The Louvre's story begins not with art but with war. In 1190, King Philip II of France ordered the construction of a defensive fortress on the right bank of the Seine to protect Paris from Norman and English raids while he was away on the Third Crusade. That squat, square keep — its foundations still visible in the museum's lowest level, the Sully Crypt — stood for over a century before Charles V converted it into a royal residence in the 1360s, lining its walls with one of Europe's first major libraries. The decisive architectural transformation came in 1546, when King Francis I demolished the medieval tower and commissioned Pierre Lescot to build a Renaissance palace in its place. Francis had already invited Leonardo da Vinci to Amboise in 1516, and several of the paintings Leonardo brought with him — including what would become the Mona Lisa — eventually entered the royal collection that would become the Louvre's core.
For the next two centuries, successive French monarchs expanded the palace and its art holdings. Henri IV completed the Grande Galerie along the Seine in 1610; Louis XIV enlarged the complex dramatically before abandoning it for Versailles in 1682. It was the French Revolution that finally opened the building to the public: on 10 August 1793 — the first anniversary of the monarchy's abolition — the Muséum Central des Arts opened with 537 paintings, most confiscated from the Church and from émigré nobles. Napoleon I transformed the institution into an imperial trophy case, renaming it the Musée Napoléon and filling it with tens of thousands of artworks seized across Italy, Egypt, Spain, and the Netherlands. After his defeat, many works were repatriated under the 1815 Congress of Vienna, though a significant number were never returned. Under Napoleon III in the 1850s, architect Louis Visconti and later Hector Lefuel added the Richelieu and Denon wings flanking the Cour Napoléon, giving the complex largely its current form.
The modern era brought the museum's most debated addition. In 1983, President François Mitterrand selected Chinese-American architect I. M. Pei to redesign the museum's entrance as part of the Grand Louvre project. Pei's 21.6-metre-tall glass-and-steel pyramid, composed of 673 rhombus-shaped and triangular panes, opened in 1989 to fierce initial controversy — critics called it a desecration of a historic monument — and has since become one of the most recognisable structures in the world. It solved a genuine logistical crisis: before its construction, the museum had only a single, inadequate entrance on the side of the building. The new underground hall beneath the pyramid tripled visitor capacity and connected all three wings for the first time. Today the Louvre's permanent collection spans seven curatorial departments — Egyptian Antiquities, Near Eastern Antiquities, Greek and Roman Antiquities, Islamic Art, Sculptures, Decorative Arts, and Paintings — comprising over 35,000 works displayed across 72,735 square metres of gallery space.
Visitors navigating the museum should treat its scale as a defining feature rather than an obstacle. The Denon Wing's ground floor alone contains the Winged Victory of Samothrace (c. 190 BC), installed at the top of its grand staircase in 1883, and Michelangelo's two Slaves (1513–1516), originally carved for Pope Julius II's unfinished tomb. The Mona Lisa hangs in room 711 of the same wing, behind bulletproof glass since a 1956 acid attack damaged its lower section. Timed online tickets are strongly recommended; Wednesday and Friday evenings (when the museum stays open until 9:45 PM) are significantly less crowded than weekend mornings. The museum is closed every Tuesday. Free admission applies to all visitors under 18 and to EU residents under 26 — and on the first Friday evening of each month, entry is free for everyone under 26 worldwide.
