The Louvre

Fülszöveg

Of all the museums in the world it is surely the Louvre which best displays the art of painting in all its variety. Not only does it contain the ancient and magnificent collections of the Kings of Francé, but, like museums founded in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries, the Louvre continues to be enriched by donations and purchases. Incomparable collectors like Francois i, to whom the Louvre owes the greatest canvases of Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael, and Louis xiv who gloried in amassing masterpieces of the French seventeenth century and of the Italian cinquecento and seicento, Iáid the foundations of the collection. Naturally, French artists are represented at the Louvre as nowhere else, and the history of painting in Francé can be studied here in its most diverse aspects. But all the schools and all the centuries of European painting are alsó presented, from exquisite miniatures to detached frescoes and vast monumental works. Year after year, more paintings are acquired,... Tovább

Fülszöveg

Of all the museums in the world it is surely the Louvre which best displays the art of painting in all its variety. Not only does it contain the ancient and magnificent collections of the Kings of Francé, but, like museums founded in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries, the Louvre continues to be enriched by donations and purchases. Incomparable collectors like Francois i, to whom the Louvre owes the greatest canvases of Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael, and Louis xiv who gloried in amassing masterpieces of the French seventeenth century and of the Italian cinquecento and seicento, Iáid the foundations of the collection. Naturally, French artists are represented at the Louvre as nowhere else, and the history of painting in Francé can be studied here in its most diverse aspects. But all the schools and all the centuries of European painting are alsó presented, from exquisite miniatures to detached frescoes and vast monumental works. Year after year, more paintings are acquired, selected according to shifts in taste and the discoveries of the history of art. Michel Laclotte, Director of the Musée du Louvre, and Jean-Pierre Cuzin, chief Curator of the Department of Paintings, teli the fascinating story of this unique collection. Their distinguished commentaries accompany somé 420 reproductions whose colouring is remarkably faithful to that of the originál works. This new edition includes the museum's latest acquisitions of which the principal works are the Astronomer by Vermeer and Georges de La Tour's St Thomas, purchased thanks to the very enthusiastic response from the public to a national appeal. The splendid collections of the Louvre are now presented in a better, re-organized framework. The great glass pyramid by I. M. Pei, the most spectacular feature of this renewal, symbolizes the forward-thinking vision of this great museum. Vissza