The Louvre is the biggest and grandest museum and art gallery in all of France, if not the entire world. The Louvre also constitutes the point of departure of the great East-West view, which crosses the Arc du Carrousel, the obelisk in the Place de la Concorde, the Arc de Triomphe on the Champs-Elysées, and extends right out to the new Arc de la Défense. Starting its life as a fortress in 1190, it grew to become a palace in 1870. A truly colossal building, it has extended across the right bank of the Seine for hundreds of years, and is impossible to miss. Since the Middle Ages the Louvre has seen war and famine, revolution and riot. During all of its history it development has been unlike any other building, each stage marked by both the major events of French history and the succession of architects and decorators who have left their mark on it and the rest of Europe.

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France’s greatest King, Louis the XIV (known as The Sun King) added expensively to the Louvre; architects Le Mercier and Le Vau were commissioned to build the "Cour Carrée", four times the size of the former Renaissance courtyard. Poussin, Romanelli and Le Brun decorated the apartments and the galleries. This was stopped of course when Louis XIV decided to move his construction to the grand palave of Versailles. Even Napoleon himself added to the Louvre’s collections by his wars (in fact, in 1803 the museum was proclaimed the “Musée Napoléon”). Inside its walls can be found the plunder of dozens of civilizations both modern and ancient.

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