Masterpieces of the Louvre: Part I

Art

Masterpiece of the Louvre:

Part I

While French governments form and fall, while France tries to halt its descent among the world powers, the Louvre holds its rank at the top of the world's art museums. Even as demonstrators paraded through the streets of Paris earlier this month, the Louvre's attendance rolled on at a steady 3,000 a day. Nothing short of war or revolution will keep the crowds below 5,000 a day at the peak of the tourist season in mid-August. Nowhere on earth is there another edifice dedicated to man's delight in art that is comparable to the mammoth structure along the Seine, spreading over 49 acres.

Providing a handy anthology of the Louvre's highlights and recording the epic history behind its vast collection have long been pet projects of Art Scholar Germain Bazin, 50, chief curator of the Louvre. In his profusely illustrated The Louvre (323 pp.; Abrams; $7.50), published last week in the U.S., Curator Bazin covers 341 key paintings from the 13th to the 19th century. Next September the record will be brought up to date with the publication of his book on the impressionists. Together the volumes will be a clear case for Bazin's claim that the Louvre "contains the most complete collection of works from all the great European schools, from primitives to moderns, ever to be assembled under one roof."

Louverie or Lower? Bazin makes the dramatic history of how the roof came into being almost as interesting as the works housed beneath it. The original Louvre may go back to the 5th century. Etymologists speculate that the name may come from louverie (a meeting place of wolf hunters), or from a leper colony, or from a Saxon fortress (lower). Still to be seen in the present foundations are remains of the mighty fortress that King Philip Augustus erected on the site about 1190. But the Louvre of today owes its origins to France's great Renaissance prince of princes. Francis I, who on Aug. 2, 1546 gave the royal command to begin a palace and pride of kings.

Strolling over the Louvre's polished parquet floors, Bazin likes to philosophize on two great portraits. Titian's Francis I (who seems to be examining the jewel of his collection, Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa) and Hyacinthe Rigaud's Louis XIV (loftily surveying the great expanse of the 300-yard-long Grande Galerie). Both have a right to their proprietary air. Bazin feels, since, along with Napoleon, they are among the Louvre's greatest benefactors.

Francis I, whose predecessor, Louis XII, is credited with bringing back Leonardo da Vinci's Virgin of the Rocks from Milan (he wanted to bring Leonardo's The Last Supper, but it was impracticable to remove the mural from the wall of Milan's Santa Maria delle Grazie), is responsible for starting the Italian collection. Four of his Da Vincis and six Raphaels are still in the Louvre. When Catherine de Medici, a generation later, erected her own palace on the site of an old tile factory, the Tuileries, more than a quarter-mile away, and suggested that the two palaces be joined, the "Great Design" for the Louvre was born.

Constructed over the next 300 years with vast wings and galleries, each in its own varying but harmonious style, the Louvre, completed in 1857, became one of the greatest of royal palaces. Even the vandalism of the Paris Commune, which in 1871 burned down the Tuileries, caused but few tears to be shed. With the Tuileries palace gone, the Louvre acquired one of the world's most breathtaking vistas, extending two miles up the Champs-Elyeees to Napoleon's Arch of Triumph.

Largesse & Looting. France's "Sun King," Louis XIV, let fall his rays first on the Louvre before building Versailles, tripled and quadrupled the royal collection. Into the royal preserve came such masterpieces as Titian's Young Woman at Her Toilet (the property of Britain's Charles I until his beheading) and Titian's Madonna with a Rabbit (which Louis won from a French duke at tennis).

It took the looting of all Europe by Napoleon's armies to surpass such Bourbon largesse. "We will now have all that is beautiful in Italy except for a few objects in Turin and Naples," Napoleon boasted. The booty kept flowing in, including such masterpieces as Veronese's Marriage at Cana, largest canvas (22 ft. by 32 ft.) in the Louvre, and Mantegna's great Crucifixion. Added to the warehouses of art confiscated during the French Revolution (including Michelangelo's marble Slaves, found in the Due de Richelieu's town house), the foreign conquests made Napoleon's Louvre the central museum for all Europe, and, incidentally, sparked a museum movement.*

Curator Bazin utters a proud Frenchman's protest against comparing Napoleon's vacuum-cleaner sweep of European art with the wholesale robbery by Hitler and Goring. Napoleon, Bazin insists, was motivated by the lofty ideal of creating a new and universal European culture, and was within the ethics of his time. But after Waterloo, Napoleon's conquerors saw Napoleon's operation uplift in another light, stripped the Louvre of 5,233 precious art objects, left little more than 100 canvases and 800 drawings.

Marble from Melos. The Louvre treasures that visitors see today represent the titanic effort made to recoup from the post-Waterloo low point. Rubens paintings from the Luxembourg palace were brought in to fill the gaps; French archaeologists sent back to the Louvre whole collections of Egyptian and Assyrian art. In 1820 the French Ambassador to Turkey was able to pick up five fragments of marble on the island of Melos for 1,200-1,500 francs ($230-$285). Pieced together, they became the Louvre's famed Venus de Milo.

Louis Philippe, "the Citizen King," sent his agent, Baron Taylor, to investigate the possibilities in Spain with 1,327,000 francs ($252,130), got back a staggering 412 Spanish paintings plus 41 Italian and northern works of art. Added to these were 220 canvases willed by Scottish Admirer F. Hall Standish. Together they were one of the Louvre's greatest windfalls and lost opportunities. When Louis Philippe was forced to abdicate, he claimed the works as royal property, and they were sold in London after his death. "One does not dare to think of what the museum would have been if this collection had been retained," says Bazin mournfully. "It is the source of most of the Spanish pictures now dispersed in the galleries of Europe and America!"

Once the Louvre became a national museum, Frenchmen proudly willed their masterpieces to it, gave endowments that padded out the government's meager subsidies, allowed such purchases as Van der Weyden's Braque triptych, including St. Mary Magdalen (for $150,000 in 1913), Duerer's early Self-Portrait (for $60,000 in 1922). But the greatest single stroke of luck was one that no contemporary of Napoleon's could have remotely imagined: the emergence in 19th century France itself of a school of painters. This school, says Curator Bazin proudly, "was to bring into the Louvre so many masterpieces of painting that the walls could scarcely hold them."

*Napoleon's art-loot depots became the foundation of Venice's Accademia, Milan's Brera galleries. His brother Louis founded Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum; brother Joseph started Madrid's Prado.

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