Restoration workshops in the Louvre
The Louvre is owned by the French government; however, since the 1990s it has become more independent.[57][62][63][64] Since 2003, the museum has been required to generate funds for projects.[63] By 2006, government funds had dipped from 75 percent of the total budget to 62 percent. Every year, the Louvre now raises as much as it gets from the state, about €122 million. The government pays for operating costs (salaries, safety and maintenance), while the rest – new wings, refurbishments, acquisitions – is up to the museum to finance.[65]A further €3 million to €5 million a year is raised by the Louvre from exhibitions that it curates for other museums, while the host museum keeps the ticket money.[65] As the Louvre became a point of interest in the book The Da Vinci Code and the 2006 film based on the book, the museum earned $2.5 million by allowing filming in its galleries.[66][67]In 2008, the French government provided $180 million of the Louvre’s yearly $350 million budget; the remainder came from private contributions and ticket sales.[62]
The Louvre employs a staff of 2,000 led by Director Jean-Luc Martinez,[68] who reports to the French Ministry of Culture and Communications. Martinez replaced Henri Loyrette in April 2013. Under Loyrette, who replaced Pierre Rosenberg in 2001, the Louvre has undergone policy changes that allow it to lend and borrow more works than before.[57][63] In 2006, it loaned 1,300 works, which enabled it to borrow more foreign works. From 2006 to 2009, the Louvre lent artwork to the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, and received a $6.9 million payment to be used for renovations.[63]
In 2012, the Louvre and the Fine Arts Museums of San Franciscoannounced a five-year collaboration on exhibitions, publications, art conservation and educational programming.[69] The €98.5 million expansion of the Islamic Art galleries in 2012 received state funding of €31 million, as well as €17 million from the Alwaleed Bin Talal Foundation founded by the eponymous Saudi prince. The republic of Azerbaijan, the Emir of Kuwait, the Sultan of Oman and King Mohammed VI of Moroccodonated in total €26 million. In addition, the opening of the Louvre Abu Dhabi is supposed to provide €400 million over the course of 30 years for its use of the museum’s brand.[58] Loyrette has tried to improve weak parts of the collection through income generated from loans of art and by guaranteeing that « 20% of admissions receipts will be taken annually for acquisitions ».[63] He has more administrative independence for the museum and achieved 90 percent of galleries to be open daily, as opposed to 80 percent previously. He oversaw the creation of extended hours and free admission on Friday nights and an increase in the acquisition budget to $36 million from $4.5 million.[62][63]
Lens
In 2004, French officials decided to build a satellite museum on the site of an abandoned coal pit in the former mining town of Lens to relieve the crowded Paris Louvre, increase total museum visits, and improve the industrial north’s economy.[70] Six cities were considered for the project: Amiens, Arras, Boulogne-sur-Mer, Calais, Lens, and Valenciennes. In 2004, French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin chose Lens to be the site of the new building, the Louvre-Lens. Japanese architects SANAA were selected to design the Lens project in 2005. Museum officials predicted that the new building, capable of receiving about 600 works of art, would attract up to 500,000 visitors a year when it opened in 2012.[70]
Abu Dhabi
On 8 November 2017, a direct extension of the Louvre, Louvre Abu Dhabi, opened its doors to the public in the city of Abu Dhabi. A 30-year agreement, signed by French Culture Minister Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres and Sheik Sultan bin Tahnoon Al Nahyan, established the museum on Saadiyat Island in Abu Dhabi in exchange for €832,000,000 (US$1.3 billion). The Louvre Abu Dhabi, designed by the French architect Jean Nouvel and the engineering firm of Buro Happold, occupy 24,000 square metres (260,000 sq ft) and is covered by an iconic metallic roof designed to cast rays of light mimicking sunlight passing through date palm fronds in an oasis. France agreed to rotate between 200 and 300 artworks during a 10-year period; to provide management expertise; and to provide four temporary exhibitions a year for 15 years. The art will come from multiple museums, including the Louvre, the Georges Pompidou Centre, the Musée d’Orsay, Versailles, the Musée Guimet, the Musée Rodin, and the Musée du quai Branly.[71]
Iran
In March 2018 an exhibition of dozens of artworks and relics belonging to France’s Louvre Museum was opened to visitors in Tehran, as a result of an agreement between Iranian and French presidents in 2016. In the Louvre, two departments were allocated to the antiquities of the Iranian civilization, and the managers of the two departments visited Tehran. Relics belonging to Ancient Egypt, Rome and Mesopotamia as well as French royal items were showcased at the Tehran exhibition.
Iran’s National Museum building was designed and constructed by French architect André Godard.[72]Following its time in Tehran, the exhibition is set to be held in the Khorasan Grand Museum in Mashhad, northeastern Iran in June 2018.[73]
Conservation
Giacobbe Giusti, Louvre Museum
In 2009, Minister of Culture Frédéric Mitterrand approved a plan that would have created a storage facility 30 km (19 mi) northwest of Paris to hold objects from the Louvre and two other national museums in Paris’s flood zone, the Musée du Quai Branly and the Musée d’Orsay; the plan was later scrapped. In 2013, his successor Aurélie Filippettiannounced that the Louvre would move more than 250,000 works of art[74] held in a 20,000 square metres (220,000 sq ft) basement storage area in Liévin; the cost of the project, estimated at €60 million, will be split between the region (49%) and the Louvre (51%).[75] The Louvre will be the sole owner and manager of the store.[74] In July 2015, a team led by British firm Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partnerswas selected to design the complex, which will have light-filled work spaces under one vast, green roof.[74]
Controversial acquisitions
The Louvre is involved in controversies that surround cultural property seized under Napoleon I, as well as during World War II by the Nazis. During Nazi occupation, thousands of artworks were stolen. But after the war, 61,233 articles of more than 150,000 seized artworks returned to France and were assigned to the Louvre’s Office des Biens Privés. In 1949, it entrusted 2,130 unclaimed pieces (including 1,001 paintings) to the Direction des Musées de France in order to keep them under appropriate conditions of conservation until their restitution and meanwhile classified them as MNRs (Musées Nationaux Recuperation or, in English, the National Museums of Recovered Artwork). Some 10% to 35% of the pieces are believed to come from Jewish spoliations[76] and until the identification of their rightful owners, which declined at the end of the 1960s, they are registered indefinitely on separate inventories from the museum’s collections.
They were exhibited in 1946 and shown all together to the public during four years (1950–1954) in order to allow rightful claimants to identify their properties, then stored or displayed, according to their interest, in several French museums including the Louvre. From 1951 to 1965, about 37 pieces were restituted. Since November 1996, the partly illustrated catalogue of 1947–1949 has been accessible online and completed. In 1997, Prime Minister Alain Juppé initiated the Mattéoli Commission, headed by Jean Mattéoli, to investigate the matter and according to the government, the Louvre is in charge of 678 pieces of artwork still unclaimed by their rightful owners.[77] During the late 1990s, the comparison of the American war archives, which had not been done before, with the French and German ones as well as two court cases which finally settled some of the heirs’ rights (Gentili di Giuseppe and Rosenberg families) allowed more accurate investigations. Since 1996, the restitutions, according sometimes to less formal criteria, concerned 47 more pieces (26 paintings, with 6 from the Louvre including a then displayed Tiepolo), until the last claims of French owners and their heirs ended again in 2006.
According to Serge Klarsfeld, since the now complete and constant publicity which the artworks got in 1996, the majority of the French Jewish community is nevertheless in favour of the return to the normal French civil rule of prescription acquisitive of any unclaimed good after another long period of time and consequently to their ultimate integration into the common French heritage instead of their transfer to foreign institutions like during World War II.
In June 2015, the Louvre was accused of discriminating against Israeli students.[78][79][80]
Napoleon’s campaigns acquired Italian pieces by treaties, as war reparations, and Northern European pieces as spoils as well as some antiquities excavated in Egypt, though the vast majority of the latter were seized as war reparations by the British army and are now part of collections of the British Museum. On the other hand, the Dendera zodiac is, like the Rosetta Stone, claimed by Egypt even though it was acquired in 1821, before the Egyptian Anti-export legislation of 1835. The Louvre administration has thus argued in favor of retaining this item despite requests by Egypt for its return. The museum participates too in arbitration sessions held via UNESCO‘s Committee for Promoting the Return of Cultural Property to Its Countries of Origin.[81] The museum consequently returned in 2009 five Egyptian fragments of frescoes (30 cm x 15 cm each) whose existence of the tomb of origin had only been brought to the authorities attention in 2008, eight to five years after their good-faith acquisition by the museum from two private collections and after the necessary respect of the procedure of déclassement from French public collections before the Commission scientifique nationale des collections des musées de France.[82]
Collections
The Musée du Louvre contains more than 380,000 objects and displays 35,000 works of art in eight curatorial departments.[83]
Egyptian antiquities
The department, comprising over 50,000 pieces,[84] includes artifacts from the Nile civilizations which date from 4,000 BC to the 4th century AD.[85] The collection, among the world’s largest, overviews Egyptian life spanning Ancient Egypt, the Middle Kingdom, the New Kingdom, Coptic art, and the Roman, Ptolemaic, and Byzantineperiods.[85]
The department’s origins lie in the royal collection, but it was augmented by Napoleon’s 1798 expeditionary trip with Dominique Vivant, the future director of the Louvre.[84] After Jean-François Champollion translated the Rosetta Stone, Charles X decreed that an Egyptian Antiquities department be created. Champollion advised the purchase of three collections, formed by Edmé-Antoine Durand, Henry Salt and Bernardino Drovet; these additions added 7,000 works. Growth continued via acquisitions by Auguste Mariette, founder of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Mariette, after excavations at Memphis, sent back crates of archaeological finds including The Seated Scribe.[84][87]
Guarded by the Large Sphinx (c. 2000 BC), the collection is housed in more than 20 rooms. Holdings include art, papyrus scrolls, mummies, tools, clothing, jewelry, games, musical instruments, and weapons.[84][85] Pieces from the ancient period include the Gebel el-Arak Knife from 3400 BC, The Seated Scribe, and the Head of King Djedefre. Middle Kingdom art, « known for its gold work and statues », moved from realism to idealization; this is exemplified by the schist statue of Amenemhatankhand the wooden Offering Bearer. The New Kingdom and Coptic Egyptian sections are deep, but the statue of the goddess Nephthys and the limestone depiction of the goddess Hathor demonstrate New Kingdom sentiment and wealth.[85][87]
Near Eastern antiquities
Giacobbe Giusti, Louvre Museum
Human-headed winged bull (shedu), Assyria, limestone, 8th century BC
Near Eastern antiquities, the second newest department, dates from 1881 and presents an overview of early Near Eastern civilization and « first settlements », before the arrival of Islam. The department is divided into three geographic areas: the Levant, Mesopotamia (Iraq), and Persia (Iran). The collection’s development corresponds to archaeological work such as Paul-Émile Botta‘s 1843 expedition to Khorsabad and the discovery of Sargon II‘s palace.[85][88] These finds formed the basis of the Assyrian museum, the precursor to today’s department.[85]
The museum contains exhibits from Sumer and the city of Akkad, with monuments such as the Prince of Lagash’s Stele of the Vultures from 2450 BC and the stele erected by Naram-Sin, King of Akkad, to celebrate a victory over barbarians in the Zagros Mountains. The 2.25-metre (7.38 ft) Code of Hammurabi, discovered in 1901, displays Babylonian Laws prominently, so that no man could plead their ignorance. The 18th-century BC mural of the Investiture of Zimrilimand the 25th-century BC Statue of Ebih-Il found in the ancient city-state of Mari are also on display at the museum.
The Persian portion of Louvre contains work from the archaic period, like the Funerary Head and the Persian Archers of Darius I.[85][89] This section also contains rare objects from Persepolis which were also lent to the British Museumfor its Ancient Persia exhibition in 2005.[90]
Greek, Etruscan, and Roman
Giacobbe Giusti, Louvre Museum
The Greek, Etruscan, and Roman department displays pieces from the Mediterranean Basin dating from the Neolithic to the 6th century.[91] The collection spans from the Cycladic period to the decline of the Roman Empire. This department is one of the museum’s oldest; it began with appropriated royal art, some of which was acquired under Francis I.[85][92] Initially, the collection focused on marble sculptures, such as the Venus de Milo. Works such as the Apollo Belvedere arrived during the Napoleonic Wars, but these pieces were returned after Napoleon I’s fall in 1815. In the 19th century, the Louvre acquired works including vases from the Durand collection, bronzes such as the Borghese Vase from the Bibliothèque nationale.[86][91]
The archaic is demonstrated by jewellery and pieces such as the limestone Lady of Auxerre, from 640 BC; and the cylindrical Hera of Samos, circa 570–560 BC.[85][93]After the 4th century BC, focus on the human form increased, exemplified by the Borghese Gladiator. The Louvre holds masterpieces from the Hellenisticera, including The Winged Victory of Samothrace (190 BC) and the Venus de Milo, symbolic of classical art.[92] The long Galerie Campanadisplays an outstanding collection of more than one thousand Greek potteries. In the galleries paralleling the Seine, much of the museum’s Roman sculpture is displayed.[91]The Roman portraiture is representative of that genre; examples include the portraits of Agrippa and Annius Verus; among the bronzes is the Greek Apollo of Piombino.
Islamic art
Giacobbe Giusti, Louvre Museum
Casket, ivory and silver, Muslim Spain, 966
The Islamic art collection, the museum’s newest, spans « thirteen centuries and three continents ».[94]These exhibits, comprising ceramics, glass, metalware, wood, ivory, carpet, textiles, and miniatures, include more than 5,000 works and 1,000 shards.[95]Originally part of the decorative arts department, the holdings became separate in 2003. Among the works are the Pyxide d’al-Mughira, a 10th century ivory box from Andalusia; the Baptistery of Saint-Louis, an engraved brass basin from the 13th or 14th century Mamlukperiod; and the 10th century Shroud of Saint-Josse from Iran.[88][94] The collection contains three pages of the Shahnameh, an epic book of poems by Ferdowsi in Persian, and a Syrian metalwork named the Barberini Vase.[95]
Sculpture