On August 10, 1793, the Musée Central des Arts de la Republique was opened. You may know it as the Musée du Louvre.
Art was not a stranger to the Palais du Louvre and going back to the 16th century Francois I first held a few of his prized pieces. Under Louis XIV they added the Salle des Rois, today’s Galerie d’Apolon and in 1725 moved the yearly Salon to the Salon Carré along with the Academy of Paintings.
On May 26, 1791, a year and a half into the French Revolution the National Assembly of France declared a museum would be created “bringing together monuments of all science and arts”. For the next year, things would move slowly although art from the churches and emigrant families that left France were amassed.
On August 9 the new government of Paris, the Paris Commune moved into the offices of the Hotel de Ville. During the night they met to come up with a plan to “save the state”. Meeting until 3 a.m. one side wanted to attack the king and the other fought against it. Louis XVI wasn’t playing along with the changes in the government and it was all about to end.
At 8 am on August 10, 1792 thousands of men, women, and even children armed with weapons charged the Tuileries. Louis XVI had the 950 Swiss Guards moved inside the palace to guard the family and left 930 gendarmes and 2000 national guards outside to keep the angry mob at bay. One little issue, they had very little ammunition. The royal family was able to escape and ran through the garden to the Assembly for safety.
Louis XVI was treated to wine and food, while Marie was tossed in a locked room with her children. It was the end of the monarchy as the Legislative Academy ended all rights of the king. On the same day, they voted on the destruction of all items and properties tied to the monarchy. The next day on August 11 a commission was created to halt the process and to search and care for these items of the national heritage.
It would go back and forth a few more times. On the 14th the cries for destruction outweighed all the others and then on the 22nd, it was declared again that the heritage must be saved. On October 1, 1792, a commission was made up of artists to create the layout of the National Museum that would be based on the collection of the kings.
The original museum was much smaller and different from the stunning temple of art seen today. The Grande Galerie, Galerie du bord de l'eau was created under Henri IV to link the Palais du Louvre to Catherine de Medici’s Palais des Tuileries. Begun in 1595, the 1500-foot-long corridor was used by the young Louis XIII for fox hunts, maybe they should bring back a fox or two in the high season.
When opened the museum held 538 paintings and 184 objects, 39 busts, and 29 tables of hard stone pieces that were mostly from the former rulers of France that began with Francois I.
Francois I was raised with an appreciation of art and culture by his mother Louis de Savoie who was obsessed with the Italian Renaissance. It was Francois who decided to remake the Monarchy and bring it out of Medieval times and began to collect paintings from the Italian masters and one of the masters himself. After meeting Leonardo da Vinci, he invited him to move to France where he would put him up in a chateau and take care of everything. Leonardo eventually gave in and made his way to France via a donkey and in tow were a few paintings.
In the short period of time before his death, Leonardo sold or gave a few of his paintings to Francois I including the Mona Lisa. The Louvre holds six paintings in its collection, more than any museum or country in the world. Italy is still mad about it.
His son, Henri II came along and didn’t have the collecting bug like his father did but did appreciate what they did have. Eventually, Henri IV & Marie de Medici would add a sizeable amount.
Louis XIII called on Nicols Poussin, Simon Vouet, Philippe de Champaigne, and Laurent de La Hyre as the painters to the king to add to the collection but it was his son that would amass more than any other king.
The Sun King, Louis XIV broke the bank by acquiring as much as he could. Italian masters, Northern School, and his own artists including Charles Le Brun, Claude Gellee, and Pierre Puget.
When Louis XIV decided to flee to Versailles in 1678 he gave up the Palais du Louvre to the artists and academics. Many including Jaques Louis David moved their atelier and homes into the Louvre and the artists were allowed to remain until Napoleon kicked them out. Over time it was the artists that shook up the 19th century that visited the galleries and copied the masters. Manet, Fantin Latour, Monet, and Berthe Morisot were often found in the Italian section and you can still find artists to this day doing the same thing.
By the time Louis XVI was in power, he had instructed his Minister of the King’s buildings, Comte d’Angiviller (Gee-Vee- Lear) to purchase paintings to fill a void in the collection. Peter Paul Rubens, Antoine van Dyck, and Le Nain were just a few. Rooms dedicated to his
During his fall the decision was made to create a museum three-quarters of the over 720 pieces had been in the hands of the kings of France. The rest were confiscated from churches and the families that chose to flee France.
The long Grande Galerie saw the paintings hung frame to frame and floor to ceiling. Today the ceiling is open to windows letting in the natural light but in 1793 it was the light from the sides that flooded in. Those windows are still there today, just hidden away behind a wall. It was artist Hubert Robert who painted an imaginary piece of what the Grand Galerie could look like that in fact would be the inspiration of the view we now see.
Although it was opened as a gift to the citizens of France they were only allowed to visit one to three days a week. These were the Revolutionary years and the ten-day calendar was in place. For 2 days it was closed for cleaning, depending on the year the public only had one to three days a week to visit and the remaining six of the ten days were reserved only for the artists and copies. The first month it was only open for 12 days.
The Palais du Louvre survived the anger of the Revolution and Terror unscathed. The supreme figure of the royal family of Paris was left without a mark because it was given back to the people of France in the middle of one of its darkest times.
The museum had to close on April 26, 1796, when the building was falling into disrepair. It was one thing to have a public palace turning into a shrine to art it was another to dip into the purse of the government to keep it going. Over the next five years, it would open and close many times until July 14, 1801, when it was once again fully open for everyone to visit.
As time went on more and more art was added to the museum. The Chateau de Versailles held all of the art and paintings of the French school while the Louvre focused those first few years on the International school mostly made up of Italian and Northern Europe artists.
Then came Napoleon.
Hitler wasn’t the only one that looted art for his own purposes, long before it was Napoleon Bonaparte. In the spring of 1796, General Napoleon during the Italian campaigns took it upon himself to gather the works of the great masters. Arriving in each city he asked for some of the greatest paintings in their collections. Amassing twenty to thirty at a time including works by Rubens, da Vinci, Titian, and Raphael from the collections of the Duke of Parma, Milan, and even the Pope. With each gathered collection he set up treaties with the dukes and Pope giving the rightful ownership to Napoleon and France.
The Treaty of Tolentino in February 1797 allowed him to enter any museum and private building and take anything they wanted including the Apollo Belvedere and the statues of the Nile and Tiber. Their next stop was Venice where he took the winged lions of St Mark’s Square and the bronze horses of St Mark’s Basilica that he would later place on top of his Arc du Triomphe du Carrousel. It was also in Vence where he would take Veronese’s Wedding Feast of Cana. A visit to the Vatican resulted in hundreds of manuscripts and forced them to pay for their transport to Paris.
In December 1797, 640 crates were sent to Paris in a mass convoy and arrived in the City of Light on July 27, 1798, and were greeted with a two-day celebration, the Festival of Liberty and the Arts. For two full days, the convoy drove through the streets of Paris. The Apollo Belvedere stood tall and held a banner that read, “Greece lost them, Rome lost them. Their fate has changed twice; they won’t change again”. However, it would.
In 1814 after the abdication of Napoleon, the owners of the seized goods wanted them back. Pope Pius VII worked with Louis XVIII who at first seemed happy to give everything back then changed his mind. Representatives from Italy arrived in Paris demanding their art returned. Deals were made and of the 5,200 pieces less than half went back. Many pieces were lost, given away, or destroyed. Today the Louvre has a few that were diplomatically agreed on, including the Wedding Feast of Cana and Tiber, and many paintings.
In November 1800 the Musée des Antiques moved into the summer apartments of Anne of Austria below the Galerie d’Apollon and was inaugurated by Napoleon. He would of course rename it the Musée Napoleon during his rule and even bring the Mona Lisa to his bedroom in the Palais des Tuileries.
Today when you visit the Louvre, the Grande Galerie is still filled with the paintings that were picked and adored by the kings of France. However, on August 10, 1793, 230 years ago, the birth of my beloved Musée du Louvre came to be and she continues to evolve and grow.
Want to explore the Louvre with me and uncover all its history and art when you are in Paris next? Reach out and schedule a tour with me. I love to share my favorite place and all the stories it holds.