Musée du Louvre

The Musée du Louvre began life as a defensive fortress built by King Philip II on the right bank of the Seine in the late 12th century, its foundations still visible beneath the modern museum's Cour Carrée. Francis I demolished the medieval keep and rebuilt the palace as a Renaissance royal residence in 1546, and successive French kings expanded it over the following centuries until Louis XIV decamped for Versailles in 1682, freeing the Louvre to house royal art collections and academies. During the French Revolution, the National Assembly decreed that the palace become a public museum, and it opened on 10 August 1793 as the Muséum central des Arts de la République, displaying works seized from the crown, the church and émigré nobles. Napoleon Bonaparte briefly renamed it Musée Napoléon and vastly enlarged its holdings through conquest, though many looted works were later returned. The museum's most recognizable modern feature, I. M. Pei's glass-and-steel pyramid entrance in the Cour Napoléon, was completed in 1989 as the centerpiece of President François Mitterrand's Grand Louvre renovation. Today the Louvre is the world's largest and most-visited art museum, an encyclopedic institution spanning eight curatorial departments from Egyptian antiquities to 19th-century French painting, and it remains the benchmark against which every other art museum measures itself.