The Louvre Palace (, ), often referred to simply as the Louvre, is a palace located on the Right Bank of the Seine in Paris, occupying a large expanse of land between the Tuileries Gardens and the church of Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois. Originally a defensive castle, it has served several government-related functions in the past, including intermittently as a royal residence between the 14th and 18th centuries. It is now mostly used by the Louvre Museum, which first opened there in 1793.
While this area along the Seine had been inhabited for thousands of years, the Louvre's history starts around 1190 with its first construction as the Louvre Castle defending the western front of the Wall of Philip II Augustus, the then new city-wall of Paris. The Louvre's oldest section still standing above ground, its palatial Lescot Wing, dates from the late 1540s, when Francis I started the replacement of the greatly expanded medieval castle with a new design inspired by classical antiquity and Italian Renaissance architecture. Most parts of the current building were constructed in the 17th and 19th centuries. In the late 20th century, the Grand Louvre project increased visitor access and gallery space, including by adding the Louvre Pyramid in the courtyard Cour Napoléon.
For more than three centuries, the history and design of the Louvre was closely intertwined with that of the Tuileries Palace, created to the west of the Louvre by Queen Catherine de' Medici in 1564, with its main block finally demolished in 1883. The French Renaissance style Tuileries was the premier seat of French executive power during the last third of that period, from the return of Louis XVI and his court from Versailles in October 1789 until the palace was set on fire during the Paris Commune of 1871. The Louvre and Tuileries became physically connected as part of the project called the "Grand Design", with the completion of the Pavillon de Flore in the early 1600s. The Pavillon de Flore and Pavillon de Marsan, which used to respectively mark the southern and northern ends of the Tuileries Palace, are now considered part of the Louvre Palace. The Carrousel Garden, first created in the late 19th century (during Napoleon III's Louvre expansion) in what used to be the great courtyard of the Tuileries (or Cour du Carrousel), is now considered part of the Tuileries Garden.
A less high-profile but historically significant dependency of the Louvre was to its immediate east, the Hôtel du Petit-Bourbon, appropriated by the monarchy following the betrayal of the Constable of Bourbon in 1523 and mostly demolished in October 1660 to give way to the Louvre's expansion. The last remains of the Petit-Bourbon were cleared in the 1760s. Today, the palace has a total floor area of 244,000 m2."Le musée du Louvre en bref", presse.louvre.fr, July 2024
General description
This section provides a summary description of the present-day complex and its main constituent parts.
Location and layout
The Louvre Palace is situated on the right bank of the Seine, between the Quai François Mitterrand to its south, the to its west (thus named since 1957; formerly and , converted into an underpass in 1987–1989), the Rue de Rivoli to its north, and the Place du Louvre to its east. The complex occupies about 40 hectares with buildings distributed around three main open spaces: the eastern Cour Carrée (square courtyard), which is closed by four wings that form the square of its name, the central Cour Napoléon, which is open on its western side onto the thoroughfare known as Place du Carrousel, towards the Carrousel Garden. The rest of the Tuileries Garden lies beyond that.
The Louvre is slightly askew of the Historic Axis (Axe historique), a roughly eight-kilometer (five-mile) architectural line bisecting the city. The axis begins with the Louvre courtyard, at a point now symbolically marked by a lead copy of Bernini's equestrian statue of Louis XIV, and runs west along the Champs-Élysées to La Défense and slightly beyond.
Since 1988, the Louvre Pyramid in the middle of the Cour Napoléon has marked the center of the Louvre complex. At the same time, the Louvre Museum has adopted a toponymy developed by the Carbone Smolan Agency to refer to the three clusters of buildings that surround that central focus point:Biasini et al 1989, pp. 152–153; Ochterbeck 2009, pp. 174–201; Louvre: Interactive Floor Plans; Louvre: Atlas database of exhibits. To the east, the "Sully Wing" is the square-shaped set of buildings that surrounds the Cour Carrée, named after Maximilien de Béthune, Duke of Sully. It includes the 16th-century Lescot Wing and the footprint of the Medieval Louvre whose remains are displayed underground; To the south, the "Denon Wing" is the array of buildings between the Cour Napoléon and the Seine, named after the Louvre's first director Vivant Denon. the Louvre's southwestern wing is the Aile de Flore. The long Grande Galerie runs on the first floor for much of the length of this building, on the Seine-facing side. To the north, the "Richelieu Wing" is the almost-symmetrical array of buildings between the Cour Napoléon and the rue de Rivoli, named after Cardinal Richelieu. Its western extension alongside rue de Rivoli is the , itself continued by the Aile de Marsan.
The Louvre Museum occupies most of the palace's space, but not all of it. The main other users are at the building's two western tips: in the southwestern Aile de Flore, the École du Louvre and Center for Research and Restoration of Museums of France (C2RMF); and in the northwestern Aile de Marsan, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. In total, some 51,615 square meters (555,000 square feet) in the palace complex are devoted to public exhibition floor space.
Many sections of the Louvre are referred to as "wings" () and "pavilions" () – typically, the pavilions are the blocks at either the end or the center of a wing. In the Louvre's context, the word "wing" does not denote a peripheral location: the Lescot Wing, in particular, was built as the Louvre's main corps de logis. Given the Louvre wings' length and the fact that they typically abutted parts of the city with streets and private buildings, several of them have passageways on the ground floor which in the Louvre's specific context are called .
Toponymy
The origin of the name Louvre is unclear. French historian Henri Sauval, probably writing in the 1660s, stated that he had seen "in an old Latin-Saxon glossary, Leouar is translated castle" and thus took Leouar to be the origin of Louvre.Sauval 1724, p. 9: "dans un vieux Glossaire Latin-Saxon, Leouar y est traduit Castellum". According to Keith Briggs, Sauval's theory is often repeated, even in recent books, but this glossary has never been seen again, and Sauval's idea is viewed as obsolete. Briggs suggests that H. J. Wolf's proposal in 1969 that Louvre derives instead from Latin Rubras, meaning "red soil", is more plausible.Briggs 2008, p. 116. David Hanser suggests instead that the word may come from French , a "place where dogs were trained to chase wolves".
Beyond the name of the palace itself, the toponymy of the Louvre can be treacherous. Partly because of the building's long history and links to changing politics, different names have applied at different times to the same structures or rooms. For example, what used to be known in the 17th and 18th centuries the or is now generally referred to as Pavillon de l'Horloge, or (especially when considered from the west), or also after the architect Jacques Lemercier who first designed it in 1624. In some cases, the same name has designated different parts of the building at different times. For example, in the 19th century, the referred to what was later called the (still later, ), on the south side of the Grande Galerie facing the Seine, before becoming the name for the main pavilion of the Richelieu Wing On the rue de Rivoli, its exact symmetrical point from the Louvre Pyramid. The main room on the first floor of the Lescot Wing has been the , , , , in the 16th and 17th centuries. It was fragmented into apartments during the 18th century, then recreated in the early 19th and called successively , or (the latter also being the name of two other ceremonial rooms, created in the 1850s and 1860s respectively); then as part of the museum, , after 1871 in honor of donor Louis La Caze, , and since 2021 . The room immediately below, now known as , has also been called , , , , (from 1692 to 1793), and in the past, among other names.
Sully Wing
The Sully Wing forms a square of approximately side length. The protruding sections at the corners and center of each side are known as . Clockwise from the northwest corner, they are named as follows: (after a now-disappeared street), (after the nearby rue de Marengo), (also ), (also ), (also ), , , and , the latter also known as . The section between the Pavillon du Roi and the Pavillon Sully, known as the Lescot Wing () as it was designed by architect Pierre Lescot, is the oldest standing part of the entire Louvre Palace. The section between the Pavillon Sully and the Pavillon de Beauvais, which was modeled after the Lescot Wing by architect Jacques Lemercier, is similarly known as the Lemercier Wing (). The eastern wing is the , named after its iconic eastern façade, the Louvre Colonnade.
Denon and Flore Wings
On the southern side of the Cour Napoléon, the Denon Wing's three main pavilions are named respectively, from east to west, after Napoleon-era officials Pierre Daru, Vivant Denon and Nicolas François Mollien. Between these and the wing facing the seine are three courtyards, from east to west the (covered as a glass atrium since 1934), (ground floor covered since 2012), and . On the side of the Seine, this wing starts with the north–south bordering a side garden known as the , and continues westwards along the Quai François Mitterrand with the Salon Carré, , and Pavillon de Flore. In the middle of the Grande Galerie are the , a composition of three monumental arches flanked by two narrow pavilions named respectively after the Duke of Lesdiguières and Henri de La Trémoille ( and ). Further west are the , a protruding structure on the northern side, the , a passageway to the quay, the on the north side, now the main entrance to the École du Louvre, and finally the Pavillon de Flore.
Richelieu and Marsan Wings
Similarly, on the northern side of the Cour Napoléon are, from east to west, the pavilions named after Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Cardinal Richelieu, and Anne Robert Jacques Turgot. Between these and the rue de Rivoli are three courtyards, from east to west the (formerly ), (formerly or ), and (formerly or ). On the side facing the rue de Rivoli, the main salient feature is the , which connects to the through the ground-floor (formerly ) between the and . Further west are the and the , built in the early 19th century and named after the nearby , then the and the Pavillon de Marsan, both rebuilt by Hector Lefuel in the 1870s.
Pyramid and underground spaces
The Louvre Pyramid, built in the 1980s on a design by I. M. Pei, is now the centerpiece of the entire Louvre complex. It leads to the underground which in turn serves a vast complex of underground spaces, including the Carrousel du Louvre commercial mall around an inverted pyramid further west.
Architectural style