Louvre Palace

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  King Philip II of France ordered the Louvre Palace built in 1190 as he prepared to leave for the Third Crusade. The fortress stood on the right bank of the Seine to guard Paris against the English-held Duchy of Normandy. It was completed in 1202 and covers a total floor area of 244,000 square meters today. Its oldest wing still standing above ground dates from the late 1540s. Most of the current building was constructed in the 17th and 19th centuries. How did a garrison castle become the symbolic center of French monarchy? How did a building that spent years as a wheat warehouse end up as one of the world's most visited museums? And what explains a design project begun in the 1540s whose successors were still finishing the courtyard four centuries later?

• 2. The First Castle

  ›

  Philip II's castle was completed in 1202, occupying what is now the southwest quadrant of the Cour Carrée. It was nearly square, measuring seventy-eight by seventy-two meters. A crenellated curtain wall 2.6 meters thick enclosed the complex, ringed by a water-filled moat. Ten round towers stood at the corners and midpoints of the perimeter, with two pairs flanking the narrow gates on the southern and eastern sides. At the center of the courtyard, slightly offset to the northeast, rose the Grosse Tour du Louvre. It stood thirty meters high and fifteen meters wide, with external walls four meters thick. Round keeps were common in French castle design at the time, but few were as large. The circular form was deliberate; it eliminated the blind angles that square towers created, angles that allowed attackers to approach out of arrow range. The Grosse Tour took on a symbolic life that long outlasted its military usefulness. The traditional formula binding the king's fiefs declared that they depended on the king for his great keep of the Louvre. That phrase persisted in official documents until the 18th century. The keep itself had been demolished in the 1520s. Louis IX added the main ceremonial hall and the castle's first chapel in the 1230s. The basement of that addition was rediscovered during heating installations in 1882-1883 and is now known as the Salle Saint-Louis.

• 3. The Renaissance Overhaul

  ›

  Francis I returned from Spanish captivity after his defeat at Pavia and in 1528 ordered the old keep demolished. He formally commissioned architect Pierre Lescot and sculptor Jean Goujon in 1546 to redesign the building in a Renaissance style. Stone deliveries recorded in December 1545 suggest the project had already begun a year before the formal commission. Francis died in 1547 before the work progressed far. His successor Henry II ordered changes on the 10th of July 1549 and pressed the project forward. Lescot demolished the castle's western wing and replaced it with what became the Lescot Wing, ending on the southern side with the Pavillon du Roi. For Henry II's bedroom ceiling in 1556, Lescot departed from the French tradition of beamed ceilings. That ceiling was relocated in 1829 to the Colonnade Wing, where much of it survives. On the ground floor, Lescot installed monumental stone caryatids modeled on classical antiquity in the guards' hall, now called the Salle des Caryatides. The Wars of Religion halted all construction in the late 1560s. By then, Lescot had sketched an ambition no one would act on for fifty years. His vision was a courtyard four times the size of the medieval castle. That expanded space would eventually become the Cour Carrée.

• 4. The Grand Dessein

  ›

  Catherine de' Medici directed the building of a new palace west of the Louvre in 1564, constructed on the site of old tile factories. That gave it its name: the Tuileries. A letter from March 1565 shows she was already considering a building to connect it to the older Louvre. Henry IV, France's king from 1589 and master of Paris from 1594, gave that idea a formal name: the Grand Dessein, or Grand Design. From early 1595, he directed the construction of the Grande Galerie along the bank of the Seine. Scholarly tradition credits Louis Métezeau with its eastern section and Jacques II Androuet du Cerceau with the western one. That wing ran about 460 meters. The physical union of the Louvre and the Tuileries was sealed with the completion of the Pavillon de Flore in the early 1600s. Louis XIV abandoned the Louvre after his mother died there in 1666. He redirected all construction funds to Versailles, leaving the Grand Dessein incomplete despite his minister Colbert's protests. When Louis XVI was forced out of Versailles in October 1789, the Tuileries became France's primary seat of executive power. That role ended on the 23rd of May 1871, when the Tuileries was set ablaze during the Paris Commune. The main block was demolished in 1883, permanently altering the Louvre's shape.

• 5. A Palace of Many Functions

  ›

  In July 1214, Philip II defeated Ferdinand, Count of Flanders at the Battle of Bouvines. Ferdinand spent the next twelve years as a prisoner at the Louvre. He was among the most notable in a long line of noble captives. The list eventually included Charles II of Navarre in 1356 and Jean III de Grailly, held from 1372 until his death there in 1375. Philip II had also established a permanent royal archive at the Louvre after French royal records were lost at the Battle of Fréteval in 1194. Louis IX relocated that archive to the Palais de la Cité in 1231. State records returned to the Louvre in various forms over the following centuries. Philip IV established a second royal treasury there by 1296. After the suppression of the Knights Templar in the early 14th century, the Louvre became the sole Parisian location of the crown's treasury. Charles V had a particular love of books, earning him the moniker le sage, meaning both learned and wise. In 1368, he placed a collection of around 900 volumes in the castle's northwestern tower and renamed it the Tour de la Librairie. That collection is widely regarded as a forerunner of the French National Library, even though it was dispersed in the 15th century. The Louvre also hosted the Estates General in 1303 in the castle's grande salle, and again in 1593 in the reconstructed Lescot Wing. In a speech at the National Assembly in February 1849, Victor Hugo called for transforming the palace into what he described as a Mecca of intelligence.

• 6. The Glass Pyramid

  ›

  In September 1981, newly elected French President François Mitterrand proposed removing the Finance Ministry from the Richelieu Wing. The goal was to allow the museum to expand dramatically. American architect I. M. Pei was awarded the commission and in late 1983 proposed a modernist glass pyramid for the Cour Napoléon. The Louvre Pyramid and its underground lobby, the Hall Napoléon, opened on the 29th of March 1989. A second phase, completed in 1993, added car parks, exhibition halls, and a shopping mall named Carrousel du Louvre beneath the Place du Carrousel. Daylight enters that underground space through an inverted pyramid. It has been described as a humorous reference to its bigger, right-side-up sister upstairs. Pei made explicit reference to André Le Nôtre, the 17th-century designer of the Tuileries Garden, as an inspiration for his design. The reconstructed Richelieu Wing's new museum galleries were inaugurated in November 1993. Today the palace's 51,615 square meters of public exhibition floor space span three wings. The museum adopted this three-wing structure in 1988, naming each wing after a historical figure: Maximilien de Béthune Duke of Sully, the museum's first director Vivant Denon, and Cardinal Richelieu. The École du Louvre and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs also occupy portions of the complex. American essayist Adam Gopnik has written that the continuity the Louvre represents is the continuity of the French state.