# Transcript

TIM BENTON
With the execution of the king in January 1793, the decision was taken to make the royal collection accessible to all, and this happened on the 10th August. After 1793, the collection was expanded with confiscations from churches, and aristocratic families.
Michel Angelo’s Slaves had been in the possession of French aristocrats since the seventeenth century, and were confiscated during the Revolution. They quickly became star attractions in the new central museum.
Fra Bartolomeo’s Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine had belonged to the Church of Notre Dame in Autun.
Another category of works which came into the Louvre, were those reception pieces submitted to the academy by academicians. This is Watteau’s Isle de Cythere.
The first real director of the Musée Central of the Louvre, was the engraver and art collector Vivant Denon. The present director of the Louvre, Pierre Rosenberg, considers Denon’s contribution to have essential.
PIERRE ROSENBERG
What was his great idea in a certain way, a very simple idea first to open the museum to everyone, and to make it a sort of democratic institution. There were examples before but the idea was not works of art hanging together, er chosen by the taste of the ruler of the prince, but trying to explain through work of art the history of art. Sculpture Gallery
That means the schools the division in northern school Italian school and French school, the chronology from Giotto you go to Masaccio and from Masaccio to Leonardo da Vinci and from there to Caravaggio and so on and so on, I mean this idea of an evolution of art history.
TIM BENTON
And Denon soon had enormously more to work with to create his history of art.
In addition to the kings collections, the central museum was swelled by an unheard of booty, the product of a systematic policy of trophies of conquest, extracted from the defeated nations of Europe.
To measure the extraordinary completeness of these acquisitions, you only have to look at Panini’s representation of the treasures of ancient Rome, painted in 1758, forty years before Napoleon’s conquest of Italy - almost all the famous antique sculptures depicted here - to see which generations of artists and cognoscenti had had to travel to Rome, were crated up and dispatched to Paris by art historians travelling with Napoleon’s armies.
In the Louvre, the best works of sculpture were displayed along a suite of galleries with, in pride of place at the end, the most extraordinary of the ancient treasures, the Laocoon.
It was almost as if Rome itself with its two thousand year old history, had been transported to Paris.
In this extraordinary painting, Hubert Robert imagined how the Grande Gallery would look in ruins after some future cataclysm. We can see some of the new acquisitions lying around, being rediscovered anew by artists and archaeologists. An artist is sketching the Apollo Belvedere. While in another corner, one of Michael Angelo’s Slaves lies unnoticed.
Works acquired by revolution or force of arms, Robert seems to be saying, could as easily be lost again in the next turn of fate.
Napoleon’s newly acquired art treasures were put on display all along the Grande Gallery, on the occasion of his marriage to Marie Louise of Austria.
Many of Raphael’s best paintings, including the Transfiguration, featured in the trophies of conquest, which doubled the Italian Renaissance collection.
Further on came some spectacular Flemish works, including Rubens’s Descent From the Cross, his most famous work. And these works were then compared with the best achievements of French classicism, including the huge canvas of St. Gervasius and Pritasius by Le Sueur.
This painting, commissioned by the crown for the church at St. Gelda in Paris, had been confiscated during the revolution.
Although most of these works had to be re-patriated after the fall of Napoleon in 1815, the French managed to hang on to a significant number.
An Italian collection which the French were able to keep was that of Prince Borghese, which was acquired for the marriage of Napoleon’s sister.
After the return of the Laocoon, the Dying Gall and the Apollo Belvedere, the statues from the Borghese collection such as this Dyonisius and the infant Bacchus, became the most famous antiquities in the Louvre.
The Borghese Gladiator, one of the most celebrated antique sculptures, which we’ve already seen as a model for Nicholas Coustou, and shown in pride of place on the bureau of Charles le Brun, finally came to France with this collection.
Of the Renaissance paintings confiscated in Italy, the largest was Veronese’s Feast of Cana. It seems that its size prevented it being sent back to Venice in 1815. Throughout the nineteenth century it had pride of place in the Salon Carré.
In the case of this wonderful 14th C painting by Cimabue, which was taken from the Church of St. Francesco in Pisa, it’s likely that the Italians were not interested enough in art at the early period to demand its return. So this is a case where military seizure may have saved the painting from destruction or neglect.
This Calvary by Mantegna, is a predela, that’s to say a small painting at the bottom of a larger altarpiece. The curator’s managed to keep the predela, when the main altarpiece had to be returned to Italy. Again, Denon was ahead of the game in valuing Mantegna’s work, at a time when early Renaissance art was not yet in fashion.