Musee du Louvre

From Paris Hotels Reviews

The Museum at The Louvre

The origins of the Musee de Louvre lie in the personal art collection of Francois I, who in 1516 summoned Leonardo da Vinci from Milan to add some prestige to the French Renaissance. Leonardo brought this greatest works with him across the Alps, including the Mona Lisa, which remains the museum's most famous possession and the idée fixe of an unhealthy number of visitors. Later kings set up “cabinets” of artworks and antiquities in the Louvre, but these were very much private collections. Although artists and academics – as well as prostitutes – lived in the palace under Louis XIV, and the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture mounted exhibitions here, known as salons, as early as1725, the Louvre was only opened as an art gallery in 1793, the year of Louis XVI's execution. Turning the palace into a museum wasn't quite the revolutionary gesture it seems, however, as the original plan had been conceived in the 1740s, under Louis XV, and purchases began in 1779. The Revolution, if anything, delayed the creation of the museum. Within a decade of opening, however, Napoleon's wagonloads of war booty – not all of which has been returned – transformed the Louvre's art collection into the world's largest. The only major changes since then have been President Mitterrand's grand makeover in the 1980s, and the decision, in 2007, to license a “Louvre Abu Dhabi” annexe. The controversial annexe, which is due to open in 2012, will borrow pictures from the home collection, and help to subsidize the enormous running cost of what might now be called “Louvre France”.

Though there are too many masterpieces to highlight here, few visitors will be able to resist the allure of the Mona Lisa, if only to see what the fuss is all about. If you're planning on a short visit, you might consider confining yourself to this, the Denon section of the museum, which also houses the rest of the Italian paintings and the great French nineteenth-century canvases, as well as Italian and Classical sculptures. A relatively peaceful alternative would be to focus on the grand chronologies od French painting and sculpture.