Great museums have many functions: They can encyclopedically survey the world, provide compelling accounts of history, celebrate varied forms of beauty and project political power. They can also have an almost mythic presence. If myths recount a society’s origins in the natural world, a great museum can do something similar, demonstrating how the world is given shape and order. It is a place where people gather, time and again, united in something akin to ritual, searching for illumination, perhaps even seeking a sense of belonging. Museums are temples of a people or a nation.
But I hadn’t realized just how mythically resonant a museum could be until I read James Gardner’s eloquent encomium to the Louvre, which traces its “many lives” from France’s prehistory into the present. “Before the Louvre was a museum,” his introduction begins, “it was a palace, and before that a fortress, and before that a plot of earth, much like any other.” Its life as a museum is venerable—over 200 years—but its life as a place of significance extends 600 years before that. And in the 1980s, excavations to create the museum’s underground bus depot unearthed the skeletal remains of a man who lived in the Bronze Age, over 4,000 years ago. Such is the microcosmic story of the largest museum in the world, with more than 782,000 square feet of exhibition space and a collection of more than 35,000 objects viewed by more than nine million annual visitors.
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