Palais du Louvre
From Paris Hotels Reviews
The Palace at The Louvre
The original Palais du Louvre was little more than a feudal fortress, begun by Philippe-Auguste in the 1190s to store his scrolls, jewels and swords, while he himself lived on the Ile de la Cité. Charles V was the first French king to make the castle his residence, in the 1360s – the ground plan of his new palace can be seen traced on the pavement of the Cour Carré – but it wasn’t until 1546, the year before the death of Francọis I, that the first stones of the Louvre we see today were laid by the architect Pierre Lescot. Henry II continued Francọis I’s plans, building the two wings that now forms the southwestern corner of the Cour Carre (to the left of the clock tower). It’s still possible to imagine how extraordinary and how graceful the building would have looked, a gleaming example of the new Renaissance style surrounded by the late Gothic of Charles V’s day.
When Henry IV to took charge in 1594, he began a project of typical ambition: to link the Louvre with Catherine de Médicis’ Palais des Tuileries to the west. He got as far as building the long wing along the Seine that now forms the Grande. The architects working under Louis XIII and Louis XIV were less bold, contenting themselves with completing the Cour Carré by largely copying Lescot’s original façade. Altogether different in design, but no more architecturally innovative, is Claude Perrault’s academically Classical colonnade facing rue de l’Admiral de Coligny, which somehow beat Bernini’s stunning Baroque design for the same contract. Napoléon III’s main contributions – the courtyard facades of the nineteenth-century Richelieu and Denon wings, designed by Visconti and Hector Lefuel – conservatively repeat the basic theme of the Cour Carré.
For all its many additions, the palace long remained a surprisingly harmonious building with a grandeur symmetry and Frenchness entirely suited to this most historic of Parisian landmarks. That is, until 1989, when, following a century of stagnation I.M. Pei’s controversial Pyramide erupted from the centre of the Cour Napoléon like a visitor from another architectural planet. (Just for the record, the pyramid has 673 panes of glass, not The Da Vinci Code’s 666 – close, but then a miss is as good as a mile with numerology.) As part of Mitterrand’s same "Grand Louvre" makeover, the basement Carrousel du Louvre shopping complex was created, its central chamber lit by the downward-pointing Pyramide Inversee. Used primarily for fashion shows and other glitzy, high-rent events, this space acquired brief notoriety following its appearance in the denouement of The Da Vinci Code, in 2003. Mitterrand also moved the Finance Ministry out of the northern Richelieu wing, whose two main courtyards were then dramatically roofed over in glass. The Passage Richelieu, linking the Cour Napoléon with rue de Rivoli, now offers a better view of the sculptures in these courtyards than that from inside the museum.
Napoleon’s pink marble Arc de Carrousel, just west of place du Carrousel, originally formed a gateway for the Palais des Tuileries. It has always looked a bit out of place, despite sitting precisely on the Voie Triomphale axis. The arch is now definitively and forlornly upstaged by the Pyramide, which has outlasted its critics’ spleen and found a place for itself in the hearts of even the most conservative Parisians.
