The palace stands on the site of a fortress built for Philip II Augustus in 1214. In 1546 Francis I had the old castle demolished and gave orders for the construction of a new palace. Over the course of the centuries this has gone through enlargements, periods of neglect, and restorations, the most recent of which has led to the creation of the
Grand Louvre, with an exhibition area of 70,000 square meters. Opened to the public in 1793, its collection was the result of centuries of a passion for art on the part of French sovereigns. It was Francis I (1515-47) who created the nucleus of the collection, summoning artists like Leonardo, Rosso Fiorentino, and Cellini to his residence at Fontainebleau and commencing the construction of the Louvre. There followed a period of neglect until the reign of Louis XIII, when the interest in art was reawakened, largely through the efforts of the king’s minister Cardinal Richelieu. The cardinal added works by Leonardo, Veronese, and Poussin to the royal collections. At the same time the Queen Mother, Maria de’ Medici, commissioned an imposing series of allegorical paintings of her triumphs and those of the French monarchy from Rubens, which still hang in one of the museum’s large halls. Under Louis XIV, who was aided in his choices by Cardinal Mazzarino, royal collecting went through its most ebullient half-century. On his death the number of paintings in the Crown’s possession had risen from 200 to 2000: these included pictures by van Dyck, Raphael’s Baldassare Castiglione, Titian’s Country Concert, and Caravaggio’s Death of the Virgin. In the eighteenth century the first problems with the organization and conservation of the numerous works began to surface: the credit for realizing the sovereigns’ idea of a museum must be given to the Revolution. With the confiscation of ecclesiastical property and Napoleon’s campaigns the collection was enlarged, but the problem of how to organize the works dogged the museum right through the nineteenth century. Under Napoleon III, who continued the policy of acquiring prestigious private collections, works like Paolo Uccello’s Battle of San Romano and Leonardo’s Annunciation entered the museum.
