{ "id": "louvre", "title": "Louvre", "lang": "en", "source_lang": "en", "summary": "The Louvre is France's national art museum and one of the world's largest and most-visited museums, housed in the former royal palace in Paris.", "category": "arts", "subcategory": "visual-arts", "type": "place", "aliases": [ "Musée du Louvre", "Louvre Museum", "Palais du Louvre" ], "generated_at": "2026-10-08", "model": "pro/claude-haiku-5-5", "url": "https://aiwiki.page/en/louvre/", "translations": { "zh-Hans": { "url": "https://aiwiki.page/zh/louvre/", "json": "https://aiwiki.page/zh/louvre.json" } }, "sections": [ { "heading": "", "text": "The Louvre (Musée du Louvre) is the national art museum of France and one of the largest and most-visited museums in the world. It occupies a large part of the former royal palace on the Right Bank of the Seine in Paris, a building that began as a medieval fortress and was rebuilt over several centuries into a Renaissance and classical palace. Its collections span roughly from prehistory to the mid-19th century and cover ancient Near Eastern, Egyptian, Greek, Etruscan and Roman antiquities, Islamic art, sculpture, decorative arts, paintings, and prints and drawings. Works such as the Mona Lisa, the Venus de Milo and the Winged Victory of Samothrace have made it a global reference point for art history and cultural heritage.\n\nThe Louvre matters for three reasons beyond its holdings. It is one of the first great public museums, opened in the aftermath of the French Revolution and expanded under Napoleon, so its history is a history of the modern museum itself. Its building records French political history, from the Capetian kings and the Valois and Bourbon courts to the 1989 Grand Louvre project and the glass pyramid that now serves as its main entrance. And it faces present-day questions about crowds, security, funding and the conservation of a historic building, which have become especially prominent since 2025.\n\nThis entry follows the Louvre from its origins as a fortress through its evolution into a palace and then a museum. It then describes the collections, the most famous works, and the ways objects were acquired. It covers visitor numbers, notable historical incidents, the Nouvelle Renaissance renovation, the 2025 jewel theft and its aftermath, the Louvre's branches abroad, and its research, conservation and cultural role." }, { "heading": "Institution and Legal Status", "text": "The Louvre operates as a national public establishment of an administrative character, placed under the supervision of the minister responsible for culture. Its legal form dates from a decree that merged the national Louvre museum and the national Eugène Delacroix museum into a single body, the Établissement public du musée du Louvre, which took effect on 1 January 1993. The museum is therefore a state body with its own legal identity. It is not simply a department of the ministry, even though the state appoints its leadership and oversees its activities.\n\nThe head of the institution holds the title président-directeur, which combines the roles of chair and chief executive. Michel Laclotte, who had been the museum's director since 1987, became the first holder of this post in 1992 and kept it until 1994. The current holder is Christophe Leribault. President Emmanuel Macron appointed him in February 2026, on the recommendation of Culture Minister Rachida Dati, one day after Laurence des Cars resigned. Her departure followed the October 2025 jewel theft. Leribault, an art historian, had previously headed the Château de Versailles. The ministry said his priority would be the safety and security of the building, the collections and the people in it.\n\nThe collections are divided among curatorial departments, usually given as eight: Near Eastern antiquities, Egyptian antiquities, Greek, Etruscan and Roman antiquities, Islamic art, sculptures, decorative arts, paintings, and prints and drawings. Paintings are arranged by national school, such as French, Italian, Flemish and Dutch.\n\nThe size of the holdings depends on how objects are counted. Some estimates put the total at about 380,000 objects, others at roughly 480,000, and a Wikipedia infobox figure based on 2019 data lists about 615,797. The number on display is more consistent. Most sources give around 35,000 works, with some estimates ranging from 30,000 to 38,000. Whichever total is used, only a small fraction of the collection, well under a tenth, is shown at any one time. Paintings alone number roughly 7,500, of which about 5,500 are catalogued in the national Joconde database.\n\nThe Louvre is also the most visited art museum in the world. The Art Newspaper's annual survey counted more than 9 million visitors in 2025, a gain of nearly 5 percent over the previous year. That total remains well below the peak of the pre-pandemic years, but it still puts the museum ahead of the Vatican Museums, which ranked second with about 6.9 million.\n\nThe Institution and the Palace\n\nThe institution and the building are related but distinct. The museum is the legal entity that owns and manages the collections, staff, exhibitions and visitor services. The building is the Louvre Palace, a historic monument whose origins go back to a 12th-century fortress and which later became a royal residence. Museum reference works commonly describe the Louvre as both an art museum and a historic site for this reason.\n\nThe condition of the building directly affects the institution's work. In a January letter to the culture minister, then-director des Cars described \"worrying temperature variations\" that endangered the artworks and parts of the building that were \"no longer watertight.\" The letter shows that the museum's conservation and visitor obligations depend heavily on a historic structure that the state has to maintain, and that the palace's upkeep is therefore a central concern of the institution, not merely a matter for architects or heritage specialists.\n\nThe building's history is discussed in the sections on the medieval fortress, the royal palace and the public museum, which trace how the museum took over a complex that had been built for very different purposes. The institution, by contrast, was created in 1793 during the French Revolution, when the royal collections became public property." }, { "heading": "Origins as a Medieval Fortress", "text": "The Louvre began around 1190, when Philip II Augustus ordered a fortress on the western edge of Paris. The site was chosen for a practical reason. Philip was building a new city wall, the Wall of Philip II Augustus, which enclosed about 253 hectares on both banks of the Seine. The western sector was judged the weakest part of that line, and the castle was placed there on the right bank to reinforce it. The project took roughly twenty years and absorbed a substantial share of royal revenue, which indicates how seriously the Capetian crown treated the threat from the west.\n\nThe castle was almost square, measuring about 78 by 72 metres, and was ringed by a moat roughly 10 metres wide that drew its water from the Seine. Ten defensive towers stood at the corners, at the midpoint of each side, and beside the two gates on the southern and eastern faces, which were protected by drawbridges. A large circular keep, the Grosse Tour, rose in the centre of the courtyard around 1200, and garrison and arsenal buildings stood outside the curtain wall. The defensive purpose was clear, but the fortress also served as a place of detention. Ferdinand, Count of Flanders, was held there from 1214 to 1226, and the site later hosted meetings and royal births, so it was not used solely for military purposes before the 14th century.\n\nThe strategic logic changed within a few generations. By the mid-14th century Paris had spilled beyond the old wall, and the Hundred Years' War made a larger enclosure necessary. Charles V ordered a new wall from the 1350s that ran outside the older one and enclosed the Louvre, so the castle lost much of its military value. Charles, who reigned from 1364 to 1380, turned the fortress into a royal residence instead. He added windows, chimneys, statues, turrets and gardens, and he created a library of 973 books. The keep was rebuilt in a more elaborate form with living quarters, so that the court could live and conduct business there. Architect Raymond du Temple is usually credited with the works commissioned in this period.\n\nMuch of this medieval structure was later buried or demolished. Its keep was taken down under Francis I, and the above-ground remains were cleared in stages between 1528 and 1660 to make way for the Renaissance palace, though some foundations were incorporated into the new building. Those foundations returned to view during excavations in 1984 and 1985, undertaken as the Grand Louvre planning got under way. The digs uncovered the castle's moat, the base of the keep, and sections of the foundation walls. Today this material forms an archaeological display beneath the Sully Wing and the Cour Carrée, which allows visitors to walk along the line of the moat and see stone from the 12th century in place." }, { "heading": "From Royal Palace to Renaissance Residence", "text": "The transformation of the medieval castle into a royal palace began with Francis I. After his captivity following the 1525 defeat at Pavia, he wanted the Louvre rebuilt in the Italian-inspired Renaissance style he had seen while held there. After Pavia in 1524, King Francis I wanted to transform the old castle of the Louvre into a Renaissance style palace. Work started with demolition. In 1528 the king ordered the removal of the great keep, a task that took four months and the tower was replaced by a moat serving the main court of the castle.\n\nThe decisive step came in 1546, when Francis I commissioned a far more ambitious rebuild. He had the old fortress razed and began to build on its site another royal residence. The king chose the architect Pierre Lescot, appointed to oversee building projects at the Palais du Louvre, transforming the old château into the renowned palace. Lescot's plan was preferred over a proposal by the Italian theorist Sebastiano Serlio. It envisioned enclosing three sides of a square courtyard with elaborate apartments, while the eastern side, facing the city as it then stood, was likely intended to be lightly enclosed with an arcade. Festive corner pavilions of impressive height, adorned with pillars and statues, were planned to replace the medieval towers. The sculptor Jean Goujon worked on the decoration. The resulting court façade and its wing, completed in 1551, became a model for French Renaissance buildings, and the sculpture of the attic bears Goujon's reliefs (consists of two main stories plus an attic richly decorated with Jean Goujon's bas-relief sculptures).\n\nConstruction was not a single campaign. Francis I had moved into the palace in 1534, while rebuilding was still under way, and the work continued after Francis' death and into the reigns of kings Henry II and Charles IX. Henry II kept Lescot in post, and Lescot continued working on the Louvre project until his death. Much of the rest of the complex was still medieval or unfinished at Francis's death, so the palace grew in stages rather than being completed to a single design.\n\nCatherine de' Medici, widow of Henry II, extended the royal complex westward. A decade later, Catharina de Medici added the Tuileries Palace to the west of the Louvre. Her palace, later linked to the Louvre by long galleries along the Seine, meant that the two buildings were eventually treated as one royal ensemble. Linking the two sites was a project carried through several reigns, and the Tuileries would remain a separate royal residence until its destruction in 1871.\n\nIn the seventeenth century the Louvre was enlarged again under Louis XIII and Louis XIV. Major additions were made to the building complex by Louis XIII and Louis XIV. Louis XIII's chief minister, Cardinal Richelieu, acquired great works of art for the king. Louis XIV, with Cardinal Mazarin, acquired collections including that of Charles I of England. Louis XIV's presence, however, did not last. Construction on the Louvre was halted for some time when king Louis XIV decided to move to the Versailles Palace. The court left in 1682, and the Louvre ceased to be a royal residence from that point.\n\nThe palace did not become empty. Earlier, as early as 1608 Henry IV offered artists studios and living spaces within the Louvre. Louis XIV continued that practice, and after the court left, the Louvre became a home for artists, who not only lived in the former palace but also copied paintings and created their own works there. In the later seventeenth century the royal academies of painting and sculpture were also lodged in the palace, which turned the Louvre into a centre for artistic training and display. The royal collection, which had begun as the private holdings of Francis I, including the painting later known as the Mona Lisa, was therefore housed in a building that was no longer a court residence but a workshop for artists and a showcase for royal art. That combination set the stage for the palace's later transformation into a public museum." }, { "heading": "Birth of the Public Museum", "text": "The Louvre's conversion from a royal residence into a public museum was a product of the French Revolution. After the king was imprisoned in August 1792, the royal collections were treated as national property, and a committee began preparing them for display in the Grande Galerie (10-4). The Muséum central des arts opened on 10 August 1793, the first anniversary of the monarchy's fall. Its opening display of 537 paintings consisted mostly of royal holdings and church property that had been confiscated (3-2). The works were hung by national \"schools\" (Italian, French, Flemish and Dutch), so that visitors could follow the development of styles across time (9-12). Hubert Robert, who had been named the museum's first keeper of paintings, helped plan the arrangement of the Grande Galerie and the Salon Carré (9-9).\n\nPublic access was limited in practice. Visitation followed the ten-day décade of the Republican calendar, with the first six days reserved for artists and foreigners and the last three for the general public (10-6). Structural problems in the building then forced the museum to close from 1796 until 1801 (3-3).\n\nUnder Napoleon, the collection expanded dramatically. The museum was renamed the Musée Napoléon, and Dominique Vivant Denon served as its first director (2-6,2-7). Sources differ on the year of the rename: French and napoleon.org accounts give 1803, while the Library of Congress authority record gives 1804 (5-5). Seizures took place across the territories that French armies occupied. The looting began around 1794 and continued until the Congress of Vienna ordered restitution in 1815 (16-1). From Italy alone, Napoleon took about 600 paintings and sculptures, according to the historian Cynthia Saltzman (14-4). Among the antiquities sent to Paris were the Apollo Belvedere, the Laocoön group and the Dying Gaul (15-2), and the Winged Victory of Samothrace also reached the capital during these campaigns (19-2).\n\nAfter Napoleon's defeat, the museum's holdings were sharply reduced. In May 1814, Louis XVIII announced that works not yet displayed in the Louvre or the Tuileries would be returned, but his speech in June asserted French ownership of the masterpieces (15-6,15-7). Progress was slow: by January 1815 the Louvre and the Royal Library had given up very little (15-11). Restitution accelerated only after the Waterloo campaign. Napoleon's abdication led to the return of nearly 5,000 works to their countries of origin (12-7). Some objects could not be moved. Veronese's large canvas from San Giorgio Maggiore, for example, was judged too big to return and stayed in the Louvre (13-2). The Tiber, a river god sculpture from the Papal collection, likewise remained in Paris (15-1).\n\nThe episode left a lasting legal and ethical precedent. The historian Bénédicte Savoy describes the 1815 repatriation as the first major act of restitution in modern times, and she argues that the post-Napoleonic clear-out became a model for later cultural restitutions (14-6,14-7). These debates are discussed further in the section on provenance and restitution and in the wider context of international law.\n\nThe 1793 opening also shaped the idea of the public museum itself. The institution is regarded as one of the earliest major public art museums, one that embodied revolutionary principles of national heritage and popular access (10-8). From the outset, the museum was conceived as a universal collection that would include works from across the world (8-6). Its model influenced museum development across Europe and beyond during the nineteenth century, and it set standards for the display and cataloguing of paintings and sculptures in state-owned collections." }, { "heading": "Architectural Development", "text": "The palace's east front, the Louvre Colonnade, is the most celebrated part of its 17th-century design. It was produced by a three-man committee, known as the Petit Conseil, made up of Louis Le Vau, Charles Le Brun and Claude Perrault, and was built mostly between 1667 and 1674. Louis XIV had first invited Gian Lorenzo Bernini to propose a design in 1665, but in 1667 he set that scheme aside in favour of a more restrained classical solution. The result uses paired giant columns, two loggias and a flat roofline. Its austerity looks back to 16th-century classicism rather than to the Baroque, and the flat roof had little precedent in France. Perrault, who had translated the Roman architect Vitruvius into French in 1673, is often credited with the design's theoretical grounding, although the attribution of individual elements is still debated.\n\nNapoleon III's reign brought the most extensive building campaign of the palace's history. The project, long called the grand dessein, aimed to join the old Louvre around the Cour Carrée to the Tuileries Palace to the west. A decree of the 1848 provisional government had already called for the completion of the north wing and the extension of the rue de Rivoli, and in 1853 the architect Louis Visconti presented plans to the emperor and Empress Eugénie. After Visconti's death, Hector-Martin Lefuel carried the work forward. The new buildings were arranged around a series of named pavilions, several of which took the names of French statesmen; in 1989 these names were also applied to the three wings of the museum complex, so the north wing became the Richelieu wing, the eastern square around the Cour Carrée the Sully wing, and the south wing the Denon wing. The south wing was planned largely for new museum galleries, the so-called Nouveau Musée Impérial, and the Denon wing is named after Vivant Denon, the first director of the museum under Napoleon. Since 1993, all of the spaces built in this campaign have been used by the museum.\n\nThe Tuileries Palace, which stood directly west of the Louvre, was set on fire during the suppression of the Paris Commune. Communards set the palace alight on 23 May 1871 as government troops entered the city, and the blaze burned for about two days. The fire destroyed the Tuileries' interior and reached the north-west wing of the museum, and the imperial library in what is now the Richelieu wing was also lost. The rest of the Louvre was largely saved, thanks to the efforts of Paris firefighters, soldiers and museum staff, notably the curator Henry Barbet de Jouy, who was given responsibility for the museum's security in 1870–1871. The Tuileries ruins were later demolished in the early 1880s. Lefuel then rebuilt the damaged parts of the north wing, including the Pavillon de Marsan, between 1874 and 1879, which led to the north wing being split into the Marsan and Rohan sections.\n\nThese events changed the palace's relationship with its surroundings. Once the Tuileries disappeared, the Louvre became the eastern terminus of the axis running through the Champs-Élysées, and its role as a royal residence had already given way to its role as a museum. The architecture of the Louvre thus combines three layers: the classical facade of Louis XIV's architects, the Second Empire expansion designed to hold a growing public collection, and the post-1871 reconstruction that closed the palace's ties to the Tuileries. Later twentieth-century works, including the Grand Louvre, built on this layered fabric rather than replacing it." }, { "heading": "The Grand Louvre and the Glass Pyramid", "text": "The Grand Louvre was a decade-long programme that President François Mitterrand announced in September 1981 to reshape both the palace and the museum it housed. Its first step was to relocate the Ministry of Finance, which had occupied the northern wing since 1871, so that the museum could take over that space. The project was meant to expand exhibition areas and remodel the building as a whole. Mitterrand chose the Chinese-American architect I. M. Pei in 1983, and the works were substantially finished in the late 1990s, although some final elements were only completed in the 2010s.\n\nThe centrepiece was a glass and metal pyramid in the Cour Napoléon, designed by Pei and presented to the public in early 1984. It stands 21.6 metres high and has a square base about 34 metres on each side, built from 603 rhombus-shaped and 70 triangular glass panels. Mitterrand inaugurated it on 4 March 1989, and it opened to the public on 29 March of that year. The design provoked fierce criticism. Among the objections were the claim that a modern structure did not belong beside a classical palace, and opinion polls at one point reportedly showed most Parisians opposed to it. Pei later recalled receiving many hostile looks on the street. Over time, however, the pyramid became accepted and then celebrated. Pei had at first considered placing a sculpture in the entrance hall, but after failed trials the pyramid itself came to serve as the work of art. Visitor numbers rose from about 3.5 million in 1989 to more than 10 million in 2018, a trend that the museum's leadership has credited partly to the new entrance.\n\nThe entrance hall lies underground. Pei's team concluded that the required floor area, which the programme put at more than 92,000 square metres, could not be built above ground without overwhelming the historic structures around the courtyard, so the new space was placed beneath it. The resulting underground hall, known as the Hall Napoléon, has been the museum's main entrance since 1993 and can be reached from the pyramid, from the Carrousel du Louvre shopping complex, and from the Richelieu passage linking to the rue de Rivoli. A smaller inverted pyramid beneath the courtyard admits daylight into the passages below, and three smaller pyramids around the main structure serve as lightwells. The underground spaces were reworked between 2014 and 2018 to improve visitor comfort, which indicates that the hall's early design did not fully resolve the problems of a very large crowd moving through it.\n\nThe excavations carried out before and during construction produced one of the most significant archaeological finds in Paris. Digging under the Cour Carrée and the Cour Napoléon exposed the foundations of the fortress that Philip II Augustus had begun around 1190, including sections of its walls and moat. Earlier campaigns in 1866 had already revealed parts of the medieval structure, but the 1980s work was far more extensive. Artefacts such as pottery, weapons and building tools were also recovered. Rather than being covered over, the remains were incorporated into the new scheme. Basement-level galleries were created to display them, and the remodelled Pavillon de l'Horloge links the underground spaces beneath the pyramid with the rooms that now preserve the medieval Louvre, allowing visitors to walk through the foundations of the original fortress archaeology and medieval history that predate the palace and the museum." }, { "heading": "Collections by Department", "text": "The collection is divided into eight departments: Egyptian Antiquities; Near Eastern Antiquities; Greek, Etruscan, and Roman Antiquities; Islamic Art; Sculpture; Decorative Arts; Paintings; Prints and Drawings. The groupings mix geography, chronology and medium. The two Near Eastern and Egyptian departments cover the ancient worlds of the Nile and Mesopotamia separately, the Greek, Etruscan and Roman department covers the classical Mediterranean, and the remaining departments are organised by object type or by region of production. Sources give different totals: one states that the Musée du Louvre contains approximately 500,000 objects, while the museum's own online database holds entries for more than 480,000 works of art. Only a small fraction is on view at any time. Figures from the end of 2016 show the scale of each department's holdings, from roughly 137,600 Near Eastern objects and 66,300 Egyptian ones to about 15,300 works in Islamic art and 12,660 paintings, with graphic arts (prints and drawings) the largest group at about 122,200 works.\n\nNear Eastern and Egyptian Antiquities\n\nThe Near Eastern department grew out of an Assyrian museum that opened in the Louvre in 1847, and it became a separate department in 1881 after excavations at Tello revealed the existence of Sumerian civilisation. Its best-known object is the stele of the Code of Hammurabi, said to have been composed around 1755–1750 BCE, which carries about 4,130 lines of cuneiform text. The collection also holds the earliest writing in the museum: Sumerians developed cuneiform, a system of writing using wedge-shaped marks impressed into clay tablets, around 3500 BCE. Monumental Mesopotamian sculpture, such as the Assyrian winged bulls, is displayed in the Richelieu wing, while smaller objects from Persia and the Levant are shown on the level above.\n\nThe Egyptian department covers artifacts from the Nile civilizations which date from 4,000 BC to the 4th century, and it is among the largest collections of Egyptian antiquities anywhere. Its strengths include funerary material such as sarcophagi, mummies and the Book of the Dead, as well as royal sculpture, among them a colossal statue of Ramesses II and the sphinx from Tanis. The department is spread over two floors and occupies parts of the Sully and Denon wings. Its origins lie in an Egyptian museum opened in 1827 in four rooms, which Jean-François Champollion helped to create.\n\nGreek, Etruscan and Roman Antiquities\n\nThis department is the Louvre's principal home for classical sculpture. Its collection spans three millennia, from Cycladic figurines to Hellenistic bronzes. The core of the sculpture collection was assembled in stages. In 1692 Louis XIV placed part of his sculptures in the Salle des Caryatides, and in 1798 further antiquities arrived from Napoleon's campaigns in Italy. The Greek galleries occupy the former royal apartments that became the Galerie des Antiques. The Venus de Milo, found on the island of Milos in 1820, entered the museum in 1821, and it has been moved within the galleries several times since. Many sculptures shown as Greek are Roman marble copies of Greek bronze originals, as very few large Greek bronzes have survived.\n\nThe Roman section includes portrait sculpture, sarcophagi, mosaics and bronzes from the Republic and Empire. Its best-known figure is the Borghese Gladiator, bought in 1807. The Etruscan section, which covers pre-Roman Italy, is anchored by the Sarcophagus of the Spouses from Cerveteri and includes tomb paintings and bronze mirrors.\n\nIslamic Art, Decorative Arts and the Western Schools\n\nThe Islamic art department is comparatively small, with about 15,000 works in the 2016 count, and it covers objects from across the Islamic world. The Decorative Arts department, which holds about 23,400 objects in the same count, is housed mainly in the Richelieu and Denon wings and includes furniture, ceramics, metalwork and jewellery of the medieval and modern periods.\n\nThe Paintings department, with roughly 12,660 works, covers the period from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century and is organised by national school. Its French, Italian, Spanish, Flemish and Dutch holdings include some of the most famous paintings in Western art. Sculpture from the medieval, Renaissance and modern periods is held in a separate department, while the Prints and Drawings department holds the largest number of objects in the museum. Because works on paper are sensitive to light, these pieces are rotated and displayed in special exhibitions, so most of this material is shown only occasionally." }, { "heading": "Landmark Works", "text": "The Louvre's most visited object is Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, which hangs in the Salle des États on the first floor of the Denon wing. Visitor surveys conducted by the museum have shown that 80% of visitors come to see the Mona Lisa, and 64% of those are first-time visitors to the Louvre. The room is also the busiest in the building, with 7 to 8 million visitors passing through the Salle des États each year. The painting's placement reflects that pressure. A period in the Grande Galerie, from 1992 to 1995, made sense historically but could not accommodate the crowds. An early-2000s proposal moved it to a separate wall in the room's centre so that more people could see it at once (showcasing the artwork up high on a separate wall in the largest room of the palace). Despite the crowds, the viewing is brief. The Louvre's own figures put the average at approximately 50 seconds observing it, and the panel is protected by glass and viewed from behind a barrier.\n\nTwo antiquities rival the painting in popular recognition. The Winged Victory of Samothrace is a Hellenistic marble that the Louvre dates to the early 2nd century BC, and attributes to the people of Rhodes. Its subject, a winged figure on a ship's prow, is usually read as a monument to a naval victory (once stood on an island hilltop to commemorate a naval victory). The statue has been displayed at the top of the main staircase, and sources differ on the year it went up, with one giving 1883 and another 1884. Greece has asked for its return, a claim the Louvre has not accepted. The Venus de Milo has a comparable history of public debate. In 1920, the American sculptor Robert Ingersoll Aitken criticised the way the statue was displayed in the museum, an early example of the arguments over presentation that continue today. During the Second World War, the Winged Victory of Samothrace and the Venus de Milo were kept at the Château de Valençay, and the Venus was returned to the Louvre after the war.\n\nThe Code of Hammurabi shows the collection's depth in Near Eastern antiquities. The object is a basalt stele 2.25 m tall, inscribed with the text of a Babylonian legal code. Scholars date the composition to around 1753 BC, while the Louvre's catalogue gives the reign of Hammurabi as 1792 to 1750 BC. The stele was found in Iran, not Iraq. It had been taken as plunder 600 years after its creation to Susa, and was rediscovered in 1901 during an expedition led by the French engineer de Morgan. The relief at its top shows the king receiving the law, symbolised by a measuring rod and tape, from the seated Shamash, the Babylonian god of justice. The Louvre's catalogue records that the object reached France through a division of finds made after the excavation. The text is often described as one of the oldest known written law codes, which is why it attracts so much attention from visitors interested in ancient law.\n\nOther works in the Louvre's collections are less widely known but are often cited by specialists. The painted limestone Seated Scribe, an Egyptian sculpture from the Old Kingdom, is admired for its naturalistic detail and its depiction of a literate official. It is displayed among the Egyptian antiquities and is one of the most frequently photographed objects in that department.\n\nDelacroix's Liberty Leading the People (1830) connects the collection to modern French politics. It commemorates the July Revolution of 1830 and shows an allegorical female figure leading insurgents over the barricades. Jacques-Louis David's The Coronation of Napoleon (begun in 1805 and completed in 1807) is a large canvas depicting the ceremony of December 1804 at Notre-Dame. Both works show how the museum became a place where the nation's history was displayed alongside ancient civilisations. They also illustrate the way the galleries link the revolutionary period to the imperial and later French states." }, { "heading": "Acquisition, Provenance and Restitution", "text": "The Louvre's collections were built up through several channels. Early holdings came from the French crown: successive kings from Francis I onward gathered paintings, sculpture and antiquities in the palace. The French Revolution changed the basis of ownership. Royal, aristocratic and church property was confiscated and placed under state control, and the Musée central des arts, opened in 1793, displayed these works as public property. Under Napoleon, military conquest added further objects, many of which were returned after 1815. Later centuries brought bequests and donations from collectors, along with purchases. Each object's history is recorded in registers that the museum's curators and archivists keep current, and the status of individual works often depends on how and when they entered the collection.\n\nAcquisitions from excavations\n\nFrom the 19th century, many Near Eastern and Egyptian objects came through archaeological fieldwork. The best-known early example is Khorsabad. In 1843 the French consul Paul-Émile Botta, working at Mosul, began digging at the site after local reports of carved stones, and he uncovered the palace of the Assyrian king Sargon II. The French government funded the work and sent an artist to record the finds. Large reliefs and winged bulls were cut into sections, moved by raft and cart, and shipped to Paris, although one consignment sank in the Tigris. The first Assyrian reliefs reached the Louvre in 1847, and the museum opened an Assyrian display that year. This model, in which excavation was directed from France and finds were sent to Paris, shaped the museum's Near Eastern holdings for decades. Today, the ethics of such removals are widely reassessed. Similar expeditions to Susa in Iran in the early 20th century brought the Code of Hammurabi to the Louvre.\n\nWartime looting and provenance research\n\nThe Louvre's provenance work during the Second World War centres on the Nazi seizure of art from Jewish collections in occupied France. In 1940 the Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce (ERR) used the Louvre as a temporary storage area before the Musée du Jeu de Paume was made available to it in November 1940. There, looted works were catalogued, sorted and crated for shipment to Germany. Hermann Göring made selections for his personal collection. The curator Rose Valland, one of the few French staff retained at the Jeu de Paume, secretly recorded the destinations and timing of shipments and passed this information to the Resistance and to French authorities. Her records helped the Allies recover many works after the war. In 1950 the French state created the Musées nationaux récupération (MNR) to bring together recovered and confiscated works; its central repository is at the Louvre, though objects are dispersed among museums across France. Provenance research on works with gaps in their wartime history continues, and the Louvre's library and archives hold much of the relevant documentation.\n\nRestitution claims and legal frameworks\n\nRestitution debates at the Louvre have mainly concerned colonial-era acquisitions and certain prominent Egyptian objects. In 2026 France adopted a new framework law, Law No. 2026-351 of 9 May 2026, to return cultural property taken during the colonial period. The bill passed the Senate in January and both chambers approved it in April. It targets items taken between 1815 and 1972, the year the UNESCO convention on cultural heritage took effect. Before this law, each return required a separate act of parliament, as in the 2020 transfer of objects from Abomey to Benin. Under the new framework, a requesting state must formally ask for an object, commit to protecting and displaying it, and provide evidence of illegitimate acquisition, which a committee then assesses. Requests concerning Louvre objects are not uniform. The Seated Scribe and the Dendera Zodiac have been the subject of public repatriation campaigns, but no verified formal Egyptian request exists for them. Debate continues over legal questions, such as the role of state sovereignty and the time limits applied, and ethical questions about whether large encyclopedic museums should retain works acquired under colonial conditions." }, { "heading": "Visitors and Crowd Management", "text": "The Louvre is one of the most heavily visited museums in the world. Its attendance peaked at 10.2 million in 2018, collapsed during the pandemic, and then recovered. The institution counted about 8.7 million visits in 2024 and more than 9 million in 2025, according to the Art Newspaper's annual survey. Foreign visitors make up most of the audience. One 2025 account put the share of non-French visitors at 73 percent, with about 40 percent arriving from outside the European Union.\n\nSpread across the year, these numbers average roughly 25,000 visitors a day, but the daily load varies sharply with the season. Busy summer days are often far above that average. Since June 2022 the museum has capped admissions at 30,000 people per day, and it later made this limit permanent. The concentration is most acute around the Mona Lisa. The painting hangs in the Salle des États, the largest room in the Denon Wing, behind a protective barrier. Published estimates of how many people see it each day vary widely, from about 15,000 to 25,000, and visitors often describe a crowd that jostles for a few seconds in front of the work. Critics note that this crush leaves other paintings in the same room, including works by Titian and Veronese, largely unnoticed. The relocation of the Mona Lisa is discussed in a separate section.\n\nThe glass pyramid designed by I. M. Pei, inaugurated in 1989, was not sized for today's traffic. The entrance was originally planned for about 4.5 million visitors, and attendance had approached 10 million within about a quarter of a century. The shortfall produced long queues outside, noise inside the reception hall, and difficulty for visitors finding their way. A \"Pyramid Project\" carried out from 2014 to 2016 doubled access control at the pyramid, reconfigured the Richelieu and Carrousel entrances, and installed sound-absorbing partitions that reduced heat and noise in the lobby. Problems have not disappeared. In 2025, director Laurence des Cars warned that the reception areas were poorly insulated against cold and heat and tended to amplify sound, which made them uncomfortable for both visitors and staff. Her concerns were part of a wider critique of the building's condition.\n\nThe museum's main tools for managing crowds combine limits on entry, scheduling and routing. Visitors are asked to book timed-entry tickets, typically for a 30-minute window, which spreads arrivals across the day. Evening openings on Wednesdays and Fridays, when the galleries stay open until 9 p.m., draw some visitors away from the midday peak. Staff also encourage people to use other entrances, especially the underground Carrousel du Louvre, which is less crowded than the pyramid queue during busy periods. The museum has also been reconfiguring circulation routes inside the galleries. These measures reduce pressure at the busiest points, but they address symptoms that the broader renovation plan seeks to resolve at a structural level." }, { "heading": "Historic Crises: The 1911 Theft and Wartime Evacuation", "text": "The 1911 theft\n\nOn 21 August 1911, Leonardo da Vinci's portrait vanished from the wall where it hung. The thief, Vincenzo Peruggia, was an Italian immigrant who had briefly worked at the museum as a handyman and glazier, and he had helped make the painting's protective frame. He entered the museum on the evening of 20 August, hid in a storage closet overnight, and in the morning took the panel from its wall and walked out with it under his workman's smock. A plumber helped him unlock a stairwell door, mistaking him for a colleague. The theft was noticed when the painter Louis Béroud came to the museum and found an empty space where the picture should have been.\n\nThe police questioned Peruggia twice as a former employee, but they did not treat him as a serious suspect. He kept the painting hidden in his lodgings in Paris for more than two years. His motive was partly patriotic: he believed Napoleon had taken the work from Italy. Some accounts also link it to his involvement in forgeries, since the disappearance could raise the value of copies. In December 1913 he wrote to a Florentine art dealer under an alias, offering to return the painting to Italy. The dealer consulted the director of the Uffizi, who contacted the police, and the picture was recovered in Florence. Peruggia received a light sentence of about one year, and the painting was brought back to Paris in early 1914.\n\nThe affair turned a painting that was already admired into a global celebrity. Press coverage ran for years, and the work's fame is partly attributed to the theft.\n\nThe evacuation of 1939–1940\n\nThe threat of a second war was anticipated well before 1939. From 1933 French museums drew up evacuation lists and searched for large châteaux far from cities and industrial sites, and the planning of director Jacques Jaujard of the Musées nationaux, who had prepared the operation over several years, was put into action when the invasion looked likely. On 25 August 1939 the Louvre closed for what was officially described as repairs. Behind the closed doors, teams took down paintings, rolled tapestries and crated antiquities. Sources differ on the scale: one account gives 203 vehicles carrying 1,862 wooden crates, while another reports 199 trucks and 5,446 crates over about four months. Oversized works such as Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa could not pass through the doors and were moved in place. The crates carried colour markings according to value, and the Mona Lisa bore the highest category.\n\nThe main destination was the Château de Chambord in the Loire valley, from which works were redistributed to other châteaux and abbeys. The Winged Victory of Samothrace and the Venus de Milo went to the Château de Valençay. The Mona Lisa travelled several times during the war, moving between sites in the Loire valley, Lot and Tarn-et-Garonne, and ended the war at the Musée Ingres in Montauban. Relocations were kept quiet and were often timed to avoid bombing, looting and German requisition. Because the Germans occupied Paris, the evacuation depended on secrecy and on the cooperation of staff who could not be seen to resist openly.\n\nNot all wartime movement was protective. From 1940 the Germans used rooms in the Louvre and the Jeu de Paume to store works looted from Jewish collections before shipment to Germany. Jaujard could not stop these transfers, but his staff kept a secret list of the true owners, which later helped restitution after the war.\n\nReturn and restoration\n\nParis was liberated in August 1944, and Germany surrendered in May 1945. The Mona Lisa returned to the Louvre in mid-June 1945. Accounts of her route home conflict in detail, and some reports say that a copy was also circulated in Austria, but the consensus is that the painting in the Louvre is the original. The Louvre was extensively renovated between 1945 and 1946, and its galleries reopened gradually over the following years. Jaujard was honoured for his role in saving much of the collection.\n\nLessons for later security and storage\n\nThe crises shaped the museum's approach in several ways. The 1911 theft showed how a single painting could be removed in a few hours with almost no supervision, and the museum's later practice of displaying the Mona Lisa behind bulletproof glass reflects the same concern, although the sources do not record a direct causal link. The wartime experience established the principle that the most valuable works must be dispersable, documented and moved to secure storage in an emergency. It also produced durable record-keeping about ownership. Since 1945 the Louvre has maintained a dedicated area for works with a Nazi-era provenance, in the context of restitution, a theme taken up in the section on acquisitions and provenance." }, { "heading": "Nouvelle Renaissance Renovation", "text": "President Emmanuel Macron presented the Nouvelle Renaissance programme on 28 January 2025 while standing in front of the Mona Lisa. Macron describes the project as a 'rebirth,' uniting the 230-year legacy of the Louvre with today's demands for accessibility, sustainability, and community engagement. The problems it responds to are concrete. The museum receives about nine million visitors a year, although it was designed to hold four million at most. Shortly before the announcement, the museum's director, Laurence des Cars, had formally alerted the Ministry of Culture to the worrying state of the building and to the difficulties caused by the surge in visitors. A leaked internal memo described leaky ceilings, chronic overcrowding, and other dire concerns that could endanger the facility's priceless collection. The stated goals are a more balanced visitor flow, better conservation, and a focus on education. Infrastructure work is also part of the plan, including repairs to aging infrastructure that will address temperature-control and water-damage issues.\n\nA new entrance on the eastern façade\n\nThe most visible structural element is a new main entrance on the eastern side, built around the Perrault Colonnade. Its main purpose is to relieve the glass pyramid by Pei, which has become the single route through which most visitors enter and leave. The new \"grand entrance\" will open at the building's eastern end, at the colonnade, opposite the Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois church, to take the strain off the main glass pyramid entrance. The government's timetable has the work finished by 2031, four years after his second term ends.\n\nThe Mona Lisa's own gallery\n\nThe most publicised element is a dedicated space for Leonardo da Vinci's painting. Currently the work hangs in the Salle des États, which is crowded, so the new room is intended to separate it from the rest of the circulation. Instead of remaining inside the overcrowded Salle des États, the Mona Lisa will move into a purpose-built gallery beneath the Cour Carrée. According to the museum's director, the room would cover about 2,000 m2, roughly three times the size of the room in which she is currently exhibited. It will be the only work on display in the new room. Visitors would have a separate attraction, with its own ticket. Relocating the painting is also expected to free space for other works. One commentary, quoting Le Monde, argued that many works are \"eclipsed and polluted by overtourism.\" No firm date for the move has been published; for now, the Mona Lisa will stay in the Salle des États.\n\nCost, funding and the winning design\n\nEstimates of the total cost vary considerably between sources. Early reports put the programme at around 700 to 800 million euros over about ten years, of which only a \"very minority\" share was to be financed by the state. Later reporting gave a figure of more than one billion euros. The new entrance and its spaces were separately put at approximately 400 million euros. The funding model combines several sources. The museum's own revenue is central: Macron's office said the entrance would be financed from the museum's own resources, and a higher admission fee for non-European visitors, starting in January 2026, was designed to contribute. The project is also tied to the higher entry fee and the licence fee paid for the Louvre Abu Dhabi.\n\nThe international architecture competition was run by the Ministry of Culture. More than a hundred applications were submitted, two thirds of them by international groups, and five teams were selected in October 2025. On 18 May 2026, Culture Minister Catherine Pégard announced that the winning team was STUDIOS Architecture Paris and Selldorf Architects, with BASE Paysagiste as landscape designers. The jury cited the excellence of its architectural vision and its integration into the site's heritage, urban, and landscape context. The concept reactivates the historic east-west axis and introduces two new underground museum entrances, providing access to exhibition areas and a route to a dedicated Mona Lisa space. The proposal still has to be refined with stakeholders, and over the coming months, the winning team will work closely with the Louvre and all stakeholders in the project to further refine the proposal. The project had been on hold after the October 2025 jewel theft, and the new president, Christophe Leribault, confirmed the works in May 2026." }, { "heading": "Apollo Gallery Heist and Security Response", "text": "On the morning of 19 October 2025, a gang carried out a daylight robbery in the Galerie d'Apollon, the gilded 17th-century ceremonial room on the first floor of the Denon Wing, while the museum was open. The method relied on a vehicle rather than a concealed entry. A truck fitted with a furniture-style lift was parked beside the building, and the crew raised a platform to a balcony. Men in high-visibility vests, who looked like a renovation crew, reached a window, forced it, and used disc cutters to break into the display cases. Accounts of the total duration vary, from under eight minutes to about seven, and only a few minutes were spent inside the room. The thieves then left on motorcycles waiting in the streets below.\n\nWhat was taken\n\nEight pieces of the French Crown Jewels were stolen, valued at about €88 million (roughly $102 million). The haul included a diamond-and-emerald necklace that Napoleon gave to his second wife, Marie-Louise, a diadem set with nearly 2,000 diamonds and more than 200 pearls linked to Empress Eugénie, and sapphire jewels associated with Queen Marie-Amélie. Eugénie's diamond-and-emerald crown was dropped during the escape and later found outside the museum, so it was not among the missing pieces. The Interior Minister's account of the raid, which focused on two display cases, described three or four thieves. Other reports describe four.\n\nThe investigation\n\nPolice made their first arrests about a week after the raid. Two men in their thirties were detained on the Saturday evening, one of them while trying to board a flight to Algeria, and one suspect was linked to the scene through DNA. The Paris prosecutor, Laure Beccuau, said forensic experts were analysing around 150 samples taken at the site. Five more people were detained at the end of October, and three of them were later released without charge. In early November, two men were charged with organised theft and criminal conspiracy, and a 38-year-old woman was charged as an accomplice. Both denied involvement. A fourth suspected member of the team was arrested later at a construction site in western France, and by late November the four men believed to have carried out the robbery had all been charged. The jewels themselves had not been recovered in any of these reports, and the museum's director described the security failure as a \"terrible failure.\"\n\nReopening and security changes\n\nThe Apollo Gallery reopened to the public on 22 July 2026, after nearly nine months closed. The museum removed every display case and every object from the room, a step it said was needed to return the painted and sculpted wall decorations to their original state. The gallery now serves once more as a ceremonial space, and visitors see its architecture and decoration without any jewels. The jewels that were not stolen are to be shown later in a separate room designed as a windowless strongroom. Reports on the reopening also said the gallery underwent enhanced security measures before it was allowed to reopen, although the public details of the upgraded surveillance and anti-intrusion systems were limited. The case also led to the resignation of the museum's president, Laurence des Cars, which is covered in the leadership section." }, { "heading": "Leadership, Labour and Financial Pressures", "text": "The resignation of Laurence des Cars and the new director\n\nLaurence des Cars, the museum's first woman director, was appointed president of the Louvre in 2021. Her final year in office was marked by overlapping crises. She handed her resignation to President Emmanuel Macron, who accepted it and called it \"an act of responsibility.\" In her farewell message to staff, she wrote that she no longer felt able to fully carry out the responsibilities entrusted to her. Under these circumstances, I feel that I am no longer able to fully exercise the responsibilities entrusted to me. Her critics described her tenure as criticised as autocratic and for prioritising style over substance. She has failed to show up to two parliamentary hearings since her departure.\n\nMacron named her successor the following day. Christophe Leribault, since 2024 the director of the Palace of Versailles, was appointed to the role by President Emmanuel Macron. Leribault had earlier led the Musée d'Orsay, and in 2021 he had been passed over for the Louvre post. He would be tasked with \"securing\" and \"modernising\" the world's most-visited museum. The government spokesperson gave his main mission as strengthening the safety and security of the building, its collections and its people, and restoring trust. Leribault's primary mission, a government spokesperson told Le Parisien, is to \"strengthen the safety and security of the building, the collections and the people, to restore a climate of trust and to carry out, with all the teams, the necessary transformations at the museum.\" He also inherits responsibility for the security master plan begun under des Cars and the renovation project, an ambitious $820 million renovation, first announced in January 2025.\n\nStrikes, understaffing and early closures\n\nLabour unrest escalated sharply over this period. Staff walked out on 16 June 2025, when the Louvre was forced to close its doors after its staff walked out over poor work conditions and severe overcrowding issues. The action was unusual because it began during an internal meeting, when employees refused to return to their posts. Unlike previous strikes at the Louvre, the protest took place very suddenly when, during an internal meeting at the museum, employees refused to return to their posts due to the overwhelming crowds and severe understaffing.\n\nThe disputes continued into the winter. In December 2025, around 400 employees voted unanimously to launch a strike, which can be renewed, to protest the \"deterioration\" of working conditions, the CGT and CFDT unions said. By January 2026 the pattern had become a repeated closure cycle. Staff at the Louvre museum in Paris staged another strike on Monday (19 January)—the ninth such action in a month. Management put the financial cost at at least one million euros in revenue for the December and early January closures. Unions pressed for more recruitment, higher pay and better maintenance of the museum. One of their demands was to drop a costly project to create a new entrance in favour of basic maintenance and infrastructure work. The staffing problem is long-standing. In 2019 the union had pointed out that amid rising crowds from 2009 to 2018, staff headcount declined in that period from 2,161 to 2,005, according to the union.\n\nThe ticket fraud investigation\n\nThe ticketing scandal exposed weaknesses in the museum's access controls. Museum officials began suspecting that two tour guides were reusing tickets in 2024, and reported their suspicions to law enforcement in December 2024. A formal judicial investigation followed in June 2025. In February 2026, authorities arrested suspects and charged nine people, including two museum employees, for a decade-long fraud that scammed the Louvre out of nearly $12 million. The scheme worked by reusing tickets and splitting groups. Prosecutors said the network allegedly reused tickets multiple times to usher in groups, and sometimes split up larger groups to avoid paying an extra fee that is usually charged for guided tour groups. The investigation also identified that the group allegedly bribed museum employees to help circumvent ticket controls. Investigators estimated the operation could have admitted up to 20 groups of visitors per day for a decade.\n\nThe affair revealed how much the system depended on trust at the checkpoints. Kim Pham, the Louvre's general administrator, argued that fraud at an institution of this size was \"statistically inevitable.\" He also acknowledged shortcomings. In response, the museum introduced stricter controls: individual tickets are now limited to two scans, while group tickets can be validated only once. Politicians were also critical. The president of the parliamentary commission investigating museum security said the Louvre had \"become a state within a state\" and that the Ministry of Culture must regain control.\n\nThe non-EEA admission price\n\nThe new higher admission price for visitors from outside the European Economic Area, introduced in January 2026, drew criticism that it singled out tourists by origin. Some observers reported that the museum had raised the price for those outside the EU. Union representatives objected to the arrangement. A CGT representative called it \"unacceptable discrimination,\" telling the Guardian \"these visitors would have to pay more to see a dilapidated museum, where they can't access the whole collection because we are chronically lacking staff and rooms are regularly closed off.\" The additional revenue was intended to help meet the museum's operating and modernisation needs, which are considerable, given the staffing and infrastructure problems described above.\n\nTaken together, the resignation, strikes, fraud case and pricing dispute show an institution under sustained strain. Its leadership, staffing and security arrangements were all under review while the renovation plans were being developed. The controversies also raised questions about how a public institution should balance access, revenue and the protection of its collections." }, { "heading": "Louvre Abu Dhabi and Louvre Lens", "text": "Louvre Abu Dhabi\n\nThe Abu Dhabi branch rests on an intergovernmental agreement signed by France and the United Arab Emirates on 6 March 2007. Under that deal, the Paris museum licensed its name, and France agreed to supply expertise, lend works and organise exhibitions. Reported totals differ by source. Artnet, citing the Washington Post, put the licence fee at $525 million and a further $750 million for French staff and loan-related work. Other outlets describe the package as roughly €1 billion over 30 years. Jean Nouvel designed the museum on Saadiyat Island, which opened in November 2017 with a dome that draws on Arab architectural forms. Its permanent collection is owned by Abu Dhabi authorities, and the museum also displays French loans, so the Paris institution's brand and its lending work both sit inside a foreign-owned building.\n\nBrand, revenue and renewal\n\nFor the Paris museum, the licence became a significant source of income. The Louvre Endowment Fund's annual report recorded that the Abu Dhabi trademark licence brought in €50 million in 2018, while donors gave about €2.7 million that year. In 2021 the two governments extended the licence by ten years, to 2047, in exchange for an additional €165 million, paid in 2022 and 2023. The Louvre agreed to lend four works in return, and the renewal was tied to a separate French–Saudi cultural project in AlUla. Reports also said Abu Dhabi had sought exclusivity over the Louvre's presence in the Gulf, which had delayed talks.\n\nLoans and the collection\n\nAbu Dhabi's collection combines purchased works with long-term loans from France. Artnet described about 300 loaned works at opening, while the Louvre's own statements and later reporting refer to a 600-piece permanent collection and roughly 250 works on loan. The Paris museum says it entrusts about 100 artefacts to Abu Dhabi each year. The agreement provides for loans from thirteen French institutions for a decade and temporary exhibitions for fifteen years. In March 2026, after a regional war involving Iran began in late February, commentators in France called for the French loans to be withdrawn. The museum said the safety of its visitors, staff and collections was its top priority, and an anonymous source said there was no imminent danger. The episode showed how loan arrangements carry risks beyond the galleries.\n\nLouvre-Lens\n\nLouvre-Lens grew from a decision in 2003 by the Culture Ministry to decentralise major Paris institutions. The Louvre chose to create an \"away-from-base\" museum, and in November 2004 the state selected Lens over several northern towns. The museum opened in December 2012 on the site of the former ninth pithead of a coal mine. Lens, with about 30,000 inhabitants, had no museum before then. The last local mine closed in 1986, and unemployment rose well above the national average. The building, by SANAA, consists of several linked pavilions set in a park on the former mine land, and its Galerie du Temps presents works in chronological order. The Louvre lends more works to Lens than to any other institution, with more than 3,000 works lent since 2012. Its visitor numbers have made it the second most visited museum outside Paris, after the Musée des Confluences in Lyon, and it is widely described as a means of regional revival through culture and education.\n\nDebates about strategy and economics\n\nCritics of the international expansion have argued along several lines. Some curators, including Catherine Goguel, objected to what she called the \"mercenary nature\" of the Abu Dhabi deal and said curatorial and conservation staff had not been consulted. A petition led by the critic Didier Rykner gathered 4,700 signatures against the scheme. Opponents also argued that lending would burden French museums and that the government was using art for trade and diplomacy. Supporters, including the culture minister of the time, rejected the idea that the country was selling its heritage, and presented the venture as the spread of French culture and a source of funds for domestic museums. Whether the Louvre's branches serve public access, regional development or revenue remains contested." }, { "heading": "Conservation, Research and Education", "text": "Much of the Louvre's conservation and scientific work takes place in the Centre de Recherche et de Restauration des Musées de France (C2RMF), a laboratory on the palace site. Its best-known instrument is AGLAE, a particle accelerator that reveals the elemental makeup of materials. The laboratory also has X-ray equipment, spectroscopy and imaging tools that work across visible, ultraviolet and infrared light, magnetic resonance instruments, chromatographs and mass spectrometers, and a photography suite equipped for everything from small sculptures and pottery to large paintings. Artworks rarely fit the sample sizes of commercial instruments, so the centre has built portable X-ray diffraction and fluorescence spectrometers of its own, one of which weighs only about 40 kg.\n\nRestoration is a visible part of this programme. Delacroix's Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople, a canvas about 4.1 by 5 metres that was moved from Versailles to the Louvre in 1881, was treated between May 2025 and April 2026. Conservators remounted it on a restored stretcher, removed yellowed varnish and materials left by earlier interventions, applied a new transparent varnish and filled small losses in the paint. Scientific imaging made during the work showed that Delacroix had first placed a soldier's corpse, trampled by a horse, in the foreground before concealing it behind banners. Past restorations have not always helped: a 1949 intervention is believed to have deliberately recoloured the tunic of Liberty in Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People, a change that later conservators reversed after finding the garment was in fact light grey.\n\nNon-invasive imaging is central to the lab's research. Infrared reflectography can penetrate paint layers, depending on the pigments used, to show underdrawings and preparatory sketches, so scholars can compare an artist's original plan with the finished picture. Radiography, first applied to paintings in the early twentieth century, uncovers hidden changes and was used on the large Marriage at Cana in 1992. During the Louvre's conservation of Giotto's Crucifix in 2010–2013, two-dimensional X-ray fluorescence mapping, radiographs and electron microscopy recovered an original gilded decoration around Christ that had been repainted in the nineteenth century. The methods do not always yield clear answers. X-rays can obscure the chemical signatures that other techniques use to date ceramics, which complicated the authentication of a sculpted horse claimed to come from the Han dynasty. Synchrotron X-ray diffraction has also been applied to a microsample from the ground layer of the Mona Lisa, shedding light on the pigments available to Leonardo.\n\nThe École du Louvre, the museum's training institution, was founded in 1882 as part of Jules Ferry's educational reforms. Its original mission was to use the collections for teaching and to train curators, missionaries and excavators. It began with archaeological subjects and soon widened to art history, epigraphy, anthropology and museology. Today it is a higher education establishment of the French Ministry of Culture, housed in the Aile de Flore of the palace. Its pedagogy centres on the close, material study of works in the context of their production and display, and it prepares students for the competitive examinations for heritage curator and heritage restorer. Its alumni work in museums, research and cultural administration across France and abroad.\n\nDigital tools support both research and teaching. The museum's online collection database gives each object a persistent identifier and an inventory number, so that catalogue records, exhibition histories and scholarly references can be linked consistently. Researchers, students and the public can therefore trace a work such as Delacroix's Crusaders from its inventory entry to its restoration record without visiting the storerooms." }, { "heading": "Cultural Symbolism and Representation", "text": "A symbol of the French state\n\nThe Louvre's symbolic weight comes largely from its origin as a public institution. The museum opened in 1793 after the National Assembly declared that the former palace should display masterpieces from across France. Most of these works were confiscated royal and church property, so the museum came to stand for the idea that a nation's heritage belongs to its citizens. That link to the French Revolution still shapes how the institution presents itself, and the museum's status as the world's most visited museum reinforces its role as an emblem of French cultural influence abroad.\n\nRecent events have pushed this symbolism into public debate. A 2025 documentary on the Apollo Gallery robbery treats the crime as a way to examine what it reveals about security, power, and national pride.\n\nScreen and fiction\n\nDan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code made the museum a fictional setting. In the screen version, the story opens inside the Louvre, where a curator is murdered, setting off the hunt for secrets hidden in famous artworks. The investigation depends on coded notes that the dead curator is said to have left on the glass protecting the Mona Lisa, as the novel's plot runs through the painting itself.\n\nThe 2025 jewel theft has also become a source for new screen projects. A publisher announced in late May 2026 that the robbery would be turned into a movie and a documentary series. Director Romain Gavras will draw inspiration from the investigative book \"Main basse sur le Louvre\". That book was written by three journalists from the French dailies Le Parisien and Le Monde and the weekly magazine Paris Match. Film rights were sold to the production company Iconoclast, while a British producer acquired the rights for a documentary series. The authors also argue that the theft of artworks has become a business like any other for many criminals. Earlier, a 44-minute documentary released in 2025 had already treated the heist as a film subject in its own right.\n\nThe universal museum debate\n\nThe Louvre is also the central case in arguments about the \"universal museum\", the idea that a great collection can be held for all of humanity. Françoise Vergès's book, first published in France in 2023 and translated into English, charts the evolution of the 'universal museum', with the Louvre as her main case study. She links the idea to the Enlightenment and especially the French Revolution, when its superior values were assumed to apply to all other countries and civilisations. Her proposal is far-reaching: she argues that to truly decolonize the museum is to implement a \"programme of absolute disorder\", a phrase that signals how sharply she rejects the existing model.\n\nThe 2002 Declaration on the Importance and Value of Universal Museums is a focal point of this argument. It asks that past acquisitions of artefacts not be judged by present standards and values but by those of their period of acquisition. Critics argue that the declaration protects an order in the museum world left by colonialism.\n\nColonial acquisitions and non-European art\n\nCritics focus on objects whose acquisition involved colonial conquest or archaeological removal. The Naram-Sin stele, an ancient looted object discovered in Susa, Iran, and taken by French archaeologists to the Louvre, is one example, and scholars ask whether it and the Hammurabi stele should be returned to Iran or Iraq. The legal framework is also contested: the 1970 UNESCO convention has not satisfied many states, including Greece and Italy.\n\nThe 2025 jewel theft intensified these questions. Although the artifacts themselves are French, the precious gems trace exotic routes through the shadows of empire. Applying that test, specialists conclude that even jewels made in France can be considered products of colonial extraction. Some experts hope the theft will push European museums to disclose their collections' provenance more transparently. Vergès likewise argues that the Louvre absorbs anti-colonial critique without a serious reckoning and rarely returns objects to their places of origin. The same debate extends beyond Paris, as Greece presses Britain to reunite the Parthenon Marbles, and Egypt campaigns for the Rosetta Stone in London and the Nefertiti bust in Berlin." } ], "links": [ "museum", "art", "cultural-heritage", "french-revolution", "intellectual-property", "international-law", "painting", "sculpture", "infrastructure", "archaeology", "middle-ages", "mesopotamia", "ancient-egypt", "ancient-greece", "roman-empire", "leonardo-da-vinci", "public-good", "x-ray", "infrared-spectroscopy", "radiometric-dating", "higher-education", "film" ], "sources": [ { "title": "Christophe Leribault appointed director of Louvre in post-heist shake-up - UPI.com", "url": "https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2026/02/25/france-louvre-director-leribault/4731772040213" }, { "title": "Louvre Museum - Wikidata", "url": "https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q19675" }, { "title": "Établissement public du musée du Louvre - Wikidata", "url": "https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q11680199" }, { "title": "Michel Laclotte", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Laclotte" }, { "title": "Louvre", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louvre" }, { "title": "Organization and governance", "url": "https://www.ecoledulouvre.fr/en/ecole/organization-and-governance" }, { "title": "Leaked Letter Reveals Louvre Director’s Plea for Help With Crumbling Infrastructure", "url": "https://news.artnet.com/art-world/louvre-leaked-letter-crumbling-infrastructure-2600955" }, { "title": "10 cool facts about the Louvre - LivTours", "url": "https://livtours.com/blog/10-cool-facts-about-the-louvre/" }, { "title": "Departments and collections of the Louvre Museum - PARISCityVISION", "url": "https://www.pariscityvision.com/en/paris/museums/louvre-museum/louvre-museum-departments-and-collections" }, { "title": "How Many Exhibits Are at the Louvre Museum? Unraveling the Vastness of Artistic Treasures - Wonderful Museums", "url": "https://www.wonderfulmuseums.com/museum/how-many-exhibits-are-at-the-louvre-museum/" }, { "title": "Exploring The Louvre's Vast Collection: How Many Paintings Are There?", "url": "https://cypaint.com/article/how-many-paintings-are-st-the-louvre" }, { "title": "The Louvre is Still the World’s Most Visited Museum, 2025 Study Shows", "url": "https://www.artforum.com/news/the-louvre-is-still-the-worlds-most-visited-museum-in-2025-1234746867/" }, { "title": "The Louvre Remains the World’s Most-Visited Museum, with Competition Coming from the Middle East and Asia in 2025", "url": "https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/most-visited-museums-2025-survey-1234779528/" }, { "title": "Natural disasters and political instability hampered U.S. museum attendance in 2025", "url": "https://www.npr.org/2026/04/04/nx-s1-5773941/art-newspaper-100-most-visited-art-museums-report-u-s-natural-disaster-political-instability" }, { "title": "Top 10 Most-Visited Art Museums (2026) - AllTheTopTen", "url": "https://allthetopten.com/top-10-most-visited-art-museums/" }, { "title": "Top 10 Most Visited Museums in the World: 2025 Figures", "url": "https://geographyworlds.com/blog/top-10-most-visited-museums-world/" }, { "title": "Medieval Louvre Castle", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Louvre_Castle" }, { "title": "Wall of Philip II Augustus", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_of_Philip_II_Augustus" }, { "title": "Wall of Charles V", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_of_Charles_V" }, { "title": "Cour Carr%C3%A9e", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cour_Carr%C3%A9e" }, { "title": "Medieval Louvre", "url": "https://europeforvisitors.com/paris/articles/medieval-louvre.htm" }, { "title": "The Medieval Louvre", "url": "https://the-louvre.museum/visit-louvre/halls_-galleries-collections/the-medieval-louvre" }, { "title": "Louvre Museum History", "url": "https://www.paristickets.com/louvre-museum/history/" }, { "title": "History of the Louvre: From Fortress to Famous Museum", "url": "https://louvre.tours/blog/history-of-the-louvre/" }, { "title": "Louvre", "url": "https://www.britannica.com/topic/Louvre-Museum" }, { "title": "Pierre Lescot", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Lescot" }, { "title": "Lescot Wing", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lescot_Wing" }, { "title": "Louvre Museum opens", "url": "https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/august-10/louvre-museum-opens" }, { "title": "Musée du Louvre - 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Espace presse du musée du Louvre", "url": "https://presse.louvre.fr/the-louvre-pyramidnbspturns-30/" }, { "title": "Louvre Pyramid", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louvre_Pyramid" }, { "title": "Grand Louvre", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Louvre" }, { "title": "Thirty years on, Louvre's pyramid scheme pays off - The Art Newspaper - International art news and events", "url": "https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2019/03/29/thirty-years-on-louvres-pyramid-scheme-pays-off" }, { "title": "The Louvre pyramid that shocked Paris turns 30 - France 24", "url": "https://amp.france24.com/en/20190329-paris-france-louvre-pei-pyramid-30" }, { "title": "Pei, creator of Louvre pyramid, reaches his century", "url": "https://gulfnews.com/amp/story/world%2Feurope%2Fpei-creator-of-louvre-pyramid-reaches-his-century-1.2017071" }, { "title": "10 Things you did not know about Louvre Pyramid by I.M. Pei - RTF", "url": "https://www.re-thinkingthefuture.com/architectural-facts/a2352-10-things-you-did-not-know-about-louvre-pyramid-by-i-m-pei/" }, { "title": "Pavillon de l%27Horloge", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavillon_de_l%27Horloge" }, { "title": "Archaeology under the Louvre - Paris Créations Virtuelles", "url": "https://pariscreationsvirtuelles.com/en/pages/larcheologie-sous-le-louvre-les-vestiges-de-la-forteresse-medievale" }, { "title": "Museum Collections - Ancient Near East and Egypt - Research Guides at Case Western Reserve University", "url": "https://researchguides.case.edu/c.php?g=1283981&p=9425464" }, { "title": "What Paintings and Other Artwork to See at the Louvre in Paris", "url": "https://www.artnews.com/list/art-news/artists/louvre-museum-paris-what-paintings-art-1234653787/marie-antoinettes-cylinder-desk" }, { "title": "best Egyptian artifacts to see at the Louvre Archives - Veronica Winters Painting", "url": "https://veronicasart.com/tag/best-egyptian-artifacts-to-see-at-the-louvre/" }, { "title": "Department of Egyptian Antiquities of the Louvre", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_of_Egyptian_Antiquities_of_the_Louvre" }, { "title": "Halls, Galleries & Collections ❒ The Louvre Museum", "url": "https://the-louvre.museum/visit-louvre/halls_-galleries-collections" }, { "title": "At the Heart of the Renaissance Palace - 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Uncle Sam Tours", "url": "https://unclesam.tours/louvre-most-visited-museum/" }, { "title": "How Many People Visit the Louvre Each Day? Louvre Statistics - Uncle Sam Tours", "url": "https://unclesam.tours/how-many-people-visit-the-louvre-each-day/" }, { "title": "The Louvre Announces 30,000 Daily Visitor Limit in Response to Huge Crowds", "url": "https://www.afar.com/magazine/pariss-louvre-museum-will-limit-the-number-of-daily-visitors" }, { "title": "Best Way to Experience the Louvre and See the Mona Lisa", "url": "https://thetourguy.com/travel-blog/france/paris/louvre/how-to-see-the-mona-lisa/" }, { "title": "Mona Lisa in the Louvre Museum", "url": "https://thebettervacation.com/paris/mona-lisa-louvre-museum/" }, { "title": "museum staff leaves mona lisa fans high dry louvre shuts down without warning", "url": "https://www.foxnews.com/travel/museum-staff-leaves-mona-lisa-fans-high-dry-louvre-shuts-down-without-warning" }, { "title": "mona lisa to get dedicated room in the louvre in museum renovation macron says", "url": "https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/mona-lisa-to-get-dedicated-room-in-the-louvre-in-museum-renovation-macron-says" }, { "title": "The “Pyramid” Project - Espace presse du musée du Louvre", "url": "https://presse.louvre.fr/the-pyramid-project/" }, { "title": "Tickets for Leonardo da Vinci Louvre: Your Essential Guide to Securing Your Spot and Maximizing Your Visit - Wonderful Museums", "url": "https://www.wonderfulmuseums.com/museum/tickets-for-leonardo-da-vinci-louvre/" }, { "title": "Best Louvre Entrance 2026: Skip the Pyramid Queue (Carrousel & More)", "url": "https://louvremuseum-guide.com/plan-your-visit/best-louvre-entrance/" }, { "title": "Best Time to Visit the Louvre: By Hour, Day, and Month", "url": "https://louvretourparis.com/best-time-to-visit-louvre/" }, { "title": "Stolen “Mona Lisa” recovered in Florence", "url": "https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/december-12/mona-lisa-recovered-in-florence" }, { "title": "Mona Lisa", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mona_Lisa" }, { "title": "Mona Lisa to the Nazis: Robbed often, why latest Louvre theft is different", "url": "https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/10/21/mona-lisa-to-the-nazis-robbed-often-why-latest-louvre-theft-is-different" }, { "title": "The Theft That Made The Mona Lisa Famous", "url": "https://jeffdillon.ca/blogs/jeff-dillon/the-theft-that-made-the-mona-lisa-famous" }, { "title": "The Heist that Made the Mona Lisa Famous", "url": "https://www.history.com/articles/the-heist-that-made-the-mona-lisa-famous" }, { "title": "Introduction - Theft of Mona Lisa: Topics in Chronicling America - Research Guides at Library of Congress", "url": "https://guides.loc.gov/chronicling-america-theft-mona-lisa" }, { "title": "Who Stole Mona Lisa Painting in 1911 from the Louvre? The Inside Story of a Daring Art Heist and Its Enduring Legacy - Wonderful Museums", "url": "https://www.wonderfulmuseums.com/museum/who-stole-mona-lisa-painting-in-1911-from-the-louvre/" }, { "title": "Evacuation of the Louvre collection during World War II", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evacuation_of_the_Louvre_museum_art_collection_during_World_War_II" }, { "title": "History of the Louvre Chapter 10: The Louvre under Siege", "url": "https://www.thefrenchhistorypodcast.com/history-of-the-louvre-chapter-10-the-louvre-under-siege/" }, { "title": "En août 1939, ces camions quittaient le Louvre chargés de tableaux décrochés pour la Loire avant de repartir encore plus loin", "url": "https://sciencepost.fr/en-aout-1939-ces-camions-quittaient-le-louvre-charges-de-tableaux-decroches-pour-la-loire-avant-de-repartir-encore-plus-loin" }, { "title": "The Louvre during the Second World War - PARISCityVISION", "url": "https://www.pariscityvision.com/en/paris/museums/louvre-museum/the-louvre-in-the-second-world-war" }, { "title": "1939", "url": "https://icienregion.fr/1939-la-joconde-a-labri/" }, { "title": "Ch%C3%A2teau de Chambord", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C3%A2teau_de_Chambord" }, { "title": "Jacques Jaujard", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Jaujard" }, { "title": "How the Mona Lisa Escaped Destruction During World War II", "url": "https://www.mentalfloss.com/art/how-mona-lisa-escaped-destruction-during-world-war-ii" }, { "title": "Episode 191 - The Recovery of the Mona Lisa — Bleu Blonde Rouge", "url": "https://www.claudinehemingway.com/paris-history-avec-a-hemingway-podcast-1/2024/1/21/episode-193-the-recovery-of-the-mona-lisa" }, { "title": "Louvre Museum during World War II - Paris Story Blog", "url": "https://paris-story.com/louvre-museum-during-world-war-ii/" }, { "title": "The Louvre during World War II: An artistic rescue operation", "url": "https://pariscreationsvirtuelles.com/en/pages/le-louvre-pendant-la-seconde-guerre-mondiale-une-operation-de-sauvetage-artistique" }, { "title": "WORLD Louvre shows its Nazi art", "url": "https://www.pressreader.com/new-zealand/sunday-news/20180204/281818579276940" }, { "title": "louvre launches global architecture competition for new entrance and mona lisa gallery", "url": "https://www.designboom.com/architecture/louvre-competition-new-entrance-mona-lisa-standalone-gallery-01-29-2025/" }, { "title": "Nouvelle Renaissance : Emmanuel Macron annonce un grand projet de rénovation et de modernisation du musée du Louvre - Actu-culture.com", "url": "https://www.actu-culture.com/musees-patrimoine/nouvelle-renaissance-emmanuel-macron-annonce-un-grand-projet-de-renovation-et-de-modernisation-du-musee-du-louvre/" }, { "title": "Frommers", "url": "https://www.frommers.com/trip-ideas/arts-and-culture/mona-lisa-getting-a-room-of-her-own-in-major-louvre-overhaul/" }, { "title": "Mona Lisa to Get Her Own Room in Revamped and Enlarged Louvre", "url": "https://www.artforum.com/news/mona-lisa-to-get-her-own-room-revamped-and-enlarged-louvre-1234726070/" }, { "title": "British tourists will pay more to visit Louvre, says Macron", "url": "https://www.yahoo.com/news/british-tourists-pay-more-louvre-161151215.html" }, { "title": "The Louvre’s Redesign Will Give the Mona Lisa Her Own Gallery", "url": "https://mymodernmet.com/louvre-mona-lisa-new-gallery-redesign/" }, { "title": "What we know about the Mona Lisa being moved to a new room at the Musée du Louvre!", "url": "https://www.sortiraparis.com/en/what-to-visit-in-paris/exhibit-museum/articles/323897-musee-du-louvre-the-mona-lisa-soon-in-a-new-room-what-we-know" }, { "title": "Overcrowded Louvre Museum In Paris To Get Major Renovations And A Room For Mona Lisa", "url": "https://www.forbes.com/sites/ceciliarodriguez/2025/01/30/overcrowded-louvre-museum-in-paris-to-get-major-renovations-and-a-room-for-mona-lisa/" }, { "title": "Mona Lisa location: where to find her in the Louvre in 2026", "url": "https://insurte.com/travel-guide/mona-lisa-louvre" }, { "title": "REPLAY. Revivez les annonces d'Emmanuel Macron pour la rénovation du musée du Louvre", "url": "https://www.franceinfo.fr/culture/patrimoine/direct-renovation-du-musee-du-louvre-suivez-les-annonces-d-emmanuel-macron_7041425.html" }, { "title": "Le nouveau président du Louvre Christophe Leribault confirme le projet de grands travaux du musée", "url": "https://www.franceinfo.fr/culture/arts-expos/louvre/le-nouveau-president-du-louvre-christophe-leribault-confirme-le-projet-de-grands-travaux-du-musee_7986854.html" }, { "title": "the worlds most visited museum is getting a major overhaul 020625", "url": "https://www.timeout.com/news/the-worlds-most-visited-museum-is-getting-a-major-overhaul-020625" }, { "title": "The Louvre chooses its entrance on the colonnade side", "url": "https://paintandpainting.com/the-louvre-chooses-its-entrance-on-the-colonnade-side" }, { "title": "STUDIOS Architecture Paris and Selldorf Architects Wins “Louvre Nouvelle Renaissance” Competition", "url": "https://aflouvre.org/newsletter/studios-architecture-paris-and-selldorf-architects-wins-louvre-nouvelle-renaissance-competition/" }, { "title": "Winners of Louvre’s €135m overhaul contest revealed", "url": "https://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/news/selldorf-and-studios-team-wins-louvres-e135m-overhaul-contest" }, { "title": "‘Louvre Nouvelle Renaissance’ International Architecture Competition", "url": "https://www.louvre.fr/en/explore/life-at-the-museum/louvre-nouvelle-renaissance-international-architecture-competition" }, { "title": "Rénovation du Louvre : Emmanuel Macron dévoile un plan de modernisation et de préservation · Echos Plus", "url": "https://echosplus.com/2025/01/29/renovation-du-louvre-emmanuel-macron-devoile-un-plan-de-modernisation-et-de-preservation/" }, { "title": "The Louvre will be renovated and the 'Mona Lisa' will have her own room", "url": "https://npr.org/2025/01/28/nx-s1-5276917/louvre-renovation-mona-lisa-paris" }, { "title": "‘Mona Lisa’ will get its own room under a 10-year renovation of the Louvre in Paris", "url": "https://www.yahoo.com/news/mona-lisa-own-room-under-184913338.html" }, { "title": "Inside the Louvre's €800 Million Plan to Give the Mona Lisa Her Own Room", "url": "https://thepariseye.com/inside-the-louvre-s-800-million-plan-to-give-the-mona-lisa-her-own-room-34972" }, { "title": "Put the Mona Lisa in Its Own Building—for Its Sake and the Visitors’", "url": "https://www.heritage.org/europe/commentary/put-the-mona-lisa-its-own-building-its-sake-and-the-visitors" }, { "title": "Announcement of the winning team in the international architecture competition to transform the Louvre - Espace presse du musée du Louvre", "url": "https://presse.louvre.fr/?p=1063000236343" }, { "title": "Louvre: Meet the winner of the architecture competition for transforming the Museum - Sortiraparis.com", "url": "https://www.sortiraparis.com/en/news/in-paris/articles/345678-louvre-discover-the-winner-of-the-architecture-competition-to-transform-the-museum" }, { "title": "‘Grande Colonnade’ International Architecture Competition", "url": "https://www.louvre.fr/en/explore/life-at-the-museum/grande-colonnade-international-architecture-competition" }, { "title": "Selldorf Architects and Studios Architecture set to add subterranean entrances to Musée du Louvre", "url": "https://www.dezeen.com/2026/05/19/louvre-renovation-entrances-selldorf-architects-studios-architecture-winner/" }, { "title": "Studios Architecture Paris and Selldorf Architects Win the International Competition to Transform the Louvre", "url": "https://www.architecturalrecord.com/articles/18202-studios-architecture-paris-and-selldorf-architects-win-the-international-competition-to-transform-the-louvre" }, { "title": "2025 Louvre heist", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Louvre_heist" }, { "title": "Louvre's Apollo Gallery reopens after French Crown Jewels theft scandal", "url": "https://www.euronews.com/culture/2026/07/22/louvres-apollo-gallery-reopens-after-crown-jewels-theft-scandal" }, { "title": "What to Know About Visiting Louvre’s Reopened Apollo Gallery - AFAR", "url": "https://www.afar.com/magazine/what-to-know-about-visiting-louvres-reopened-apollo-gallery" }, { "title": "Louvre reopens Apollo Gallery after a brazen heist, but no jewels on display - ABC News", "url": "https://abcnews.com/International/wireStory/louvre-reopens-apollo-gallery-after-brazen-heist-jewels-134975099" }, { "title": "Louvre Apollo Gallery Reopens After Jewellery Heist", "url": "https://www.outlooktraveller.com/News/louvres-apollo-gallery-reopens-after-2025-jewellery-heist-what-visitors-can-expect" }, { "title": "The Louvre Museum's Apollo Gallery reopens to public following October 2025 burglary", "url": "https://gulfnews.com/world/the-louvre-museums-apollo-gallery-reopens-to-public-following-october-2025-burglary-1.500616644" }, { "title": "Two new suspects handed preliminary charges over Louvre jewels heist, prosecutor says", "url": "https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/two-new-suspects-handed-preliminary-charges-over-louvre-jewels-heist-prosecutor-says" }, { "title": "2 new suspects charged in the Louvre jewel heist : NPR", "url": "https://www.npr.org/2025/11/01/nx-s1-5594194/suspects-charged-louvre-jewel-heist-paris" }, { "title": "Fourth suspect charged in Louvre jewel heist investigation", "url": "https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/11/28/fourth-suspect-charged-in-louvre-jewel-heist-investigation" }, { "title": "Arrests made in crown jewel heist at Paris' Louvre museum, prosecutor says", "url": "https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/arrests-made-crown-jewelry-heist-111534076.html" }, { "title": "French police make 5 further arrests in Louvre heist of crown jewels", "url": "https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/french-police-5-further-arrests-111225767.html" }, { "title": "Four-minute heist at the Louvre: How priceless jewels were stolen in France", "url": "https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/10/19/four-minute-heist-at-the-louvre-how-priceless-jewels-were-stolen-in-france" }, { "title": "New president announced for the Louvre following resignation of Laurence des Cars - ArtReview", "url": "https://artreview.com/new-president-announced-for-the-louvre-following-resignation-of-laurence-des-cars/" }, { "title": "Louvre director Laurence des Cars resigns", "url": "https://www.finestresullarte.info/en/news/louvre-director-laurence-des-cars-resigns" }, { "title": "The Louvre’s new director is inheriting a troubled, traumatised museum—can he repair the damage? - The Art Newspaper - International art news and events", "url": "https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2026/04/03/christophe-leribault-new-director-musee-louvre-inherits-traumatised-museum" }, { "title": "Christophe Leribault Replaces Laurence des Cars as Louvre Director", "url": "https://www.artforum.com/news/christophe-leribault-named-director-of-the-louvre-1234744397/" }, { "title": "Head of France's Versailles Palace to take over Louvre: source to AFP", "url": "https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/head-frances-versailles-palace-over-082926824.html" }, { "title": "Christophe Leribault Tapped to Lead Louvre Museum One Day After Laurence Des Cars’s Resignation", "url": "https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/christophe-leribault-louvre-president-appointment-1234774536/" }, { "title": "The Louvre Names Christophe Leribault Its New Director", "url": "https://news.artnet.com/art-world/louvre-new-director-christophe-leribault-2748537" }, { "title": "The Louvre shuts due to staff strike on overcrowding", "url": "https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/louvre-shut-staff-strike-overcrowding/" }, { "title": "‘We are angry’: Louvre Museum in France closed as workers strike", "url": "https://gulfnews.com/world/europe/we-are-angry-louvre-museum-in-france-closed-as-workers-strike-1.500380466" }, { "title": "Louvre closes again due to staff strikes - The Art Newspaper - International art news and events", "url": "https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2026/01/19/louvre-closes-again-staff-strikes" }, { "title": "Louvre closes for third time in a month due to staff strike - France 24", "url": "https://www.france24.com/en/france/20260119-louvre-closes-for-the-day-due-to-staff-strike" }, { "title": "'The Louvre Is Suffocating': Museum Closed As Workers Strike, Citing Overcrowding", "url": "https://www.npr.org/2019/05/28/727592823/the-louvre-is-suffocating-museum-closed-as-workers-strike-citing-overcrowding" }, { "title": "Authorities Charge Louvre Employees in Decade-Long Ticket Fraud Scam", "url": "https://www.asisonline.org/security-management-magazine/latest-news/today-in-security/2026/february/louvre-ticketing-fraud/" }, { "title": "Investigators Unravel $12 Million Ticket-Fraud Scheme at the Louvre", "url": "https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/louvre-hit-with-12-million-ticket-fraud-scheme-180988236/" }, { "title": "The Louvre Museum's director has resigned in the wake of October's brazen jewel heist", "url": "https://www.npr.org/2026/02/24/g-s1-111343/france-paris-louvre-museum-heist-director-resigns" }, { "title": "French authorities detain nine in suspected €10 million Louvre ticket fraud", "url": "https://www.uscannenbergmedia.com/2026/02/23/french-authorities-detain-nine-in-suspected-10-million-louvre-ticket-fraud/" }, { "title": "Ticket Scam at Louvre - Rick Steves Travel Forum", "url": "https://community.ricksteves.com/travel-forum/france/ticjet-scam-at-louvre" }, { "title": "Louvre Closes as One-Fifth of Workforce Goes on Strike", "url": "https://news.artnet.com/art-world/louvre-strike-2729747" }, { "title": "louvre museum director resigns in wake of brazen october crown jewel heist in paris", "url": "https://www.barchart.com/story/news/395563/louvre-museum-director-resigns-in-wake-of-brazen-october-crown-jewel-heist-in-paris" }, { "title": "The Louvre Closed Monday Due to an Impromptu Staff Strike", "url": "https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/louvre-paris-closed-monday-due-to-strike-working-conditions-1234745223/" }, { "title": "Louvre Abu Dhabi license extended until 2047", "url": "https://english.alarabiya.net/life-style/art-and-culture/2021/12/03/Louvre-Abu-Dhabi-license-extended-until-2047" }, { "title": "Partnerships May Help the Louvre’s Finances, but Not Everyone Is Happy to Share the Museum’s Clout", "url": "https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2019-06-17/museums-use-of-partnerships-stirs-controversy-across-france" }, { "title": "Macron's Gulf tour: UAE's Louvre Abu Dhabi contract extended to 2047 and more French-Saudi culture deals - The Art Newspaper - International art news and events", "url": "https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2021/12/13/macron-gulf-tour-uae-saudi-arabia" }, { "title": "Louvre Abu Dhabi: How a monument rose from the sand", "url": "https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2017/12/style/louvre-abu-dhabi/" }, { "title": "After Years of Delays, the Louvre Abu Dhabi Will Officially Open in November", "url": "https://news.artnet.com/art-world/the-louvre-abu-dhabi-open-november-1072157" }, { "title": "Louvre Abu Dhabi", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louvre_Abu_Dhabi" }, { "title": "SPECIAL REPORT", "url": "https://gulfnews.com/uae/how-louvre-abu-dhabi-symbolises-strong-cultural-bond-between-uae-france-1.89335263" }, { "title": "Louvre Abu Dhabi opens to public", "url": "https://gulfnews.com/amp/story/entertainment%2Farts-culture%2Flouvre-abu-dhabi-opens-to-public-1.2122318" }, { "title": "Louvre curators condemn “collections for rent” schemes ahead of plans to open a branch of the Paris museum in Abu Dhabi - The Art Newspaper - International art news and events", "url": "https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2019/08/19/louvre-curators-condemn-collections-for-rent-schemes-ahead-of-plans-to-open-a-branch-of-the-paris-museum-in-abu-dhabi" }, { "title": "Louvre to build branch in Abu Dhabi", "url": "https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna17482641" }, { "title": "iconic french museum opening branch in middle east", "url": "https://www.npr.org/2007/03/12/7849306/iconic-french-museum-opening-branch-in-middle-east" }, { "title": "Fears grow for French loans at Louvre Abu Dhabi as war rages", "url": "https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20260312-fears-grow-for-french-loans-at-louvre-abu-dhabi-as-war-rages" }, { "title": "Fears grow for French loans at Louvre Abu Dhabi as war rages", "url": "https://www.therogersvillereview.com/news/national/article_c2126ef6-c630-5118-8c06-da9ce02b1730.html" }, { "title": "Presentation of the Louvre-Lens - Louvre-Lens", "url": "https://www.louvrelens.fr/en/presentation-du-louvre-lens/" }, { "title": "The Louvre-Lens", "url": "https://www.louvre.fr/en/the-louvre-in-france-and-around-the-world/the-louvre-lens" }, { "title": "Louvre-Lens", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louvre-Lens" }, { "title": "Louvre sister museum in old French mining city celebrates 10 years", "url": "https://www.connexionfrance.com/news/louvre-sister-museum-in-old-french-mining-city-celebrates-10-years/243330" }, { "title": "New Louvre museum in Lens, France, aims to revitalize mining town", "url": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/11/AR2009121100124.html" }, { "title": "Louvre-Lens: exhibitions, museum collections - PARISCityVISION", "url": "https://www.pariscityvision.com/en/paris/museums/louvre-museum/louvre-lens" }, { "title": "Delacroix’s Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople Restored to Its Original Glory", "url": "https://www.louvre.fr/en/explore/life-at-the-museum/delacroix-s-entry-of-the-crusaders-into-constantinople-restored-to-its-original-glory" }, { "title": "Louvre, Delacroix regains his colors: restored masterpiece on Crusaders in Constantinople", "url": "https://www.finestresullarte.info/en/modern-art/louvre-delacroix-regains-his-colors-restored-masterpiece-on-crusaders-in-constantinople" }, { "title": "Delacroix's 'Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople' Cleaned - Art History News - by Bendor Grosvenor", "url": "https://www.arthistorynews.com/articles/9575_Delacroixs_Entry_of_the_Crusaders_into_Constantinople_Cleaned" }, { "title": "The Louvre Unveils Its Iconic Delacroix After a Stunning Restoration", "url": "https://news.artnet.com/art-world/louvre-delacroix-restoration-2479081" }, { "title": "Tales from the lab beneath the Louvre - C&EN", "url": "https://cen.acs.org/analytical-chemistry/Tales-lab-beneath-Louvre/102/i24" }, { "title": "The Louvre Laboratory - C&EN - American Chemical Society", "url": "https://cen.acs.org/articles/86/i22/Louvre-Laboratory.html" }, { "title": "X‑ray and Infrared Microanalyses of Mona Lisa’s Ground Layer and Significance Regarding Leonardo da Vinci’s Palette", "url": "https://pubs.acs.org/jacsat/article-abstract/145/42/23205/320260/X-ray-and-Infrared-Microanalyses-of-Mona-Lisa-s?redirectedFrom=fulltext" }, { "title": "The examination of works of art using electromagnetic rays - Gilles Perrault", "url": "https://www.gillesperrault.com/the-examination-of-works-of-art-using-electromagnetic-rays/" }, { "title": "The Louvre Crucifix by Giotto", "url": "https://www.academia.edu/11826566/The_Louvre_Crucifix_by_Giotto_Unveiling_the_original_decoration_by_2D_XRF_X_ray_radiography_Emissiography_and_SEM_EDX_analysis" }, { "title": "Our history", "url": "https://www.ecoledulouvre.fr/en/ecole/our-history" }, { "title": "L'École du Louvre (The Ecole du Louvre), France - Global partnerships and study abroad - University of St Andrews", "url": "https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/study-abroad/postgraduate/ecoledulouvre/" }, { "title": "École du Louvre Fonds de dotation - Friends of Fondation de France", "url": "https://www.friendsoffdf.org/projects/ecole-du-louvre-fonds-de-dotation/" }, { "title": "École du Louvre - Wikidata", "url": "https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q273534" }, { "title": "Category:Entry of the Crusaders in Constantinople by Eugène Delacroix - Wikimedia Commons", "url": "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Entry_of_the_Crusaders_in_Constantinople_by_Eug%C3%A8ne_Delacroix" }, { "title": "Museum Without Objects", "url": "https://tribunemag.co.uk/2025/04/museum-without-objects" }, { "title": "The HEIST: The Louvre's Stolen Crown Jewels - Apple TV", "url": "https://tv.apple.com/us/movie/the-heist-the-louvres-stolen-crown-jewels/umc.cmc.1difls3nqxntlmukd5udv3h4r" }, { "title": "The Da Vinci Code Paris Filming Locations You Can Visit", "url": "https://www.bubblyliving.com/the-da-vinci-code-paris-filming-locations-you-can-visit/" }, { "title": "Louvre jewelry heist to be turned into film - 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