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The Louvre: A History Of The Museum

The worldwide, iconic centerpiece for art and history known commonly as The Louvre has been the home to the French monarchy, a battle fortress during the Hundred Years War and currently as a world-class museum with art ranging from the Mona Lisa by Leonardo DaVinci(which some believe to be a self-portrait of DaVinci) to artifacts from Ancient Egypt to Greek, Etruscan, Native American and Near East antiquities. But the Louvre was not always the artistic mecca that the world has familiarized the name with.

Since its beginnings, the Louvre has conferred legitimacy on those who claimed it, for the brief period of a human lifetime, and as such it has been central to the history of its city and nation, even before there was a nation. It has been a wartime castle, and, rarely, a peacetime palace; it has witnessed faith, bloodshed, grandeur, and spectacle, despair, terror, and resolve that we in our time can only imagine--or reconstruct from the gilded traces left to us. The Louvre drew on the greatest talents of Europe, and was built at the cost of the misery of anonymous millions. Its construction vied with wars, revolutions, and the fall of kings, the rise of republics, and the loss of empires.

At the turn of the thirteenth century, the Capetian warrior king Philip Augustus was trying both to wrest several northern French provinces from King John Plantagenet of England, the treacherous brother of Richard the Lionhearted, and to safeguard the Île-de-France, the region of which Paris was the capital. On the western side of the city's fortifications, facing the Plantagenet holdings, the French king erected a moated castle with towers on a site called the Louvre; the castle walls surrounded a moated circular keep, the Great Tower, one hundred feet high, one of the architectural wonders of the age. Within the stone enclosure, buildings lined the west wall and the Seine wall on the south. This arrangement effectively protected Philip Augustus from foreign enemies to...