The Architectural History of the Louvre: 800 Years in Three …

Set­ting aside just one day for the Lou­vre is a clas­sic first-time Paris vis­i­tor’s mis­take. The place is sim­ply too big to com­pre­hend on one vis­it, or indeed on ten vis­its. To grow so vast has tak­en eight cen­turies, a process explained in under three min­utes by the offi­cial video ani­mat­ed above. First con­struct­ed around the turn of the thir­teenth cen­tu­ry as a defen­sive fortress, it was con­vert­ed into a roy­al res­i­dence a cen­tu­ry and a half lat­er. It gained its first mod­ern wing in 1559, under Hen­ri II; lat­er, his wid­ow Cather­ine de’ Medici com­mis­sioned the Tui­leries palace and gar­dens, which Hen­ri IV had joined up to the Lou­vre with the Grande Galerie in 1610.

In the sev­en­teen-tens, Louis XVI com­plet­ed the Cour Car­rée, the Lou­vre’s main court­yard, before decamp­ing to Ver­sailles. It was only dur­ing the French Rev­o­lu­tion, toward the end of that cen­tu­ry, that the Nation­al Assem­bly declared it a muse­um.

The project of unit­ing it into an archi­tec­tur­al whole con­tin­ued under Napoleon I and III, the lat­ter of whom final­ly com­plet­ed it (and in the process dou­bled its size). The Tui­leries Palace was torched dur­ing the unpleas­ant­ness over the Paris Com­mune, but the rest of the Lou­vre sur­vived. Since then, its most notable alter­ation has been the addi­tion of I. M. Pei’s glass pyra­mid in 1989.

The pyra­mid may still have an air of con­tro­ver­sy these three and a half decades lat­er, but you can hard­ly deny that it at least improves upon the Cour Car­rée’s years as a park­ing lot. It stands, in any case, as just one of the count­less fea­tures that make the Lou­vre an archi­tec­tur­al palimpsest of French his­to­ry prac­ti­cal­ly as com­pelling as the col­lec­tion of art it con­tains. (Fran­coph­o­nes can learn much more about it from the longer-form doc­u­men­taries post­ed by Des Racines et des Ailes and Notre His­toire.) And how did I approach this most famous of all French insti­tu­tions on my own first trip to Paris, you ask? By not going at all. On my next trip to Paris, how­ev­er, I plan to go nowhere else.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Louvre’s Entire Col­lec­tion Goes Online: View and Down­load 480,00 Works of Art

A 3D Ani­mat­ed His­to­ry of Paris: Take a Visu­al Jour­ney from Ancient Times to 1900

How France Hid the Mona Lisa & Oth­er Lou­vre Mas­ter­pieces Dur­ing World War II

Take Immer­sive Vir­tu­al Tours of the World’s Great Muse­ums: The Lou­vre, Her­mitage, Van Gogh Muse­um & Much More

Japan­ese Guid­ed Tours of the Lou­vre, Ver­sailles, the Marais & Oth­er Famous French Places (Eng­lish Sub­ti­tles Includ­ed)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.