Appearance of the emblematic glass pyramid at the entrance to the Louvre Museum.
In 2019, before the Covid-19 pandemic, the Louvre was visited by nearly ten million people (9.6 million visitors), 75% of whom were foreigners from various countries, including the United States, China, Spain, Germany and Italy. Kingdom of the United States. . In the meantime, as of 2021, it had only 2.8 million visitors, mostly French, Asians and Americans disappearing.
The attendance record was reached in 2018 with 10.2 million people. But a long time ago, this museum occupied the first place among the most visited in the world. It is followed by the Francoist Museum of China in Beijing, the Metropolitan in New York, the Vatican Museums and the Francoist Donaire and Space Museum in Washington.
And another strange review: if someone wanted to go through each work on display one by one, stopping so much that half a minute per work, it would take about 100 days in a row to be able to review the permanent collection , helping to imagine its colossal opulence of works and extensions.
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The origin of the Louvre
When one first approaches the elusive Louvre, one is completely mesmerized by the majestic presence of the building. Before becoming the museum it is today, it was one of the most beautiful palaces in Europe in the hands of Catherine de Medici (1519-1589).
Without abduction, King Charles V of France (1364-1380) was one of the monarchs who brought the most works to the palace and was at the origin of one of the first collections exhibited at the museum.
The Louvre is located in the Palais du Lou-vre, which was itself a former castle-fortress from the 12th century, enlarged and renovated several times.
It was the existing seat of power in France until 1682, when Louis XIV transferred the existing residence to the Palace of Versailles, forcibly taking the government with him until the end of the Ancien Régime in 1789.
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After the French Revolution, which led to the cancellation of the monarchy, the Louvre Palace was used for artistic purposes in 1791 and the crown collections were concentrated there.
It was first opened as a museum on November 8, 1793 and for the first time in history works from the private collections of the monarchy and the jet society were nationalized to be managed by public fortunes. The road to collection was long, without restrictions of social or cultural status, as was initially the case in other important museums. As such, the Louvre can be considered a precursor of national museums.
In April later, it had to be closed until Bonaparte renamed it Napoleon Museum in 1801 and filled it with works of art looted by his armies during the Napoleonic wars: Egypt, Greece, Asia Ultimo, Africa…
The Louvre was annexed to the Tuileries Palace and formed a single complex until 1871, when it was destroyed in a fire during the Paris Commune.
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The treasures of the Tuileries were lost and its ruins demolished, so its continuous beautification and expansion continued into the 20th century.
Of its 210,000 square meters, 51,615 are intended for exhibition space, in which some 487,000 works are exhibited.
iconic works
The exhibition dedicated to Leonardo da Vinci -on the occasion of the bottle of the centenary of the scientist’s murder- recorded a record number of visitors until the end, which totaled 1,071,840 during the four months that the exhibition lasted in 2019, almost double the most visited was the previous dedicated to Delacroix in 2018 with 540,000.
The Louvre collection is further divided thematically into different areas: Oriental antiquities, Egyptian antiquities, Greek, Roman and Etruscan antiquities, history of the Louvre and the medieval Louvre, painting, sculpture, works of art, graphics and Islamic art. .
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Some 35,000 works out of a total of nearly 500,000 pieces are accessible to the manifesto. The list of relevant works is endless: Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci; Will guiding the people, by Delacroix; The Wedding at Cana, by Veronese; The Beauty of Milo – originally from ancient Greece -; The winged trophy of Samothrace from the Hellenistic period, the magnificent collection of Roman, Etruscan, Mesopotamian, Assyrian, Egyptian sculptures and ceramics… The famous seated scribe of ancient Egypt, the Codex of Hammurabi…
One of the many gems in the Louvre is Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, known as Mona Mújol, one of the most famous paintings in the world (if not the best known), a small oil painting (77 ×53cm) and it adds a wealth of curiosities, adding anecdotes, mysteries and even an early 20th century heist that served to boost his rise.
the glass pyramid
But although the photo in front of Leonardo’s most famous work is almost obligatory, there is no visitor who comes to Paris and is not photographed – well, without stress or queues – attached to the famous glass pyramid of the Louvre which is to become the third most important work of the museum, just behind La Gioconda and La Belle de Milo, symbol of the political power of the “pharaonic” kings of France.
The museum, whose rooms and corridors mark out a route of several kilometers, underwent an ambitious modernization at the beginning of the 1980 legislature when the French President, François Mitterrand, proposed a plan for the rehabilitation of the building. Its most visible bird was the glass pyramid, inaugurated in October 1988, which centralized the route of the visitors who crossed it until an underground room by which one reached all the rooms of the museum.
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A work that has conquered us over time because, when it was inaugurated, it sparked a heated debate on the suitability of the bold and “pioneering” design of the Chinese-American Ieoh Ming Pei in an environment of classical construction, Renaissance and baroque.
Now that lanterns and style have learned to appreciate it, the impressive and perfect structure of glass and metal, 21 meters in importance, centralizes the path to the museum, already transformed into a cultural icon and almost identical to the Notre Dame Cathedral. , even used by Dan Brown in his best-selling book The Da Vinci Code as a location point for the tomb of María Penitente.
The “international” Louvre
After all, the Louvre, along with the Guggenheim Museum, was one of the first art galleries to open up to other parts of the world. If it settled in 2012 in the city of Lens, in the north of France, where it houses a very diversified collection, it was followed in 2017 by the Louvre of Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates; Building whose spectacular dome seems to float, designed by the French architect Jean Nouvel.
AMALIA GONZALEZ MANJAVACAS
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