Beginning with the Louvre

Abstract

The Louvre Museum was the first significant art museum that can be called public in the modern sense of that term. As such, it has always interested historians of museums and of the Revolutionary era. Born in the radical phase of the first French Republic, it opened its doors in 1793 and welcomed all comers, high and low. In this, it contrasted greatly with other early art museums and galleries. Throughout Europe, royal and aristocratic collections described (or remembered today) as 'open to the public' normally admitted only well-born or, at the least, well-connected and educated, men and (more rarely) women. That is, in the later eighteenth century, 'the public' was likely to mean something that to us might seem very restricted and privileged. It wasjust this public, however, to whom the culture of art belonged. Knowing what to think, do, and say in an art gallery was generally understood as marking the boundary between polite society the 'public' that mattered and the vulgar, quite literally uncivilized crowd. It is no exaggeration to say that the Louvre changed this meaning of art collections almost overnight. From its first displays of art treasures confiscated from crowned and titled heads (soon to be augmented by loot taken from all over Europe), the new museum was a brilliant monument to the Republic and its ideal of equality. Its organizers were keenly aware of its ideological and symbolic importance as a new kind of public space representing a new kind of state and addressing a new museum public. Determined to make it speak meaningfully of and for the Republic, they sought to distinguish its displays from the fashionable princely and aristocratic art galleries of the old regime. In a relatively short period of time, the museum adopted principles of installation, many of which continue to organize state and municipal collections to this day. Andrew McClellan's Inventing the Louvre sets out to be a definitive retelling of this now-familiar story of the museum's creation and early years. The product of long labour, it has both the strengths and weaknesses of such a sustained, monumental effort. It often reads like microhistory, as McClellan insists on working into his narrative what seems like every remotely relevant detail gleaned from the archives those innumerable reports, minutes, pamphlets, memoranda, and other materials through which he has patiently sifted. This is truly a book for specialists with a high tolerance for massive minutiae in combination with a sometimes narrow focus. Moreover, McClellan unavoidably spends much time replowing familiar fields the basic episodes of his story (d'Angiviller's preparations to alter the Louvre's Grande Galerie, David's campaign to gain control of the Louvre Museum administration during the Revolution, the triumphal entry of confiscated loot from Italy in 1798, and so on) have already been well explored by others. Nor is there great novelty in his central argument that French museums of this time were profoundly shaped by political concerns or in the basic assumptions he makes about the scope and nature of the French Revolution. Having said all of this, the book's strengths are considerable. For all the familiarity of its plot, Inventing the Louvre tells its story with greater depth than anything before it, uncovers new information, and skilfully fashions its several narrative strands into a coherent and convinc-