Louvre Museum

The Louvre (French: Musée du Louvre)? is the national museum in France dedicated to the prior art to impressionism, fine arts as both archeology and decorative arts. It is one of the largest in the world. 

It is located in Paris (France), in the former royal palace of the Louvre, and currently promotes two subsites in Lens (France) and Abu Dhabi (United Arab Emirates)

Its extensive collections are the result of a double historic effort. By collecting developed by the French monarchy over several centuries, the efforts of men of the Enlightenment, the disentailment work of the French Revolution and the archaeological and driven purchases throughout the nineteenth century joined campaigns.

 The opening of the Louvre in 1793 meant, in the history of museums, the transfer from the private collections of the ruling (monarchy, aristocracy and church) classes galleries public property for the enjoyment of the whole society. Therefore, the Louvre was the forerunner of all the great European national museums and Americans, and indeed was the model for many of them. It is the most visited art museum in the world, famous for its masterpieces, especialmenteLa Gioconda of Leonardo da Vinci.

The building that houses the museum since its foundation is the old castle of the Louvre, then converted into a royal palace. It dates back to the twelfth century, and was embellished with Renaissance extensions and more delayed. In this building Carlos V accumulated the king its artistic collections. Subsequent monarchs Francisco I and Enrique II planned reforms to make it truly a Renaissance royal residence.

It was Queen Catherine de Medici which outlined the project that made the Louvre the great palace it is today, work that continued Enrique IV after the wars of religion. In its architectural and decorative improvements they have involved multiple artists over several centuries, from Claude Perrault and painters Simon Vouet and Charles Le Brun in the seventeenth to Delacroix and Georges Braque, who painted some of their roofs.

After the French Revolution, which involved the abolition of the monarchy, the Palais du Louvre was intended (by decree of May 1791) artistic and scientific functions, focusing on the following year the collections of the crown. Part of the Louvre was first opened to the public as a museum on November 8, 1793. This was a logical solution, given that it was occupied by the academies and because, in 1778, had prepared the draft using your Gran comopinacoteca gallery. 

The novelty of the measure was that real real property is nationalized, and that access was free because it is not limited to the educated public and is not regulated by arranged visits, as if it happened in the Uffizi and the Museo del Prado in its early years .The construction of the Palace of Versailles, streamlined under the reign of Louis XIV, made the Louvre left unoccupied by the real family late seventeenth century, and therefore settled on it, and in the eighteenth century, the French Academy then the remaining schools. There annual exhibitions of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture were celebrated.

The building of the Louvre was attached to the palace of the Tuileries (the correct translation is Palais des Tejeras) forming a single set until 1870, when the latter was destroyed in the events of the Paris Commune.

 The artistic treasures of the Tuileries were lost in the fire at the palace, the ruins were demolished; since then, the Louvre dominates the large open space in this solar park.

The huge museum, whose halls and corridors make a tour of several kilometers, underwent an ambitious modernization in the 1980s, the most visible element was the glass pyramid. It was designed by architect Ieoh Ming Pei and opened in 1989 to centralize the access of visitors who descend on it to an underground hall through which you access the various rooms of the museum.

Despite such modernization, several sectors of the Louvre were occupied by public bodies, and only recently have been evicted and adapted as showrooms. In March 2004, the opening of a new gallery devoted to the art of Islam is announced for an international design competition was launched in 2005 and opened in 2008, with an investment of 50 million euros. However, the deployment of Islamic collections continued higher, underground extension, which opened in 2012 and is crowned by a singular shaped cover flying carpet. These halls were sponsored by Islamic countries and magnates, eager to promote the dissemination of culture in Europe.

Thanks to the attractiveness of its rich collections and tourism flowing annually by Paris, the Louvre remains among the most visited museums in the world; over 2009 received 8.5 million visits.