What happens when we try to walk at night through museums we can no longer visit? A range of online virtual tours provides the possibility, but apart from physical problems of reproduction—the pixel resolution is inadequate, the movement glitchy and twitchy—the real difference is the loss of tactile and optical tension, the missing dialogue of aching feet and happy eyes. Online, we float, ghostlike, down corridors, making giddy hundred-and-eighty-degree spins, with no querulous photographer from Toledo with a selfie stick to bump into. Sit and know you’re sitting is the meditation master’s insistence, and Walk and look while knowing you’re walking and looking is the more complicated Zen of the museum experience: the physical and the painterly, the squinting to see and the moments of transporting vision, have to go in tandem. The work is there, actually there as a physical fact, which you could touch, if you were allowed to. A book may be an object, but the Kindle edition of “Hamlet” is as much Hamlet as the (no longer extant) manuscript. Raphael’s portrait of Baldassare Castiglione exists at one specific point on the planet, and nowhere else, having begun in one nameable place and followed a track through time, owner by owner and wall to wall. Reproductions reproduce, and they often do it well, but they can’t reproduce the sex appeal of museumgoing, the carnal intersection of one physical object with another, you and it. It’s a thing, there; you, a thing, here.
This truth is never so piercingly felt as when we think about revisiting in our minds the Louvre in Paris, since its essential experience is enormity and intimacy, constantly colliding, on a scale unequalled by any other gallery in the world. Closed for four months during the pandemic, the Louvre reopened recently, in a cautious, by-appointment-only manner; but, like most of the great galleries of Europe, it remains off limits to still-tainted Americans. As Mark Twain, the archetypal exhausted American tourist, noted when he visited in the eighteen-sixties, the museum contains “miles of paintings by the old masters,” but the experience of its Grande Galerie—a corridor, not a room—is necessarily closeup. Even the large and little rooms that spring off its sides hold out the possibility of an intimate encounter with the past. You look—well, you would look, if you could get within thirty feet of it, past the bulwark of tourists for whom it is the destination of a European visit—at the gallery’s most famous picture, Leonardo’s “La Gioconda” (the one called, in English, the “Mona Lisa”), and you see paint, crackle, a smile, a non-smile, a mystery, a woman, a remembered page of prose (“She is older than the rocks among which she sits”), and, if you allow proximity to defeat familiarity, a genuinely weird, extraterrestrial portrait. Had Leonardo come from another planet, as he sometimes seems to have, this would be a picture of its geology, its flora, and its queen.
Ten million people visited the Louvre last year, before France’s lockdown in March, and no museum can become so crowded without cancelling its own purpose, or replacing it with another purpose—the purpose of a dutiful hajj, of having been there. There are too many people looking to allow anyone to see. Construction of the “Grand Louvre,” begun in the nineteen-eighties, with a new entrance hall crowned by the I. M. Pei pyramid, was meant to organize and order the overcrowding, but has only added to the exhaustion. The long lines that snake around the pyramid in the summer without a trace of shade are tiring to look at, let alone stand in. And, once inside, the physical act of buying a ticket and getting oriented is so extended that it makes the time between the urge to visit and the actual experience of a work of art punishingly long.
Nonetheless, the place is so big, so various, so filled with objects, and so beautifully disordered that there is still, especially off-season, a chance to infiltrate inside, instead of being regimented within it. A Saturday morning in one of the lesser wings—say, the Richelieu wing, opened in the nineteen-nineties—offers time alone with overlooked delights, like the sixteenth-century Flemish tapestries called “Les Chasses de Maximilien,” which include a bracing account of the Emperor out hunting with his dogs and horses and attendants and whippers-in on a winter morning, perfectly capturing the smoky, enveloping air of the Flemish woods while providing an extraordinary encyclopedia of canine types, some strange, some familiar.
Mysterious in effect, the Louvre is delightfully mysterious in history, too, as James Gardner shows in “The Louvre: The Many Lives of the World’s Most Famous Museum” (Atlantic Monthly Press). No one knows why the Louvre is called the Louvre. You would think that it has some relation to “Lutetia,” the Roman name for Paris, or the like, but not a bit; the origin of the name is as opaque as the French love of Johnny Hallyday. Even so, the name has stuck through the site’s transition from citadel to showplace. The continuity the Louvre represents is the continuity of the French state. Gardner relates the long story of the Louvre, starting around the thirteenth century, when it was simply a castle, through its elevation as a palace, and then, in the seventeenth century, its expansion into service as an office building for French royalty. In those centuries, the building intersects art history only occasionally. A kind of false spring occurred when François I seems to have bought pictures from Leonardo at Amboise, in the early sixteenth century—three paintings, including that smiling lady, which remain the nucleus of the collection. It was a cosmopolitan collection—the French King, like many of his successors, displayed his power by demonstrating his taste, with the model of collecting as a form of exotic shopping already in place.
Pictures were also commissioned and displayed there. Peter Paul Rubens’s seventeenth-century series apotheosizing the life of the mediocre Marie de Médicis as the Queen of France migrated into the royal collection early on, and remains both the apogee and the burlesque of major art that is also pure toadying to power. In the late seventeenth century, Louis XIV bought a tremendous number of pictures, but, as Gardner rightly says, he bought as a contemporary New York billionaire would buy, acquiring blue-chip names—then mostly Italian—without much evidence of distinct sensibility. Still, one great picture after another did come into his personal collection for the benefit of France, including what is, for some people’s money, the single greatest picture in the Louvre, that Raphael portrait of the Italian diplomat and author Castiglione. Raphael, the most talented painter who has ever lived, somehow compressed in a single frame all of the easy painterliness and understated humanity of Titian, while fixing, in Castiglione’s mixture of wisdom, intensity, sobriety, and wry good humor, the permanent form for the ideal author photo.
Gardner’s muscular, impatiently expert prose recalls Robert Hughes in his city books, “Barcelona” and “Rome.” He indulges in a few polemics along the way but has unusually firm, if retardataire, views on architecture and a shrewd, watchful, knowing eye—noting, for instance, that the greatest architectural achievement of the complex, the seventeenth-century Colonnade, with its bas-relief pediment, is now so hidden away, around the corner from the pyramid and the central court, that “not one visitor to the Louvre in a hundred, perhaps in a thousand, will ever see this masterpiece.”
His account reminds us that we always make one era responsible for what belongs to the one before, and among the truths of French history is that we give the Revolution credit—or blame—for historical processes and institutions that were under way long before 1789. The great public-private spaces of modernity—the restaurants and cafés with their class- and caste-spanning crowd—were all nurtured during the Enlightenment, even if they blossomed after the Revolution. Although the Louvre formally opened as an art gallery in 1793—the beginning of the Terror—the idea to make it so had begun half a century before. The removal of the court to Versailles under Louis XIV, in 1682, had left an enormous volume of unused space, and even more was created by the expansion of the Tuileries Palace, west of the courtyard where the pyramid now stands. The urge to turn the princely palace into a picture palace led, in the eighteenth century, to a series of exhibitions in the former royal residence—the kind of French salons that would, by attraction and repulsion, dominate French taste right up to the First World War.
The direction and planning of the incipient Louvre luckily fell into the hands of two remarkable fonctionnaires who, more than anyone else, are responsible for its character. The first was the extravagantly named Charles-Claude Flahaut de la Billarderie, Comte d’Angiviller, who was appointed the keeper of the king’s estates by Louis XVI. As Gardner tells us, he was intent on establishing a museum in the Grande Galerie, and he went about the heroic work, through both architecture and acquisition, of turning a royal abode into an art gallery. D’Angiviller’s dream was made real by an accident of finance almost impossibly ironic to imagine, given that the Louvre has, for more than a century, been the special haunt of American tourists. The end of the American Revolution, we learn from Gardner’s history, helped finance the French museum. Once the War of Independence had been concluded, the French government could start to collect on its loans to the American colonies, putting thirteen million livres in d’Angiviller’s hands.
He started collecting good pictures, not greedily and haphazardly, as prestige prizes, but with a modern kind of eye, devoted to filling gaps in the collection. He sent his emissaries north, for instance, to buy one of the great Rembrandts that distinguish the collection—the humane and anti-idealizing artist not being at all an obvious choice to French aristocratic taste at the time. D’Angiviller also renovated the Grande Galerie itself, envisioning a huge iron-and-glass skylight that would illuminate the arriving pictures.
He lost his job when the Revolution happened—he fled, for fear of losing his head as well—but the position of what was, in effect, museum director fell to an equally aesthetic and public-spirited conservator, Jean-Marie Roland de la Platière, usually called Roland. A Girondin liberal, he built on d’Angiviller’s efforts, with their implicit appeal to ever-larger audiences, and dreamed for the first time of a true museum: a synoptic collection telling the story of art-making in all its genres, available to everyone. “It should be open to everyone and everyone should be able to place his easel in front of any painting or to draw, paint, or model as he chooses,” he declared. When the Louvre opened at last as a museum, in 1793, anyone could go in.
Roland, with his impeccable liberal credentials and democratic instincts, was one of the more pitiable victims of the countless pitiable victims of the Jacobin Reign of Terror. Only months before the museum’s opening, he took off, afraid of the radicals. Though he got out of Paris, his intellectual, spirited wife, an activist who belonged to the wrong families, biologically and politically, was arrested in the spring of 1793 by the Jacobins, and publicly beheaded in the fall. “From the moment when I learned that they had murdered my wife,” Roland wrote (in words Gardner doesn’t quote), “I would no longer remain in a world stained with enemies.” He committed suicide by sword thrust.
As the revolutionary chaos gave way to the military dictatorship of Napoleon, the Louvre was transformed in another direction. Napoleon set out to loot the world for the benefit of the museum. Of the assaults on Egypt and the Levant, Gardner writes that they “may be unique in the history of warfare in that their goals had almost as much to do with the acquisition of visual art as with the conquest of territory.” In the inevitable French manner, there was even a bureaucracy of the piracy: a comité d’instruction supervising agences d’évacuation and agences d’extraction, which, Gardner says, “essentially oversaw the removal of all portable economic and cultural assets from the conquered nations.”
The Link LonkOctober 19, 2020 at 05:01PM
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In Love with the Louvre - The New Yorker
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