In love with the Louvre

Adam Gopnik | The New Yorker | 19th October 2020

The Louvre has had a charmed existence. Competent early administrators; spared the wrath of various rebellious mobs; the beneficiary when French armies “looted with terrific taste”; and the Mona Lisa. Visitors enjoy “enormity and intimacy, unequalled by any other gallery”. The collection is old, which serves to illustrate “how constant taste is’. And the Louvre is nothing if not constant: “The continuity the Louvre represents is the continuity of the French state.”