No other edifice in the world forms so vast a treasure house of rich and varied works of art as the great Palace of the Louvre whose growth we have traced in our story. The nucleus of the gallery of paintings was formed by Francis I. and the Renaissance princes at the palace of Fontainebleau, where the canvases at the beginning of the seventeenth century had reached nearly 200. Colbert, during the reign of Louis XIV. by the purchase of the Mazarin and other collections, added 647 paintings and nearly 6000 drawings in ten years. In 1681 the Cabinet du Roi, for so the collection of royal pictures was called, was transferred to the Louvre. They soon, however, followed their owner to Versailles, but some hundred were subsequently returned to Paris, where they might be inspected at the Luxembourg Palace by the public on Wednesdays and Saturdays. In 1709 Bailly, the keeper of the king’s cabinet, took an inventory of the paintings and they were found to number 2376. In 1757 all were again returned to Versailles, and it was not until 1793, when the National Convention, on Barrère’s motion, took the matter in hand, that they were restored to the Parisians and, together with the works of art removed from the suppressed churches and monasteries, formed the famous picture gallery of the Louvre, which was formally opened to the public on the first anniversary of the memorable 10th of August. Napoleon’s spoils from Italian and other European galleries, which almost choked the Louvre during his reign, were reduced in 1815 by the return of 5233 works of art to their original owners, under English supervision. During the removal of the pictures British sentries were stationed along the galleries, and British soldiers stood under arms on the Quadrangle and the Place du Carrousel to protect the workmen. Subsequent gifts and private legacies have since added priceless collections, the latest, that of Thomy-Thierry, endowing the Museum with numerous examples of the Barbizon school.
The ground floor, devoted to the plastic arts, contains in its antique section many excellent Greco-Roman works, but relatively few of pure Greek workmanship. Among those few are the beautiful reliefs in the Salle Grecque and, in the Salle de la Vénus de Milo, the best-known and most-admired example of Greek statues in Europe, which gives its name to the hall. It was to this exquisite creation of idealised womanhood that the poet Heine dragged himself in May 1848 to take leave of the lovely idols of his youth, before he lay, never to raise himself again, on his mattress-grave in the Rue d’Amsterdam. “As I entered the noble hall,” he writes, “where the most blessed goddess of beauty, our dear Lady of Milo, stands on her pedestal, I well-nigh broke down and lay at her feet sobbing so piteously that even a heart of stone must be moved to compassion. And the goddess gazed at me compassionately, yet withal so comfortless as who should say, ‘Dost thou not see that I have no arms and cannot help thee?’” It was a God with arms that poor Heine needed. An early work of a nobler and more virile type meets the visitor as he mounts the staircase to the Picture Gallery—the Victory of Samothrace, one of the grandest examples of pure Greek art in its finer period.