When Napoleon Bonaparte seized power in the coup d’état of 9 November 1799, he was widely seen as the inevitable consequence of the French Revolution, whose ambitions he did so much to embody and betray. Louis XVI had been executed six years before, the Terror had swelled and then subsided, the Directory came and went, and now this scion of minor Corsican nobility could gaze with an air of uncontested ownership from his new apartment in the Tuileries half a mile east to the Palace of the Louvre. He was not yet emperor—that eminence would come five years later—but already he lived like one, and already it pleased his wife Josephine to hang the Mona Lisa on one side of her bed and Holbein’s portrait of Erasmus on the other.
The Louvre and its environs proved to be of singular centrality to Bonaparte’s ambitions. His path to power had been immeasurably aided on 5 October 1795, when, a few hundred feet from the Pavillon de Marsan at the western end of the Louvre, he subdued a royalist revolt beside the Church of Saint Roch on the rue Saint-Honoré, thus ushering in the phase of the Revolution known as the Directory. Soon he embarked on his first Italian campaign of 1796–1797, followed by his Egyptian campaign of 1798–1801, and from both of these foreign adventures he brought back thousands of works of art that continue to swell the collections of the Louvre. Even his coup d’état, the famous eighteenth Brumaire, occurred when he stormed the Palais des Tuileries and compelled the deputies to appoint him first consul.
For fifteen years, from the coup to his fall from power in 1815, Napoleon lived mostly in the Palais des Tuileries, when he was not leading armies into battle or reposing in one of the palaces of the ousted monarchy. His first full taste of the Louvre’s charm had occurred on 20 December 1797, when, following his return from the victorious first Italian campaign, he attended a lavish banquet in his honor in the Grande Galerie. A painting by Hubert Robert records the scene, in which a single table, impossibly long and covered in flawless white linen, seems to stretch out between dull, greenish-gray walls toward a vanishing point in infinite space. Such banquets would not be repeated often, however, since both the food and the smoke of the candelabras were seen as posing a threat to the gallery.
Three years later Napoleon was very nearly assassinated, on Christmas Eve of 1800, near the present Pavillon de Rohan. He had entered a carriage in the Cour des Tuileries—where a lawn now fans outward toward the Tuileries Garden—and was heading north to the opera in the theater of the Comédie Française, in order to hear Haydn’s oratorio Die Schöpfung. Preceded by his cavaliers de la garde consulaire and followed by the carriage of Josephine and her sister, Napoleon rode east to the place du Carrousel, then north along the rue Saint-Nicaise. Unbeknownst to him or his men, a group of Chouans, members of the royalist resistance in Brittany, had armed a crude device known as a machine infernale—a barrel filled with gun powder, bullets, and nails—that they detonated from a distance by means of a fuse attached to a sawed-off shotgun. But through some miscalculation, the detonation was delayed, allowing Napoleon and his party to pass unharmed. The explosion, however, shook the entire Quartier du Louvre, at the time one of the busiest and most populous parts of the city. As many as twenty-two men, women and children died, and many more were injured. A number of houses in or near the place du Carrousel were also destroyed. Ironically, this violent and inadvertent clearing of the area helped greatly in laying the groundwork for the massive construction of the Louvre’s northern half, which was about to begin.
Some ten years later, Napoleon experienced a far happier event in the Louvre, when he led his second wife, Marie-Louise, in a wedding cortege from the Tuileries Palace through the Grande Galerie to the Salon Carré, where they exchanged vows. Along the entire length of the Grande Galerie, according to a contemporary drawing by Benjamin Zix, thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of bystanders came to watch as the imperial couple passed. Despite all the tourists who now traverse that space at the height of the summer season, this event may well have drawn the largest crowd ever assembled in the four-hundred-year history of the Grande Galerie.
Few of the Parisians who stormed the Bastille twenty years earlier could have imagined that they were witnessing the birth of a new era in human history, and none could have known that an obscure second lieutenant, all of twenty at the time, would come to hold dictatorial power over their lives, with the Louvre as the center of his operations. The attack on the Bastille, though it eventually changed the world, had little immediate effect on Paris or the Louvre. Scarcely a month later, in August of 1789, tens of thousands of visitors thronged the Salon Carré, as they always did, to see its annual or biennial Salon. But this time they would have been more apt to admire the new glass skylight that had been installed six weeks earlier—a miracle of modernity—than to reflect on the events of the month before. Such traces of disquiet as could be found in the Salon of 1789 were subtle enough that few visitors noticed. Hubert Robert, who could complete a canvas in a single sitting, exhibited a work depicting the assault on the Bastille, painted one week after the event. Now in the Musée Carnavalet, it depicts the ugly old fortress, its brick façade rising against an evening sky filled with storm clouds, while rubble fills its waterless moat and Parisians stand about marveling at what they had just brought to pass. At the same time, one of the most famous French portraits of the age, Jacques-Louis David’s depiction of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier and his wife, now in the Metropolitan Museum, was withdrawn from the Salon at the last minute for fear that it might be vandalized: although the aristocratic Lavoisier is known today as the “father of modern chemistry,” he was also a commissioner of the Royal Gunpowder and Saltpeter Administration, and much of his gunpowder had been stored in the Bastille.
Other than those works, however, the images on view were much as one would expect from previous Salons. Joseph-Marie Vien exhibited Love Fleeing Servitude, one of his typically charming allegories involving an airborne Cupid. Jean-Baptiste Regnault’s equally typical Deposition, a work of austere piety now in the collection of the Louvre, made its debut on this occasion, as did several of David’s most illustrious compositions, among them The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons and Paris and Helen, both of which now hang in the Louvre’s Salle Daru. Although attendance numbers for these annual Salons were not taken, we know how many catalogs were sold. The number for 1789 was 18,200, a drop of more than 15 percent from the 22,000 sold two years earlier, but only slightly lower than in the two Salons before that: it is a fair guess that this drop was related to the recent convulsions in the capital. If we assume one catalog for every three people who attended, then roughly fifty-five thousand members of the public, a perfectly respectable figure, visited the exhibition in the four weeks of its run.
In due course, however, as the Revolution expanded and its implications grew more apparent, the art of the Salons became more assertively political. In the Salon of 1791, David displayed the preparatory sketches for his Oath of the Jeu de Paume, depicting the moment when the members of the constituent assembly, having gathered in Versailles, vowed not to disband until they had written a constitution. Two years later, he did not present any work at the Salon, although, in the neighboring Cour Carrée, he did exhibit his great Death of Marat, depicting the assassination, scarcely a month earlier, of the famous revolutionary. As for the Salon of 1795, David was again absent, this time for the excellent reason that he was imprisoned following the fall of his ally Robespierre. By the end of the decade, the exhibition’s flattery of the ascendant Bonaparte was manifest and unapologetic. Even before his coup d’état, his bust appeared in the Salon of 1798, while the Salon of 1801 included Baron Gros’s Bonaparte on the Pont d’Arcole and Regnault’s Death of General Desaix (commemorating one of Bonaparte’s most trusted deputies).
No part of Paris witnessed as many of the Revolution’s great events as the Quartier du Louvre and the area just beyond it, stretching from the revolutionary clubs of the Palais-Royal west to the guillotines of the place de la Concorde. Across the street from the Louvre, in the courtyard of the Palais-Royal, the orator Camille Desmoulins, on 12 July 1789, leapt up on one of the tabletops of the Café de Foy and incited his fellow citizens to take up arms against the crown. A few blocks west, the Jacobins conspired in what is now the Marché Saint-Honoré, while their adversaries, the more moderate Feuillants led by the Marquis de Lafayette, met in a monastery a few blocks further west, on what is now the rue de Castiglione. The two factions would initially come together in fierce debate in the Manège, formerly a royal riding academy that stood just south of the monastery, on what is now the rue de Rivoli, opposite the Tuileries Garden.
In early October, about a month and a half after the storming of the Bastille, a famine seized the capital. The women of Paris, escorted by General Lafayette and twenty thousand soldiers of uncertain loyalties, marched on Versailles, eleven miles to the west, to present their grievances to the king. Amid flaring tempers, the royal family was induced to return to the capital. By the time they arrived at the Tuileries, they found that it had changed greatly. Under high ceilings, makeshift mezzanines accessed by makeshift stairways had been slapped together and fitted with makeshift stove pipes and doorways. To complete the degradation, the odor of cooking and privies wafted through the halls, and clotheslines were strung from windows whose glass panes, as often as not, had been knocked out and replaced by oiled parchment or old newsprint.
Suddenly everyone had to clear out to make way for the royal family and the multitudinous court that was descending on Paris in a train of nearly a thousand carriages. Since there was not enough space for all of them in the Tuileries and the Louvre Palaces, lodgings were found in the Grande Galerie, in the stables of the Grande Écurie and, across the river, in Les Invalides. Once inside the palace, Louis was periodically brought to the windows of his apartment to wave to the crowd of gawkers who had gathered in the Jardin des Tuileries. Marie Antoinette—according to ancient protocol—occupied the floor beneath him, while their children were placed in the appartement de la reine on the ground floor of the southern half of the Tuileries. There were only two children now, since the dauphin, Louis Joseph, had died only three months earlier at the age of seven—it had not been an easy year for the royal couple. Other members of the royal family found lodging in the Pavillon de Flore
and the Pavillon de Marsan, at the western end of the Louvre.
For the next two years, the royal family were virtually prisoners in the palace. And it was from the Cour des Princes, between the Pavillon de Flore and the site of the present Arc du Carrousel, that the royal family tried to escape on the night of 20 June 1791. The plan called for the Comte de Fersen, a Swedish aristocrat dressed as a coachman, to pick up the royal children and their governess in a carriage too ramshackle to arouse suspicions. From there he would continue to the rue de l’Échelle, a few hundred feet northeast of the palace, where the king and then the queen, disguised as their own servants, would arrive separately. Their plan was to travel to Varennes and slip unobserved into Flanders. The children were successfully evacuated, and the king, together with his sister, Madame Royale, joined them as planned on the rue de l’Échelle. But Marie Antoinette lost her way amid the labyrinth of medieval streets that stood between the Tuileries and the Louvre and so, confused and afraid, she reached the carriage two hours late. That delay was their undoing: the duc de Choiseul, who was supposed to meet them with a squadron of hussars near the border and escort them out of the country, assumed that they were not coming and left his post. When they finally reached Varennes without guards, they were identified by the locals and returned, under duress, to the Tuileries.
A few months later, the monarchy of France, as it had existed for eight centuries, ceased to be. Louis would continue to function as king, but as of 4 September 1791, he was no longer the king of France, the sovereign embodiment of the French state, but rather the king of the French, and thus a servant, however exalted, of the French people. According to the same logic, the Louvre and the Tuileries, which had been designated as les bâtiments du roi (the buildings of the king) became les bâtiments de la nation. Even though the two architects charged with maintaining the Louvre and the Tuileries, Maximilien Brébion and Jean-Augustin Renard, retained their posts, the very decrepitude of those buildings (combined with the fact that their long-debated union was still unachieved) was taken as proof of the culpable incompetence of the old order. As the oratorical Betrand Barère charged: “The Louvre and the Tuileries are monuments of greatness and of indigence. The genius of art has traced their contours and raised their façades, but the dissipating indifference of several kings and the towering avarice of many ministers have disdained to bring them to completion.”1 Accordingly several projects were drawn up at this time for the completion of the Louvre complex. The most interesting, in that it presaged what eventually came to pass, was by Jacques Guillaume Legrand and Jacques Molinos. Their plan proposed—hardly for the first time—a new northern wing corresponding to the Grande Galerie to the south. As importantly, their paired-down architectural language anticipated the form in which that wing would eventually materialize, fifteen years in the future, under the imperial architects of Napoleon I.
Tensions between the king and the legislature came to a head on 11 June 1792, as the latter was deliberating in the nearby Manège: Louis vetoed first the legislature’s decision to exile refractory priests and then its attempt to establish a military camp just beyond the borders of Paris. He feared that these forces might be used against the citizens. In response to his vetoes, a mob of sanscullotes, members of the Paris working class, showed up before the garden façade of the Tuileries Palace and tried to pry open the wrought-iron gate separating the public part of the garden from the king’s private garden. At that point, on the other side of the palace, the king’s cannoniers defected and turned their weapons against the eastern gates. As the citizens poured into the Tuileries, they found the king cowering beside one of the windows of his first-floor apartment. They compelled him to drink a toast to the health of the nation while he wore the red bonnet of the Revolution.
Remarkably, the palace sustained no damage on this occasion. That would not be the case two months later. On 10 August 1792, amid rumors that munitions were being amassed in the Tuileries to use against the people, the sansculottes armed themselves again as they approached the palace from the west. There they were met by a contingent of four thousand members of the National Guard, Swiss Guard and gendarmerie. As the Swiss Guard began to fire on the mob, the king was compelled to sign an order for them to stand down. At this point the sansculottes poured into the palace once again, provoking a melee that resulted in the death of 380 of their members and twice as many of the palace guards. While the western façade of the Tuileries sustained little damage beyond a few bullet holes, the lodgings of the Swiss Guard on the eastern side were burnt to the ground. Traces of the charred remains came to light during the excavations of the 1980s. In all, nearly 1,200 men died on that one day at the southern end of the Louvre.
But that was only the beginning of the violence. On 21 January 1793, Louis was beheaded in the place de la Revolution (today’s place de la Concorde), opposite the entrance to the Hôtel de Crillon. The guillotine had been set up near where we now find the statue of a seated female figure from fifty years later, representing the city of Brest. Marie Antoinette died in the same place and by the same means nine months later, on 16 October. In the thirteen months of the Reign of Terror—from June 1793 to the end of July one year later—more than 2,600 men and women were thus executed in the place de la Revolution. And if Louis Capet, as the king was known, was one of the very first to suffer this fate, one of the very last was the author of the Terror himself, Maximilien de Robespierre, who was decapitated on 28 July 1794, exactly a year and a day after he had achieved his malignant eminence.
There was a curious continuity between the cultural ambitions of the ancien régime and those of the revolutionary order that replaced it. More than a century later, the Soviets would make a point of repudiating what they saw as the effeteness of Old Russia, with its Fabergé eggs and Gallic manners. But relatively little of that antagonism can be found—at least at a cultural level—between the old and new orders of revolutionary France. Coypel and Boucher, the standard-bearers of rococo, had become anathema to some of the more radical painters of the latest generation, and, as we have seen, spitballs, discharged by the students of the académie, menaced the surface of Watteau’s Pèlerinage à l’île de Cythère. But the austerely neoclassical idiom that reached its apogee in Jacques-Louis David had been fostered and widely admired in the Salons of the ancien régime, and all sides appear to have been in general agreement regarding the future of art and especially of the Louvre as an art museum.
David, the Jacobin ally of Marat and Robespierre, foresaw the Louvre as a nursery for the future greatness of French art: from the floor of the assembly, he enjoined its members “to call forth the spirits of the great masters. May their learned and immortal masterpieces speak powerfully and constantly to the artist inflamed with a love of his art!”2 In this he was scarcely less vehement than d’Angiviller, who, in the dying days of the old order, had fought so valiantly to transform the Louvre into a temple of art.
In any discussion of the Louvre’s future role as a museum, however, the prevailing opinion was that the palace should be occupied not just by the visual arts, but also by governmental ministries and learned societies. Indeed, this position dominated all discussion of the subject until the Ministry of Finance finally left the northern part of the Louvre in 1993. But this point of view was expressed most clearly on 26 May 1791, when, after half a century of debate, delay and dashed hopes, the constituent assembly issued the momentous decree that formally transformed the palace into the museum that we know today: “The Louvre and the Tuileries,” the decree read, “will be united to form the National Palace, intended for the inhabitation of the King and for the gathering of all the monuments of science and art and the principle establishment of public instruction.” Around the same time, scores of smaller museums were projected throughout the country in many of the provincial departments.
The Louvre’s initial designation as a muséum rather than the now standard French musée attests to how novel the word and even the concept still were. In its first half century or so of existence, the Musée du Louvre, as it is known today, would change its name several times. It would be known as the Musée Napoléon, the Musée Royal and the Musée Napoléon III before it assumed its present name. At its birth, however, it was the Musée Central des Arts.
Whatever high-flying phrases attended the foundation of the Louvre Museum, the man tasked with putting them into action, in effect its first director, was Jean-Marie Roland de La Platière, a pragmatist of few words. Belonging to the more moderate Girondin wing of the National Convention, he was determined to have the museum up and running as soon as possible. Given their differing personalities and politics, it was inevitable that Roland would eventually come into conflict with the radical David. Whereas David was mainly concerned that the art be made available to other artists, Roland insisted that “it should be open to everyone and everyone should be able to place his easel in front of any painting or sculpture he chooses.” He saw the opening of the museum in frankly political terms: “I believe that the museum will have so great an effect on people’s spirits, will so elevate their souls and so stir their hearts, that it will be one of the most powerful means of illuminating the French Republic.”3
As Roland’s words suggest, the creation of the Louvre Museum was an event at once exuberantly populist and unapologetically elitist. It aspired to bring the highest visual culture into the public realm, which necessarily included the lowest rungs of society. All visitors were welcome as long as they comported themselves with dignity: they had to be sober and under no condition must they try to poke the canvases. It was implicitly assumed that something enriching and ennobling would come from being in proximity to five hundred of the finest paintings ever made. At the same time, and for the same reason, neither the curators nor the public itself would have ever assumed that there was any point in exhibiting popular art or art of the second rank: only the best would do.
And yet, few museums in the world ever opened in more perilous circumstances than the Louvre on 8 November 1793. The date was chosen to coincide with festivities celebrating the new constitution. At the same time, the Reign of Terror was in full swing: in what amounted to a coup d’état, the Montagnards began arresting members of the Girondin faction and would soon start executing them, even as they were now executing aristocrats in the place de la Concorde. Meanwhile, reactionary unrest in the Vendée had turned into a full-blown civil war and, beyond the Rhine, the united armies of the old order were marshaling against the young republic.
There was nothing at all beautiful about one’s arrival at the new museum. Passing through a labyrinth of irregular streets, the visitor entered the Cour du Louvre, still full of ramshackle houses and shops. From there one moved through a long, ill-lit passageway before entering what is now the Cour du Sphinx and ascending the narrow stairway that Maximilien Brébion had designed a generation earlier to facilitate access to the annual exhibitions in the Salon Carrée.4 The museum, of course, was far smaller than it is today, occupying only the half of the Grande Galerie that is closer to the Louvre Palace. It was separated from the western half, closer to the Tuileries, by a makeshift partition. Once visitors reached the actual galleries, they found them to be far more somber than what we see today. Because the glass ceilings that had been planned would not be completed for another decade, the art was so poorly lit that it could be fully appreciated only on the brightest days. In his Interior View of the Grande Galerie from about 1795, Hubert Robert, perhaps the best source for how the museum looked at its inception, depicts the galleries in a way that hardly seems inviting: there was no ornament along the walls, and low wooden fences separated the public from the art. The darkened vault of the gallery was painted a somber bluish-gray, the lateral walls, a dull slate green. Although light filtered in from both sides of the Grande Galerie—these side windows would be mostly suppressed during the 1850s—the strong glare on sunny days made it harder to see the paintings: because they were hung Salon style, usually three high, a close inspection was almost impossible.
Gabriel de Saint-Aubin’s view of the Salon of 1753, in the Salon Carré of the Louvre. The stacking of paintings six high is associated with these periodic exhibitions and is accordingly known as “Salon Style.”
In addition to the 538 paintings on view, 48 sculptures were hauled up from the depot in the Salles des Antiques, just beneath the Salon Carré: all but nine were ancient or modern portrait busts, reflecting the imperial Roman coloration of the age. The Mona Lisa was still in Versailles—having not yet achieved anything like the transcendent status it would acquire at the end of the next century—but another of Leonardo da Vinci’s female portraits, La Belle Ferronière, was on view. So too were Raphael’s La Belle Jardinière and La Grande Sainte Famille, Veronese’s Pilgrims at Emmaus, Le Brun’s Family of Darius at the Feet of Alexander and Guido Reni’s three depictions of the labors of Hercules. Thus although all painting genres were represented, history painting, still deemed the most prestigious, predominated in the new galleries.
The Louvre was not open to the public every day. Working with the Republican calendar promulgated in 1793, the directors of the museum divided each month into three ten-day periods. In each of these, the museum was open to artists for the first five days, followed by two days of closure, dedicated to maintenance of the premises, and then three days when the public was allowed to visit, from nine o’clock in the morning to seven o’clock in the evening. Sixty veterans of military campaigns were assigned duty as guards, not only to ensure the safety of the works of art, but also to make certain that no one entered the museum in an intoxicated state or with a dog, and that children were not separated from their parents. An attempt was also made to keep visitors moving generally in the same direction. Above all, the guards were needed to protect the art, often images of the repudiated, reactionary Roman Church and portraits of the discredited nobility. These were a likely, even legitimate target for the sort of revolutionary zeal that, until recently, had been openly encouraged by the council itself.
Not many months after the Louvre’s inauguration, the Vicomte de Roland, together with many other Girondins, became the subject of persecution by the now triumphant Montagnards of the Jacobin faction. Roland took his own life, while his politically active wife was sent to the guillotine. The painter David, a close associate of Maximilien de Robespierre, assumed Roland’s place as director of what would become known, between 1794 and 1797, as the Muséum National des Arts. A committed revolutionary, David oversaw the suppression of the Academies of Architecture and of Painting and Sculpture, which he saw as bastions of the old order. He made other changes, however, that were less ideological. Because doubts had emerged regarding some of the restoration work on paintings in the collection, especially Raphael’s La Grande Sainte Famille, David established a new conservatory to oversee such procedures. But his tenure proved brief: during the so-called Thermidorean Reaction, which began on 27 July 1794 with the execution of Robespierre and other Jacobin leaders, the more radical members of the Louvre were removed and, in the case of David, arrested. Their positions were filled by such stalwart artists of the ancien régime as Hubert Robert, the architect Charles de Wailly, the sculptor Augustin Pajou and Fragonard (who had also served under David). Each of these members of the Louvre’s inchoate staff was compelled to learn, as he went, lessons that no previous schooling or experience could possibly have imparted. For even if the Louvre was not the first art museum in history, it was one of the first and it was surely the largest ever created.
And yet, despite the convulsive circumstances that attended its creation, the success of the new museum was immediate. As the annual or biennial Salons had proved, the Parisian public felt a great pent-up hunger for visual culture. Although a similar appetite existed for literature and theater, opera and dance, that appetite had long been satisfied—for a certain price—within the existing structures of Parisian cultural life. But the ability to see art, especially great art, was far more limited, if not impossible beyond the Salons. There was the modest open-air exhibit of art in the place Dauphine, as well as the annual display of paintings that the Goldsmith Guild had commissioned for the Cathedral of Notre-Dame. And of course there were the many altarpieces that could just be made out in the darkened corners of the local churches. But most of this work, in addition to its generally middling quality, was French, fairly new, and somewhat limited by its ecclesiastical subject matter. The incomparable collection of the duc d’Orléans had indeed been displayed in the Palais du Luxembourg, but that was nearly twenty years in the past. And despite the fact that Paris possessed some of the finest art collections in Europe, they were accessible almost exclusively to the well-born: the students of the academy, to say nothing of the general mass of society, rarely saw any of them.
But when the Louvre finally opened on 8 November 1793, all of that changed. For the first time, any man or woman in Paris could stand before some of the loftiest examples of human artifice ever assembled in one place. It is easy to imagine the powerful effect that the public felt, before the age of photography, on encountering for the first time the beauties of the Florentine High Renaissance, the sinuous mannerism of Correggio and Parmigianino, the brooding human depths of Rembrandt van Rijn.
A few years later, on 15 August 1797, the Louvre initiated a practice, almost inadvertently, that would prove to be of the highest importance to the future of museums throughout the world. A special and temporary exhibition opened in the Galerie d’Apollon, consisting of 427 drawings from the museum’s collection, arranged according to schools and specific artists. Although this exhibition was presented as nothing more than a collection of drawings brought before the public, it may well be the first example of the sort of special exhibition that now stands at the core of what most museums, including the Louvre, do and are, enabling them to reinvent themselves from one season to the next.
The Louvre’s influence was felt in other ways as well. For the past two hundred years, the institution has been so intimately associated with art that we tend to overlook the important role it played in the birth of the World’s Fair exhibitions that we know today. The Exposition des produits de l’industrie française (The Exhibition of the Products of French Industry) was held for two consecutive years, 1801–1802, in the Cour Carrée, as a direct ancestor of all those universal expositions that would draw worldwide attention in the latter years of the nineteenth century and that gave us, among other things, the Eiffel Tower in 1889. To accommodate the exhibition, long wooden colonnades were set up in the four corners of the Cour Carrée, recalling the porticoed walkways of ancient Athens and Rome.
In the time of Napoleon Bonaparte, the Louvre was made up of two great, separate and unequal kingdoms. The first and more important consisted of the grand tradition of European painting, essentially the painting of Italy, France and the Lowlands from the time of Raphael down to the work of contemporary artists. The second kingdom was the collection of antiquities: this meant, in theory, the sculptures of Greece and Rome, but in practice the sculptures only of Rome; Greece remained a largely undiscovered country at the end of the eighteenth century, and the golden age of archaeology—in which the Louvre played so prominent a role—was still several generations in the future. Napoleon chose two men, Vivant Denon and Ennio Quirino Visconti, to shape the institutional development of the Louvre, the former overseeing its paintings, the latter its ancient sculptures.
The most visited part of the modern Louvre is the Aile Denon, named in honor of Dominique Vivant, Baron Denon (1747–1825), whom Napoleon Bonaparte chose to be the first director of the museum: occupying the Louvre’s southern half, the upper story of the Aile Denon, in addition to comprising part of Grande Galerie, dates to the 1850s and displays the museum’s Italian paintings from 1300 to 1800, as well as the larger French paintings of the early nineteenth century. Denon, in addition to being an able draftsman and engraver, also achieved renown as a writer and art critic. Long before the demise of the ancien régime, he had earned a minor literary reputation from a brief work of fiction, Point de Lendemain, a tale of youthful amorous adventure. While serving as a diplomat in Italy, Denon nurtured his deep understanding of visual art. Bonaparte met him through his wife Josephine and was sufficiently impressed that he asked Denon to join his Egyptian campaign. Denon was officially part of the literary and artistic section of the Institut d’Égypte, a learned society that Napoleon formed to study the culture of ancient Egypt, which, until then, had been almost entirely unknown to the West. The result of Denon’s participation was the two volume Voyage dans la basse et la haute Égypte (Journey in Lower and Upper Egypt), which is often credited with sparking that taste for Egyptomania that conquered much of Europe in the first quarter of the nineteenth century.
But above all else, Denon was a compulsive collector who, both in his private and official capacities, passed through life acquiring all manner of oddments. Anatole France attested to this voracious, all-conquering appetite in a vivid description of Denon’s apartment at No. 7 Quai Voltaire, directly across the Seine from the Grande Galerie. His taste in the old masters was astonishingly broad for that time, embracing everyone from Ruysdael and Giotto to Fra Bartolomeo and Guercino. “The good man had kept them with much taste and no preference,” the author relates.5 Denon also collected Chinese porcelain and Japanese bronzes, a fifteenth-century reliquary, the ashes of Heloise (beloved of Abelard), a few hairs from the moustache of Henri IV, some bones of Molière and La Fontaine, a tooth of Voltaire and a drop of Napoleon’s blood.
Robert Lefévre’s portrait of Vivant Denon (1747–1825), director of the Louvre from 1802 until Napoleon’s fall in 1815.
Such being his acquisitiveness, one is not surprised by how zealously Denon raided the palaces, monasteries and private homes of Europe in his determination to enhance the holdings of the Louvre, which he directed from 1801 until the fall of Napoleon in 1815. Denon ingratiatingly suggested that the Louvre be renamed the Musée Napoléon, and so it was until the regime’s collapse. Even tombs were not safe from Denon, who soon came to be known as the aquila rapax, the rapacious eagle. Although most of the art he seized was eventually returned to its rightful owners, following Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, some of the best works, among them Giotto’s Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata, remain in the Louvre to this day.
There was no province of art that did not engage the universalizing instincts of Vivant Denon, but his duties at the Louvre were focused almost exclusively on European painting from the Italian primitives to the nineteenth century. The other half of the Louvre’s mission, in practice if not in theory, was to display Greek and especially Roman antiquities. This field called upon the unrivaled expertise of Ennio Quirino Visconti (1751–1818), who had distinguished himself in his native Rome by cataloging the collections of the Museo Pio-Clementino in the Vatican. If Denon was an aesthete and an impresario of sorts, Visconti was a scholar and archaeologist who had conducted pioneering excavations at the Tomb of the Scipios in Rome and at the Villa of Hadrian, just outside the city. A native Roman himself, Visconti rose quickly through the ranks: after his pioneering research on the antiquities in the Museo Pio-Clementino, he became curator of Rome’s recently formed Musei Capitolini. When Napoleon invaded the city in 1798, he exiled the pope and established the short-lived Republica Romana. Visconti, who had long harbored republican sympathies, became one of its six consuls. But when the papacy was restored in 1800, Visconti fled to Paris, where he spent the rest of his life, arranging the Louvre’s collection of ancient art, the Musée des Antiques. Half a century later, his son, the architect Louis Visconti, would devise the master plan for the Nouveau Louvre of Napoleon III.
Of the Louvre’s many paintings by Hubert Robert, none is more disconcerting than his Imaginary View of the Grande Galerie in Ruins from 1796, which depicts the building as a classical desolation, recalling the Palace of Domitian on the Palatine Hill in Rome: the entire roof of the Grande Galerie has been shorn off to reveal open sky, while the ground is littered with fallen debris, and peasants wander among shattered antique torsos. But in the center of the picture is a puzzling sight: a young artist sketches the Apollo Belvedere, among the finest sculptures to survive the fall of Rome and one of the most famous works associated with the Vatican Museums. Why it should appear in a scene of Paris, even one as fanciful as this, becomes clear in another painting by Robert, perhaps from the same year, The Draftsman of Antiquities. Here the viewer encounters another part of the Louvre (the modern Cour du Sphinx) mercifully intact, again with the Apollo Belvedere and other ancient masterpieces, among them The Old Centaur, which is indeed part of the Louvre’s collections. The sculptures, including the one of Apollo, are displayed with no ceremony and in no order, for this is an accurate depiction of the warehouse that the Louvre had become. Robert was content to act as a journalist, dutifully recording what he saw in front of him. This work bears witness that the French Republic (which was initially in such financial straits that it had to extract gold threads from the tapestries of François I) would soon overrun Europe, pillaging as it went and conveying its ill-gotten booty directly into the galleries of the Louvre. Although most of these works would ultimately be returned, such restitution was still twenty years in the future: for now, the Louvre became the greatest repository of art, ancient and modern, that the world had ever seen or would ever see again.
By fair means and foul, these treasures accumulated in the chambers of the Louvre. Scarcely one hundred days after the storming of the Bastille, the constituent assembly voted, on 2 November 1789, to nationalize the property of the clergy. A year later, on 1 December 1790, that same body passed another law calling for important cultural artifacts to be removed from churches and convents and, soon enough, from the homes of those members of the nobility who had escaped into exile (or were subsequently executed). By the middle of that decade, more than thirteen thousand works had been seized from the collections of ninety-three aristocrats. Among these were two royal princes, Philippe Egalité, duc d’Orléans and the Prince of Condé, as well as such renowned collectors as the Baron de Breteuil, the duc de Brissac and Charles de Saint-Morys, whose collection of French, Italian and Northern drawings was said to number more than twelve thousand. The labels beside many of the paintings in the Louvre bear witness, even today, to the predations of two centuries past. Next to the provenance one finds the words saisie révolutionnaire, or revolutionary confiscation. Each of those works was acquired through an act of aggression mitigated only by the emulsifying passage of years. The works thus confiscated were then placed in depots around the country. In Paris itself, two of these depots stood on the Left Bank: the Convent of the Petits Augustins, whose remains were subsequently integrated into the École des Beaux-Arts on the rue Bonaparte, and the Hôtel de Nesle, which stood directly across the Seine from the Louvre and no longer exists.
Hubert Robert’s Imaginary View of the Grande Galerie of the Louvre in Ruins (1796), painted amid an ongoing debate about how to adorn the gallery. Napoleon seized the Apollo Belvedere, in the center, from the Vatican, to which it would be returned twenty years later.
But at least these treasures were valued and spared. Religious sculptures and liturgical objects fared far worse. The medievalism that dominated European taste for much of the nineteenth century and that was so integral to the rise of nationalism was not yet the cultural force it would soon become. For now, neoclassicism reigned supreme and expressed itself in a virulent anticlericalism. Many of the finest works of medieval sculpture, among them the western portal of Notre-Dame de Paris, were damaged or obliterated as the citizens vented their hatred of the church. The royal tombs at Saint Denis—six miles north of Paris’s modern boundaries—were ransacked and all the bones scattered. The tombs themselves, masterpieces of the French Renaissance and a matter of relative indifference to the attackers, were sometimes spared, but such bones as could be retrieved were relegated to a mass grave.
As always in such assaults, gold chalices and jeweled robes were nothing more than expensive objects that could be profitably melted down or otherwise monetized. Some few of these religious heirlooms, especially those that were deemed of essential value to the French nation, survived the onslaught. A sword named Joyeuse, thought to be the one that Charlemagne carried into battle and that was afterwards used to crown the kings of France, arrived at the Louvre in 1793 and remains there to this day. Whatever its origins, it underwent numerous modifications over the centuries and would soon do so again: when Napoleon I crowned himself emperor in 1804, he insisted not only that Joyeuse be part of the ceremony, but also that it bear his initial, N. When he in turn was exiled in 1814, the restored Bourbon king, Louis XVIII, replaced that noxious letter with the fleur-de-lis, the traditional emblem of the French monarchy.
Today the sword belongs to the Louvre’s Département des Objets d’Art, as does another masterpiece of medieval art that was seized from the treasury of Saint Denis early in the revolution. This is the so-called Vase d’Aliénor, a vase that Abbot Suger of Saint Denis gave to Louis VII in the first half of the twelfth century and that eventually came into the possession of Eleanor of Aquitaine. The body is formed from solid rock crystal, while its silver-gilt neck and base are encrusted with jewels. Even more imposing, perhaps, and surely better known, is the porphyry vase known as Suger’s Eagle, mounted in gold around the mouth, body and base, in such a way as to suggest the head, wings and talons of an eagle. These three masterpieces of medieval art resisted the usual fate of jewel-encrusted golden objects only because they were understood to be of supreme historical consequence.
These seizures took on an almost industrial dimension when, a few years later, the armies of France—mostly under Bonaparte, but even before him—overran the kingdoms and principalities of Europe and then advanced into Egypt and the Levant. Indeed, these military campaigns may be unique in the history of warfare in that their goals had almost as much to do with the acquisition of visual art as with the conquest of territory. If the seizure of fine art had been one of the inevitable consequences of the ancient Roman campaigns, now it was nothing less than the stated aim and policy of the French high command. The Comité d’Instruction, the body convened to oversee the seizure of precious art, ordered the creation of what it politely called agences d’évacuation and agences d’extraction, which essentially oversaw the removal of all portable economic and cultural assets from the conquered nations. The Comité d’Instruction further advised that “artists and learned literary men be sent in secret, following in the footsteps of our armies … and carefully remove monuments of art and science and bring them into France.”6
One of the most vociferous advocates of this policy was Jean-Baptiste Wicar, a rather middling neoclassical painter who had studied under David and now applied the most twisted logic to justify such wholesale rapacity: “Liberty commands us to confiscate the remains of [Rome’s] splendor. It is for us that time has preserved them…. Only we can appreciate them.”7 Another of David’s pupils, the even less gifted Jacques-Luc Barbier, vindicated such pillaging in the name of both civilization and humanity itself. In accordance with the universalizing logic of the Déclaration des droits de l’homme (The Declaration of the Rights of Man), he contended that “the immortal works left to us by Rubens, Van Dyck and the other founders of the Flemish School are no longer in a foreign land. Brought together with care by the representatives of the people, they have now been deposited in the fatherland of art and inspiration, in the fatherland of liberty and sacred equality, in the French Republic.”8
Translated into action, this lofty oration resulted in pulling down and carting away two large altarpieces, The Raising of the Cross and The Descent from the Cross, from the Cathedral of Our Lady in Antwerp. These were the work of Peter Paul Rubens, an artist especially admired by the French and thus especially in their crosshairs. He was but one of many Flemish artists whose works were seized, together with those of Van Dyck, Jordaens and Rombouts. Next the French forces swept through Holland, seizing nearly two hundred paintings from the collection of the stathouder Frederic William V, Prince of Orange, after he fled their advancing armies. The rapacity of the French extended to architecture itself: the Palatine Chapel in Aachen, one of the most perfectly preserved monuments of the age of Charlemagne, was despoiled of its verde antica columns. Several of these were integrated into the interior architecture of the summer apartments of Anne of Austria, where they remain, unnoticed and all but unacknowledged, to this day.
But the real goal of the French armies, at least in regard to cultural booty, was Italy, and Rome most of all. “If our victorious armies penetrate into Italy,” wrote Abbé Grégoire, a Catholic priest and ardent revolutionist, “then the seizure of the Apollo Belvedere and the Hercules Farnese would be the most brilliant conquest. It is Greece that decorated Rome: but should the masterpieces of the Greek republics adorn a country of slaves? The French Republic ought to be their ultimate resting place.”9
On 2 March 1796, Napoleon Bonaparte, a twenty-six-year-old soldier who, three years before, had done the state some service at the blockade of Toulon, was placed at the head of the Army of Italy. On a personal level, Napoleon appears to have quickly acquired a taste for art. Less than two months after his promotion, by which point he had already conquered much of Italy, he wrote: “In the treaty we have just concluded, I had wanted to include a beautiful painting by Gerrit Dou, owned by the King of Sardinia, but I didn’t know how to work it into an armistice.” He needn’t have worried. Another general, Bertrand Clauzel, heard of this wish and, some two years later, he acquired the painting for the Louvre, where it remains to this day. Soon Napoleon invaded the Veneto, where he seized Mantegna’s Virgin of Victory and Carpaccio’s The Preaching of Saint Steven, both of which remain in the Louvre, having never been returned.
While in Venice Napoleon removed the four horses from the façade of the Basilica di San Marco and sent them to Paris. To be sure, six centuries before the Venetians themselves had stolen the horses from Constantinople’s Hippodrome during the Fourth Crusade. These horses were destined to sit in Paris for more than a decade, atop the Arc du Carrousel and flanking a statue of Napoleon dressed in antique robes (they have since been replaced with reproductions). Also in Venice, Napoleon carted off Veronese’s Wedding Feast at Cana, which, at twenty feet high and more than thirty feet across, is the largest painting on canvas in the Louvre, dominating the south end of the Salle des États and facing the Mona Lisa. From Venice the Grande Armée descended into Rome, where it made off with Raphael’s late masterpiece, The Transfiguration, as well as Poussin’s Martyrdom of Saint Erasmus, the Apollo Belvedere, the Laocoön, the Capitoline Brutus and much besides. The army commanders, aided by the scholars in their train, seem to have had an unerring instinct for all that was most beautiful or, failing that, most famous and valuable.
It took time, however, for these treasures from Rome and the Veneto to reach Paris. The fastest route, surely, was sailing around Spain and up the Atlantic Seaboard, but this was also the riskiest path, given the perils of the ocean. And so, the precious cargo passed from Civitavecchia to Marseille, hugging the shore all the way. From there it traveled up river along the Rhône, Saône and Loire among others. Once they reached Paris, on 27 July 1797, these masterworks were assembled into perhaps the most astounding spectacle the world had ever seen. As had been customary in the triumphal processions of ancient Roman generals, these imperial spoils were drawn by the thousands along the quays of the Left Bank from the Jardin des Plantes to the Champs de Mars. Together with live lions, bears and camels, the great bronze horses of Saint Mark, together with the Laocoön, the Apollo Belvedere and hundreds of paintings and rare works of silver and gold, were carried into the fields where, nine decades later, the Eiffel Tower would rise.
Here a wooden Altar of Liberty had been set up for the occasion. Despite its temporary nature, it was a large and imposing structure whose two curving porticoes, inspired by Bernini’s Saint Peter’s Square, flanked a curving, central grandstand. Before the grandstand stood an equestrian statue and, below that, in stunning isolation, the so-called Capitoline Brutus, one of the finest bronze sculptures to survive the fall of the ancient world. Made probably toward the beginning of the first century before Christ, it was taken from the Capitoline Museums in Rome (where, following its return, it can still be seen today). Although there is no reason to suppose that it depicted either of the two historical Brutuses, the fact that both had dispatched tyrants in the name of liberty and the Roman Republic proved enchanting to the citizens of revolutionary France. And as these treasures progressed through the city, panels—once again in a strict reenactment of Roman republican precedent—described them to the populace. One panel informed the throng of onlookers that “Greece gave them up and then Rome lost them. Their fate has changed twice before. It will not change again.”
This triumphalism infected the new museum as well. The birth of the modern museum around 1800 also saw the birth of the modern museum label. In this as in so many other respects, the Louvre was a pioneer, even though it sometimes struggled to find its way. Regarding the Apollo Belvedere, for example, Ennio Quirino Visconti’s label informed visitors that “[Pope Julius II] had it transported to the Belvedere of the Vatican where, for three centuries, it won the admiration of the Universe. Thereupon a hero [Napoleon Bonaparte], guided by victory, came to remove it and to place it forever beside the banks of the Seine.”10
If these astounding acquisitions initially inspired the greatest excitement and pride, the backlash came soon enough. The renowned critic and theoretician Antoine Quatremère de Quincy wrote a tract titled “Letters on the Damage Caused to the Arts and to Science by the Removal of the Art of Italy, the Dismembering of Its School and the Despoiling of Its Collections, Galleries and Museums, etc.” In it Quatremère de Quincy expressed his belief that “the spirit of conquest in a republic is entirely subversive of the spirit of liberty.” For all his eloquence and principles, however, he did little to change minds. Despite his persuading fifty eminent men of culture to undersign a letter of protest, one of Napoleon’s cronies, Gaspard Monge, dismissed them all as nothing more than “little dogs barking at the chariot of a victor.”11
Although Denon had signed one of Quatremère de Quincy’s petitions, he seems to have changed his mind when, several years later, he was placed at the head of the Louvre. Few public figures were more zealous in acquisition than Denon. After the Battle of Ulm, in 1805, had given Napoleon control over much of the region north of the Rhine, Denon wrote to him that “there should be in France some trophy of your victories in Germany,” and he suggested, among much else, paintings of the German school, “in which the Museum is completely lacking.”12 Accordingly, Napoleon seized 299 paintings from the collection of the Elector of Hesse and more than 150 from the Museum Fridericianum. In the space of eight months, he sent south along the Rhine more than 850 paintings, hundreds of ancient statues, as well as countless drawings and entire collections of medals and ivories.
By the time Napoleon turned his sights upon the Holy Roman Empire, the Austrians were well aware of Denon’s rapacity and had sent many of their treasures east to Hungary for safekeeping. Even so, Denon made off with nearly four hundred paintings, including Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s great Winter and the Wedding Feast, now in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum.
Spain, which Napoleon initially conquered in 1808, presented different problems. During the first phase of the Peninsular War, he had given the Spanish throne to his older brother, Joseph, who suddenly proved reluctant to part with the masterpieces that had fallen so suddenly and pleasantly into his possession. But that did not stop Denon from trying. Again he wrote the emperor, in much the same terms as he had regarding Germany, seeking “to add to the collection [of the Louvre] twenty paintings of the Spanish school, in which the museum is completely lacking, and which would be for all time a trophy of this latest campaign.”13 He himself could not be there to select them, and the list of three hundred paintings, drawn up by Francisco de Goya, among others, ultimately disappointed him. Although these included three works by Francisco de Zurbarán from the Cartujo of Jerez, as well as Antonio de Pereda’s fine Dream of a Knight, Denon dyspeptically wrote that “one can easily see by the choice how easily His Majesty, the King of Spain [Joseph Bonaparte], was duped by the people he charged with the selection.”
Although the booty from Germany, Austria and Spain had been won within a context of war, Italy, by the time Denon arrived, had already been pacified for a decade and thus could present no plausible pretext for further rapine. And yet, on 13 September 1810, three imperial decrees went forth ordering the suppression of monasteries and convents in Liguria, Piedmont and Tuscany, as well as other regions. And so Denon descended upon the conquered lands and set to work. As a meager testament to his restraint he volunteered that “I shall never ask for the works of painters who are already in the museum, my goal being to find the works of artists who are very rare and not to dispossess the cities of all of their paintings.”14
There were two important consequences of these seizures. One had to do with the science of art restoration. Many of the works were treated in the studios of the Louvre, which was at the forefront of this essential new discipline. “The fame and quantity of works that came into the hands of the Louvre’s teams,” write the authors of the Histoire du Louvre, “contributed to perfecting the techniques [of restoration] and promoted a better appreciation of the role of the restorer.” Indeed, when the seized paintings began to return to their rightful owners after Waterloo, many of the owners were pleasantly surprised to find them in such good condition. The director of the museum of Brunswick, Johann Frederich Ferdinand Emperius, commented that his paintings had returned in a state “that was certainly no worse, and in some cases far better, than the state in which they left us.”
The second noteworthy consequence was a new, even revolutionary, appreciation of the Italian primitives, a term which, early in the nineteenth century, included everyone before the High Renaissance, from Botticelli as far back as Giotto and Duccio. Today, when these artists are counted among the pinnacles of Western painting, it is hard to imagine with what indifference, if not distaste, they were viewed in the generations between Raphael and Vivant Denon. Such fifteenth-century painters as Filippo Lippi, Andrea Mantegna and Sandro Botticelli exhibited skills in composition and perspective that were comparable to those of Raphael and his contemporaries, and so they were tentatively acceptable to the taste of the ancien régime. But what was one to make of the true primitives, Cimabue and Barna da Siena and Simone Martini, whose seemingly crude and schematic renderings in two-point perspective or no perspective at all must have appeared almost savage to eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century viewers? For the Parisian public, the revelation of such works must have seemed as shocking and uncanny as that of Pablo Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon, with its aesthetic of African masks, almost exactly a century later.
In 1814, Denon displayed examples of these “primitives” in a massive exhibition that is not entirely unknown to art historians, although its incalculable importance in Western culture has been misunderstood or overlooked. Although it was devoted primarily, but not exclusively, to the earlier Tuscan school—Giotto, Cimabue and the like—in fact, many later painters were included. Some of these artists, like the Sienese mannerist Domenico Beccafumi, were younger Italian contemporaries of Raphael. But the exhibition extended its purview even further to contain the seventeenth-century Spanish baroque masters Zurbarán and Ribera. The common quality in this exceedingly heterogeneous mix was that the paintings, taken together, represented all that had been excluded from the official narratives of Western art for nearly three hundred years. The introduction to the show’s catalog explained that “a large part of the paintings in this exhibition consist of works prior to the High Renaissance, elevated to its highest point of splendor by Raphael, Titian and Correggio.”
The author of the catalog—presumably Denon himself—cajoled and flattered the visitor into receptivity to these unusual, and therefore possibly offensive, works: “There is reason to believe that the austerity of the primitive painters will have little attraction for those viewers who, having been raised on a particular type of perfection, admire only those objects that seem to correspond to it…. But the true connoisseurs who, always few in number, can discern the real value of each object, will surely find the greatest interest in a chronological sequence of paintings that offers them the means to study the most original works of the history of art and the march and development of the human spirit.”15 For the first time that we know of in any land or at any time, art was being brought into the public realm precisely because it differed from anything that most of the public had ever seen before and because it ran contrary to everything that that public had been taught to admire. This one exhibition surely did not cause, but it just as surely reflected, a great shift in Western culture: it represented the first moment in which that change became manifest. The selfsame quest for what is new, perhaps radically new, continues to define the art that is being made today and the very language in which we speak about it.
During the decade of its fleeting existence, France’s First Republic was too busy fighting for its life to devote any part of its scant resources to the beautification of the Louvre. But by the time Napoleon seized power as First Consul in 1799—thus ending the Republic and the Revolution in one blow—conditions had stabilized to the point where such projects could be contemplated. Decisive in all things, Napoleon now undertook the completion of the Louvre complex nearly a century and a half after Louis XIV had abandoned it, leaving it in a state of perilous suspension. Although these two rulers differed in almost every respect, they shared the conviction that governing was stagecraft on the grandest of scales and that there was no greater stage than a palace or an entire city. Even if Napoleon, like his predecessors, failed to unify the Louvre and the Tuileries, he was the first to undertake the great northern pendant to the Grande Galerie, the endeavor that his nephew Napoleon III would bring to completion half a century later. In the meantime, he contributed greatly to the Louvre’s physical and institutional growth as a museum and, through the same process, he fundamentally transformed the center of Paris into what we recognize today. Napoleon, like Louis XIV, had more respect for buildings, especially large and impressive buildings, than for the finer points of architecture. “Ce que je cherche avant tout, c’est la grandeur,” he once said, adding, “Ce qui est grand est toujours beau”: “What I seek before all else is grandeur. Whatever is grand is always beautiful.”16 But there is something fundamentally untranslatable in the emperor’s use of the French word grandeur, which can mean grandeur or, simply, bigness. He appears to have had both of these meanings in mind.
His first intervention in the museum was modest in scale, but important: he ordered the creation of a new and grander entrance, leading to the antiquities on the ground floor of the Louvre and to the paintings on the floor above. Before this addition, visitors entered the museum through the cluttered and uninviting courtyard that is now the Cour du Sphinx, at the eastern end of the Grande Galerie, a makeshift entrance to what was still a makeshift museum. Thanks to this new intervention, however, visitors for the first time could enter the museum in style through the Rotonde de Mars, the northernmost part of the Petite Galerie, created by Louis Le Vau in 1655.
Jean-Arnaud Raymond, the architect in charge of this revision, changed little of Le Vau’s façade other than to furnish it with a severe lintel supported by two Doric columns, in keeping with the neoclassical taste of the time. Such changes, however, have left no trace, since the exterior was altered again during the massive building program undertaken by Napoleon III in the 1850s. But the interior of the Rotonde de Mars remains largely as Raymond left it, with a new painting on the ceiling, Jean-Simon Berthélemy’s Man Formed by Prometheus, or the Origin of Sculpture, later retouched by Jean-Baptiste Mauzaisse. Paintings were also added to Romanelli’s seventeenth-century originals in the summer apartments of Anne of Austria, directly south of the Rotonde de Mars. Such, then, was the meager record of the consulate’s interventions in the palace and museum of the Louvre.
But that was little more than a prologue to the far more extensive changes that Napoleon would make after he became emperor in 1804. Most of this subsequent work was carried out by his court architects Pierre Fontaine and Charles Percier. Working as a team, they were among the most prolific Parisian architects of the first half of the nineteenth century and they fully embodied the Empire phase of neoclassical design. They had studied together at the Académie des Beaux-Arts, and thereafter they lived and worked in such close alliance that the two men are buried together in Père Lachaise Cemetery. Their association with the Louvre began in 1801, when they fortified the Tuileries Palace, demolished buildings in the place du Carrousel, and installed a gate between it and the Cour des Tuileries directly to the west. By 1804, Fontaine, aided by Percier, was made the official architect of the Louvre and the Tuileries, a position that he held, astonishingly, for almost half a century until he retired in 1848, with all his faculties intact. He was so long-lived that although he began his career under Louis XVI, by the time he died at ninety-one, he had lived to see the beginnings of Baron Haussmann’s transformation of Paris and Louis Visconti’s transformation of the Louvre.
Napoleon expected great things from Percier and Fontaine. In 1810, with the birth of his son and only legitimate child, Napoleon conceived of an immense palace, equal in size and splendor to the Louvre, that would overlook the Colline de Chaillot, where the Palais du Trocadéro now faces the Eiffel Tower in the Sixteenth Arrondissement. Although the plans were drawn up and ready to go, Napoleon was deposed before the work could ever begin. By this point, however, Percier and Fontaine had already effected great changes to the Louvre and the area around it, especially the area directly north of the Tuileries Garden. Much of today’s First Arrondissement, the core of modern Paris, is a direct consequence of this initiative. Five convents stood directly north of the Tuileries Garden, from which they were separated by a simple wall of compacted dirt for the entire half mile from the place de la Concorde to the Pavillon de Marsan. Percier and Fontaine began by piercing the southern part of these properties with a broad avenue known as the rue de Rivoli, in honor of one of Napoleon’s earliest Italian victories. The architects replaced the dirt wall with the elegant wrought iron gates we still see today, and, on the northern side of the street, they designed a seemingly endless arcade whose Spartan structures rose three stories over an arcaded base, with two penthouse levels added later. In the process, the architects razed two important buildings that stood in the way of the new avenue, the royal stables and royal riding academy, which had served as the legislative chamber of the First Republic. But the new avenue had extended only as far as the rue de Rohan when the emperor fell from power, and it would not reach its ultimate destination in the Marais for another half century.
Among the many tasks that Napoleon assigned Percier and Fontaine, certainly not the least was providing a roof for those parts of the Cour Carrée that had stood exposed to the elements since the 1660s. The pair also completed the work that Soufflot had begun half a century earlier to bring the northern and southern façades of the interior courtyard—whose exterior shells had been completed by Louis Le Vau one and a half centuries before—into conformity with the eastern wing; the western wing, the masterpiece of Pierre Lescot and Jacques Lemercier, remained largely unaltered. In this way, the Cour Carrée assumed the form we see today, not only through the aforementioned architectural enhancements, but also through an extensive sculptural program on the north, south and east wings, in a reverent, if not quite exact, imitation of Jean Goujon’s friezes for the Aile Lescot.
One of Percier and Fontaine’s earliest and most important projects at the Louvre was the construction, starting in 1804, of the galerie neuve, or new gallery, the northern pendant to the Grande Galerie that had been dreamed of since the days of Charles IX nearly 250 years before. This addition faithfully reproduced the appearance of the Grande Galerie. But here the architects ran into a problem: since that earlier structure consisted of two very different halves, they had to choose which to reproduce. As they began all the way in the west and worked eastward (that is, from the Pavillon de Marsan in the direction of the Cour Carrée), they decided that the south-facing side of the new structure should reproduce Androuet II du Cerceau’s original from around 1610. Clearly its elegant giant-order pilasters, spanning the entire façade, were congenial to French neoclassical taste. Ironically, du Cerceau’s original was torn down in the 1860s, leaving only Percier and Fontaine’s western half to remind us of what was lost. In any case, here again Percier and Fontaine had barely reached the halfway mark—the Pavillon de Rohan—when Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo and all work ceased. Today, the eastern half of the northern wing is part of the Louvre Museum, while the western half has been occupied since 1905 by the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, an entirely autonomous institution.
Percier and Fontaine had a much freer hand on the new structure’s northern façade, fronting the rue de Rivoli. There is a very clear stylistic break between their building and its continuation, half a century later, under Hector Lefuel. The juxtaposition—one could almost say the collision—of the two styles expresses the conflict between the severe neoclassicism of the First Empire and the extravagant mannerism of the Second. There is something unlovely about Percier and Fontaine’s façade; indeed, it may be the least successful part of the entire Louvre complex. Heavy in mural presence, sober in design and now darkened by decades of exhaust fumes, it instantly deflects any interest or affection. Although it aspires to the same Spartan austerity as the rue de Rivoli itself, it has just enough ornament to betray that avenue’s noble simplicity. On its two main levels, the rounded tops of the ground-floor windows harmonize with the curved niches on either side of them, but clash with the more austere design of the windows directly above them. The result is an awkward rhythm across several hundred meters of the rue de Rivoli. And the fact that the niches west of the rue de l’Échelle never received their intended statues only accentuates the dreariness of this stretch of Paris.
But Percier and Fontaine’s talents, though surely distinguished in architecture, were more evident in their interior designs. Few architects made greater contributions to our experience of the Louvre, of standing before the paintings and sculptures themselves. In the fullness of time they would be responsible for the spatial articulation of the Grande Galerie that we see today, as well as the design of the Musée Charles X and the Collection Campana in the southern wing of the Cour Carrée, together with the grand stairways at either end of the Colonnade at the eastern end of the palace. Percier and Fontaine loved rich polychrome marble designs—supremely in the Arc du Carrousel—but they suppressed that preference in the Colonnade stairways, surely out of respect for the solemn dignity of Charles Perrault’s monochromatic masterpiece. Largely identical, these two stairways present an uninterrupted length of wall whose pale stone is allowed to speak for itself, while the regimented balustrades, Corinthian pilasters and paired columns enhance that sense of sobriety. The only important ornaments are the reliefs of male and female forms—personifications of commerce and the spirit of war among them—mingling with the Olympian gods. To most visitors, this splendid décor will appear to be just another stairway, and if they are indifferent to the architects, they will surely be indifferent to the sculptors who designed the friezes. And yet two of these northern bas reliefs are well worth acknowledging. They are the work of Barthélémy-François Chardigny, who was working on them on 3 March 1813, when he fell to his death from one of the scaffolds.
In 1806, Napoleon ordered the removal of all the artists, artisans and shopkeepers who had occupied the lower level of the Grande Galerie for fully two centuries, since its construction under Henri IV. Their removal was deemed necessary for several reasons, not least the self-evident fact that the Louvre was now performing a vastly greater public role than it had even a generation before, when its only function was to welcome visitors to the biennial Salon. Given this press of new visitors, the old stairway that Maximilien Brébion had created in the 1750s seemed woefully obsolete. In its place, Percier and Fontaine created, between 1807 and 1812, one of their finest works, a grand entrance to the museum that rose from the Rotonde de Mars to the point where we now find the Winged Victory of Samothrace, before it diverged, as its more recent replacement also does, towards the Galerie d’Apollon on the left and the Salon Carré on the right. Most of this great passageway has vanished, but enough remains to provide a powerful sense of its former splendor. Between the Escalier Daru and the Salon Carré stand three rooms, the Salle Percier, Salle Fontaine and Salle Duchâtel, which are reserved for Italian Renaissance frescoes: their décor is the very embodiment of the Empire style and an implicit rejection of the Republican severity that this pair of architects had displayed on the rue de Rivoli. One enters these spaces through polychrome Serlian arches with black Tuscan columns and capitals etched in gold. These columns support vaulted ceilings with reliefs and paintings set in gilded frames, while a checkered black-and-white marble floor spreads out beneath one’s feet. Just before entering the Salon Carré, visitors pass under The Triumph of French Painting: Apotheosis of Poussin, Le Sueur and Le Brun, a mural completed by Charles Meynier in 1824. Although few tourists will notice it as they rush to see the Quattrocento masterpieces in the next room, its nationalistic message would have been lost on none of Meynier’s contemporaries.
The issue of how to make the Grande Galerie, nearly half a kilometer in length, visually coherent and appealing had defeated many generations of architects and artists, starting with Louis XIII’s ill-fated attempt to have Poussin paint all 460 meters of the ceiling. Given its staggering length, especially relative to its narrow width, this space is without parallel in Western architecture. It seems prodigiously long even today, despite the fact that one sees only about half of its true length: the western half was divided from the eastern half through the creation of the Pavillon des Sessions under Napoleon III in the 1860s. Percier and Fontaine, inspired by an earlier plan of Charles Wailly, created six paired arches to span the width of the gallery, supported on either side by paired Corinthian columns of red marble. The problem with these interventions, which remain in place today, is less their inherent quality than their relative scarcity; they stand too far apart from one another to generate that sense of energetic continuity that was clearly sought. Far more successful is Percier and Fontaine’s treatment of the Galerie des Batailles in Versailles (designed thirty years later for King Louis Philippe), despite its being only half the length of the Grande Galerie.
Percier and Fontaine had greater success in 1808 with the design of the Arc du Carrousel, which stands about a thousand feet west of the Pyramide and forms part of that spectacular axis that stretches to the Arc de Triomphe, three miles away. The two arches were conceived at the same time, and largely in commemoration of the same events, Napoleon’s victories in Austria, even though the far larger Arc de Triomphe, designed by Jean Chalgrin, was not completed until 1836, long after Bonaparte’s defeat, exile and death. As we see it today, the Arc du Carrousel has been stripped of the original context that defined it, and rises in isolation beside the vehicular traffic to the east. Initially, however, its effect would have been very different: it stood just beyond the rue Saint-Nicaise, which coincided with the medieval fortification torn down under Louis XIII. The Arc du Carrousel was intended to demarcate the Cour des Tuileries, which was part of the palace, from everything to the east. It was so positioned that anyone entering or leaving by the gate was compelled to pass under it.
The arch commemorates, specifically, the Battle of Austerlitz (1805), Napoleon’s single most important and strategically brilliant victory, which ended the so-called War of the Third Alliance waged against Russia and Austria. Among the friezes integrated into its surface are The French Army, Embarking at Boulogne, Threatens England; The Kingdoms of Bavaria and Wurtemburg Are Created; and All of Italy Submits to the Laws of Its Liberator (i.e., Bonaparte himself). This monument was based on the ancient Roman arches of Septimius Severus and Constantine in or near the Roman Forum. Here, as in those antecedents, two smaller arches flank a tall central arch, although the addition of lateral entrances to the outer arches appears to have no Roman precedent. Facing east and west, eight Corinthian columns on tall pedestals are crowned with life-sized sculptures of soldiers from Bonaparte’s Grande Armée. The bright, pinkish shafts of these columns, however, quarried in the Caunes-Minervois region of Southern France, reveal a chromatic boldness entirely foreign to surviving Roman models. Finally, on the roof of the arch stands a chariot in which the classically robed embodiment of truth is drawn by four splendid horses, with a similarly draped female form on either side. Originally the four horses were those that Napoleon had taken from the Basilica di San Marco in Venice, and the charioteer was none other than Napoleon himself, dressed in classical attire. After Waterloo, however, Napoleon was deposed and the horses returned to Venice, but not before the sculptor François Joseph Bosio created, in 1828, the copies one sees today. One final design of Percier and Fontaine deserves mention: the Chapelle de Saint-Napoléon. Consecrated to a made-up saint in a tentative first step toward creating a new imperial cult, it stood directly opposite the Rotonde de Mars. But it had not progressed very far when Napoleon was deposed, and it has now been integrated into the Cour de Khorsabad.
Intended as a grand entrance to the Tuileries Palace, the Arc du Carrousel was created between 1806 and 1808 by Charles Percier and Pierre Fontaine. The arch was originally crowned by a statue of Napoleon, flanked by the four horses of the Basilica di San Marco in Venice.