When I. M. Pei’s glass pyramid opened at the Louvre more than 20 years ago, many argued that this 70-foot-tall structure had destroyed the classical beauty of one of the world’s great museums. But today, as crowds wait on long lines outside the pyramid, which serves as the Louvre’s main entrance, what once seemed audacious has become as accepted a part of the city’s visual landscape as the Eiffel Tower or the Arc de Triomphe.
Now the museum is again risking the public’s wrath as it introduces the most radical architectural intervention since the pyramid in 1989. Designed to house new galleries for Islamic art, it consists of ground- and lower-ground-level interior spaces topped by a golden, undulating roof that seems to float within the neo-Classical Visconti Courtyard in the middle of the Louvre’s south wing, right below the museum’s most popular galleries, where the Mona Lisa and Veronese’s “Wedding Feast of Cana” are hung.
Ten years in the making, the $125 million project, which opens on Saturday, has been financed in part by the French government, along with Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia, who gave the Louvre $20 million toward the galleries, the largest single monetary gift ever given to the museum. Corporations have kicked in money too, including Total, the oil company, and the governments of countries like Saudi Arabia, Oman, Morocco, Kuwait and the Republic of Azerbaijan.
On a recent cloudless afternoon, as teams of workers were putting the finishing touches on the project, a visitor was allowed to enter the heavily guarded Visconti Courtyard, where the golden roof billows up from waist level at the edges to about 22 feet close to the center. At first glance it looks gauzy enough to blow away in a heavy wind, but according to members of the architectural team who were working at the site, it weighs 150 tons and has been painstakingly fashioned from almost 9,000 steel tubes that form an interior web, over which are a layer of glass and, on top of that, a shimmering anodized gold surface.
This deftly engineered design is the work of two architects, the Italian Mario Bellini and the Frenchman Rudy Ricciotti, who won an international competition to create the new wing in 2005.
When the plans were first unveiled, the architects said, the roof resembled a “a scarf floating within the space” — a somewhat loaded description, perhaps, considering that last year the French officially banned full veils in public places. The museum’s “luminous veil,” or “flying carpet” as it has also been called, covers some 30,000 square feet of gallery space on the ground and lower floors. The new galleries, roughly four times as large as the space previously devoted to Islamic art at the Louvre, house a collection spanning 1,200 years of history, from the 7th through the 19th centuries, and includes glass works, ceramics, metalwork, books, manuscripts, textiles and carpets.
Their opening comes 10 months after the Metropolitan Museum of Art introduced its own new galleries dedicated to the arts of Islam. The Met, in an effort to avoid defining the collection solely in terms of religion, chose an unusually long title for its spaces, “The Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia and Later South Asia.” The Louvre, on the other hand, has taken the exact opposite approach, calling its galleries simply, “Islam.”
“This is the way the world has spoken about Islam, not only the religion but the civilization,” explained Sophie Makariou, the Louvre’s director of Islamic art, insisting that the name is not an oversimplification. “We were out to tell the history of these people. It’s as complicated as a textile. There are many different threads and a lot of different kinds of civilizations who built this world.”
And while the Met’s installation is organized mainly by geography, the Louvre has arranged its objects chronologically. The collection draws both from the Louvre’s own holdings of about 14,000 artworks and artifacts representing the breadth of the Islamic world from Spain to India and from the collection of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, which is contributing 3,500 works on permanent loan.
Delicate manuscripts and textiles are displayed in the lower-floor galleries, where there is no natural light, while vitrines upstairs display stone sculptures, glassware and metalwork. (These angled glass cabinets — the work of the architect and museum designer Renaud Piérard — allow art and artifacts to be seen from all angles. “It is very important to have perception of objects, their shapes, their profiles and not to hang them like pictures against a wall,” Ms. Makariou said.)
When Henri Loyrette, the Louvre’s director, arrived at the museum in 2001, there was not even a separate department of Islamic art. This in spite of the Louvre owning what it calls “one of the richest collections of Islamic art in the world” — a trove large and varied enough to easily warrant a museum of its own. Still, Mr. Loyrette said recently, he did not want to create a separate museum for the Islamic works because they are “so closely linked to our collection, and to Western art, they would be sorely missed were they not part of the Louvre.”
Already the world’s most popular museum, with nearly nine million visitors in the past year alone, it is on its way to becoming even more popular, Mr. Loyrette said. “We have always been open to the world, and today, as our attendance keeps growing, our visitors are increasingly interested in the Islamic world. But many people do not know anything about it, and it is important to show them the luminous face of this civilization.”
The Islamic collection includes prized objects that have been on view at the Louvre for years, like an intricately inlaid 14th-century metal basin from the Middle East known as the Baptistery of St.-Louis, Ottoman jade bowls that belonged to Louis IV and an early-11th-century Egyptian rock crystal ewer from the royal abbey of St.-Denis.
But now there will also be scores of artworks and objects that have not been displayed before. Sitting in her office on the Rue de Rivoli, several blocks away from the Louvre itself, Ms. Makariou talked of some of the discoveries she has made over the last few years. One of the most intriguing, she said, and the one that gave rise to the most challenging undertaking of the project, was the group of some 3,000 16th- and 17th-century ceramic tiles from the Ottoman Empire that had been languishing in storage since the 1970s.
“Many of them didn’t even have accession numbers,” she said. Each tile was photographed, recorded and a database created, and then a team of curators, conservators and mount makers spent two years working every day to figure out how to arrange them in a convincing display. “It was a giant puzzle that took more than seven years to complete,” Ms. Makariou said.
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