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| Louvre
Museum |
The
Louvre Museum in Paris, France, is the
oldest, and arguably the most famous
art gallery and museum in the world.
The Louvre has a long history of artistic
and historic conservation, from the
Capetian dynasty until today. The building
was previously a royal palace, and is
famous for holding several of the world's
most prestigious works of art, such
as Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Li
sa,
The Virgin and Child with St. Anne,
Madonna of the Rocks and Alexandros
of Antioch's Venus de Milo. Located
in the center of the city of Paris,
between the Rive Droite of the Seine
and the rue de Rivoli in the Ier arrondissement,
it is accessed by the Palais Royal -
Musée du Louvre Metro station.
The equestrian statue of Louis XIV constitutes
the starting point axe historique, but
the palace is not aligned on this axis.
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| Mona
Lisa |
Virginand |
Venus
de Milo |
Antinous |
The Musée du Louvre--that is, the
museum that inhabits the Louvre Palace--has
existed for over two hundred years, though
it has occupied the palace exclusively
for a fraction of that time. During the
long aristocratic centuries, the great
collections of fine and decorative art
housed in the Louvre were the property
of its royal residents, the concept of
a museum where the public might view such
treasures not even dreamed of. The story
of the museum is a complex one, which
embraces the story of the palace: of the
kings, queens, and commoners who built
it; were conceived, lived, conspired,
and died in it; fled it and decorated
it. The story of the Louvre is also the
story of Paris, and of France itself.
The
world's largest museum, the Musée
du Louvre is also one of the world's most
exciting places, its buildings offering
a journey through time, while its
galleries display works that arouse the
full range of human responses, from admiration
and wonder, to curiosity, lust, and anger.
The profusion and variety of objects tell
us about the times, about social, class,
sexual, and religious feelings and beliefs.
But there is more than history within
this space, represented perhaps most perfectly
by the ubiquitously imitated but never
replicated Mona Lisa. Leonardo's portrait
(thought by some to be a self-portrait)
transcendentally transforms paint on canvas
into an impression of deep stillness as
elemental as the enigmatic landscape behind
the sitter, her hand on an equally mysterious
sill. This painting, which has evoked
every human and artistic emotion from
frustration, envy, and contempt to violent
rage, has come to stand for the enduring
force of art.
Since
its beginnings, the Louvre has conferred
legitimacy on those who claimed it--for
the brief period of a human lifetime--and
as such it has been central to the history
of its city and nation, even before there
was a nation. It has been a wartime castle,
and, rarely, a peacetime palace; it has
witnessed faith, bloodshed, grandeur,
and spectacle, despair, terror, and resolve
that we in our time can only imagine--or
reconstruct from the gilded traces left
to us. The Louvre drew on the greatest
talents of Europe, and was built at the
cost of the misery of anonymous millions.
Its construction vied with wars, revolutions,
and the fall of kings, the rise of republics,
and the loss of empires.
The
museum's story is also the history of
all museums and embraces the very notion
of what we call art: the process by
which the guardian lion of a Mesopotamian
temple ends up in a glass cage bathed
in French sunlight--or the picture of
a self-possessed Florentine lady hangs
behind a vertical, glass-fronted bunker.
"A
Romanesque crucifix was not originally
a sculpture, Cimabue's Madonna was not
originally a painting, even Phidias'
Athena was not originally a statue."
So begins Le Musée Imaginaire,
by André Malraux, novelist and,
as French minister of cultural affairs,
overseer of the Louvre from 1958 to
1969. We become curators of the Imaginary
Museum when we restore something of
the artwork's original qualities, evoking
them in situ, in masonry museums. For
example, the Louvre's palatial halls,
literally teeming with visionary manifestations
of talent, and of faith, fear, and the
hope of Heaven, elicit curiosity, admiration,
and the awe of viewers. Such profound
feelings can overshadow the recollection
that each of these works was made for
specific surroundings, a context that
endowed it with significance, whether
church or throne room.
Our
imaginations are stirred by the sea-green
patina of ancient bronzes, the ethereal
whiteness of ancient marbles, European
and Asian, and the romantic signs on
The Victory of Samothrace and The Venus
de Milo of the passage of time, as another
French writer, and great sculptor, Marguerite
Yourcenar, wrote. If we free our imaginations,
we can see in those bronzes once more
the warm browns of human skin, see those
marbles painted in colors that, bleached
by the centuries, the statues themselves
have taught us to perceive as garish
(it was Michelangelo and the Renaissance
that mistook, then perpetuated the absence
of color). These, and their Christian
successors in incense-scented chapel
and church, contained divinity or grace,
and if we look for these works in museums
and galleries today, it is because they
still contain their antique power.
Space
and time alter artworks, and so does
photography, by taking an object out
of all context except for the frame
of the single picture--or of the book
that contains the photographs. In a
book, photography can have a leveling
effect, making all objects of similar
size, simply because they are on pages
of the same size. Here, too, viewers
become curators when they reimagine
the work not only in its original surroundings,
but also in its original dimensions.
There is more: like people, some artworks
are more photogenic than others. Photographs
can lighten varnish-darkened paintings,
and drawings too light-sensitive to
be exhibited can be viewed at leisure.
By the same token, however, the magic
of some works does not survive the translation
into a photograph. The delicate, tender
light that glows from medieval teenage
Madonnas and their babies fades in the
flattening light of photography. (Paradoxically,
the bad black-and-white photographs
of scholarly illustrations can do these
sculptures more justice, because more
imagination is required of the viewer.)
We
can somewhat restore works to the Imaginary
Museum because the receiving of art, like
the making of it, is a process of pursuing
what is true, of surrendering to the object's
mystery. We can label that mystery "art"
or "talent" or "genius"--or
necessity: the masons who cut and laid
the blocks of Paris limestone for Philip
Augustus's Great Tower were certainly
placing beauty second, after the security
of a firmly planted structure. (Eight
centuries later, stability would be one
of Pei Ieoh Ming's guiding architectural
values as well, leading him to raise pyramids
within the Louvre's grounds.) |
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