Museum Masterpieces: The Louvre

Scope:
Museum Masterpieces: The Louvre
The name “Louvre” is instantly recognizable as the most famous art
museum in the world. With collections numbering in the millions,
it sprawls through a complex of buildings that dates from the 12 th
through the 20 th centuries and covers acres in the heart of Paris—a city that
is the art capital of Europe. Many of the millions of annual visitors to the
Louvre make what amounts to a pilgrimage to this hallowed museum only
once in their lifetimes. They stand in line, negotiate the signs, follow hired
guides, listen to a veritable Babel of languages, and leave—a few hours or a
few days later—both amazed and exhausted, knowing that their quest to see
all that is great in the Louvre is far from complete. Returning to their homes,
they nurture memories that are a confused blur of aesthetic sensations that
are often dif� cult to sort or evaluate.
This series of lectures introduces the greatest of universal museums. Its aim is
not comprehensive. The focus is narrowed to just one of the seven curatorial
departments of the Louvre: the single most famous, the Department of
Paintings, which is responsible for European paintings from the Middle Ages
until the mid-19 th century. These works of art form an encyclopedic summary
of the achievements of painters that can be called the single most important
such collection in the world. Alone, they require a day of walking to survey
adequately; the aim of these lectures is to both prepare new viewers for this
visit and to be a “study aid” for those who have been and gone before.
European painting has been considered for centuries to be among the most
glorious and complicated modes of expression in the long history of the arts.
The Louvre treats that history by dividing the works by national tradition and,
within those traditions, by region, school, style, and major master. A patient
visitor to the Louvre’s collection will be submitted to a crash course in the
history of European painting—a course that will form a sturdy scaffolding of
visual knowledge that will last a lifetime. The sheer scale and quality of the
Louvre’s collection of European paintings make it the � rst required stop on
what is, for many, a lifelong study of art. Although the museum’s collections
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