LEARNING TO LOVE THE LOUVRE

It's imposing, encyclopedic, and way too crowded. But use patience and a little strategy, argues Elaine Sciolino, and the world's greatest museum will enchant you.

- Elaine Sciolino

HOW DO YOU FALL in love with the Louvre? The biggest, grandest, most visited public repository of art in the world, it demands our attention. But love? Like an evasive paramour, the Louvre may not always seem to be interested in a relationship.

The building has sat, stonily, on the Right Bank of the Seine for centuries, starting as a medieval military fortress at the end of the 12th century, then becoming a palace and finally a museum. Royals and rulers renovated it more than 20 times, satisfying their vanity but leaving behind a sprawling structure that lacks logic. Its galleries, façades, staircases, and ceilings are individual jewels, but together they do not form a coherent whole.

I remember nothing about the first time I visited the Louvre, the summer after my junior year in college. I wish I could say I was moved by its majesty, or felt the ghostly presence of kings and queens. Perhaps I was frustrated by the scale of the place: the long, dark corridors; wings closed because of a shortage of security guards; room after room of paintings of Jesus, Mary, and their relatives, followers, enemies, and attendant angels. I must have seen the Mona Lisa, but all I wrote in my journal was: "I went to the Louvre and walked outside of the Tuileries Garden along the shops."

Like me, it took time for Laurence des Cars, the director of the Louvre, to yield to the museum's seductive power. Des Cars came to the Louvre's top job in 2021 after four years as head of the Musée d'Orsay, and some years before that as scientific director of the museum in Abu Dhabi that bears the Louvre's name. But even she remembers nothing about the very first time she visited the Louvre. "I cannot really pin the moment," she says. "I was not a great museum-goer when I was a kid.