Funding for the construction of the Louvre-Lens Museum has come from the European Union, the regional authorities and primarily from the Nord – Pas-de-Calais Regional Council. The Louvre-Lens Museum demonstrates a willingness to place a strong and ambitious cultural programme right at the heart of a positive regional venture.
The Louvre-Lens Museum is co-financed by the European Union. Europe is committed to Nord – Pas-de-Calais through the European Regional Development Fund.
This book has been published as part of the exhibition Galerie du Temps at the Louvre-Lens Museum; it has been updated and takes into account the new works included in the exhibition as from December . The exhibition the Galerie du Temps has been organised by the Louvre Museum, Paris, and the Louvre-Lens Museum. The Grande Galerie has been constructed with the patronage of Crédit Agricole Nord de France.
In application of the French law of March (article ) and the Code of Intellectual Property of July , all partial or total reproduction for collective purposes of this work is strictly forbidden without the explicit permission of the publisher. In this regard, it is reminded that abusive and collective use of photocopying is a risk for the economic balance of the circuits of book production. © Musée du Louvre-Lens, Lens © Somogy éditions d’art, Paris for the first edition for the fifth edition www.louvrelens.fr www.somogy.fr ISBN Musée du Louvre-Lens : ---- ISBN Somogy éditions d’art : ---- Dépôt légal : January Printed in Czech republic (European Union)
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LOUVRE LENS THE GUIDE 2016 Xavier Dectot Jean-Luc Martinez Vincent Pomarède
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The patrons and partners of the Louvre-Lens Museum Principal Sponsors Crédit Agricole Nord de France Veolia Environnement Major Sponsors Auchan Nexans Caisse d’Épargne Nord France Europe Key Partners Orange Caisse des Dépôts SNCF Partners Trend Française de Mécanique AG2R La Mondiale Fondation d’entreprise Total Vitra Groupe Sia Crédit du Nord CCI de région Nord de France Dupont Restauration Maisons et Cités With the participation of the Compagnons du Devoir et du Tour de France for the manufacture of the furniture in the picnic area
Exhibition Curators of the Galerie du Temps: Jean-Luc Martinez and Vincent Pomarède Design: Studio Adrien Gardère Louvre-Lens Museum President: Jean-Luc Martinez Director: Xavier Dectot General administrator: Catherine Ferrar Associate administrators: Elvire Percheron and Ludovic Vigreux Head of the conservation service: Luc Piralla Researcher and exhibition supervisor: Anne-Sophie Haegeman Public mediation: Juliette Guépratte Multimedia: Guilaine Legeay Organisation and administration: Raphaëlle Baume, Caroline Chenu, Fanny Pelvet and Samuel Percq Louvre Museum President-director: Jean-Luc Martinez General administrator: Karim Mouttalib Assistant general administrator: Valérie Forey Lenders of the exhibition pieces The pieces exhibited in the Galerie du Temps all come from the eight departments of the Louvre Museum Display design Designer: Studio Adrien Gardère (project leader: Lucie Dorel / Mathieu Muin) Lighting: ACL. Conception lumière Display cases: Goppion Graphics: Norm Mounting: Version bronze Installation: André Chenue S.A.
Publication Louvre-Lens Museum Editorial coordination and iconography: Charles-Hilaire Valentin Somogy éditions d’art Publishing director: Nicolas Neumann Graphic design: Loïc Levêque Adaptation and layout: Larissa Roy Editorial coordination: Marie-Astrid Pourchet Translation from French to English: Timothy Stroud Editorial contribution: Katharine Turvey Technical production: Béatrice Bourgerie and Mélanie Le Gros
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
From the very start this project was instigated and carried out by the Nord – Pas-de-Calais region and the Louvre Museum. Both teams must be warmly thanked for their constant dedication and involvement. Special gratitude must also be extended to those who first worked on the overall conception of the Galerie du Temps: Elisabeth Taburet-Delahaye, Jean-Marc Legrand, Olivier Meslay, Marielle Pic and Danièle Brochu. Particular mention should be made of those who have been closely involved with the development of the museum since its inception: at the Louvre, Claudia Ferrazzi, Valérie Forey, Katia Lamey and Catherine Sueur; at the Région Nord – Pas-deCalais, Yves Duruflé, Didier Personne, Jérôme Darras, Bernard Masset, G illes Pette, Elvire Percheron. The Louvre-Lens teams have been formed since 2011 and recognition is due to their constructive and ongoing efforts. The Research and Restoration Centre of the Musées de France was a vital partner during the early stage of the project and we would like to express our appreciation to all its personnel.
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Following pages: The Louvre Museum in Paris, aerial view The Louvre-Lens Museum, aerial view, looking south-north (computer generated image)
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CONTENTS
Preface, Daniel Percheron Foreword, Jean-Luc Martinez
THE MUSEUM, Xavier Dectot
THE GALERIE DU TEMPS
ANTIQUITY, Jean-Luc Martinez
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A Territory Like No Other Alike Yet Different, the Louvre-Lens
Introduction, Xavier Dectot
Antiquity in the Collections of the Louvre Museum THE ORIGINS OF ANCIENT CIVILISATIONS (4TH AND 3RD MILLENNIA BC) The Birth of Writing in Mesopotamia The Origins of Egyptian Civilisation The Rise of Mediterranean Civilisations THE TIME OF THE GREAT EASTERN EMPIRES (2000–500 BC) The Ancient Near East in the Time of Babylon Egypt of the Great Temples City-States of the Mediterranean The Assyrian Empire The Twilight of Ancient Egypt The Persian Empire A GREEK AND ROMAN WORLD (500 BC–476 AD) Classical Greece The World of Alexander the Great The Roman Empire
THE MIDDLE AGES, Jean-Luc Martinez and Vincent Pomarède
THE MODERN ERA, Vincent Pomarède
The Middle Ages in the Collections of the Louvre Museum Eastern Christianity: the Byzantine Empire Western Christianity: the First Churches The Emergence of Islamic Civilisation Encounters between Italy, Byzantium and Islam in the West Gothic Europe The Islamic Golden Age in the Near East Encounters between East and West
The Modern Era in the Collections of the Louvre Museum The Renaissance Three Modern Islamic Empires Arts of the Court Baroque Europe French Classicism The Enlightenment Neoclassical Movements Islam and Western Art in the 19th Century On the 1830 Revolution: Art and Power in France
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PREFACE
Daniel Percheron Senator for Pas-de-Calais President of the Conseil Régional Nord – Pas-de-Calais
With the opening of the Louvre-Lens Museum, situated over a former pithead, a dream has come true for the region of Nord – Pas-de-Calais and its president. It is also a dream for the inhabitants of the region, whose recent history is founded on the hardships of the coal-mining life and the difficulties of the closure of the pits, and who now accept the conversion of the facilities with immense courage and unequalled dignity. It is a dream, too, for the Conseil Régional, its members and administration, who have overcome uncommon obstacles to help this region hold its head high once more, fix on the horizon and forge a new path. It is a dream for the mining basin, which sees urban and rural landscaping projects transform the old mining centres and their surroundings: the slightly crazy hope of a successful graft for the economic renewal of France’s twelfth agglomeration, with the museum and its associated Euralens project, from which the entire region may benefit in a dynamic that we hope is irreversible. This dream was founded on a wholly exceptional decentralisation project, wished for by President Chirac and then taken on by the Conseil Régional with the passion and ambition to bring the plan to fruition. This drive was not represented purely by the financial contribution made by the Conseil Régional and its partners for the construction and operation of the Louvre-Lens, it has also taken the form of this institution’s commitment to play a major role at every stage of the project since its launch in 2005, and which will extend well beyond the museum’s opening. It is with the desire to participate with the LouvreLens in all its cultural, social and economic developments that the members of the Conseil Régional have wished to bring this dream to life, to offer it to the four million inhabitants of Nord – Pas-de-Calais and to share it with their fellow European citizens.
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FOREWORD
Jean-Luc Martinez President of the Louvre Museum
Three years have already passed since 4 December 2012 and the opening of the Louvre-Lens. Each anniversary is a moving occasion: to watch this museum root itself in its territory, and the public make return visits as they become increasingly focused on discovering and rediscovering the works, is an enormously gratifying experience for all those at the Louvre and elsewhere who were involved in the creation of this museum. Much has been accomplished in these three years by the young Louvre-Lens team and we can be proud that the initial objectives have been achieved: however, more than the number of visitors that we have welcomed (almost two million people), it is the high regard in which the museum is held and the diversity of its visitors that is so rewarding. The first exhibitions and events held allowed the museum to get to know its various publics and understand their expectations. The success attained confirmed the relevance of the combination of artistic and scientific excellence with an ambitious visitor information programme suited to all ages and backgrounds. It is remarkable that more than half of the Louvre-Lens’s visitors have come from the local region and neighbouring countries, Belgium in particular, and are more diversified than those of any other museum. The Louvre-Lens’s fourth year, 2016, will mark a new era for this young museum, which will be placing emphasis on rigorous standards and democratization. Democratization lies at the heart of this public project and the Louvre-Lens will continue its efforts to win new visitors and build loyalty among those who already know the museum. With regard to high standards, these will be mirrored in an exemplary presentation of the collections of the Louvre in the Galerie du Temps. For the third consecutive year, thirty-four new masterpieces will be presented in the museum, replacing those that will return to the galleries in the Palais du Louvre in Paris. This rotation, which respects the chronological presentation of the works in the Galerie, is very representative of the wealth of the Louvre collections: Prince Ginak, Majordomo Keki, a superb new Egyptian statue, works from ancient Phoenicia
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and Carthage, gilt-bronze Gothic statuettes from Flanders, Susanna and the Elders by Tintoretto, the extraordinary Clubfoot by Ribeira, and the most beautiful painting by Thomas Lawrence in the French collections…. These are some of the important new additions in the Galerie du Temps for the year 2016. The museum’s cultural offering has also flourished over the last three years and will continue to do so. In 2016, the joyous eighteenth century will be the centre of attention, revolving around the exhibition Dance, Kiss Who You Wish. Parties and Pleasures in the Time of Madame de Pompadour; then, after a journey through the seventeenth century of Charles Le Brun, the Louvre-Lens will highlight the cultures of ancient Mesopotamia, an exhibition that is eagerly awaited at this time when new barbarians are destroying the ancient sites of Syria and Iraq. La Scène will pursue its vibrant programme open to all publics in partnership with the theatres and theatrical companies of the region. Lastly, Behind the Scenes – the visits to the museum’s technical department and reserves, unique in France – will be broadened to welcome the public to the restoration workshops where they will be able to witness and learn about this essential step in the life of a work of art. The Louvre-Lens has become a recognised local, national and international institution. Through its partnerships with European museums, it has asserted itself as a fundamental establishment in Europe. In a region that boasts a great many museums, it has succeeded in taking its place in this local network by offering one of its neighbouring curators carte blanche to display a regional collection in the Pavillon de verre. The Louvre-Lens will continue to operate on this twin-level network with new projects in the years to come. We can be sure that, by combining high standards with an open spirit, this new stage in the life of the Louvre-Lens will allow the museum to pursue its adventure, and the public of Nord-Pas-de-Calais and further afield to enjoy more rewarding and inspiring encounters with masterpieces from the history of art.
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THE MUSEUM
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A TERRITORY LIKE NO OTHER Xavier Dectot
The Louvre-Lens is a museum in every aspect, combining all the universality of the Louvre with all the richness of its host territory. The history of Nord – Pas-de-Calais has heavily marked the region and is consubstantial with its identity. It all began almost three hundred years ago in the part of the Hainaut annexed by France following the Treaties of Nijmegen. In 1716 Viscount Jacques Désandrouin obtained authorisation from the king to investigate whether the vein of coal known to exist north of the border continued into France. His discovery of it at Fresnes-sur-Escaut provided the spark for the first coalmining activity, in which the company Anzin played the leading role. The Industrial Revolution increasingly stoked the demand for coal but it was not until the mid-19th century that it was discovered that in Pas-de-Calais the vein curved along an eastwest axis. This moment marked the change in destiny of the Gohelle area. Until that time, the Lens plain had been sparsely populated and was devoted primarily to agriculture in spite of its relatively unfertile soil but, with knowledge that it was entirely crossed by the coal vein, the Gohelle was transformed. Pit after pit was opened and the plain became entirely devoted to coal mining. The most important consequence of this transformation, much more so than the changing of place names (Bully-en-Gohelle became Bully-les-Mines), was the demographic explosion: from fewer than 3000 inhabitants in 1850, the population of Lens alone grew to more than 30,000 in 1913 and to over 40,000 in the 1960s. This increase relied greatly on immigration, initially from within France and from Wallonie in Belgium, then from further away: Poles and Moroccans were the nationalities most widely represented in the mines.
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Even the organisation of the mining companies affected the territory. They implemented a system in which all social activities revolved around themselves: the inhabitants were grouped in communities linked to the pit in which they worked, where they were almost self-sufficient. Each family benefited from a patch of garden, health care, a church and schools. The entire system, from birth to death, operated for the benefit of and through the mine. The great depth of the mines made extraction of the coal less profitable than in other regions, increasingly so as other sources of energy were developed. The pits gradually closed during the 1960s and 70s, with the last surviving into the 1980s, but they marked the landscape in the long-term, creating astonishing skylines, slag heaps and, above all, endowing the agglomeration that built up along the entire length of the coal vein with its distinctive appearance, that of a succession of mining estates built during very different epochs. However, coal mining was not the only form of human violence that had an impact on this territory. The low hills of Artois are the only raised land between the Paris basin and the plain of Flanders and were a strategic location, particularly during World War I. After the three battles of Artois in 1914–15, the front remained stuck at the foot of Vimy ridge until it was captured in 1917. The towns at its foot, including Lens and Liévin, were almost completely destroyed, a fate that was repeated in World War II. The resulting appearance of these towns is a blend of a rich Art Deco heritage with more modern, often very utilitarian, architecture, such as the “Camus” buildings that constituted the reconstructed mining estates. An understanding of the value of the former coal
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mines in terms of industrial heritage was slow to develop. Whereas today the mining region has been listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site, it was long the case that when a pit was closed, its pithead was demolished. This was the fate of the installations at Pits 9-9 bis operated by the Lens mining company, when mining came to a halt in 1960 and the buildings were torn down in 1983 to make room for a business park. It was in 2004 that the decision was taken that this 22-hectare plot of wasteland would become the site of the “other Louvre”. An important trading region since the Middle Ages, today’s Nord – Pas-de-Calais, which lies between Flanders, Hainaut and Artois, later turned to industry for its prosperity. Right across the region, not just in the mining district, manufacturing plants heavily changed the face of the landscape and the region’s cultural outlook. Following the example of the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Lille, which was founded at the end of the 18th century, a string of fine art museums sprang up in the 19th century as a result of the generosity of important local collectors and large State deposits. The two World Wars brought a heavy toll on the museums in terms of pillaging and destruction but a dynamic acquisitions policy combined, once again, with numerous deposits by the State allowed them to re-establish their prestige. More recently the museum panorama has opened up to modern and contemporary art at the instigation of important collectors who have become generous donors. The finest example is probably the LaM (Lille Métropole Musée d’Art Moderne) in Villeneuve-d’Ascq, the fruit of the donation of the collection belonging to Geneviève and Jean Masurel, which also incorporates one of the largest collections of Art Brut. In addition to the creation of museums, mention must be made of the numerous refurbishments and redevelopments that have taken place: besides the LaM, the years before the opening of the LouvreLens were marked by another large museum project, that of La Piscine Musée d’Art et d’Industrie in Roubaix; this museum opened in 2002 in the former municipal swimming pool, an unusual development that encouraged its adoption by the local community. Set against this cultural background, the Pasde-Calais mining basin may seem very isolated, yet cultural life here is far from barren as it can boast another vein of wealth in live entertainment, for which it has also inherited a large number of
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theatres and other facilities from the 19th century. Moreover, this sphere has been strongly supported by the Conseil Régional since its creation, as it has rightly been considered a means to counter economic and social decline at a time when mines and textile factories have seemed doomed to closure. The outcome of their action is an extensive network of production and performance facilities. One of the most representative is Culture Commune, which was installed at Loos-en-Gohelle on the site of the former mine 11/19, close to the Louvre-Lens. Established in 1990, once the last coal had been hauled up and the mining history of Nord – Pas-de-Calais definitively closed, Culture Commune has patiently but determinedly succeeded in being accessible to a public, that often has little appetite for culture, without ever sacrificing quality. But perhaps even greater than Nord – Pas-de-Calais’ abundance of entertainment halls, which represents its cultural force and wealth, is the vigorousness of the networks that make use of them and the wide variety of productions they offer to the region’s different publics. There are some who might think the creation of a new Louvre in the heart of a mining district with an essentially industrial and working-class history improbable. However, it is this very anomaly that has made this development possible. For, from its opening day, this other Louvre must be close to its visitors and deeply rooted in the local culture. Now, the history of this mining district, born of industrial and military violence, has moulded a unique people, one that sets great store by solidarity, warmth and a real tradition of welcome. When a decision had to be made on the location of what was to become the Louvre-Lens, the entire territory became involved in the enterprise: the local institutions, of course, first and foremost the Conseil Régional, which has carried the project forward with the support of the Conseil Général, the Communauté de l’Agglomeration and the Ville de Lens, but also that of the general public. The involvement of the local population has been very pronounced since the town first put forward its candidature and has never waned. As for the economic sectors, they have broadly implicated themselves in the life of the museum, primarily through sponsorship, which has been crucial since the construction phase, but also through investment by local companies and associations to transform the territory to welcome the arrival of the new establishment.
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Watercolour by Peltier of the Pits - bis, - bis, - bis, - bis and their villages, Centre historique minier, Lewarde.
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Photograph of the pithead of Pit , Centre historique minier, Lewarde, pre- ().
Head frame of Pit , Lens, Centre historique minier, Lewarde, ().
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ALIKE YET DIFFERENT, THE LOUVRE-LENS Xavier Dectot
North side: reception hall (in the centre). East view of the reception hall. Interior of the reception hall.
The architectural project The Louvre-Lens is closely linked with the territory in which it has been placed, first and foremost with the plot on which it has been installed. This is in fact an old pithead, the entry-point to Pits 9 and 9 bis operated by Mines de Lens, which has been raised a few metres above the surrounding terrain by the accumulation of shale. On the east side it is overlooked by a monument to sporting and mining history, the Bollaert stadium, built in 1932–33 by the mining company. To the north and south are two very different housing estates built for the mine workers. On one side, Saint-Théodore is a gardenestate built between the wars (like its neighbour, the estate Jeanne d’Arc). It is formed by streets of semi-detached houses with small, individual gardens and tree-lined avenues that create the impression of space. Beside the church in the centre of the village are two schools, one each for girls and boys. The regularity of the buildings is only broken opposite the entrance to the mine, where large houses inhabited by the upper echelons of the personnel (the engineer, assistant engineer, doctor and pharmacist) are ringed by walls and larger gardens. On the other side, by Pit 9 bis, the village was destroyed during World War II and reconstructed with prefabricated buildings. Quickly built, these were known as “Camus” after the engineer who devised them. These too are semi-detached and ringed by a garden but seem perhaps even more rational from an urbanplanning perspective. With regard to the pit itself, all that remained of it at the start of the 2000s was the badly damaged changing room and the stable, which had been transformed into a living space. Around it a small
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area had been turned into a business park but most of the 22 hectares had been abandoned and become overgrown. It was this extraordinary space in the middle of the agglomeration and very close to the railway station that the Louvre and Nord – Pas-de-Calais region offered to the imagination of the architects who wished to take part in the design competition. The winner, who was chosen in 2005, was the Japanese firm SANAA, created by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa (destined to win the Pritzker Prize in 2010) in partnership with Catherine Mosbach, Celia Imrey and Tim Culbert. One of the most remarkable aspects of their design is the maximal use of the available space through the creation of a park-museum rather than a museum set in a park. As such, visitors to the Louvre-Lens do not suddenly enter a museum but approach it gently through an expanse of greenery that both draws attention to the history of the site and encourages appropriation of the place. The mine is present but delicately and subtly so. The old haulageways, the railway tracks that carried the coal to the station and the shale to the slag heaps have been transformed into paths through the park and towards the museum. Certain plant species, pines in particular, recall the timber joists used to support the mining tunnels. Others attest the reappropriation of the site by nature. Thus, the west side has been colonised by a copse of birch trees; birches are known as pioneer trees because they are the first species to take up residence in a new space. Further evidence of nature taking back this plot is provided by the more discreet liquorice milk vetch (astragalus
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glycyphyllos), a protected plant. For visitors, reminders of the mine are provided by views of the mining estates, the stadium, and the head frames, notably the one over Pit 3 in Liévin, where a mining disaster occurred in 1974, and slightly further away, one in metal and another in concrete at Pit 11/19 at Loos-en-Gohelle, which stand at the foot of the two highest slag heaps in Europe. In the park, the building itself does not have a very dominant presence. Unlike the large, vertical constructions often favoured for museums by contemporary architects, SANAA chose to respond to the very linear and horizontal architecture of the mines with a long, single-storey building that extends the entire length of the park, and which, when viewed from the outside, almost disappears from view as the walls of the different modules of which it is composed are made of either glass or anodised aluminium and offer a delicate reflection of the surroundings. Furthermore, the gutter-bearing walls are not straight but slightly curved, accompanying the visitors’ gaze rather than confronting them head-on. The building consists of five modules, all of which receive the public at garden level. The large reception area lies at the centre: its high, glazed walls can be entered from all sides, depending on which part of the garden you arrive from. Two vast exhibition wings are spread on either side. One of SANAA’s strokes of genius was to develop them as long galleries without permanent partitions inside, thus allowing the museum to evolve and transform over time. The walls of these two
galleries have no apertures but natural light enters from above, the intensity of which can be controlled by an ingenious system of shutters. On the east side, the Grande Galerie extends for 120 metres in length and is where the first exhibition, which will be discussed later, will be displayed for five years in an open space without any partition to interrupt the gaze of its visitors. Equally ambitious, the inside walls are also lined with aluminium, creating an effect that sets the works off in a very vibrant manner. At the end of the Grande Galerie lies a new glazed space, the Glass Pavilion, where visitors can enjoy views of the surrounding countryside and consider the major themes of the Grande Galerie more closely through small exhibitions whose purpose is to create a dialogue between works from the Louvre to those from museums in the region. On the west side is the gallery dedicated to temporary exhibitions. Slightly shorter at 90 metres long, it will hold large international exhibitions for periods of approximately three months. This gallery too is built as a single volume but can easily be divided to match the requirements of the exhibition. Lying at the end of this gallery is La Scène, a large auditorium. The novelty behind this design is that La Scène and the temporary exhibition gallery communicate, which enables the events held in the auditorium to spill over into the exhibitions just as easily as exhibitions to extend into La Scène. The floor of the foyer is the setting for one of the museum’s contemporary artworks, a mosaic by the artist Yayoi Kusama.
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THE GALERIE DU TEMPS
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INTRODUCTION Xavier Dectot
The Grande Galerie is the heart of the Louvre-Lens. It is the setting for exhibitions designed to be displayed for five years, using works lent by the Louvre in Paris and is in a way the permanent collection of the museum in Lens. Like any permanent exhibition, however, it is not static: in Lens the presentations are affected by annual rotations that see some works leave and replaced by others. What makes the Galerie du Temps, the first exhibition to be held there, particularly original is its manner of presentation. Using the entire long gallery designed by SANAA, the elegant and ingenious layout devised by Studio Adrien Gardère presents the works chronologically in a single space. In consequence, works that in every encyclopaedic museum in the world are exhibited separately, as they come from different civilisations or were created using different techniques, are here placed alongside one another. And yet the world of the Mesopotamians and Persians was in permanent contact with the world of Greece and Egypt, and during the Middle Ages, just as in the 16th and 17th centuries, many artists habitually worked as painters, sculptors and specialists in other techniques. The Galerie du Temps therefore offers visitors a unique outlook on the history of art within the limits that are those of the Louvre: beginning with the invention of writing in Mesopotamia in the 4th millennium BC and ending with the Industrial Revolution in the mid-19th century, just when coal began to be mined in Lens.
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ANTIQUITY
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Jean-Luc Martinez
ANTIQUITY IN THE COLLECTIONS OF THE LOUVRE MUSEUM
With regard to the long period that it has become conventional to refer to as Antiquity, which began with the invention of writing (c.3500 BC) and ended in the West with the end of the Roman Empire (AD 476), the collections of the Louvre Museum make it possible to illustrate the rapid development of three distinct and more or less contemporary seats of civilisation: the Near East, Egypt and the Mediterranean basin. The Galerie du Temps at the LouvreLens brings together 70 works produced over more than 4000 years in this vast geographical area that stretched from Algeria to Afghanistan. The organisation of the display allows attention to be drawn to the relationships, exchanges and moments of unification that occurred between these three centres. The works exhibited in the middle of the gallery originate in the region often called the Fertile Crescent, which, from Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq), a region crossed by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, methods of writing and models of state organisation spread eastwards (to the Iranian plateaus) and westwards (as far as the shores of the Levant, today Syria and Lebanon) and thus came into contact with the two other continents where the two other centres were developing: Egypt, an African civilisation centred entirely in the Nile valley, which is presented on the right side of the gallery, and the Mediterranean basin, on the left side. This geographic distribution across the width of the gallery is interwoven with a chronological distribution running lengthways that highlights important moments of unification and reveals the complexity of historical geography. Thus,
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after the period of the early civilisations (4th and 3rd millennia BC), the focus is on the great empires of the 2nd and 1st millennia – Babylon, the Assyrian Empire and then the Persian Empire – which progressively unified the Near East and integrated Egypt and part of the Greek world before Alexander the Great’s conquests (336–323 BC) established a form of Hellenisation that stretched from the East to the West as a prelude to the Roman Empire. Visitors may wish to progress through the gallery transversally to appreciate works created in different places during the same period, which is the manner that is proposed in these pages. Alternatively, the option exists to follow the evolution of a given artistic production in a single geographic area – for example, in Egypt, from the origins of writing around 3200 BC until the advent of Islam – for which one’s direction of visit would be lengthways, moving from one presentation to the next. Lastly, another possibility is to allow oneself to be guided purely by the nature of the works on show, as several thematic itineraries run through this chronology: writing and languages of communication; royal and imperial portraits, and the decoration of temples and palaces; and that of funerary goods, the evolution of the human figure, and the gods and heroes of mythology. Visitors are thus invited to take a long journey back in time to encounter works produced by the great civilisations of antiquity whose names are as exotic as they are evocative: Sumer, Babylon, Egypt, Assyria, Persia, Greece, Etruria, Rome – echoes of a distant past.
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. After Polycles (active in Alexandria, Egypt, c. BC) c.AD – Marble Roman Copy of a “Sleeping Hermaphrodite” L . m MR Collection of Pope Pius VI (–)
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THE MIDDLE AGES
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Jean-Luc Martinez Vincent Pomarède
THE MIDDLE AGES IN THE COLLECTIONS OF THE LOUVRE MUSEUM
The thousand years covering the long period between the 5th and 15th centuries is arbitrarily known in the West as the “Middle Ages”. As with other historic notions, this term, which is over-used and was given a derogative connotation during the 19th century, does not do justice to the sophisticated and complex civilisations that, far more than the remote period of Antiquity, laid the foundations of the modern world, particularly with regard to its political geography. It was a period of profound change that during the “Early Middle Ages” (5th– 10th centuries) saw the progressive transformation of the culture that emerged from Late Antiquity into an original civilisation, that of Romanesque and Gothic Europe (11th–13th centuries). The developments that occurred within this culture during the 14th and 15th centuries endured for a further century and broadly coexisted with the period that, quite improperly, is termed “the Renaissance”. Although this chronology is only valid for Western Europe, it nonetheless corresponds roughly to the major divisions in the history of the Byzantine Empire – split by the iconoclastic crisis (730–843) and Fourth Crusade (1204) during the proto-Byzantine and medioByzantine periods (4th–11th centuries) – and that of the renaissance of the empire during the Palaeologan dynasty (1261–1453). It is also consistent with the hiatuses in the history of the Islamic world which, following the period of unity represented by the Umayyad, Abbasid and Fatimid caliphates (7th–11th
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centuries), was split by turmoil and recomposition marked by the incursions of new peoples into the Islamic world, the Crusades and the founding of the sultanates (11th–13th centuries). These difficulties were followed by a period of regional fragmentation (13th–15th centuries) brought about by the invasion of the Mongols under Genghis Khan. These chronological periods may vary depending on whether emphasis is given to forms of continuity or rupture. Thus Antique culture experienced profound upheaval from the 4th century with the foundation of Constantinople as the new capital of the Roman Empire (AD 330), the adoption of Christianity as the state religion (AD 380) and the permanent division between the Western and Eastern parts of the empire (395), even if the beginning of the Middle Ages is generally taken as the moment the last Western Roman emperor was deposed (476), though this event in itself was of little import. The end of the medieval period is more easily fixed in the second half of the 15th century, with the taking of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks (1453), the retaking of Granada by the Catholic Monarchs of Spain (1492), and the “discovery” of America by Christopher Columbus the same year. These events are reference points for two decisive developments in modern European history: first, the disappearance of the Byzantine Empire and advance of the Ottoman Empire to the edge of Europe, prelude to a confrontation and mutual fascination that lasted several centuries; second, the
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rising power of Spain and European colonial expansion across America, Africa and Asia. The Galerie du Temps thus reflects three distinct centres of these medieval cultures and, as has already been proposed for the period of Antiquity, draws attention to moments of rapprochement and exchange: on the right, Byzantine art and the arts of Islam as continuations of the Roman works produced in the eastern part of the Empire, and on the left, Western medieval art, represented essentially by works from what is now France. In the centre of the gallery, a place has been found for the Italian peninsula, which, in many aspects, was the region more than any other where the exchanges between these distinct areas occurred. A special place has also been devoted to architecture and its decoration in order to highlight the particular characteristics of these areas of civilisation: the Byzantine monastery in Bawit (Egypt) (fig. 74), the since-destroyed cloister of Notre-Dame-des-Doms Cathedral in Avignon (figs. 78, 79), the decoration from the facade of the Romanesque Church of Notre-Dame-de-laCouldre (figs. 80, 81), a mosaic showing Byzantine influence from Torcello Basilica, Venice (fig. 97), a Gothic retable from the Church of Saint-Martin in Nolay (fig. 106), a fragment of a cenotaph from Syria (fig. 109), and the decoration from the mihrab of a mosque or a tomb of an Iranian saint (fig. 111). The section dedicated to the Middle Ages comprises forty-seven works grouped in seven themes.
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. Paris, France c.– Ivory, traces of colour Triptych: Scenes from the Life of the Virgin H . cm OA Gift of the Marquess Arconati Visconti,
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. Nevers, Duchy of Burgundy (present-day France) c.– Polychrome limestone Virgin and Child from a Leper Hospital H . x W . x D . m RF Gift of Mme du Verne,
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THE MODERN ERA
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Vincent Pomarède
THE MODERN ERA IN THE COLLECTIONS OF THE LOUVRE MUSEUM
Modernity is the term traditionally given to the period that, continuing from the Middle Ages, began with the Renaissance and lasted until it was supplanted by the contemporary era. While all historians agree that modernity began with the end of the Middle Ages during the 15th century – sometimes in 1453, with the fall of Constantinople and thus the end of the Byzantine Empire, sometimes in 1492, with the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus – only the French-speaking school of history has defined it as ending with the French Revolution in 1792, leaving the contemporary era to begin at the end of the 18th century. For most Anglo-Saxon countries, the modern period continued until the middle of the 20th century, and for some persists even today. However, the chronological divisions of the Louvre Museum have been established in accordance with a completely different logic, imposed by the symbolic date, 1848, that divides the collections of the Louvre from those of the Orsay Museum. Thus the objects in the Louvre were created no later than the mid-19th century. The Galerie du Temps bases its limits on those of the Louvre and thus offers a modern period that runs from the Renaissance to the middle of the 19th century. This new stage in our journey through the history of the arts, both in its content and the physical space dedicated to it in the gallery, is marked by an acceleration in the chronology of events: the points of temporal reference are no longer millennia or even centuries, as in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, but half-centuries or even decades. Thus the wealth of artistic events and trends during the 1650s – from Rembrandt to Poussin, from La Tour to Claude
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– or the 1830s – Ingres, Corot, Duseigneur – entail a loosening of museographical limits and shorter temporal units. Figures are indicative of the choices made when the Galerie du Temps was conceived, choices that followed from the very nature of the collections of the Louvre: whereas 94 works out of the 213 exhibited illustrate the five centuries of the period designated as “Modern Times”, only 119 represent all the previous millennia. This chronological acceleration is coupled, moreover, by a clear geographic contraction. “We must, in our modern times, have a European spirit,” stated the novelist Madame de Staël learnedly in 1813, and the final third of the semi-permanent exhibition in the Louvre-Lens adopts this logic to the letter as far as the contraction of geographic borders is concerned: with the exception of the countries where Islam is dominant, which are represented in the last section of the Galerie du Temps with creations from Iran, Turkey and India, the pieces from the Renaissance to the 19th century come from European countries only and, more specifically, from the countries in Western Europe. Reflecting the acquisitions policy of the powersthat-be over several centuries – first monarchs, then the republics – the national collection has clearly laid emphasis on the Italian, French, Flemish and Dutch schools. So the crossing of the history of the arts proposed by the Galerie du Temps at the Louvre-Lens ends with a panoramic view of European art during modernity and, as far as the 19th century is concerned, through the works of Duseigneur and Ingres, with a discreet but real celebration of French art.
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. Rembrandt Harmensz Van Rijn, known as Rembrandt Leyde, Netherlands, – Amsterdam, Netherlands, Oil on canvas Saint Matthew and the Angel H . x W . m INV Collection of the Comte d’Angiviller
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. François Frédéric Lemot Lyon, France, 1772 – Paris, France, 1827 Lead Portrait of Napoleon I, Emperor of the French from 1804 to 1815, in Triumph H x W cm MR Commissioned by Napoleon I
. Jean-Pierre Franque Buis-les-Baronnies, France, – Quintigny, France, Salon of Oil on canvas Allegory of France before the Return of General Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) from Egypt H x W cm INV Acquired at the Salon of
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