Setting aside just one day for the Louvre is a classic first-time Paris visitor’s mistake. The place is simply too big to comprehend on one visit, or indeed on ten visits. To grow so vast has taken eight centuries, a process explained in under three minutes by the official video animated above. First constructed around the turn of the thirteenth century as a defensive fortress, it was converted into a royal residence a century and a half later. It gained its first modern wing in 1559, under Henri II; later, his widow Catherine de’ Medici commissioned the Tuileries palace and gardens, which Henri IV had joined up to the Louvre with the Grande Galerie in 1610.
In the seventeen-tens, Louis XVI completed the Cour Carrée, the Louvre’s main courtyard, before decamping to Versailles. It was only during the French Revolution, toward the end of that century, that the National Assembly declared it a museum.
The project of uniting it into an architectural whole continued under Napoleon I and III, the latter of whom finally completed it (and in the process doubled its size). The Tuileries Palace was torched during the unpleasantness over the Paris Commune, but the rest of the Louvre survived. Since then, its most notable alteration has been the addition of I. M. Pei’s glass pyramid in 1989.
The pyramid may still have an air of controversy these three and a half decades later, but you can hardly deny that it at least improves upon the Cour Carrée’s years as a parking lot. It stands, in any case, as just one of the countless features that make the Louvre an architectural palimpsest of French history practically as compelling as the collection of art it contains. (Francophones can learn much more about it from the longer-form documentaries posted by Des Racines et des Ailes and Notre Histoire.) And how did I approach this most famous of all French institutions on my own first trip to Paris, you ask? By not going at all. On my next trip to Paris, however, I plan to go nowhere else.
Related content:
The Louvre’s Entire Collection Goes Online: View and Download 480,00 Works of Art
A 3D Animated History of Paris: Take a Visual Journey from Ancient Times to 1900
How France Hid the Mona Lisa & Other Louvre Masterpieces During World War II
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
