![Sample our Museum and Heritage Studies journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5945/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Museum-Heritage-Studies.jpg"})
Abstract
When the monarchy in France collapsed in 1789, the ambitious project of Louis XVI's minister of the arts, the Comte d'Angiviller, to transform the Grand Gallery of the Louvre palace into the most splendid museum of art in Europe collapsed with it. D'Angiviller himself fled the country and the first Revolutionary government was left to complete the Louvre project and to claim it as their own. On 10 August 1793 the doors of the Musée du Louvre were opened and the public was invited to inspect works of art that had once belonged to the king, his courtiers, and the Church, but which now belonged to the Republic, and a space that was no longer a royal palace but a palace of the people. The purpose of this essay is to examine aspects of the formation of the Musée du Louvre at the height of the French Revolution and the symbolic values it possessed at the time.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Andrew L. McClellan
This study is based on Andrew McClellan's recent dissertation (1987) for the Courtauld Institute of Art. He has published a related essay in Art History (1984) and has an article on two Neoclassical designs for a Bourbon chapel in St.-Denis forthcoming in the Burlington Magazine. [Department of Fine Arts, Tufts University, 11 Talbot Avenue, Medford, MA 02155]