Louvre Museum

The Louvre Museum—Musée du Louvre—begins as a royal project and ends as a public one. Housed in the Louvre Palace, whose core was built in the late 12th to 13th century under Philip II, it retains traces of the medieval fortress even today in the museum’s basement. When Francis I converted the palace into the primary residence of the French kings in 1546, the Louvre became a stage for power rather than defense—something reinforced when Louis XIV chose Versailles in 1682. The museum’s transformation is equally decisive. During the French Revolution, the National Assembly decreed that the Louvre be used as a museum, and it opened on 10 August 1793 with an exhibition of 537 paintings, drawn largely from royal and confiscated collections. From there, the Louvre evolved into the Western-art benchmark people name in a single breath: it is home to the Mona Lisa, along with Venus de Milo and Winged Victory. …

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