Louvre, Paris

The main entrance of the Louvre, in the center of the Cour Napoléon, is the glass pyramid (22m/72ft high; 675 panes of glass) designed by the Chinese American architect Ieoh Ming Pei (b. 1917) and opened in 1989. This gives access to the underground Hall Napoléon, in which are information desks, the ticket office, the bookshop, cafe and restaurant, auditoria, the Print Cabinet and rooms for special exhibitions. From here corridors and escalators take visitors to the various departments in the three main wings.

On the lower floor (basement level) of the Louvre's Richelieu Wing, opened in November 1993, are contemporary exhibitions, French sculpture and Islamic art; on the ground floor, round two covered inner courtyards, the Cour Marly and the Cour Puget, are French sculpture and Oriental antiquities; on the first floor is applied and decorative art and on the second floor German, Flemish and Dutch painting.

On the lower floor of the Sully Wing (the east wing round the Cour Carrée) are the new department on the history of the Louvre and the excavations of the medieval crypt; on the ground floor are Oriental and Egyptian antiquities, Coptic art, Greek, Etruscan and Roman work, including the famous Venus de Milo; on the first floor are applied and decorative art, Egyptian, Greek, Etruscan and Roman antiquities (Victory of Samothrace) and 18th century French painting; and on the second floor are the 17th and 18th century French schools and graphic art.

On the lower floor of the Denon Wing of the Louvre (south side of the Cour Napoléon) are Greek, Etruscan and Roman antiquities, the art of late antiquity and Italian, German and Dutch sculpture; the ground floor also displays Greek, Etruscan and Roman antiquities, together with Italian, German, Flemish and Dutch sculpture; the Galerie d'Apollon (treasures from the royal collections), French painting from the Middle Ages to the 19th century, Italian painting from the 11th to the 18th century (including Leonardo da Vinci's "Mona Lisa"), German, Flemish and Dutch painting of the 15th-17th centuries, the northern schools of the 18th and 19th centuries, Spanish and British art, and drawings of the 15th to 19th centuries.

The first royal collector was François I, who brought together in his palace of Fontainebleau paintings, sculpture and reproductions in the Italian style, including the enigmatically smiling "Mona Lisa". Another king interested in art was Louis XIV, who acquired the collections of Cardinal Mazarin and a celebrated financier and art-lover, Jabach, which included Titian's "Entombment". In 1683 the royal collection contained over 2,000 pictures. On August 10, 1792 the Royal Museum was established, and from 1794 onwards this was enriched by thousands of works of art brought back as booty by the French armies. Deprived after the fall of the Empire of all these stolen treasures with the exception of a few works such as Veronese's "Marriage in Cana", the Louvre continued to make fresh acquisitions. In the course of the 19th century the departments of Egyptian and Oriental antiquities were established, and later successive architects tried to bring order into the museum's maze of rooms. Since then the seven departments of the museum have grown steadily through new acquisitions and gifts from over 2,700 donors.The Museum now possesses over 30,000 works of art. It is possible, therefore, to give only a general account of the scope and variety of the collections and a selection of the most famous works on view.

The buildings round the Cour Carrée square in Paris belong to the Old Louvre (Vieux Louvre), the Palais du Louvre proper, now known as the Sully wing. It occupies the site of Philippe Auguste's original stronghold. The Lescot facade was begun in the reign of Henri II, the other wings in the time of Louis XIII and XIV, but they were completed only by Napoleon. The Pavillon de l'Horloge (Clock Pavilion), better known as the Pavillon Sully, is designed to match the style of the Lescot facade; it was built in the 17th century by Jacques Lemercier, who also added the northern part of the west wing in a quasi-Renaissance style.

Before construction work on the Louvre began archaeologists carried out excavations in the Cour Carrée and Cour Napoléon and brought to light the remains of Philippe Auguste's fortress of ca. 1200, with its keep, and Charles V's 14th century palace.

The Pavillon de Flore and the Pavillon de Marsan were linked until 1871 by the Tuileries Palace. The Pavillon de Flore takes its name from the relief of the "Triumph of Flora" (by Jean- Baptiste Carpeaux, 1866) on the side facing the Seine.

Le Louvre des Antiquaires contains 250 antique dealers on three floors offering furniture and objets d'art of all periods.

In November 1993, on the 200th anniversary of the Louvre as a museum, the second and most important part of the Grand Louvre project was completed. It had begun in 1989 with the departure of the Ministry of Finance from the northern (Richelieu) wing of the palace, which it had occupied for over a hundred years, since the time of the Duc de Morny, Napoleon III's minister, to new premises at Bercy. As the opening of the new entrance to the museum under I. M. Pei's glass pyramid had signalled the completion of the first phase of the project, so the opening of the north wing (also designed by Pei) on November 18, 1993 marked the successful completion of the second. This doubled the exhibition space available to the museum from 30,000 sq.m/323,000 sq.ft to 60,000 sq.m/646,000 sq.ft, giving it room to display over 30,000 exhibits. In the final phase, which is due to be completed by 1997, the existing rooms in the south wing are to be reorganized, and the exhibits in the Denon and Sully wings, apart from the large works in the Greek collection, are to be rearranged. At the same time the construction of the Carrousel du Louvre, the underground facilities to be provided under the courtyard round the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel (an underground parking lot with over 700 places, a service center with shops, restaurants and function rooms, all to be privately run), to be linked with the museum's reception area, will be pushed ahead. In addition the facades of the palace will be restored and the Jardin du Carrousel replanted.With the reopening of the remodelled rooms on the first floor of the Sully wing round the Cour Carrée in December 1992 the planned rearrangement of the Louvre's picture collections began. In future they are to be displayed in national schools, since French painting accounts for more than half the museum's holdings. The schools of northern Europe will be shown in the north (Richelieu) wing; the southern schools, as hitherto, will be in the south (Denon) wing; and French painting will be mainly in the Sully wing round the Cour Carrée. The present division into seven departments - Oriental (including Islamic) art, Egyptian (including Coptic) art, Greek, Etruscan and Roman art, sculpture, painting, applied and decorative art and graphic art - will be retained, though the separation of genres will not be absolutely rigid. Sculpture will be displayed mainly on the ground floor of the Denon and Richelieu wings, and painting and graphic art will be brought closer together.The Palais du Louvre stands on the site of the medieval stronghold built on the right bank of the Seine by Philippe II (Philippe Auguste) about the year 1200. This side of the river was then known as Lupara, which later became Louvre. Remains of Philippe Auguste's fortress can be seen on the mezzanine level below the Cour Carrée. Louis IX (St Louis) added a large hall and extended the crypt (excavation finds on mezzanine level); then in the reign of Louis V Raymond du Temple enlarged the castle still further, and in 1360 the king moved into it, although the palace on the Ile de la Cité remained his official residence. Until the reign of Henri II the French kings lived omly sporadically in their town palace. Detailed evidence on the history of the building in the time of Charles V is provided by the "Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry", the prayer-book illuminated by the Limburg brothers. In the 15th century the Louvre served mainly as an arsenal for the storage of weapons, since the kings preferred to live in their châteaux on the Loire. Then in the first half of the 16th century François I, the "Renaissance king", took an interest in the palace. He had the keep pulled down and commissioned the architect Pierre Lescot and the sculptor Jean Goujon, following Italian models, to build the halves of the west and south wings of the Old Louvre which meet at a right angle round the present Cour Carrée. After François' death these parts were completed by Lescot and Goujon, and in 1566 they were extended by the Petite Galerie (at right angles to Lescot's south wing). At almost the same time (1564 onwards), after the death of Henri II, the Tuileries Palace was built as a residence for his widow Catherine de Médicis only 500m/550yds west of the Old Louvre (along the present Avenue du Général-Lemonnier). In the reign of Henri IV this palace was linked by the long south wing along the Seine, the Galerie du Bord de l'Eau, with the Petite Galerie. After the murder of Henri IV his widow moved to the Palais du Luxembourg. Their son Louis XIII completed the Cour Carrée and the Pavillon Sully. Louis XIV commissioned Le Brun and Le Vau to remodel the Petite Galerie and Claude Perrault to build a monumental facade on the east wing, now known as the Colonnade. Both the Louvre and the Tuileries were occupied only for short periods, and after Louis XIV moved his residence to Versailles they fell into such a state of dilapidation that in the mid 17th century consideration was given to their possible demolition. Louis XV, however, began the process of renovation. At this time the idea first emerged of bringing together in the Louvre the royal collections of masterpieces of art. In 1776 the Grande Galerie was declared a museum. During the Revolution, on May 26 1791, the people were able for the first time to see the royal apartments. Napoleon enlarged the courtyard in front of the Tuileries (now the Jardin du Louvre and Place and Square du Carrousel) and set up in its center the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel, and also began the construction of the north wing along Rue de Rivoli. In the reign of Napoleon III the Louvre and the Tuileries were joined up, and Baron Haussmann laid out the Jardin du Louvre and Place and Square du Carrousel in their present form. Only a few years later, however, on May 23, 1871, the Tuileries Palace was burned down by the Commune. Fortunately the fire was extinguished before it reached the Louvre, but the Tuileries was completely destroyed and was not rebuilt. Finally in autumn 1981 President Mitterand initiated the ambitious project to make the Louvre the biggest museum in the world, the Grand Louvre, which was to be a temple of culture worthy of the historic site on which it stood.

In 1665 an architectural competition was held to secure the best architects of the day to design a suitably imposing east front for the Old Louvre. Among those who entered the competition were the French architects Jean Marot and Jacques Lemercier and the Italian Lorenzo Bernini, architect of St Peter's Square in Rome. The winning design was the joint work of Claude Perrault, Louis Le Vau and Charles Lebrun. Their Colonnade, which can now be seen in its full height, represents a compromise between French Baroque and Italian Neo-Classical models. The twin columns and flat roof are characteristic of the Italian neo-classical style, while the emphasis given to the central section with its triangular pediment and to the ends of the facade is typically French.Now that the basement structure has been exposed the colonnade with its 18 Corinthian columns is given the height and the distance which the architects intended. The classical severity of the facade was designed to be relieved by a series of statues along the roof balustrade, but this part of the project was not carried out. After the court departed for Versailles building work stopped and was resumed only in the time of Napoleon. From that period date the sculpture in the pediment (Minerva, 1811) and the relief over the arch of the doorway (the goddess of Victory in a four-horse chariot); higher up, to right and left, are medallions with the initials of Louis XIV.

The southern half of the west wing of the Cour Carrée at the Louvre, built between 1559 and 1574 by the architect Pierre Lescot (1510-78) and the sculptor Jean Goujon (1510-68) is a masterpiece of Renaissance architecture. In its conspicuous harmony it illustrates how the men of the Renaissance sought to achieve the regularity of their antique models in a clear and modest form but not necessarily without ornament - a style very different from the monumental classicism of the late 18th century, as seen, for example, in the Madeleine and the Panthéon. Both horizontally, in the alternation of the doorway and pediment levels with the window level, and vertically (if the low upper story is seen as a unit with the roof) there is a clear division into three; and the relationship between the door and window sections and between the height of the storys and the projecting moulding that marks them off also shows a ratio of 3 to 1. The round-headed windows on the ground floor give it the effect of an arcade. On the middle floor every two windows with triangular pediments alternate with a window with a semicircular pediment (again showing the rhythm in threes). The top floor is famed for Jean Goujon's marvelous relief decoration in the semicircular pediments, between which is a richly ornamented balustrade. The reliefs in the pediments are allegorical, representing nature (left; Ceres for agriculture, Neptune for seafaring, genius with cornucopia), war (center; the war god Neptune, the war goddess Bellona, prisoners) and learning (right; Archimedes for astronomy, Euclid for geometry, genius of learning).

In the west pavilion in the north wing of the Louvre (Pavillon de Marsan) is the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, which is independent of the Louvre. It has a rich collection of furniture and furnishings from the Middle Ages to modern times. Attached to it is a fashion museum, the Musée de la Mode et du Textile, with a collection of costly creations by Chanel, Dior, Worth, Cardin and other famous couturiers.