discussion \ art history

C HAP T E R 3

THE LOUVRE

Rome n'est plus dans Rome Elle est tout a Pm1,s. (Rome is no longer in Rome I She's aU in Paris.)

-EIGHTEENTH·CENTURY FRENCH VAUDEVILLE DITTY

I T WAS A MISERABLE DAY AT THE LOUVRE. BENEATH A SKY thick with clouds, the dtizzle drew a moist curtain over the curved

courtly Rourishes of the seventeenth-century palace, whose galler ies seemed to stretch endlessly into the mist. Alain Pasquier, chief con- servator of Greco-Roman antiquities at the museum, was in a foul

mood. For starters, he was behind in editing the proofs to the cata log for an upcoming exhibit on Praxiteles, an influential sculptor in an- cient Greece, which was set to open at the museum in eight weeks .

Praxiteles, long admired by art rustorians, was a master technician and an artistic provocateur, the first to sculpt nude women in ancient

Greece, whose style was copied by other sculptors for hundreds of years after his death. Pasquier had stayed up late the night before to close the catalog and was likely to be staying up late again tonight to get his proofs done in time for a hard deadline. He was also under pressure to finish assembling a group of antiquities that were to be sent on loan to a new Louvre mUSeUt11 being set up in Abu Dhabi, in the Persian Gulf The Louvre had agreed to curate a new museum in the

tiny emirate-a kind of satellite branch-loaning for a period of yea rs a fair nutnber of pieces from its vast collection. But that projec t waS

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turning out to be a magnet for all kinds of unexpected criticism from France's museum and art establishment, who had taken the view that the Louvre-the most important and oldest museum in the world and the one to which Pasquier, a year from retirement, had consecrated rus life's work-was whoring itself out to a country of 1l0nrnUSeUffi-

going Bedouins in exchange for a fat check. Idiots , he thought. The Louvre sucked up $300 million a year in ex-

penditures, and the French government had been tightening the screws

every successive year. The galleries were in desperate need of updating, and the Louvre had no tradition whatsoever of raising money from private donors. Taxpayers and tourists paid the bill for rumself and rus sixry-five fellow curators, not to mention the several hundred employ-

ees at the museum. The catalogs cost a fortune, conservation cost a for- tune, the building cost a fortune, and if the Arabs were willing to fork over SI.3 billion for the privilege of having the Louvre's imprimatur on their building, why not' Perhaps the cultural snobs who were wrun- ing in Le MOl/de about the loss of the "French patrimony" had a better idea for coming up with some cash?

But those critics weren't rus problem. What was his problem was that two weeks earlier Greece had suddenly threatened to pull out of the Praxiteles exfUbit, protesting the inclusion of a stunning, life-size bronze Statue of a young Apollo. The armless, fourth-century bronze, nick- named "Sauroktonos," Greek for "the lizard slayer," was being sent from the Cleveland Museum of Art and was an early version of a marble Apollo from the later Roman era-complete with arms and a lizard craWling up a trunk-which was owned by the Louvre. Both sculptures were very rare; the Cleveland Apollo was the only known bronze of its kind in the sryle of Praxiteles. The Louvre owned one of only two Roman-era marble sculptures like it, with the other in the Vatican. The Cleveland piece was a perfect example of the early influence of Praxite- les, and Pasquier had plarmed to exfUbit the two statues side by side for the first time ever.

Without warning, Greece had announced that it had a problem With the Cleveland statue. The culture ministry said that it was unsure of its provenance and would withdraw its loan of a half dozen key sculptures if Sauroktonos were included in the exhibit. "They never

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mentioned this to the C leveland museum . They've never asked for the sculpture to be returned," Pasquier grumbled to me, as he canceled our scheduled meeting.

The Cleveland museum had bought the statue in 2004, and its Cura- tors were unsure of how and where it was originally found. But they re- jected the Greeks' claim that the bronze had been underwater and had been fished by an Italian vessel in international waters between Italy and

Greece in the '990S. Instead, the Cleveland museum said it was bought from two well-known dealers, Ali and Hicham Aboutaam, who owned the Phoenix Ancient Art Gallery in Geneva, and had come from a col- lection held in East Germany from before World War I!. C leveland's cu- rators said they had spent a year investigating the provenance before buying the scu lpture. In truth, the exact chain of ownership was un-

clear: from East Germany it was sold to an unidentified Dutchma n in 1994, who sold it to another collector, who sold it to the Aboutaams in 2001 with the understanding that he would remain anonymous. Cleve- land's experts said the statue had never been underwater. And anyway, since its place of origin was unknown, why should the Greeks have a

claim? Nonetheless, it was a diplomatic tangle of the kind that was tak- ing up more and more time for the Louvre's curators. Pasquier had just returned from Athens, where-reluctantly-he was forced to give his agreement to drop the Cleveland sculpture from the exhibit. Without the half dozen Praxiteles sculptures from Greece, the entire exhibit didn't have much of a point.

And so it was going in that particular week in January 2007 at the Louvre, a venerable institution with incalculable treasures, long accuS-

tomed to calling the shots in the world of museUllli and antiquity. From the outside, the Louvre was as popular as ever, visited by 8.3

million people in 2006 alone, most of them foreign visitors who came from allover the world to see the Mona Lisa, the Venus de Milo, and the Winged Victory of Samothrace. The runaway best-selling book The Da Villci Code, and the blockbuster movie that followed, had brought with it a new wave of popularity for the museum's collection, and the Louvre had cleverly capitalized on the iconic image of the Mona Lisa from the movie poster to mount its own informational campaign.

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But from the inside, the mood did not seem so self-confident. Things

were changing in the world of art and antiquity, and those changes were beginning to have an effect on the Louvre, and on the morale of its staff. Within the museum , a new dynamic was taking hold, as the institution

changed a long-held policy of curatorial tenure. Until 2004, the post of museum director was a lifetime appointment, as were the heads of the various departments. This had led to a near paralysis in the administrative

structure, for it was impossible to remove a department head who was abusing his or her power or falling down on the job. The new rule fuled positions for three years only, to be reconfirmed or changed at the end of that time. That reform set the complacent scholars at the Louvre on

edge. And outside the Louvre, the supremacy of its judgment--and indeed

its mission-was being questioned. Every day it seemed another de- mand for restitution arose. Every day some journalist threw questions at a Louvre official over one object or another, asking whether it would be fair to consider the return of sonle of the Louvre's prized possessions to

their countries of origin. It was becoming unmanageable. The hardworking officials at the Louvre found these developments

confusing. Never before had they been asked to justify themselves in tllis way. The Louvre was unaccustomed to being refused loans of pieces

they requested for exhibits. They were thrown off balance by tllis new

atmosphere of suspicion and, frankly, disrespect. "You end up thinking we're all a bunch of looters, thieves, exploiters,

that we're some kind of criminals," said Aggy Lerolle, the Louvre's chief press attache. The Greeks may feel indignant now about the provenance of this or that statue, she said, "but who would be inter-

ested in Greek sculpture if it were all in Greece? These pieces are great

because they are in the Louvre." The same was true for the media drumbeat created by Zahi Hawass

in Egypt. Lerolle did not deign to call him by name. " The Egyptian keeps coming to ask for more things, through the media," she said. "Legally he has no right to ask for any tiling before 1983 ," when Egypt banned the export of antiquities unearthed after that date.

In her offices-an aluminum, three-story prefabricated structure

in one of the Louvre's many courtyards, a temporary home while the

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permanent offices were undergoing renovation-Lerolle and her team

were juggling a barrage of inquiries, in addition to their regular work. Already she and her staff were overstretched, often working until 8:00

p.m., with the Abu Dhabi project heavy in the news and set to open in a matter of months. But the restitution issue would not go away. A writer from the British publi cation Art Newspaper had called earlier in the day to ask about a Turkish request for the return of a panel of col- orful tiles from the sixteenth century, part of the museum's Islamic art

collection. The panel had come from the tomb of an Ottoman sultan, Selim II,located in the Hagia Sophia complex in Istanbul. In this case, it appeared that the panel had a history and a provenance; a French re- storer had received the panel in 1895 in exchange for restoring nu-

merous other panels from the same tomb, and had made copies at the time for Istanbul to have in its place. The restorer sold the panel to the Louvre upon his return to France. The Turks were, apparendy, crying foul nonetheless; the Louvre was convinced the entire business was nonsense, but wading into the details took valuable time. In internal e-mails over the latest set of requests, the Louvre officials were dismis-

sive, with one writing to another with ill-concealed exasperation: "The Islamist press launched the whole thing."

These challenges came as a kind of cu lture shock to the Louvre, an arm of the French state and a pillar of France's own national identity. Forged in the fervor of revolutionary zeal, the Louvre was meant to em- body the very essence of the humanist ideals that led to the overthrow of the French monarchy and the creation of a representative democracy. Art was not to be hoarded by the rich; it was to be shared. Knowledge was for all. Human achievement was not restricted to a single class,

and great beauty, accessible to all, could elevate any citizen. It was a so- cialmessage that the Louvre could represent within its walls, simply by existing. To take the palace of France's kings and transform it into a pub- lic temple, where all French people could enjoy the royal art collection and other artistic treasures of the world, was a symbolic act that res- onates with perfect clarity even today. The building was first opened to the public as a museum on November 8, ]793, amid the French Revo- lution. The early collection was made of the crown jewels of France

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and illustrated vases collected by an abbot to the crown. The Crown Furniture Repository came to the Louvre in ] 796, along with other

so-called revolutionary seizures. mainly royal. Over time, the egalitarian ethic of the revolution has COIne to run

deep in the veins of the French body politic, evident in the widespread

conse nsus today that the government should not just pay for health care, education, child care, and public transportation, but also actively support the arts. France spends fully 1.5 percent of its national budget on culture-more than $4 billion a year (approximately 3.1 billion

euros)-including allocating about $500 million to museums. But hand in hand with France's egalitarian ethic comes a parallel, if

contradictory, elitism. Art is for all, if you are French. Enlightemnent is of a particularly Western variety. In coming to the Louvre to view the art of the world in a universal museum, gathering all the great artistic

achievements of humankind, you pay homage to the supremacy of this glorious museum and the culture that created it. The Louvre opened its doors to art that was gathered, bought, looted, and appropriated from other places, without much thought to the consequences or concerns of those places of origin. From 1794 onward, France's revolutionary armies rounded up artworks from across Europe, with the aim of fill- ing the halls of their new public palace. They brought pieces that were considered to be the very pinnacle of artistic beauty: the Apollo Belvedere, and the Laocoon group, taken from the papal collection in the Vatican; the Dying Gaul, snatched from Rome's Capital Museum; the four horses from the San Marco cathedral in Venice. These arrived in Paris with great celebration. The rise of Napoleon Bonaparte and his conquests across Europe invited yet another wave of looting, fore- mOSt from Italy, where he won battles in 1797 and 1800. The despoil- in g of Italy was an act of national pride, enshrined in paintings that depicted caravans of artwork being carted off to Paris. The vast trea- Sures brought from Italy led to a grand restoration and completion of the Louvre-new galleries were built along the rue de Rivoli-and its renaming as the Napoleon Museum in 1803. For a short period, north- ern Europeans were able to see the finest of classical sculpture without

traveling to the Mediterranean.

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None of this history is mentioned, however, on the Louvre Web site under the heading "How the Collection Was Formed." That di-

gest leaps from the acquisition of art belonging to the crown in 1796 to the purchase of a medieval collection in 1825. Like most of the great Western museums, the Louvre has chosen the history that suits it. Regardless, led by the esteemed savant Vivant Denon, who became the museum's director in 1804, the Louvre continued to grow through

purchase-including forced purchases, such as part of the Borghese collection of sculpture--and appropriation, which was sometimes re- versed. The collections shrank by about two thousand paintings when almost all the wartime acquisitions (including the bronze horses from San Marco) had to be returned after Napoleon's final defeat at Water- loo in 18r5.

The elitist strain that is built into the Louvre has an explicitly na- tionalist component. No object that has become part of the French mu- seUln system can ever be sold, since it has officially become French patrimony. To sonleone who comes from Greece, this must seem like a

strange concept: the Parthenon frieze in the possession of the Louvre has become, ipso facto, French. The building of a national collection was centra1 to creating the narrative of French greatness, of the powe r

and the glory of its empire. Like so much in French culture, the Louvre is organized around the unspoken principle that the French are a great nation with a mandate to instruct and lead the world in all matters of

human progress, whether art, history, philosophy, politics, science, or food. Over the centuries, that elitism has become an integral part of its identity, as much a part of its essence as the populist ideals of the rev- olution. Indeed , it is this mix of egalitarianism and elitism that is so peculiar to the French, and that to them poses no contradiction. The fuling of the Louvre is a perfect example: the French colonized for- eign countries and taught the narives to read their language, while shipping off the local treasures to the Louvre for the edification and wonder of the European masses. Deep in the DNA of the institution is this passionately held belief-valid, perhaps, but not unanimously believed-that the world should be grateful that the Louvre preserves and displays the great art of the world. How that art came to be at the

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museum is not a question that the curators or other officials actively

consider. And why should they? It is, after all, tlte Louvre.

THE FIRST INESCAPABLE reality of the Louvre is its mind-boggling

size. I have seen many museums in my life. I have seen scores of Egyp- tian, Greek, Mesopotamian, and other ancient artifacts. I have been to

the Louvre many times. But in all my years of visiting this imposing

palace, whether to see the new glass pyramid or to stroll through the eighteenth-century sculpture garden, I never quite grasped its scale. When, for the first time, I went thtough all the rooms displaying antiq- uities, they seemed endless. Not just the Venus de Milo or the dramatic Winged Victory of Samothrace. Not just the nine rooms-rooms-of

Greek vases. Not just the display of mummies, with the row of stone sphinxes and rearing baboons that originally stood alongside the obelisk on the Place de la Concorde but were moved indoors by nineteenth- century prudery (the baboons' genitals can be seen). Long after most of the visitors had gone, I continued to wander through the halls of the

Egyptian collection, past the spectacular rooms that most visitors see, with the matching reliefs of Ramses ll, the two massive red granite sphinxes, and the colossal foot from the statue of Amenophis III in

Thebes. When it all sinks in, the visitor cannot help but be overwhelmed by the totality of tillS grandeur and by a sense of gratitude at the oppor- tunity to see so much, so beautifully displayed.

And yet there are dirty secrets in the Louvre's collecting past. Its Egyptian collection, dating back to 1826, is as breathtaking as it is oblique in revealing its origin. Jean-Fran~ois Champollion, the famed decoder of the hieroglyphs, was the Louvre's first curator of Egyptian art, and the collection is a cornerstone of the Louvre, a symbol of its revolutionary, Enlightenment purpose. Indeed, the collection was part of the very creation of modern Egyptology. All the more notable, then, that the monumental pieces on display in the Louvre have no apparent past other than that in antiquity, and that they came to the tnuseum with no previous owners. They do have a past, of course,just nOt One that is evident fronl visiting the museum or its bookstore- 1ll0St of it was taken from Egypt during decades of unchecked looting

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in the nineteenth century. Thus Champollion pulled together a daz- zling collection of nine thOusand objects in just a few years. Some, though not most, came from Napoleon's expedition; much more came

from the rapacious collectors in later decades who were working to dismantle monuments in Egypt as quickly as possible.

Some have interpreted this dismantling as a desire to save the mOn- uments from extinction, because Egyptians were reusing the materials

for new construction. That view, from today's vantage point, is overly converuent. While it is true that many of Egypt's rulers were prepared

to dismantle ancient temples to build factories (Egypt's modernizi ng leader Mehmet Ali was even prepared to use the stone from the pyra- mids in construction, but budding Egyptologists like Giovanni Belzon i convinced the pasha this was a bad idea), what mainly drove the Euro-

pean collectors was greed and national pride. They wanted to gather as many pieces for their national collections as possible, before their British or French or German rivals could do so. Thus, Champollion bough t 4,000 pieces from the collection of Henry Salt, the British consul in Egypt who found the British Museum less inclined than the Louvre to pay his prices. He bought 500 pieces from the collection of Bernardino Drovetti, the French consul in Egypt, who was in a pitched race with Salt to despoil the country. The Louvre had earlier acquired 2,500

pieces from the collection of Edme-Antoine Auguste Durand, anothe r collector-adventurer. Toward the end of his life, Champollion went to

Egypt himself and brought back another 102 pieces, including twO bas-reliefs ripped from the tomb of Seri I. Three painted reliefs of

Anlenophis III were bloodlessly cut out of his tomb by an unknown nineteenth-century adventurer and cataloged at the Bibliotheque Na- tionale, before ending up at the Louvre. "At that time, there were no rules, except to please Champollion," remarked Roger KhO\vam, an eighry-five-year-old, Egyptian-born antiquities dealer who sold man), pieces to the Louvre, as did his father and grandfather before him. "The Egyptian law didn't forbid commerce. And it was conceived to please Champollion."

The French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette, who later became the first director of Egypt's monuments and the founder of Egypt's Cairo Museum, went to Egypt in 1850 and began excavating in Saqqara,

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where he discovered catacombs of Apis bulls, the Serapeum. (In his ac- count of the discovery, Mariette describes blowing up the vaults with gu npowder.) Over a four-year period, operating under a partage agree-

ment with Egypt that he instituted, Mariette sent some 6,000 objects to the Louvre, including one of the most famous statues in the Egyptian de- partment, the seated Scribe. Today it graces the cover of one of the Louvre's Egyptian catalogs. Another 2,500 pieces collected by a French

physician, Antoine Clot (who traveled to Egypt to help modernize the

country's health services in the 18505), went to the Louvre as well. At the\ time, the Antiquities Service was run by the French; the Egyptians them.=...,

selves had no say in what could leave the country. The Louvre's antiquities holdings went through another major ex-

pansion during the reign of Napoleon lIl, as French explorers pushed into Asia Minor and Mesopotamia. Paul-Emile Botta, the French con-

sul general in Mosul in 1842, which was part of the Ottoman Empire at the time, set out to find the biblical ciry of Nineveh. Instead he found Khorsabad , the remains of the Assyrian palace of King Sargon II , and the dazzling winged bulls that were its entrance. For the next few decades, the French government dispatched archaeological missions- either directly or through French institutes in Athens, Cairo, Rome, and the Ottoman Empire-led by budding explorers who excavated

and sent home artifacts fresh from the ground: Assyrian, Phoenician, Su merian, Babylonian, Mesopotamian, Persian. These missions filled the museum, taking objects from countries mainly under the control of a European empire under the rules of partage, or, in some cases, with permission to take everything.

I But there is a reason for not revealing the origin of so many pieces from the Egyptian collection: the tales would embarrass the Louvre. And to the average visitor, it would undoubtedly mar the experience of reveling in the treasures of the ancient world to know how they ar- rived in this place, in this condition. Where the museum offers hints,

£nOte questions 3re raised than answered. Two priceless pieces of art and of history are tucked away in a niched hallway in the Louvre,just off the main room that houses most of the munmlies. You could eas- ily nliss them; I nearly did. The first, the Chamber of Kings, is a floor- to-ceiling account of the history of Egypt's royal families, covering

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three walls, rendered in colorful, sculpted bas-reliefs and hieroglyphic cartouches of the kings' names. Built under Thutmosis III (1472- 1425 BC), the chamber is made of stone blocks and covers eleven centuries of pharaonic history; it is inscribed with sixty-one names, including those of many pharaohs. I t is one of only five known chro nological lists of royal names; thus, its historical value cannot be overstated. But the piece, on closer impection, has been badly damaged. More than half of the inscriptions are done in trompe l'oeil, painted on instead of

sculpted. How could that be? The explanation is suggested, barely, if you read between the lines of the legend to the left of the chamber, which tells you that the chamber was found and dismantled by the ex- plorer Emile Prisse d'Avennes in 1843. "It ,vas a ruin in Karnak when

Prisse d' Avennes dismantled it," the Louvre tells us. The legend goes on to explain that "elements" were "lost in transport" by a broken case, but luckily Prisse d'Avennes had made plaster casts of the walls before he removed them, so they could be reconstituted on arrival.

This is prevarication of the first order, a selective telling that is

rather shock ing for an institution dedicated to preserving histo ry. Prisse d' Avennes was a half-heroic, half-tragic figure, who devoted forty years of his life to discovering and understanding ancient civi- lizations, especially Egypt . He was a gifted artist who made hundreds of sketches, papier-mach" impressions, and plaster casts of thousands of inscriptions and reliefs that covered the tombs and temples in Egypt, a critical record of monuments that were in the process of being exca-

vated, looted, or otherwise irretrievably altered in the nineteenth cen tury. But he stole the Chamber of Kings, also known as the Table of Kings, for the purpose, he said, of its preservation. Even the most celebratory his- tory of the Louvre, a glossy account by Nicholas d' Archimbaud, notes that Prisse was actually in a race to snatch the bas-;elief before the Germans could do so. He had settled near the ruins of the Temple of Karnak in ancient Thebes, and according to one account was increas-

ingly disturbed by the demolition of ancient monuments, which were being used as stone quarries to build factories. Without the necessary

firman-the permission of the Ottoman authority-he removed the bas-reliefs under cover of night, using a few men and basic tools. He

also took several stelae, with domestic scenes dating back to 4,000 Be,

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E1Ilik Prust d'AvlmusJ artist, explorer, amllooler. (Image from

Whe Was Whe ill Egyptian Arch,elegy)

and several priceless papyri. He bribed the local governor and begged his way to getting the reliefs into twenty-seven packing cases that were placed on boats to Cairo. From Cairo, they moved to Alexandria, and in 1844, a full year later, he finalJy escorted the cargo to France. But, again, nationalism was a motivating factor; the French ReVile Archeolo- gyae thanked Prisse for saving the chamber "from vandalism ... and from being removed by the Pruss ian Conunission . . . and above al l, for having refused to sell it to England."

Tragically, the French state did little to appreciate or to properly preserve this find. The wa lls of the Chamber of Kings needed to be reconstructed and were meant to be displayed in the Bibliotheque Nationale in an exhibit designed by Prisse. But in his absence, workers applied a hot varnish to the walls rather than a colorless shellac, which destroyed the paint that colored them. Even Prisse's son and biogra-

iher later noted, "An object which 3 5 centuries had left unharmed las been destroyed by indifference and ignorance." Is Prisse the hero

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of this story or the villain? Perhaps Prisse did save the monument, though most of the Temple of Karnak remains. The trompe l'oeil was made possible by his original sketches. But the paint-over was necessi- tated because he removed the sculptures from their place of origin. None of this can be imagined by reading the explanation beside the

Chamber of Kings in the Louvre today. The same holds for the wondrous object that occupies the other end

of the niche in the same room, one of the five pieces that Zahi Hawass has demanded be returned to Egypt. The zodiac ceiling of the Temple of Denderah would easily be missed by the average museum visitor, so

tucked away is it from the busier byways. This treasure was ripped fro m the building that housed it by the French collector Sebastien Louis Saulnier and his agent,Jean Baptiste Lelorrain, in the early 1820S. T he temple was familiar to early Orientalists, as it was among the objects

described by a wonderstruck Vivant Denon, the French savant who was among the first Eutopeans to lay eyes on this temple as Napoleon's army pushed south in 1799. The ceiling is in every way sublime, though it will probably never again be seen in its entirety, as Denon saw it. T he

zodiac ceiling is a dense kaleidoscope of intricate images and symbols from Egyptian astronomy, with recognizable symbols from astrology still in use today. As a historical document, the ceiling documents the Egyptians' deep knowledge of the astral movements of the sky-of planets, eclipses, and constellations. The ceiling gives us a precise notion of the state of the cosmos 2,050 years ago. One inscription actually records a solar eclipse that occurred on March 7 in the year 5 [ BC at [no a.m. Other carvings show the position of the constellations from June 15 to August 15, in 50 Be. Sculpted into the ceiling are a big dlp- per, a little dipper, a bull, Cassiopeia, Orion, a scorpion, Sagittarius-all familiar symbols to this day. It is magnificent. Saulnier, a former police comnussioner in Lyon under Napoleon who had been thrown out of power after the restoration of the monarchy, decided that such J remarkable piece should belong to France.

According to the Louvre's documentation, SauJllier succeeded in

gaining "the express permission of Mehmet Ali," the ruler of Egypt, to take it, though the museum makes no mention of what inducement waS necessary for such a feat. The engineer Lelorrain had forged special tool>

THE LOUVRE ......-..< 7S

in France to do the deed. Working on the rooftop of the Denderah temple, Saulnier hacked and gouged at the zodiac ceiling over the course of twenty-two days, trying to drag it down using chisels and saws. But when more than three weeks of hacking did not succeed in removing the ceiling, Lelorrain turned to gunpowder in specially drilled holes to dislodge it. The explosions finally did the trick, destroying a nearby sculpture of Isis. The masterpiece was then dragged on special wooden

rollers down from the rooftop, toward a waiting boat, but the rollers wore out because it \vas so heavy Lelorrain had to resort to levers and, again, brute force. When the ceiling reached the river, there was a fur-

ther drama when it slipped off the sloping planks and fell into the soft mud. This still sounds horrible, at a distance of nearly two hundred years. At the time, the mutilation of the temple caused outcry even

among the nationalistic French. The savant Edme Jomard protested, as did Jean-Fran,ois Champollion. Henry Salt protested, but for a different reason. He had been planning to make off mth the zodiac ceiling him- self, to sell to the British Museum, but Saulnier had beaten him to it.

I asked the Louvre's chief Egyptian curator, the gentle Christiane Ziegler, pale of skin and hesitant of voice, about the brutal removal of the zodiac ceiling. She said simply, "How else would you remove a stone ceiling?"

Unlike the Chamber of Kings, this artifact survived its extraction and shipment to France and was treated better once it got there. On its arrival in Paris, the zodiac ceiling was sold to King Louis XVII[ for

150,000 francs. He placed it in the Bibliotheque Nationale, where it remained until 1919, when it was moved to the Louvre. Today, the louvre visitor is given a detailed analysis of the carvings on the ceil- 109. But there is not a single word about how this remarkably impor- rant artifact came to be removed from its place of origin.

("ERE IS A DAZZLING, encyclopedic quality to the Egyptian gaI- eties of the louvre. Room after room depicts every imaginable as- peCt of . E . I·e k· c· . If:· anCient gyptlan lLe: coo 109, I urruture, Jewe ry, arnlltlg, aCCOunt · . d f . . J . mg, sewIng, sex, an 0 course the mtncate funerary process. th:;~r quantity is matched only by the amazing, intact state of most of

pieces, With brilliant color and intricate detail. There IS one entire

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room of ancient Egyptian hand mirrors. There is a glass display case devoted to what the curators call ciaqlloirs, a kind of Egyptian castanet, and another display case filled with chesslike board games. But almost none of them offer information about how these objects came to be in the halls of the Louvre. The first major piece greets visitors as they

enter the Egyptian wing, a large sphinx of red speckled granite. In pristine condition, except for the same hacked-off nose visible on so many Egyptian sculptures, probably courtesy of overzealous early Christians or Muslims, the sphinx is noted to have been "found in Ta-

nis," though most viewers probably do not know where that is. (It is in the northeast Nile Delta.) There is no clue as to how this massive piece of stone was moved thousands of miles from there to the base-

ment of a French palace. In the same room, matching reliefs of Ram- ses II, adoring the Sphinx of Giza, adorn the walls. The legend reads: "This relief was found, with the one facing it, between the feet of the grand sphinx of Giza." Fascinating. But who took it? How? And when?

For the visitor to the Louvre, an enduring mystery, worthy of the

Sphinx itself. When I was sure I was nearing the end, I turned a corner and found

myself before an entire row of life-size seated gods, Sekmets, from the reign of Amenophis III. I counted seven in a row, all black. And then,

more still: the sarcophagus of Ramses Ill , an eighteen-ton mass of scone, covered in intricate script and scenes, discovered and hauled

here from the Valley of the Kings. Finally, darkness had fallen and the museum was nearly closed, and

still I wandered through new rooms of Egyptian artifacts, discovering

new treasures. It was quiet, deserted, dim. Suddenly, I was stopped in my tracks by a sight both familiar and strange. Tucked against the wall of an obscure, paneled room painted orange, perched high on a pedestal with a spotlight and little else to distinguish it, was the sculpted stone head of Althenaten, the tenegade, revolutionary pharaoh. It is one of the most famous images of the monotheistic king. The legend beside Akhenaten's bust reads simply that Egypt donated the Akhenaten head to the Louvre. No date. No reason. I learned later that it was a major gift-the sort of piece Egypt no longer allows to leave the country- in the wake of the heroic efforts of a French archaeologist and Louvre

THE LOUVRE ...........c 77

curator, Christiane Desroches NobIecourt, to save the Temple of Abu Simbel in southern Egypt. The story is one of those typically grand

dramas of which Egypt seems to have an endless supply. In the 1960s the completion of the Aswan High Dam, created as a public project

by the nationalist Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, threatened to submerge the monument. Destoches Noblecourt successfully rallied UNESCO to save Abu Simbel, but she could not convince the organi- zation to save a lesser shrine, the Temple of Amada. In time-honored

French tradition, Desroches Noblecourt swore that "La France Ie sauve!"-France would save the temple!--and persuaded an otherwise uninterested President Charles de Gaulle to do exactly that. This was

an ambitious undertaking that meant cutting the stone temple into pieces, placing it on rails, and transporting it several miles away and 180

feet above its original site. Once again, none of this gripping backstory is offered in the quiet anteroom where Akhenaten resides.

The massive stone sculpture is missing much of the skull, and from head-on it looks thin , diminished. But ftom the side view, the face, with its graceful features in the elegant, elongated style of the Amarna era, is intact and stunningly beautiful. The pharaoh is smiling.

BEHIND THE SCENES, the Louvre is very different from the ornate rooms of state that display the jewels of the museum's collection of 350,000 objects, only about 10 percent of which are on permanent display. The offices of the staff of the museum are unadorned, except for a framed poster or two in a nartow corridor. And all the offices seem well worn, badly in need of a coat of paint. Modern office chairs ful the office spaces beneath elaborate plaster moldings along the ten- foot ceilings, but they are no longer gilded, and the ancient wood Roors creak.

The back alleys of internationally renowned museums could them- selves be the subject of an investigation. No matter how gleaming and magisterial the courtyards and exhibition halls may be, the museum back rooms usually resemble the fire escape of a regional theater. They are often draped with fabric and are stacked high with clutter-no, not of second-rate Monets, chipped marble busts, or the watercolor land- scape of some now-forgotten nineteenth-century painter, but with