Darwinian creature, attains an imposing stature and sensuous character through this combination of accident and need. The present-day visitor can’t see much from before the 1850s, when Napoleon III reshaped and constructed the Louvre into its near-modern form, but Mr. Gardner lets us see the past in the museum’s presence. 

But how did it become a museum at all? At first, from royal art collections, beginning with François I, who reigned from 1515 to 1547, conquered the Duchy of Milan for a time and consolidated the influence of the Italian Renaissance on French taste. In 1516 he convinced Leonardo da Vinci to live in the royal summer residence; three years later, he died there, in the King’s arms, according to a (possibly apocryphal) painting by Ingres. Leonardo had brought along 20 of his notebooks, along with three paintings—“St. John the Baptist,” “Virgin and Child With St. Anne,” and the “Mona Lisa.” They ultimately became part of the Louvre’s collection (though at one point, Napoleon’s wife, Josephine, slept with the “Mona Lisa” at her bedside). 

Another aspect of the transformation from palace to museum took place a century later, when Henri IV invited painters, sculptors and craftsmen to live and work on the ground floor of the Grande Galerie—hoping to have a beneficial effect, as he declared in 1608, on artisanship “throughout the length and breadth of the kingdom.” That tradition lasted for two centuries, until it was ended by Napoleon, but it effectively freed artists from medieval guilds and hierarchies of training and obligation, and associated their activity with civic virtue. But it wasn’t until 1793—in the midst of the Revolution’s Reign of Terror—that a portion of the Louvre became a public museum. 

This history is told with all the great verve, insight and eye for detail that Mr. Gardner’s criticism is noted for. And it allows us to see the remarkable singularity of the Louvre as a museum that was neither founded by a ruler to celebrate his glory, nor founded by a state to reflect its Enlightenment vision, nor created at the peak of national power to reflect the reach of an empire. The Louvre is an institution that slowly evolved over centuries, so that the creation and display of art eventually became inseparable from the many and various incarnations of the state.

Mr. Gardner’s passion also invites us to share his affection—and to plan a visit. “The Colonnade,” he says of the Louvre’s too-little-seen eastern façade, “is not only the finest portion of the Louvre, it is also, in the estimation of this critic, as fine a piece of architecture, classical or otherwise, as will be found anywhere in the world.” 

There is just one cavil. Only a few color images are tipped into the 6 x 9-inch book, and the black-and-white reproductions are shorn of fine detail. More seriously, we cannot easily trace the Louvre’s evolution with only endpaper maps and some spot illustrations. Many of these issues are alleviated by Rizzoli’s new and oversize “The Louvre: The History, the Collections, the Architecture” (615 pages, $100), with sumptuous full-color photographs by Gérard Rondeau that can be almost as alluring as the art pictured. The text—by historian Geneviève Bresc-Bautier, a former director of the museum’s Department of Sculptures—presumes too close an acquaintance with the subject and stashes insights in dryly translated institutional prose. But with Guillaume Fonkenell, Ms. Bresc-Bautier edited the definitive three-volume “Histoire du Louvre” (2016), to which Mr. Gardner pays homage, so this text too is useful for reference. 

And both of these books go a long way to support Mr. Gardner’s assertion that “the Louvre is as great a work of art as anything it contains.” 

 —Mr. Rothstein is the Journal’s Critic at Large. 

 Appeared in the September 26, 2020, print edition as 'Tout le Louvre.'