The Louvre by James Gardner

Author:James Gardner [Gardner, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780802148797
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2020-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

Of the Louvre’s many paintings by Hubert Robert, none is more disconcerting than his Imaginary View of the Grande Galerie in Ruins from 1796, which depicts the building as a classical desolation, recalling the Palace of Domitian on the Palatine Hill in Rome: the entire roof of the Grande Galerie has been shorn off to reveal open sky, while the ground is littered with fallen debris, and peasants wander among shattered antique torsos. But in the center of the picture is a puzzling sight: a young artist sketches the Apollo Belvedere, among the finest sculptures to survive the fall of Rome and one of the most famous works associated with the Vatican Museums. Why it should appear in a scene of Paris, even one as fanciful as this, becomes clear in another painting by Robert, perhaps from the same year, The Draftsman of Antiquities. Here the viewer encounters another part of the Louvre (the modern Cour du Sphinx) mercifully intact, again with the Apollo Belvedere and other ancient masterpieces, among them The Old Centaur, which is indeed part of the Louvre’s collections. The sculptures, including the one of Apollo, are displayed with no ceremony and in no order, for this is an accurate depiction of the warehouse that the Louvre had become. Robert was content to act as a journalist, dutifully recording what he saw in front of him. This work bears witness that the French Republic (which was initially in such financial straits that it had to extract gold threads from the tapestries of François I) would soon overrun Europe, pillaging as it went and conveying its ill-gotten booty directly into the galleries of the Louvre. Although most of these works would ultimately be returned, such restitution was still twenty years in the future: for now, the Louvre became the greatest repository of art, ancient and modern, that the world had ever seen or would ever see again.

By fair means and foul, these treasures accumulated in the chambers of the Louvre. Scarcely one hundred days after the storming of the Bastille, the constituent assembly voted, on 2 November 1789, to nationalize the property of the clergy. A year later, on 1 December 1790, that same body passed another law calling for important cultural artifacts to be removed from churches and convents and, soon enough, from the homes of those members of the nobility who had escaped into exile (or were subsequently executed). By the middle of that decade, more than thirteen thousand works had been seized from the collections of ninety-three aristocrats. Among these were two royal princes, Philippe Egalité, duc d’Orléans and the Prince of Condé, as well as such renowned collectors as the Baron de Breteuil, the duc de Brissac and Charles de Saint-Morys, whose collection of French, Italian and Northern drawings was said to number more than twelve thousand. The labels beside many of the paintings in the Louvre bear witness, even today, to the predations of two centuries past. Next to the provenance one finds the words saisie révolutionnaire, or revolutionary confiscation.

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