In addition to the Musée du Louvre, both the Musée des Arts Décoratifs and the École du Louvre reside in sections of the Louvre building. Only a small part of the Louvre’s current footprint was ever a royal residence. Until its destruction by the Communards in 1871, the Tuileries Palace to the west connecting with the northern and southern arms of the Louvre, was the more prestigious and sumptuous Paris residence for kings and emperors. It was in the Tuileries Palace that Josephine reposed on her bed flanked by the Mona Lisa and Holbein’s Erasmus. The 500-metre-long Grande Galerie, bordering the Seine, was built in the early 1600s under Henri IV to link the Louvre to the Tuileries Palace. Interestingly, the eastern half of the Grande Galerie, now home to the greatest of the Louvre’s Italian pictures, was originally used as apartments for artists and craftsmen, a practice that continued for two hundred years.

The Louvre, in succinct and engaging prose, brings to life the history of this massive building complex. Gardner’s text is aided by an inspired piece of book design. The endpapers are maps of the Louvre, colour-coded by building period. This is most helpful; I found myself referring to it constantly. As Gardner admits, this is not a work of new scholarship but of interpretation and explanation. It draws on many sources, notably the massive three-volume, 2,500-page Histoire du Louvre (2016).

Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV’s finance minister, advised him in 1663 that ‘nothing reflects better upon the greatness and spirit of princes than buildings’, something Louis clearly took to heart. While Louis’ most famous building project is of course Versailles, he also made considerable changes to the Louvre before abandoning it in 1682. He quadrupled its size and created the stupendous neoclassical eastern façade, or Colonnade. As Gardner notes, most visitors to the Louvre miss this architectural tour de force since they enter from the west, either via I.M. Pei’s Pyramide or the Carrousel du Louvre. Gardner’s book forms a critical commentary on the architecture of the building, and he is forthright in his judgements. He considers the Colonnade the finest part of the complex, and his catholic taste enables him also to admire Pei’s splendid new pyramid entrance and masterly creation of the interiors of the Richelieu Wing, as well as the over-the-top baroque/rococo-revival interiors built for Napoléon III’s Ministry of Finance. He writes about Peter Paul Rubens’s magnificent Marie de Médicis cycle: ‘Through their profusion of rich vermilions and smoky golds, these paintings operate like machines to produce a single product, a certain kind of exhilaratingly gaseous glory’.

I.M. Pei’s Pyramide or the Carrousel du Louvre in Paris (Wikimedia Commons)

If you find visits to the Louvre intolerable due to the crowds, this is not just a pre-Covid aversion. During the eighteenth century, the annual Salons held in the Salon Carré, adjoining the east end of the Grande Galerie, were famous crushes as visitors strained to look at the tiers of paintings. Napoleon and Marie-Louise’s wedding procession in 1810 through the Grande Galerie was witnessed by many thousands.

The Louvre opened as a museum during the Revolution on 10 August 1793, but its genesis was during the ancien régime. The modest collection of some 650 paintings and sculptures was originally confined to a small part of the building. Gardner succinctly explains how both the building and unrivalled collections have expanded over the centuries. He wryly notes that: ‘These masterpieces contribute so materially to the gross national product of the nation that the health of its tourist industry can be measured by how close a visitor can get to the Mona Lisa.’

It was under Napoleon that the Louvre had its greatest moment as an art collection. He looted and plundered the great European collections and, in the manner of Roman emperors, shipped the trophies home. He wanted to create the greatest collection in the world, and for a few years it was.

Not only did the Louvre purloin from Venice Paolo Veronese’s vast Wedding Feast at Cana, which remains there to this day; but for a few years it held the Laocoön and the Apollo Belvedere from the Vatican, and Bruegel’s Winter and Wedding Feast, among the four hundred paintings from Vienna. The four bronze horses taken from San Marco in Venice strode atop the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel. Restitution for many but not all of the more than five thousand looted treasures was swift after the fall of the dictator; most of them had been returned by the end of 1815. Perhaps with Napoleon in mind, an emptied Louvre greeted the Nazis in 1940.

The Louvre, both the building and its collections, has had a strong effect on many visitors, with Henry James writing in A Small Boy and Others of the Galerie d’Apollon: ‘not only beauty and art and supreme design, but history and fame and power, the world, in fine, raised to the richest and noblest expression.’