# Transcript

TIM BENTON.
Let’s start with the physical context of the museum.
How did the present building of the Louvre come about?
The origins of the Louvre were as a fortress guarding the westward approaches to Paris, along the river.
The medieval Louvre with its picturesque towers and massive bulk came to represent a symbol of the royal power in Paris, holding out against revolts. The remains of this old Louvre, lost for four hundred years, have been excavated and now form part of the new Louvre.
Today’s museum not only displays it’s collection of art, but also its own history.
When Francis I decided that his old fortress needed humanising, the first bit to go was the Round Dungeon, the Keep. In 1546, just before he died, he replaced the west side of castle courtyard with a wing in the new Italian Renaissance style, by the architect Pierre Lesco. Inside, the new wing offered elegant classicising state rooms like this one, now known as the Hall of the Cariatides. Many dramas in French history unfolded in this room, while it was still part of the royal palace.
By 1590 a new wing had been added leading down to the walls on the riverbank. A new palace had also been built outside the walls to the west, called the Tuilleries after the tile ovens in the area. A grand plan developed, to link up the partially built Louvre to the new palace with long wings on both sides.
One of these was built, but it would take another two hundred and fifty years before this project was finally completed. The long gallery along the river, always known as the Grande Gallery, was nearly a kilometre long, crossing the city walls and moat. The scale of the Grande Gallery is still astonishing. From this woodcut the state of the Louvre and the Tuileries under Henry IV can be grasped, with parts of the old fortress still standing.
The fortress was then demolished, and under Louis XIII a start was made to extend Francis I’s wing into a great square court, the Court Carré. Although the completion of the Court Carré took over a century, the original style of Lescau’s sixteenth century wing was generally respected.
In the 1660s the main problem was the construction of the east facade, intended to present an imposing front to the city and to house a grand new suite of rooms for Louis XIV.
Work was still unfinished when in 1674 Louis XIV decided to move his court out of Paris to the Palace of Versailles.
Following the French revolution in 1789, the palaces of the Tuileries and Louvre took centre stage in events. With the king a prisoner in the Tuileries, and eventually executed in January 1793, the palace was declared a national monument, and part of the Louvre given over to a central museum of the arts.
Napoleon commissioned his architects to complete the grand plan, but it was left incomplete until Napoleon’s nephew seized control of the government in 1851, subsequently declaring himself Emperor Napoleon III. By 1866 the Louvre was finally complete with the enclosure of the whole palace and the construction of two new wings. Napoleon III made the Louvre and the Tuileries into a single enormous building of state, housing suites for himself and his family, as well as ministry buildings, state meeting rooms, several museums and academies.
It all ended badly of course with a disastrous Franco- Prussian war of 1870-71 - Napoleon’s defeat and exile and the Paris commune of 1871 - in the course of which the Tuileries and several other buildings of state were gutted by fire. The ruins of the Tuileries stood for ten years, but in the end this royal palace was pulled down.
And this is how the Louvre remained, for a hundred years, in gentle decline. The museum shared the buildings with the Ministry of Finance, and several other state institutions, until in September 1981 President Mitterand announced a plan to dedicate the whole building to the museum. This project came to be known as the Grande Louvre. The Ministry of Finance was moved out to a new building at the Bourse. Perhaps if you think that this is how the Louvre might have been redesigned by a modern architect, the question of tradition and continuity comes into focus.
By comparison the pyramid, designed by the American architect I.M. Pei, is an exceptionably discreet external expression of an enormous transformation inside and underground - where thousands of cubic meters were excavated - to make space for the new museum.
I M PEI.
I remember when I went to the Louvre back in 1951, my first experience with the Louvre, there were only two little toilets in that huge museum, and you don’t find it. One simply did not find those things, you know.
So it didn’t function as a museum, so the museum brief was a very very important one, in order to make it work as a museum a very major intervention had to take place. When I met Mr. Mitterand, President Mitterand at that time, I told him yes, I say something could be done to make it function well as a museum, though we have to dig under Napoleon Court.
And that was the first step. Now if he at that time told me, Mr. Pei, I don’t think that is possible, and then I would have said then I’m sorry there’s nothing could be done. But he was very understanding so he said I can understand what you meant very well, that’s fine.
TIM BENTON.
Now here’s a puzzle. When we the British cut off the head of our King Charles I, he had the finest collection of paintings in Europe. But Oliver Cromwell sold them off, and pretty soon most of them found their way through the dealer network into the collection of Louis XIV. So most of these paintings are not in a British Museum, but in the Louvre. But when the French put their king, Louis XVI to the guillotine in 1793, they decided to form a national art museum out of the royal collection.
Why? Well it’s a complicated story.
The revolutionaries knew that there had to be a complete break with the age of royal tyranny. On the other hand, they considered it the right of free men and women of France to have access to the great works of art of the past.