Treasures of the Louvre

This programme contains some strong language.

My name's Andrew Hussey

and I'm the Dean of the University of London Institute in Paris.

I first came to the city as a teenager

and I have had a big connection with it ever since.

Now, I live and work here.

I still love the place and I'm still fascinated by it.

But these days, I travel around Paris not just for pleasure,

but also to explore the places that inspire my writing about the city.

But there's still one trip in Paris that I always make

with a fair amount of trepidation.

And that's here.

To the Louvre.

As you can see, the Louvre is big, brooding and vast.

To be honest, I've always been quite

intimidated by this most massive of museums.

But in this film,

I want to change the way that I, and maybe you, see it too.

So I want you to come with me

on a tour of this extraordinary institution,

and to do a little bit of time-travelling in French history.

On the way, I am going to try and make sense of a place

that's jam-packed with over 35,000 pieces of art

that you'll find in mile after mile after mile of galleries.

It's a building that's over 800 years old and bursting with history.

So come with me and see the Louvre transformed

from a medieval fortress to a royal palace,

and then to a modern-day museum.

We will look at the great art of da Vinci,

Rubens,

David

and Gericault.

We will enjoy the glories of antiquity

and explain why the magnificent artworks that you can see today

arrived in the museum,

and what they tell us about both the Louvre and France.

I want to argue that if you know the secrets of the Louvre,

know its history, know the glorious art within these walls,

then I think you can understand France.

The Louvre.

Well, there's lots and lots and lots and lots of art here.

So, where to begin?

Why not start with one of the oldest paintings in the museum?

From the 15th century, a work of art with a gruesome subject.

It will give us our first clue to the Louvre's long history.

Look at this.

This is a painting called La Crucifixion du Parlement de Paris.

There's a lot of interesting stuff going on here.

Here in the foreground, for example,

this bloke with his head in his hands.

That's Saint Denis, who was one of the patron saints of Paris.

Saint Denis was martyred in the third century,

beheaded on the high ground above the city,

the present-day quartier of Montmartre.

But his is not the only image of suffering.

At the centre of the painting is Christ on the cross.

On one side of him is the grieving Virgin Mother,

comforted by Mary Magdalene. On the other, St John the Evangelist.

And this is art with a purpose.

It was deliberately hung in the main chamber of the Parlement de Paris,

a reminder to lawmakers to show due humility

in the face of divine justice.

But one other detail provides an insight into more earthly

matters of bricks and mortar.

This is the best approximation of what the Louvre

would have looked liked to medieval Parisians.

What they saw was a fortress, a citadel of military power.

The medieval Louvre

was built strategically close to the River Seine,

along the walls of the medieval city.

A 30-metre tower looked out to the West and the enemy,

the English, on a border sometimes only 45 miles away.

The castle dominated the Parisian skyline,

a very visible, a very deliberate assertion of French power.

On the outside of today's museum,

there are a few clues to what lies underneath.

The opening of a well and a cesspit.

Below, there are the thick, strong walls and tall palisades

that defended the Capetian and Valois kings of France

from their enemies.

This is the Louvre entresol, the basement of the museum.

30 years ago, excavations took place which revealed these walls,

which show just how forbidding the Louvre was

in its original medieval incarnation.

Now, there's been a lot of debate

over the meaning of the word "Louvre".

But I'm going to go with the old French term, "louver",

which means "fortress" or "stronghold".

I think that pretty much sums up the place and its history.

When the Renaissance came to France in the 16th century,

this military fortress became

a royal palace of great style and culture.

In the museum today is the portrait

of the man who began this transformation.

This is Francois I, King of France,

and the first great builder of the Louvre.

It was painted around 1530 by the artist Jean Clouet.

It's a portrait of a real Renaissance man. He is a fighter.

Check out the hand on the sword ever ready. But he is also a lover...

of culture. And so it's a picture of refinement.

Check out the tasteful clothes.

He is every inch, as the French would say, a man "a la mode".

Francois I began the tradition that French kings should be both

connoisseurs of art and patrons of artists.

In 1516, he persuaded an elderly Leonardo da Vinci to leave Italy.

The painting days of the great genius were over,

but it is thought that he brought with him...you-know-who.

This painting that millions come to see today was the first-ever

work of art to enter the French royal collection.

# Mona Lisa

# Mona Lisa, men have named you... #

Ah, Mona Lisa.

Mona Lisa.

That smile, that smile.

Enigmatic, mysterious, tender or mocking?

"What is it about that smile?"

I asked the Louvre's curator of Renaissance art, Vincent Delieuvin.

La probleme que j'ai avec La Joconde, c'est...

-TRANSLATION:

-'The problem I have got with the Mona Lisa

'is that she is such a big media star.'

THEY SPEAK FRENCH

TRANSLATION: 'What you have to do is

'to try and forget that she is such a big star

'and really get into the painting.

'Get up close and love it for what it is,

'and she definitely invites us to love her.

'It's such an incredible ability of the painter to portray that

'most difficult and subtle of human expressions, the smile.

'There are 1,000 ways of interpreting a smile, and that was the genius

'of Leonardo, to be able to capture

'such a subtle and rich human expression.

-'She is such a flirt.

-Of course she's a huge flirt.

'The French like that sort of thing,

'but hey, you're not completely untouched by her, are you?'

# Mona Liiiii-saaaa. #

What else is there left to say about this painting?

Only that in the 16th century, La Joconde, as it's known

in France, was something quite new in Western art.

TRANSLATION: 'The idea of creating a sense of contact between the viewer

'and the subject had never been done before.

'Or the open posture with her hands turned towards us.

'She's greeting us as if we were in her palace, in her room, even.

'It's even smiling at us.

'That technique of drawing the viewer directly into the painting

'was hugely innovative.

-'Was all this a new departure for Western art?

-Absolutely.'

'How many politicians' portraits have you seen in the style of La Joconde?

'Everyone uses Leonardo's style, from the framing to

'the posture, to the direct approach of the subject to the audience.'

So how influential was this approach to portraiture at the time?

Well, let's go back to the portrait of Francois.

Had its creator, Jean Clouet, seen the Mona Lisa?

We don't actually know. But Francois does look us straight in the eye.

His body is turned towards the viewer

and his hands face the same way

as da Vinci's Florentine lady.

And as with her, we are drawn towards the personality of the King.

Francois was not only a patron of the arts but a builder of palaces.

He'd spent some time in Italy

and he wanted to emulate the style of the Renaissance palazzi.

So the medieval tower was pulled down.

Moats were filled in and a courtyard built, the Cour Carree,

overlooked by this imposing and ornamented facade.

And within, the King demanded

a makeover of gloomy royal apartments.

This is the Salle des Caryatides.

I think it's a place that best captures the spirit

and feeling of the Renaissance Louvre.

It's a vision of science and nature in harmony,

and it signals the beginning of the French classical tradition.

You can see its expression in the four sculptures by Jean Goujon,

which give the room its name.

These are the four caryatides.

They have a function as pillars,

but they are also works of art in themselves -

beautifully sculpted forms,

every curve and fold capturing a fleshy allure.

And they stand sentinel to an elegant stairway that reveals to us

yet another treasure of the Louvre.

If we look around here, we see images also sculpted by Jean Goujon.

And they give us pointers to the man who commissioned this

passageway, between the first and second floors of the palace.

He and his mistress have a love of hunting.

And here, look at this letter H.

That's a royal monogram, a kind of graffiti tag chiselled in stone.

And H stands for Henri II, who succeeded Francois II.

Both within and without, every ruler who wanted to use the Louvre

as a symbol of their power would leave their mark in this way.

So, the walls read like an alphabet designed for posterity.

The Renaissance Louvre was a place of great culture

but it was also the location for great violence

during the infamous Saint Bartholomew's Eve massacre.

When religious war between Catholics

and Huguenot Protestants threatened to tear France apart,

the palace was witness to great horror that began with

that most familiar of sounds from

the nearby church of Saint Germain L'Auxerrois.

In the early hours of the 24th of August 1572,

the sound of monks tolling the bell for Matins could be

heard as usual throughout the streets of Paris.

But this particular morning,

this normally reassuring sound was the cue for slaughter to begin,

of Protestants by Catholics.

"Tuez-les tous!" was the battle cry. "Kill them all!"

Writer on the Louvre, Daniel Soulier, told me about the moment

the very heart of power in France became a killing field.

SPEAKS FRENCH

TRANSLATION: 'These windows were the Queen's rooms.

'So all the key decisions surrounding the Saint Bartholomew massacre

'would have taken place just metres above where we are now sat.

'We know that many people were killed here in the courtyards of the Louvre.

'They were slightly hesitant to kill people

'in the actual royal apartments, so we imagine that they

'dragged a lot of people out here in order to kill them.

'There is another story that people tell.

'The King at the time, Charles IX,

'sat in a balcony window with a crossbow,

'firing down upon Huguenots who were trying to escape on the River Seine.'

There was a survivor of this terrible day in the Louvre,

a Huguenot prince of the blood, Henri of Navarre.

Days before the massacre,

Henri had married the sister of Charles IX, Marguerite de Valois.

20 years later, the couple were King and Queen of France.

The last Valois king had died childless and Henri,

next in line to the throne,

became the first ruler of a new dynasty, the Bourbons.

But to become Henri IV for all of France,

and crowned as such in Paris, a deal needed to be struck.

Henri would have to convert to Catholicism.

He passed through here, the Rue St Honore,

which is just opposite the Louvre, heading for Notre Dame to hear Mass,

and this was the 22nd of March, 1594.

He did this because, as we know, to give France peace

and unity, it was worth a Mass.

"Paris vaut bien une messe."

A statue of Henri IV is on the Pont Neuf, which was itself completed

in his reign, to connect the right and left banks of the Seine.

But the King was also determined

to make his mark on the royal palace nearby.

Henri wanted to link the Louvre

to the recently built palace of the Tuileries nearby.

So to connect the two palaces, he ordered this built -

the Grande Galerie.

A name was now given to this grandiose vision of expansion.

Le Grand Dessein, the great plan.

As you can see, it's all conceived on the grandest scale.

It is half a mile from there to there, for example.

And the idea was that this is a place of entertainment

and magnificent spectacle.

You could come here, for example,

to watch the water pageants on the Seine.

But it's also a mystical space, a sacred space.

It's where Henri IV and the Bourbon kings who came after him,

literally believed that they had the divine touch.

They believed, most importantly, that they

could cure people of the disease of scrofula,

which is a really nasty kind of tuberculosis of the neck.

What would happen is that the King would receive people,

and say "The King touches you. God cures you."

Either way, I hope it worked.

Now, there is a clue to Henri's life and loves in the Louvre.

It's a painting that is not in one of the main galleries,

where thousands gather to look at the usual suspects.

But if you find this mysterious and striking work of art,

you won't be disappointed.

This is Gabrielle d'Estrees and her sister.

Gabrielle d'Estrees was the mistress of Henri IV.

As they say, every picture tells a story. Have a look at the gestures.

Gabrielle's sister is holding her nipple between thumb

and finger, to indicate that she is pregnant with the King's son,

the future Duc de Vendome.

Gabrielle is also holding a bejewelled hand of gold.

It's not worn on her finger to symbolise a marriage,

but it is thought to be the King's coronation ring,

a token of his love and his loyalty.

The two women are sitting in a bath,

perhaps filled with milk or wine, as was the aristocratic custom.

Both are beautifully made up to show off their white alabaster faces.

Women of the time, actually,

would crush up the innards of swallows

and mix them with lilies, ground pearls and camphor

and smear the paste on their faces to get this ghostly look.

This didn't seem to dampen the ardour of Henri,

who couldn't resist Gabrielle.

She bore him three other children before her sudden death in 1599.

Henri's own life also came to an abrupt end,

on the streets of Paris on the 14th of May, 1610.

One of his greatest achievements was to have guaranteed

the religious liberties of Protestant Huguenots.

But for such tolerance, he would never be forgiven by those who saw

themselves as holy warriors for the true faith of Rome.

The fun-loving Henri came to a gory and violent end.

It was here, on the Rue de la Ferronerie.

This was where a religious fanatic called Francois Ravaillac

pulled back the blinds of the carriage the King was travelling in

and plunged a long knife, three times, deep into his chest.

The assassination of Henri left uncertainty

over who would now rule France.

Here's the story in paint of the woman who did.

Here in the Louvre

are 24 canvases devoted to the life of Marie de Medici,

Henri's second wife.

As regent, the Queen had many enemies.

She needed to legitimise her grip on power.

So she turned to the weapon of art

and the greatest painter of the day, Peter Paul Rubens.

I talked to curator Blaise Ducos

about the biggest painting here showing the Queen's coronation.

TRANSLATION: 'Here, the first big impression is one of a great movement

'over towards the main focus of the painting, which is, of course,

'Marie de Medici in the process of being crowned

'in the Saint-Denis Basilica

'the day before the assassination of Henri IV.

'You can even see him in the background,

'but very much recognisable, watching the Queen.

'And in the process, giving her the sense of legitimacy that without,

'she wouldn't have been able to govern and rule as regent.'

This is painting on the grandest of scales.

This the art of the Baroque,

with its extravagant use of movement and colour

and its feeling of sensuality.

And all of this simply leaps out here.

SPEAKS FRENCH

TRANSLATOR: 'It's a piece of theatre in many senses,

'and you have to look at it that way.

'They're very theatrical paintings, very...Baroque.

'And, of course, Rubens was the great Baroque painter.'

And it was the sheer ornamentality of the Baroque

that fired the imagination of the next ruler Of France

to mould the Louvre in his own image.

This is the famous portrait of Louis XIV by Hyacinthe Rigaud.

He was the Sun King,

the L'Etate C'est Moi - champion of bling.

He was the Bourbon who brought

new levels of pomp and grandeur to the Louvre.

But to my mind there's something over-the-top,

even desperately camp about this painting.

Have a look at the big hair, the shoes, the clothes,

the rich, rich colours.

All of it seems to be screaming luxury and power,

but, after all, that was what it was all about.

During the early years of Louis' reign,

the Louvre echoed to the sounds of thousands of labourers,

masons and joiners, working to create new facades -

stuccos, elaborately carved ceilings and wood panelling.

Work started on an opposing facade on the outside of the Cour Carree.

This colonnade would look out.

A Parisian would look up to the palace with due deference and awe.

Here, in the Cour Carree,

Louis completed the building work begun by his father.

He quadrupled the size of this courtyard

to the dimensions you see today.

And with one express aim -

to make the Louvre a bigger and more imposing place.

And inside a royal waiting room was built - the Rotonde d'Apollon -

to wow impressionable visitors to the palace.

Just off the Rotonde, a spectacular gallery was built -

the Galerie d'Apollon, designed by the King's architect, Louis Le Vau.

I'm looking around because everything here

has a kind of mystical or allegorical meaning,

and all of that is literally revolving around the King himself.

And just look at this place!

It's splendid, it's glittering with all this gold glory -

it really is the personification of what it means to be the Sun King.

Every image here reinforces

the assertion that the King was god-like -

the centre of the universe.

Looking down from high, on a country where he, and he alone,

had absolute power.

With a rule over France,

that could never ever be questioned by mere mortals.

And like his illustrious predecessor Francois,

Louis was not only a builder,

but someone with a huge appetite for collecting art -

the Charles Saatchi, if you like, of the 17th century.

During his reign, the size of the royal collection

expanded from 150 to exactly 2,376 paintings.

He bought the best French art of his time -

32 Poussin, 11 Claude, 26 Le Brun and 17 Mignard.

And foreign masterpieces like this lovely but sombre painting,

The Death of the Virgin by Caravaggio.

All now hang here in what was HIS Louvre.

The Louvre was a luxurious plaything for Louis XIV,

but there was one big problem - it was in Paris, and he hated Paris.

But, funny enough, the Parisians also hated him.

So what happened in 1670 was that Louis XIV left Paris for Versailles

in a great, big, splendid, royal huff.

And he hardly ever set foot in the place again.

But he didn't leave empty-handed -

he took all of his artworks with him.

With the exit of Louis XIV to Versailles,

the Grand Dessein was put on hold.

Much of the building work remained unfinished.

The colonnade was left without a roof.

Throughout the 18th century,

the Louvre had a much more ramshackle feel to it.

And it echoed to a more plebeian cacophony of sounds and voices.

The Grande Galerie changed from the preserve of royals and aristocrats,

and became instead the centre for artistic hustling in Paris.

This is where you'd find engravers hard at work, furniture-makers,

makers of the very finest hats -

it was a place of great energy, bustle and commerce.

But the most important thing that happened here,

was that by royal warrant, artists were allowed to come and live here,

and they copied paintings, and then they made their own art.

And this was the moment when the Louvre properly became

a centre of cultural exchange in the endless carnival of Parisian life.

As the palace began to open its doors to vulgar outsiders,

the presence of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture

in the King's former apartments,

still preserved a sense of decorum and gravitas in the Louvre.

First in the Grande Galerie, and here in the Salle Carree,

the Academy held an annual, then biennial, exhibition.

Starting on St Louis' day 25th of August,

the Salon was open to the public.

The idea of showing art to all who wish to come was novel,

and proved fantastically popular.

Events at the Salon were something

to be argued about in another institution,

for ever dear to all Parisians.

This was the first-ever coffee house in Paris,

opening to customers in 1686.

From the word go, the Cafe Procope attracted intellectuals.

In the 18th century, the philosophes of the Enlightenment came here -

and amongst them was someone very important to our story.

Behind me here - this is Denis Diderot.

Now Diderot wrote penetrating critiques of the Salon,

and in doing so he effectively invented art criticism.

And he threw down a challenge to artists with an ambition

to impress him in the Salon -

"First of all move me, surprise me, rend my heart,

"make me tremble, weep, shudder, outrage me,

"and delight my eyes afterwards, if you can."

Diderot was delighted by one artist, whose wonderful and poignant

self-portraits you can find in the Louvre.

And this is the painter, Jean-Baptiste Simeon Chardin.

Chardin did this pastel drawing of himself when he was 76,

and the infirmity of old age had stopped him painting in oils.

In his still lives,

Chardin was painting on a much smaller scale than a Rubens.

And the canvases of Chardin have an apparent simplicity about them.

But this art is not simplistic, and in these paintings

small, not big, is beautiful.

The work of Chardin mesmerised Diderot

who saw something magical at work.

"Oh, Chardin, it's not white, red and black

"that you are mixing on your palette,

"it's the very substance of objects.

"It's the very air and light that you put on the tip of your brush,

"and place on the canvas."

I talked to curator Marie Catherine Sahut about Chardin

and what he taught Diderot.

SPEAKS FRENCH

TRANSLATOR: 'All Chardin's efforts went into the magic

'of turning inanimate everyday objects into beautiful artwork.

'And for Diderot, I think, it was all about entering into the paintings

'and the mind-set of Chardin,

'and trying to find out what it was that made it so magical.

'The word "magic" is, in fact, used a number of times by Diderot,

'and Chardin taught him to go right up to a painting,

'as, when you get up close to a painting,

'it ceases to have any significant meaning.

'It becomes just streaks of paint.

'And then gradually, as you move away from it,

'everything slowly creeps into focus.'

There is one painting of Chardin

that I especially wanted to look at here -

the one that is considered his masterpiece - The Ray.

Yes, it's a still life.

But with such energy and motion -

look at the cat about to pounce on the oysters!

And what really draws the eye,

is the eviscerated form of the ray fish.

TRANSLATOR: 'I think Chardin created a true character of the ray,

'personified in many senses with a seemingly tragic character.

'He uses the form of the ray, this triangular shape that you see,

'but also its whiteness to construct his painting.

'And then there's the semblance of a face,

'that many people read into the painting.

'Which is, in fact, neither the mouth, nor the eyes, but the gills.

'It's a sort of anthropomorphic vision of this ray.

'Which is, of course, also rather dramatic,

'with his insides coming out, reddened.'

Whatever genius we now recognise in the still lives of Chardin,

this style of art was seen by the Academy as inferior

to the more high-minded genre of history painting.

Works inspired by the past can be seen in the Salle Rouge...

..where hang the creations of one artist from the last 18th century

who received the acclaim of the Salon

with paintings that looked back to antiquity

as a source of moral instruction to the present.

This is a self-portrait of the artist who features

in the next part of our story -

Jacques Louis David -

and it captures him at a bad moment in his life

when he was in prison during the French Revolution.

But the curious thing is the expression on his face.

Is he angry? Is he frightened?

Or is this the self-regard of the tormented artist?

He was certainly vain enough, but we're getting ahead of ourselves.

In 1784, David painted this - The Oath of the Horatii.

And he did it for the man who'd given him a studio and lodgings

in the Louvre - Louis XVI.

It tells the story of three brothers sworn to defend Rome.

Look at the outstretched arms reaching towards the father

who holds the weapons of war in his hand.

And look at the way the picture splits in two -

between its masculine and feminine characters.

The style is simple, austere with sombre colours.

The painting took the Salon of 1785 by storm -

hailed as an instant masterpiece of neoclassical art.

But what meaning did it have for the monarch who paid for it,

and the others who saw it?

Everyone agreed it was a patriotic painting.

But was there something more subversive going on here,

addressed to those now seeing themselves as citizens?

Because this was a painting whose message would change

during a turbulent decade of French history.

Just in the ten years after David had painted The Oath of Horatii,

his patron, the King, was dead.

He was sent to the guillotine here in the Place de la Concorde.

This was the most shocking moment yet in the drama of the Revolution

that had begun with the storming of the Bastille.

On a windy morning, on January 21st, 1793,

Louis the XVI mounted the scaffold, watched by thousands.

There was a roll of drums...

..and then the 12 inch blade fell.

CROWD ROAR

As was the custom, the severed head dripping with blood, was held aloft

for display to the citizens of the first French Republic.

As so began the Terror,

when 18,000 men and women were sent to the guillotine,

and David, now an elected deputy to the National Convention,

was up to his neck in it.

David voted for the killing of the King,

and eagerly signed arrest warrants so others could go to their deaths.

When Robespierre's great rival Danton went to his death,

David was there shouting out mockingly...

"Le voila, le scelerat ! C'est ce scelerat qui est le Grand-juge !"

"Here, look at the criminal who thinks he's the big judge."

David became Robespierre's cultural commissar.

He demanded that artists be at the service of the people,

the meaning of their art appropriated for the Revolution.

David included his own art in this command.

So, when his masterpiece The Oath of the Horatii was shown again,

it was interpreted as a work of revolutionary virtue,

with oaths to La Patrie, much "fraternite",

and a taste for martyrdom.

But what paintings like this needed was a public place

to educate loyal citizens of the Republic.

So David and fellow revolutionaries, turned to an idea

proposed by Enlightenment thinkers like Diderot,

who'd advocated that a permanent exhibition space be created -

a museum. So, where?

On the 10th of August, 1793,

exactly 12 months after the fall of the Ancien Regime,

the Louvre was declared Musee de la Nation, "the people's museum".

And the ceremony took place here in the Grande Galerie.

What actually happened was that all art in France was nationalised,

all art in fact in the territories that France also had its eye on.

So what happened really was that

from the royal collection in Versailles, from churches,

from aristocrats, from exiles -

all art now belonged to the people, "la grande patrie".

This was brutal and necessary,

argued the likes of David and his fellow revolutionaries.

But what was really happening was a seismic shift in European history.

This was the moment when art ceased to be

the preserve of the rich and the wealthy

and was really at the service of the people.

The new museum worked to the revolutionary 10-day week.

The first six were reserved for artists who were at liberty

to take paintings off walls to copy,

free to put chalk marks on the canvases.

Then the Louvre was open three days for the public.

With the last day for cleaning and repairs.

And to add to the galleries of confiscated art,

the revolutionary army was given the order to seize new treasures

during the campaigns abroad.

On the 27th of July, 1798,

on the anniversary of the fall of Robespierre,

an extraordinary procession of revolutionary booty from Italy

made its way across Paris.

And it ended up here on the Champs des Mars.

There were 80 wagons stuffed to the gills with books, manuscripts,

rare plants and exotic animals.

And there were also lots of paintings

from church and aristocratic collections -

including Titian and Raphael -

whose ultimate destination was the Louvre.

On a banner proclaimed the slogan of the day -

"Ils sont enfin sur une terre libre."

"At last, they're in a free country."

Today there are works of extraordinary beauty

for us to enjoy in the Louvre,

and all because of this revolutionary plundering.

There are sculptures by Michelangelo -

The Dying and The Rebellious Slaves.

They were taken from the Vatican in Rome.

And from the Benedictine monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice,

was seized this vast canvas -

The Wedding Feast at Cana by Veronese.

Its life-size figures

had been dominating the refectory for over 200 years.

The painting was so big it had to be cut into two

to make the journey by mule across the Alps.

Vincent Delieuvin knows the painting intimately.

THEY CONVERSE IN FRENCH

TRANSLATOR: 'When we take step back and get a sense of the perspective,

'there are the columns reaching out at the back, which give it amplitude,

'and, of course, there's the colour - the greens, the blues and the reds.

'All bouncing off and complementing each other.

'It's extraordinary.

'Across the painting, it's the little hidden gems that I love.

'All the little details.

'There's even a musical performance going here in the foreground.

'And there's a woman over here that's looking straight at us,

'as if...flirting with us!

'Next to the one picking her teeth.

'All of these amusing little bits and pieces.

'Even the slightly sterner men - you can see this chap over here,

'who is holding himself very distant and severe.

'Those that look like they're about to fall asleep

'because of the alcohol.

'It's such a vibrant painting - almost noisy, if you will.

'But in the end,

'what I find extraordinary

'is the figure smack bang in the middle of the painting.

'This is the haloed figure of Jesus Christ

'with the Virgin Mary by his side.

'Staring into space, oblivious to the revelry around him.'

Perhaps the message here is simple -

all this pleasure around me is ephemeral,

what I bring you is eternal.

By 1798, when this booty reached Paris,

the revolutionary ardour of David, indeed of France, had cooled.

After the fall of Robespierre, David was arrested

and put in prison where this self-portrait was painted.

So perhaps this gaze shows a certain scepticism

and distaste for the rough old trade of politics.

But if David was anything, he was a survivor.

On his release, the painter was ready to ride

the next wave of history.

Time to offer his talents to the next strong man of France.

TRUMPET FANFARE

David found himself at the beck and call of a man

who said that he didn't know much about art and architecture,

but he did know exactly what it meant

when it came to buffing up his image.

This was a man who'd been a military hero during the Revolution.

Then after the coup d'etat that ended the Directory,

he was the First Consul.

He was the despot who crowned himself Emperor.

Yes, Napoleon Bonaparte.

If you visit Napoleon's Tomb here at Les Invalides in Paris,

you can see enshrined in marble

evidence that the Louvre was important to Napoleon.

I love this. This is the celebration of Napoleon's public achievements,

it's, "Look upon my works, ye tourists, and be impressed."

And either side is a list of everything that he's achieved

as public works.

And in the centre of it is the Travaux du Louvre, the Louvre.

Once Napoleon had absolute power in France, he wasted little time

in using the Louvre for the purposes of self-promotion.

The dictator ordered that the Revolutionary Museum

now be called the Musee Napoleon.

And he had this mini and first Arc de Triomphe erected here

in front of the Louvre on the Carrousel

as a monument to his martial glory.

On top were beautiful bronze statues of horses

plundered from St Mark's Square in Venice.

Friezes celebrated Napoleon's many military campaigns.

And there's this inscription dedicated to the Austrian Campaign,

and the decisive French victory at the Battle of Austerlitz.

Napoleon put his imprint on walls and ceilings with the letter N,

and his chosen images of bees and eagles.

And he needed a painter to immortalise the most sacred

moments of his life in the most sacred spaces.

On the 18th of December 1803, a proclamation declared,

"Nous avons nommes M David notre premier peintre."

Much to the immense self-satisfaction of David,

he was now "our" first painter,

and in 1804, "we" had a job for him.

Napoleon made sure that David, his court painter,

witnessed the moment that he crowned himself Emperor

here in Notre Dame on the 2nd of December 1804.

Originally, David had a ringside view for his sketching,

but then the master of ceremonies,

an aristocrat called Louis-Philippe de Segur,

who was very conscious of class and rank,

moved David right up into the galleries,

right high up where he could neither see the procession

nor, crucially, could he see the crowning.

When this happened, David exploded, he went mad,

there was a fight, real fisticuffs, and it was only after this punch-up

that David got his rightful place back.

The rest, of course, is art history, but, you know,

talk about an artistic temperament!

The finished work's in the Louvre,

and it's a piece of work on a huge scale.

It's the detail that's important, and this is what preoccupied

David and Napoleon when they met to discuss the painting.

David captured the moment that Napoleon crowned Josephine queen,

not his own coronation.

Her kneeling figure was copied

from Rubens' Coronation of Marie de' Medici.

By the way, she's had years taken off her

by David's painterly facelift.

Originally, David had painted the Pope with his hands

folded in his lap, until the Emperor explained that he hadn't got

the Pontiff all the way from the Vatican just to sit and do nothing.

So, David changed this to Pope Pius VII blessing the coronation.

And there's mischief here too.

Look at the wily survivor Talleyrand and his turned up nose.

This is the man that Bonaparte famously called,

"a piece of shit in a silk stocking."

The female figure on the balcony,

that's Napoleon's mother, who couldn't stand Josephine

and actually wasn't there on the big day.

But on instruction, David put her in the picture anyway.

And there, of course, sketchbook in hand, is the great artist himself.

Despite the success of this painting,

there was a prickly relationship between David

and the courtiers around the Emperor.

This picture was meant to be

the first of four celebrating the coronation,

but the project was never completed after squabbles about money.

So it's perhaps no coincidence that in 1806, the great general

gave David and fellow painters their marching orders.

They had just 24 hours

to pack up their studios in the Cour Carree and get out.

And when Napoleon married for the second time in 1810,

David wasn't asked to record the ceremony

when it took place in the Louvre.

The close relationship between painter and despot was over

as their fortunes declined,

David to new rivals with new ideas about art,

Napoleon to the hubris that led to his fall from power

and the return of the Bourbon monarchy.

The rule of Napoleon was ended in 1815 with the Battle of Waterloo,

and the Restoration of the Bourbon dynasty was secured.

The Louvre was renamed Le Musee Royal,

and all of the visual propaganda changed too.

Out went the Napoleonic N

and the bees and the eagles that had been his symbol,

and in came the image of the lily and the monogram LL for Louis XVIII,

and there was other interesting stuff.

If you look up here, you can see that this is the face of Napoleon.

What happened was that the new King

had a wig placed on Bonaparte's head,

transforming him into the image of his illustrious forebear, Louis XIV.

The Restoration was a challenging period for the Louvre, forced

to concede to demands that 5,000 pieces of plundered art be returned.

The bronze horses on top of the Arc de Triomphe went back to Venice,

and were replaced by these grey imitations.

Some treasures did remain.

The Wedding at Cana was kept, simply too big to be moved again,

the museum argued.

An elderly David was now in exile like his former patron Bonaparte,

but a new generation of painters was emerging

and producing stunning works of art.

One is to be found in the Salle Rouge.

This painting, Le Radeau de la Meduse, The Raft of the Medusa

by Gericault, is one of the great treasures of the Louvre.

It was the talk of the Salon when it was first exhibited in 1819,

and it was very quickly acquired by the then-director of the Louvre,

the Compte de Forbin. I think it's an extraordinary, complex painting.

It's realistic but it's not quite real,

you've got these human bodies constructed as a kind of pyramid.

It's very romantic, it's about human suffering

but also about the impossibility of hope.

But what you really feel is that you're in the painting,

you're in that pyramid of human suffering.

And you can see the kind of forensic nature of Gericault's work.

He was the kind of man who spent hours in mortuaries

and hospitals sketching out dead bodies

and he wasn't even afraid to take home the limbs to work out the

tricky bits, and that's what makes this painting so stark, so powerful.

There was no bigger scandal

than the shipwreck of the frigate Meduse off the West African coast,

captained by the hapless Viscount Chaumareys.

Of the 147 crew, only 13 survived.

This was headline news,

and the public lapped up lurid tales of cannibalism and madness.

Such a juicy story translated to canvas could only be

good for the career of the 20-year-old artist.

I asked curator Sebastien Allard about the painting.

HE SPEAKS FRENCH

TRANSLATOR: 'It was, and has been taken as a form of allegory,

'since Gericault's depicting a ship that was wrecked

'as a direct result of the incompetence of its captain.

'Survivors were stranded on a raft without food, water or hope,

'and people took all this as an allusion to the French State

'after the fall of the Empire, governed by incompetence.'

There are more intense, romantic sensibilities at work here.

TRANSLATOR: 'We can see here a taste for rather dark and sinister painting

'that's in stark contrast to the relatively clear and bright paintings

'of David, and which, of course,

'acts as a tool towards the dramatic effect of the painting.

'And it's a rather macabre style,

'with a penchant for death and corpses.'

As well as bringing the best of contemporary art into the Louvre,

these decades of the Restoration saw the arrival from Egypt

of mysterious and magical objects that were old yet very new.

On the 25th of October 1836,

the great obelisk behind me here was unveiled.

It came from a temple in Luxor

and was the gift of the Khedive of Egypt.

Its original base featured monkeys

who had suspiciously large erections,

and obviously this had to be replaced by something

much more austere, in granite and fashioned in Brittany.

But nonetheless, this latest monument was a great success,

and the most important thing was

that it announced a new mania in France for all things Oriental.

The man who arranged the passage of the obelisk to Paris,

and who brought so much to the story of the Louvre,

was Jean-Francois Champollion.

Now Champollion worked here in the Louvre, and he established

the superb and stunning collection that we see here today.

But not only that, Champollion was the first person to decipher

hieroglyphics, and in doing so, he invented the science of Egyptology.

Inspired by Napoleon's Egyptian Campaigns,

Champollion devoted his life to understanding this ancient culture.

By the age of 16, he knew a dozen ancient languages,

and with this extraordinary facility,

he began the long task of deciphering hieroglyphs.

In 1824, in the Precis du systeme hieroglyphique,

Champollion revealed that he had cracked these hidden codes.

By this time, Champollion had persuaded the King to buy three

private collections for the Louvre,

and these were housed in a dedicated Musee Egyptien.

When it opened, Champollion wrote an open letter to visitors saying,

"I'm thrilled just thinking about what I have to show you."

And he was dead right to be thrilled.

Along with statues of Egyptian pharaohs,

there were religious artefacts and everyday objects.

Today, we take these for granted,

but in 1826, this was the shock of the new.

We should pause to reflect on this moment in our story,

because it signals another important transformation

for the Louvre.

Before, it was a palace with paintings.

Now, it's what we recognise properly as a museum,

full of works of art from all ages and cultures,

and a place for scholarly investigation.

In its way, this was a cultural revolution.

And speaking of revolution,

what had happened to the French taste for it?

MUSIC: "La Marseillaise"

After 15 years of monarchy, the barricades went up in Paris.

For three days, between the 27th and 29th of July 1830,

there was street-fighting across the city to challenge

the autocratic rule of Charles X.

"Les Trois Glorieuses",

as it was known in revolutionary folklore, is naturally commemorated

here with this fine and thrusting monument at Place de la Bastille.

But one young French artist wanted to do things his own way

to commemorate this July Revolution.

He wanted something more sweeping, more daring,

something more epic, and what he did is in the Louvre.

28th of July, Liberty Leading the People by Eugene Delacroix,

is to be found in the Salle Rouge.

In 1830, Delacroix had written to his brother that he was

taking on a modern subject, a barricade.

"If I haven't fought for my country, at least I'll paint for her."

The painting that emerged from his studio was the hit of the Salon.

It's realistic.

Delacroix used real people as models to depict real events,

but it's also allegorical.

There's bare-breasted Marianne, bayoneted musket in one hand,

the Tricolour flag of the Republic in the other,

the personification of Liberty in revolution.

This Republican Amazon leads young and old

and all classes to the barricades.

Here, the top-hatted figure of some means,

and here the pistol-packing student.

At their feet, the dead,

a Royalist National Guardsman and this semi-naked figure,

surely copied from Gericault's Raft of the Medusa

that Delacroix knew so well.

And it all takes place against the smoking backdrop of Paris,

the Republican flag hanging from Notre Dame in the distance.

And the colours used here, red, white and blue of course.

There is, perhaps, no more iconic image in all of French history.

And it didn't take long for the street-fighting men and women,

commemorated by Delacroix, to be at it again.

As Karl Marx observed, "History was repeating itself."

Revolution in 1848 was, in that very French way,

followed by reaction.

The nephew of Napoleon, Louis Bonaparte,

came to power by coup d'etat

that ended the short-lived Second Republic,

and like his uncle, declared himself Emperor of a Second Empire.

At the heart of this Empire would be a city of Grands Boulevards

and buildings built by Baron Haussmann.

And the Louvre was to become the symbol of a modernised Paris.

In 1852, a new Louvre Project was announced that would complete

the Grand Dessein by connecting both sides of the Louvre

to the Palace of the Tuileries.

The old tenement buildings and stalls

that had been part of the site for centuries were

bulldozed to make way for this vision of the future.

The Louvre was once more to be a focus for political power.

The Emperor would rule from here.

It would be the site of government, with bureaucrats in the new wings

working away for France,

and it would be a symbol of French cultural power,

with its magnificent museum.

The sheer ambition of this project was explained to me

by Daniel Soulie.

HE SPEAKS FRENCH

TRANSLATOR: 'We say in France

'that Napoleon really gave "the full packet".

'It was a full-on Imperial project.

'He threw limitless money, limitless people and limitless resources at it.

'The Emperor had a hand in everything that happened in the Louvre,

'so all possibilities were open.

'He ordered that where the little town had sprung up here behind us,

'the Richelieu Wing should be built,

'and the Denon Wing on the other side over here.

'With these two new wings, he was able to enclose the space and create

'a courtyard of vast proportions, right at the centre of the building.'

Grandeur on the outside was reinforced by opulence within.

Again, no expense was spared.

Just look at all this luxury.

The walls, the fittings, the carpets and the furniture.

What does it remind you of?

Yes, Louis XIV, and that was deliberate.

This Second Empire style was a self-conscious

and some said vulgar way of aping the Sun King.

But Louis Bonaparte wanted everybody to know that his Louvre

was as much a glittering reflection of his Imperial eminence

as any in the past.

But the destruction of the old Louvre

was mourned by one poet and critic.

Charles Baudelaire was a regular visitor to the museum.

It was a warm and comfortable place to meet his mother.

He once took a five franc whore to look at the ancient statues.

She professed to be scandalised by the nudity.

Baudelaire was a great admirer and friend of Delacroix,

who in 1851, had completed this ceiling in the Galerie d'Apollon.

They were romantic soul brothers.

Of the painter he wrote,

"Delacroix was passionately in love with passion

"but coldly determined to express passion as clearly as possible."

But while Baudelaire loved the art inside the Louvre with passion,

he hated what had happened outside.

In 1857, a collection of his poems was published, The Flowers of Evil.

In it there's one poem, The Swan, which captures his melancholy

over what had been lost here and elsewhere in Paris.

The rickety tenements, the market stalls and the poor in pocket

but rich in heart.

HE RECITES IN FRENCH

-TRANSLATION:

-'Paris changes! But in my melancholy nothing has moved

'New palaces, blocks, scaffoldings, old neighbourhoods

'Everything for me is allegory

'And my dear memories are heavier than stone

'And so outside the Louvre an image gives me pause

'I think of my great swan His gestures pained and mad

'Like other exiles both ridiculous and sublime

'Gnawed by his endless longing.'

Baudelaire had lost his beloved Paris, but the city created

by Haussmann for Louis-Napoleon is one that you can still enjoy today.

And I for one never fail to be impressed by its scale,

its straight lines and symmetry.

But it wouldn't take long for the Emperor to lose the capital,

and with it, his Louvre.

In 1870, he entered into a disastrous war with Prussia.

France was occupied and Paris put under siege.

After military defeat,

Louis Bonaparte left the Louvre for the last time and went into exile.

In Paris, barricades went up for one final time,

as a Commune was declared.

The Communards took control of the city in the spring of 1871.

At first, it was all done in a traditionally festive mood.

En fete.

On the 16th of May, the Communards knocked down the mock Roman column,

here on the Place Vendome that had been erected

as yet another tribute to Napoleon's military exploits.

Then, around midnight, the revolutionary fiesta moved on.

Around 300 Communards broke into the cellars of the grand Hotel du Louvre

where they helped themselves to the finest wines and smoked...

the most expensive and hugest cigars they could find.

But these May days of hope were also accompanied

by intense fighting around the Louvre,

as civil war between left and right turned bloody.

On 23 May, the Palace of the Tuileries was set on fire

and its dome blown up with explosives.

The place that had been home to kings, queens and emperors

burned for 48 hours.

The destruction of the Tuileries

left a gaping hole that created this skyline,

with its clear views all the way to the Arc de Triomphe.

As for the Louvre, I think that this was a defining moment.

The residence of royals and emperors, the Tuileries

had always been the symbol of autocratic rule to Parisians.

Yet the Louvre was by now a different place

in the eyes of the people, so it was spared the torch.

Perhaps the presence of publicly available art

guaranteed its survival.

Why destroy the People's Museum?

That would be vandalism.

And by the time a Third Republic was established in 1870s,

there was much more to be enjoyed in the museum.

There were wonderful new paintings donated by benefactors

like the generous Dr Lacaze.

One of these is The Club Foot by Jusepe de Ribera,

a 17th-century portrait of disability.

The boy smiles and reveals his broken teeth.

He looks us straight in the eye, he wants something.

So look at his hand holding a piece of paper, a begging letter.

"For the love of God, give me alms," it reads.

And visitors could marvel at this fabulous marble statue,

the Winged Victory of Samothrace,

which had arrived from an excavation in the Aegean.

Over 2,000 years old, it's a depiction of the Greek goddess Nike,

thought to be celebrating a naval battle.

She's got a kind of still beauty and grace,

but her flowing drapery gives a dynamism and movement.

I feel as if she could take wing at any time

and fly through the miles of galleries.

The Louvre was now established as a democratic space

open free to the public six days a week.

And visitors from all over France and beyond

were eager to visit this must-see part of the Paris experience.

By the late 19th century,

there was no question that Paris was the cultural capital of the world.

And that the Louvre was the most potent symbol of this domination.

By now, it was well established as a public space

open to all who wished to visit.

The artists of the day would congregate in places like this,

Cafe La Palette.

And the Impressionists were the most regular visitors to the museum,

taking their inspiration from the past, to look, learn and copy.

Here in the Louvre is a pastel drawing by Degas, La Sortie Du Bain.

Here's a Monet.

At the time, works like these were considered avant-garde,

scandalous even,

and as such, were rejected by the Academy

that still controlled the Salon.

So these painters were forced to exhibit in a Salon des Refuses.

Here's a Pissarro.

He once said to Cezanne that he'd be glad to see the Louvre burn down.

But Cezanne himself valued the museum.

He wrote to a friend, "Keep the best company,

"spend your days at the Louvre." Which is just what he did.

Cezanne loved to contemplate the work of Chardin -

his visual language, his depiction of nature,

simplicity of his composition.

And all of this he put into his own work.

But composers could be similarly inspired.

Claude Debussy stood in front of this painting,

Embarkation For Cythera, by Jean-Antoine Watteau.

Who wouldn't be captivated by

the playful flirtatiousness of the couples?

And who wouldn't be mesmerised by its mystery?

Debussy saw all of this and wrote a piece for piano,

L'Isle Joyeuse.

And writers too enjoyed the museum.

Not only as a place of culture, but also as somewhere to meet friends.

And even sometimes to meet lovers.

The Louvre was a place of amorous assignation

for the American writer Edith Wharton.

This is where she met her lover,

the Paris correspondent of The Times, Morton Fullerton.

They used to send each other secret notes in the Paris postal system.

It was a kind of early 20th-century form of text messaging.

One from Edith simply said,

"At the Louvre, one o'clock, under the shadow of Diana."

But speaking of mysterious ladies...

..after all these many years, what had happened to you-know-who?

The Mona Lisa remained in the royal collection until the Revolution.

Then, in 1800, Napoleon demanded

that she join him in his bedroom in the Palace of the Tuileries.

So, not tonight, Josephine.

But in the 19th century, La Joconde was back in the Louvre.

Now scrutinised by tortured aesthetes.

That smile on her face was surely

the oh-so cruel and mocking pout of the femme fatale.

Then, on 21 August 1911, the painting was nicked.

The heist was both daft and daring.

What actually happened was that a young Italian workman,

a painter and decorator called Vincenzo Peruggia,

just walked out off the building with the Mona Lisa under his coat,

presumably whistling a cheery aria as Italian workmen are wont to do.

He took it back to Mama Italia.

Pandemonium broke out.

The museum was closed for a week, the director was sacked,

and two new guard dogs were appointed, Jacques and Milord.

The whole of Paris had a right good laugh

at the expense of a red-faced Louvre.

New lyrics were set to favourite melodies

which satirised the cheeky abduction.

And these were sung in musical halls and cabaret clubs across the city.

One dirty ditty found the Mona Lisa in a place of ill repute.

"Mon poteau.

"Embrasses-moi, je suis pas begueule.

"Mais je m'ennuyais beaucoup dans ce palais.

"Un soir que le gardian criait,

"'On ferme!' J'ai repondu, 'Ta gueule!'

"Et je suis carbatte toute seule."

Which roughly translates as, "Hey, mate, give us a kiss, I'm not fussy,

"but I was so bored in that palace. So one night when the guard cried,

"'Closing time!' I just said, 'Fuck you, mate!' and scarpered."

The year the painting returned to the Louvre,

after being found in Italy, was the first of a World War

when a generation bled to death for France.

Then, in 1940, a second war erupted,

bringing humiliation and occupation.

And after that, there was the loss of empire.

So after all this,

how to project the prestige of France in diminished times?

Why, with art, of course.

And the Louvre had a role to play in a piece of cultural diplomacy.

In 1962, General De Gaulle decreed

that the Mona Lisa should visit the USA.

So La Joconde left Le Havre

on the luxury transatlantic liner SS France in a first-class cabin,

cocooned in a waterproof container that would float if the boat sank.

On her arrival in New York, she was received by President Kennedy

like a head of state, before doing her duty for France

and becoming a massive hit with the American public.

KENNEDY: Monsier Malraux, I know that the last time the Mona Lisa

was exhibited outside Paris in Florence,

a crowd of 30,000 people packed the gallery on a single day,

while large crowds outside smashed the windows.

I can assure you that if our own reception is more orderly,

though perhaps as noisy, it contains no less enthusiasm or gratitude.

APPLAUSE AND LAUGHTER

By the 1960s, and despite the treasures within,

the Louvre was showing its age. It was stuck in the past.

So perhaps that's why new wave film director Jean-Luc Godard decided

to shoot a sequence for his 1964 film Bande A Part there

to show his heroine, Odile, and would-be criminals Arthur and Franz

attempting to beat the world record for running through the museum.

Obviously they're up for a bit of fun in the stuffy museum.

But I also think this is an artful piece of satire by Godard.

A quick critique of the French cultural establishment.

So, how could the museum get a new lease of life?

Well, return to the idea of building again.

Return to the spirit of the "Grand Dessein".

In the 1980s, it was the creation of this structure behind me here

which symbolised the transformation of the Louvre

into a museum for the modern world.

This is the glass Pyramid designed by American architect IM Pei.

Finished in 1989,

it's the most visible expression of the grand projet

of the then President of France, Francois Mitterrand.

And it's now the Pyramid that defines the Louvre to the world.

The Louvre was perfect for Mitterrand.

NEWSREADER: 'The inauguration of the new entrance to the Louvre

'by President Mitterrand this afternoon means the public...'

Mitterrand was a politician with an acute sense of history.

And a vanity to match.

When elected in 1981, he was looking for projects that would be

lasting testaments to his presidency.

His culture Minister, Jack Lang,

suggested radical change for the museum.

Passant et repassant...

TRANSLATION: 'I was going past the Louvre every day.

'And I remember being shocked by the dirtiness of the place

'and its general state of disrepair,

'with all the dust covering everything.

'And I was shocked by the presence of a large car park,

'right in the middle of the Cours Napoleon, for all the civil servants.

'So in, I think, July 1981, I added a little note to Mitterrand

'titled "Le Grand Louvre".

'I said to him, "What if we totally completed

'"the transformation from palace the museum?"'

Before things Egyptian

were the shock of the new in a previous century,

plans for a pyramid structure

reflecting the ambitions of Mitterrand

as a modern-day pharaoh created a storm.

Le Monde's critic accused the government of turning

the courtyard of the Louvre into an annexe of Disneyland.

"Ooh-la-la! Quelle horreur!"

But I actually think that the Louvre came out of all this

smelling of roses.

This time, the modernists have won.

When I look at the Pyramid, I feel like I'm looking at

a great work of modern art in steel and glass.

Still, I'm curious to know

what the Louvre's great pioneering Egyptologist, Champollion,

might have made of this tribute to an ancient culture.

What strikes me, in this city of most meaningful monuments,

is that this says we are a modern country, we are go-ahead.

"Nous sommes la France tres cool."

But it's not only the outside that impresses.

The Pyramid illuminates a huge reception area underground.

And new areas of the Louvre

have been opened up to the shining light of culture.

Including the new Richelieu Galleries in the East Wing,

formerly occupied by the men from the Ministry of Finance.

The palace would now be all museum.

I'm in the Cours Marly, and I'm surrounded by statues.

This courtyard area used to be open to the elements.

But now it's all glassed over,

letting the light of the Parisian skies flood in.

And that makes it a really comfortable

and airy place to view art.

Visit today and you understand

that the Grand Louvre project has been a runaway success.

Before the '80s, 2 million people visited the Louvre every year.

Now, the figure is closer to 9 million.

And this grandest of "grands projets" continues.

In September 2012, a new gallery opened

to house the riches of the museum's collection of Islamic art.

Here are 3,000 works in 3,000 square feet of exhibition space.

All housed in the most radical piece of architecture

to grace the museum since the Pyramid.

There's a wonderful elusiveness

to the Islamic gallery's roof and ceiling.

Is it a golden veil? Undulating sand dunes?

Or perhaps even a flying carpet?

Under this covering, there are great treasures.

With Islamic strictures against representations of the human form,

everyday objects become art.

A candlestick adorned with ducks.

A perfume burner in the shape of a cat.

Both from 11th century central Asia.

And these calligraphic delights with their messages from the past.

A lamp that shines the wisdom of Islam.

A ninth century vase with a love letter written on its side.

And a plate from Samarkand with an inscription which reads,

"At first, magnanimity has a bitter taste.

"But in the end it feels as sweet as honey."

And in the lower galleries, I'm looking for a special work

because it gives us one last reminder of the story of the Louvre.

And here it is - the Baptistere de Saint Louis.

A masterpiece in brass, inlaid with gold and silver.

It was made in Syria in the 14th century,

the work of Mohammed ibn al-Zain.

It's beautiful in its detail.

And here, a coat of arms seemingly hammered on at a later date.

This is the fleur de lys of the Bourbon Kings.

How this extraordinary object got into their hands is not known,

but it was used to baptise Louis XIII, son of Henry IV

and father of the Sun King, those great builders of the Louvre.

And it made its way to the museum in 1793,

confiscated from the royal collection

by David and the revolutionaries.

But, for this magnificent art, there's also a much bigger picture.

This shows that the museum is sensitive and aware,

building a bridge between France and the Muslim world.

And this fulfils France's historical role as an influence there,

"une puissance musulmane".

So, under the canny piece of cultural diplomacy

to project just the right image of France in today's world.

But let's end where we started, with the word,

with a medieval word, "louver", meaning stronghold.

Because when I began this journey,

the Louvre did feel very much like a cultural fortress.

But time-travelling through its art and history,

what I've tried to do is open it all up, literally to "ouvrir le Louvre".

And in the process, I've come to realise that there's another word

which sums the place up much, much better.

And this is a very French one, very Gallic -

"la gloire".

Now, this is a word

which is a little bit difficult to translate into English.

But what it's about is power, splendour and beauty.

And that for me, cher telespectateur,

is the real treasure of the Louvre,

buried deep here in the heart of Paris.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd